Top Ten of Two Thousand and Eight...ALLITERATION

So writing a personal top ten for pretty much anything is both presumptuous and pretentious, but this is the internet and those kinds of things don't exist here, so I'm going to go ahead and throw out my top ten Game releases for the year in no particular order:

Valkyria Chronicles
Little Big Planet
Fallout 3
Gears of War 2
Lost Odyssey
Grand Theft Auto IV
Metal Gear Solid IV
Dead Space
Fable II
Super Smash Brothers Brawl

Wow, a ton of surprises right? If you were to take out Lost Odyssey and insert Call of Duty: World at War, this list would be nearly identical to every other top ten list out there (Except for those kids who just compile a list of every JRPG released this year, you know who you are). The only real underdog to get any significant recognition this year was Valkyria Chronicles, which is good, but there weren't more gems floating around? Yeah there were a ton of killer XBL PSN and NVC games, Braid, Mega Man 9, World of Goo, etc., but otherwise I think this was a year full of disappointments. Tons of games looked like they had promise but failed to deliver i.e. Army of Two, Infinite Undiscovery, Animal Crossing City Folk (I'm totally going to get shit from -other Matt - for that). Did Nintendo even have any holiday releases besides Animal Crossing? Did they need them? Financially? No. By reason of proving that they actually give a damn about their consumer base? Yes.

You know what? Now that I'm on that subject...

The only excuse I can possibly find for them having such a weak showing in the winter season is that they've got something HUGE on the horizon. Something that, with the incredible revenue they're raking in, they could afford to push back and perfect for another year. Something to the effect of a new Legend of Zelda or Super Mario. My guess is that it may be Star Fox, trying to redeem itself from its weak efforts on the Gamecube. While it would be less likely, perhaps Nintendo wants to take some extra time fine tuning its online services in order to drop an on-line compatible F-Zero title. Wishful thinking, anyway. A more likely scenario is that Nintendo is above all else a corporate entity that values cashflow above fan service. No matter how fickle the casual audience is (seriously, these are the same people who would start fist fights in Wal-Mart over the last Furby) Nintendo knows that that is where the money is at and is going to give them what they want (which is apparently shitty party games) every single time until the hype is gone and they come crawling back to their core.