Nintendo DS

FU2 is the Most Appropriate Acronym Ever

HIGH: Using a Jedi mind trick to get a stormtrooper to commit suicide.

LOW: Everything else.

WTF: You know what this level needs? More walkers.

Such a Tease

HIGH Going through the test area that recaps the previous games.

LOW Getting to the end of the game and realizing that it was the middle of the story.

WTF Why can't anyone just say what they think is happening?

Nintendo righted the Wii ship a little with decent December in terms of sales. Comparatively speaking, however, Nintendo's victory was hollow when you notice that Wii sales were down a whopping 38% year-over-year (YOY). Put that number next to a 42% increase YOY for the Xbox 360 and you can argue that Nintendo wasn't a winner at all.

2011 has the potential to be a big year for video games. We're weeks away from seeing the Nintendo 3DS hit retail, motion control technology for the Sony PlayStation 3 and Microsoft Xbox 360 will continue to mature, and there's going to be plenty of software just waiting to be bought. Before the year really gets into high gear, I'm going to log five predictions here about some events that I think will happen.

Since all my esteemed colleagues seem to be doing it, I feel compelled to slap together thoughtfully craft a year-end assessment of my own. As there enough "Top 10 of 2010" lists to make a "Top 10 'Top 10 of 2010' lists" list, I won't be making one of those. Instead, I'll just ramble about some trends of 2010 and release you unharmed back to the Internet wilderness.

Although we're officially into 2011 now, it's not quite time to turn the page when it comes to sales numbers as figures for December 2010 should be trickling out over the coming week or two.

Second Verse, Worse Than the First

HIGH The game's climax, which does a magnificent job of tying its plot and its relationship arc together.

LOW Completing the game for the third time and realizing I'd have to do the first puzzle again again.

WTF Lady, we are about to die of hypothermia. I do not need to hear about ice-9.

I actually remember that section of that level in Super Mario World quite well. If it's any consolation to Yoshi, it wasn't an easy decision to make at the time.

Some of you may view this as a cop-out, but rather than do a fairly common Game of the Year piece, I'm doing things a little differently. I'm going to run down a list of great games that I played this year. I'm not going to say that one was necessarily better than the other, but I hope this gives you some idea of the games that got me to believe that 2010 was a very good year for video game software.

I hate reading and making top 10 lists. Usually. Generally I just don't like it when I see something meaningless like "TOP 10 ASSES OF VIDEAGAEMS" or something similarly silly. A top 10 games of the year or top 10 games of all time list is really the only time when I can excuse the use of a list in such a fashion. Even still, up to this point I resisted making one. I mean, isn't it enough if I say I liked a game? Do I really need to use some kind of imaginary metric to rank them?