wine users - Jan 2012 - Anybody have any luck with games on Sandy Bridge?

I have been trying for the past several weeks to install my various windows
games on my new Sandy Bridge desktop (Ubuntu 11.10, integrated Sandy Bridge
graphics, Wine 1.3) with little to no success. While the games install just fine
as the appdb says they should, I have yet to get any game to run and I have come
to the conclusion that it is because of the graphics. The most progress I have
made is with Halo Combat Evolved where I can get it to the main menu (which
shows up as a garbled mass of nothing and spams the terminal with notices about
undefined values for opengl). Does anyone have any hints to getting my games to
work on Sandy Bridge? I am at a loss here and it is really getting frustrating
[Crying or Very sad].

Here is what I have done so far:
 - I tried the Xorg-edgers packages for graphcs, eventually reverting after they
caused video problems and made native linux programs unable to run properly
 - I have used the built in directx library and also tried installing directx 9
from the microsoft website. Neither works as I have installed them (maybe I am
messing up?)

I have tried installing:
 - Steam (this program loads just fine actually...its getting the games to work
that isn't going so good)
 - Magic the Gathering on Steam (which the appdb says is questionable anyway)
 - Some flight simulator demo game on Steam
 - Warcraft III
 - Halo Combat Evolved

Ubuntu is pretty much running as installed in relation to graphics and native
linux games that use the 3d acceleration work spectacularly. It is getting the
graphics to work with wine that just doesn't seem to work. I really
don't want to have to break down and buy windows just for video games since
I am not a real big gamer (hence just the integrated graphcs).

This won't help you a ton.. but...

yes its possible, so it could be a Linux or Driver issue.  I have played several
games with Wine on Mac OS X using a i7 with a HD 3000 graphics.  In fact its
worked in a few games that the ATI couldn't run right.