Good luck Jim,
the game's towns remind me of a Final Fantasy game as I can easily spend a good amount of time in them doing a variety of things. A lot of thought got poured into this game.
Fable 2 "can" be a good game if you let it be, but part of me feels you can just beat it in a few hours and that will be that since my buddy told me about it and we even spent a few minutes playing it at his house over the weekend for a while. He said "rent it."
Gears of War 2 is a fun game, but it also has a fairly short storyline. However it's chalk full of features such as a horde mode feature where you and some friends can empty waves of horde up to 50, hidden stuff reminiscent of finding the COG tags from Gears 1, and the multiplayer has some pretty fun modes as well. It is even a bit like Perfect Dark where you can implement and play with and/or against bots in online play. If you were a Gears fan before it doesn't disappoint. This is a game that actually builds and is better than the original. I must admit it's pretty fun. I'm more into working with people to accomplish tasks than the same old drill of player vs. player. The new Call of Duty I believe will satisfy that hunger lol.
I very much look foward to playing Mirror's Edge. The game is getting some pretty high marks in reviews due to it being a very different type of game so hopefully when I get some free time I will be able to play it.