PSP

Ghost in the Machine

HIGH The excellent expanded characterization of The Boss.

LOW Watching a tank slowly circle an area for 30 minutes while attempting to non-lethally disable its entourage.

WTF The ending after the ending. Pacifica Ocean?

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.

I'm only one track away from completing the most recent Trials HD DLC and the damn thing is driving me insane.

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?

Publishers should take a page from LucasArts. The best way to sell your preposterous video game might be to put away the expensive pyrotechnic effects, shaky-cam footage and orchestral score and just go for laughs.

Well, it has reached the time of year when we harvest the crop of retrospectives, the best-of and worst-of lists that one can accuse of gratuitous iconoclasm, corporate servitude, or trolling as suits your fancy. I continue my habit of not naming a "Game of the Year", nor even a "Game (that I played) of the Year" because it's a hollow designation, and (rightfully) nobody cares. That said, since it is customary to roll out some kind of year-end wrap-up, here is one.