Team Fortress 2 (Xbox 360, PC, PlayStation 3)

While Portal is being given its much deserved credit for the year, and Half-Life 2 has enjoyed years of acclaim, let's not forget about the other pillar of Valve's The Orange Box. It's been eight years since the release of Team Fortress Classic, and the game has undergone so many revisions and delays we half expected it to be released alongside Duke Nukem Forever sometime in 2012. As it turned out, the game not only saw the light of day but ended up being an addictive online experience.

As a console gamer enjoying this with a gamepad, I don't care much much for the sniper, soldier, demoman, or anything except medic and occasionally the engineer. There's something brutally satisfying about charging into battle behind a heavy weapons guy, dodging the occasional bullet (people still haven't learned) and injecting him with a team-killing jolt of invincibility. Hours of enjoyment and not a single bullet shot. Pure. Enjoyment.

Nintendo did a very good thing by including the Japan-only N64 3D shooter Sin & Punishment: Successor to the Earth on the Wii's Virtual Console. Now, they seem to be celebrating the global introduction of the series by including the game's protagonist, Saki Amamiya, as an assist trophy in Super Smash Bros. Brawl.

Saki brings his "Cannon Sword" to the fray, which is a--well, you can probably guess what it is. With super-slick characters like Saki and Gray Fox appearing as assist trophies, we're a little disappointed that Nintendo hasn't gone the extra mile to make them fully playable in the game. In fact, there hasn't been a new character introduced on the Brawl blog in quite some time, so maybe we'll get some interesting news in the weeks to come.