Ok. Im going to do this completely different from everyone else. I am just going to list the 10 best games i played during the past year, regardless of platform and different categories. I. Take into consideration when reading this that i can only list games that i have actually played for platforms that i actually own so this is not nearly as wide and deep as the lists made by GameSpot. This is the 10 best games i played for the first time on my own consoles during 2006, released during 2006 so this will mostly be a xbox 360 list since i bought one in the end of 2005 and since then games have started coming out for real over the last year. NOTE: I have not yet played Twilight Princess. I just ordered that game to my gamecube but note that it will not appearing on this list. Anyways. Heres spots 4 to 1. This is a continuation from a previous blogpost.

4. Tomb Raider - Legend

Platform: Xbox 360  /  Genre: Action-Adventure  /  My Score: 8.8

A magnificent comeback for a heroine that has really lost her grace since TR3. Now Lara is back on top and and both her and everyone else is loving it. If you´re a Tomb Raider fan like me this was one of the biggest releases this year for sure. This together with TR3 might be the best games fauturing Lara that has ever come out. An excellent Actionadventure that i played through over and over again and that I could play yet again without getting bored.

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3. Guitar Hero 2

Platform: PS2  /  Genre: Rythm  /  My Score: 8.9

Bigger, badder, harder and louder than its predecessor, Guitar Hero 2 dropped the bomb just like GH1 did with some AWE-SOME rock once again. A more varied and longer songlist, more avenues, more characters, a training mode Pro Face-Off and Co-Op. The no.1 game to play with your friends. Fav. songs include Jordan by Buckethead, Laid to Rest by Lamd of God, Six by All That Remains and Hangar 18 by Megadeth. Just to name a few.. Why not go for Freeeeeebiiiiiird in Pro-Face Off at once?! 

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2. New Super Mario Bros.

Platform: NDS  /  Genre: Platform  /  My Score: 9.1

The first new 2D Mario game for ages and every old-school gamer shouts with joy. New SMB combines elements from all of the previous SMB games to create a platformer that oozes of nostalgia but never feels like its just riding on former success. It feels new, fresh and its the best platformer and almost the best game of 2006. Mario cant get much better than this at the moment, im not sure if even Galaxy can top this. Ive been playing this for months and months on my DS and im still going back to it to milk more Star-coins from the excellent levels !

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1. Gears of War

Platform: Xbox 360  /  Genre: Shooter  /  My Score: 9.6

The best shooter and the best game of 2006. This is one of the best games I have ever played. It revolutionolizes the game we play shooters with active reload, cover and the best shooter camera ever. It delivers the heaviest action you´ll find on any console for years to come together with the best graphics ever seen in a videogame. Supreme voiceacting brings the cool characters to life and the best music of the year really brings you into the battle. The Chainsawbayonet together with the Lancer is one of the best shooterweapons of all time and the multiplayer became the most popular live-game ever in a couple of days... So much consideration has gone into every little aspect of this game that its near perfection. You must truly be an actionhater if you have ANY reason not to play this game. This is the game that you should buy an entire console to play. NOW ! Anything else is just plain out stupid..

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I just realized i REALLY need an RGB cable for my gamecube to play this tho so I ordered one today. Should be arriving Monday. Composite on HDTV = mess.

Ordered these a week before Christmas but they never arrived. Now they have.

Ok. Im going to do this completely different from everyone else. I am just going to list the 10 best games i played during the past year, regardless of platform and different categories. I. Take into consideration when reading this that i can only list games that i have actually played for platforms that i actually own so this is not nearly as wide and deep as the lists made by GameSpot. This is the 10 best games i played for the first time on my own consoles during 2006, released during 2006 so this will mostly be a xbox 360 list since i bought one in the end of 2005 and since then games have started coming out for real over the last year. NOTE: I have not yet played Twilight Princess. I just ordered that game to my gamecube but note that it will not appearing on this list. Anyways. Heres spots 10 to 6.

10. Viva Piñata

Platform: Xbox 360  /  Genre: Management - Sim  /  My Score: 8.0

An extremely original, charming and fun management game for all ages where you run your own garden and attract paperanimals that will live and prosper in it. Plant trees & flowers, build houses and make your piñatas romance. Laid back, relaxed and with a gorgeous graphical design. Very adaptive gameplay !

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9. Prey

Platform: Xbox 360  /  Genre: FPS  /  My Score: 8.2

Experimenting with gravity, spirit-walking, the completely new way of dying and with portals. The developers really made Prey a mind bending shooter. It is a big celebration to old school shooters with stunning level design, loads of self-distance, humor and creative solutions of otherwise worn out shooter concepts. Fueled by the Doom 3 engine,with a story of love and earth-saving and with a very creative arsenal of weapons this is one of the absolute most memorable shooters that saw the light of day 2006.

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8. Table Tennis

Platform: Xbox 360  /  Genre: Sport-sim  /  My Score: 8.3

Rockstar showed us that they can do more than just 3rd person free roaming criminalsims. With TT they made what in my opinion is by far the best Sportsgame for years. Its simple to learn and hard to master and Rockstars new graphical engine is up there with Unreal engine 3 for sure when it comes to deliver lifelike playermodels. This might also be some of the most intense multiplayeraction you´ll find in a sportsgame ever. I dont even have to mention that the audio is supersharp and the controls extremely good. Well done Rockstar !

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7. Dead Rising

Platform: Xbox 360  /  Genre: Horror-survival  /  My Score: 8.3

Capcom takes zombies to the next level. They shamelessly rips off Dawn of the Dead and puts you in the role of Frank West, together with a few survivors in a mall full of thousands and thousands of zombies. Its full of zombie-humor, whacko characters and tons of creativity. Everything in the mall is your weapon. Do what you want for 72 hours. Anyone who has ever enjoyed a survival-horror game will enjoy this experience immensly as it is something completely fresh. Excellent soundeffects, superb music and perfect english voiceacting. The story will hold you tight until you find out the truth and you will feel for every character before its over. Truly a milestone in the year of 2006.

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6. Saints Row

Platform: Xbox 360  /  Genre: GTA-style Freeroamer  /  My Score: 8.5

When GTA3 came out every other game after it with the same concept is now a GTA clone. Saints Row is another game that borrows the GTA3 concept and builds on it. On many levels Saints Row owns the GTA games. The graphics are really sharp for a game of this scope and size and the map system has waypoints so you dont have to get lost if you dont want to. The game of course has alot of the other content that makes GTA clones what they are. Sexual content, swearing, drugs, explosions and lots and lots of sidemissions and activities to undertake. Saints Row kind of surprised us all with being a really really good GTA clone instead of another bad one and delivers solid and fun gameplay and some of the best characters / voiceacting Ive heard in a great while

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5. Marvel: Ultimate Alliance

Platform: Xbox 360  /  Genre: Action-RPG /  My Score: 8.6

Hack N Slash RPG´s havent been this fun for a very long time. Raven seems to get almost everything right with this one and gives us a game in the above named genre with cool talents, spells and weapons together with most of the existing Marvel universe. Never before have this many Superheroes, villians and locations from Marvel been seen in the same game. You put together your own team of 4 superheroes and go through the campaign to stop Dr Doom from destroying the universe. Its a lenghty adventure that will bring out the Comic geek in anyone. I actually started 2 subscriptions for Marvelmagazines after playing through this game. The action-RPG gameplay feels rock solid and the game is a blessing in Co-Op !

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Stay tuned for spots 4-1...

Found it for ~20 bucks today and Ive been thinking about giving this a shot for along time.

Note about my Final Verdicts. They are not meant to be reviews on how you play the game and what its all about. My verdicts always assumes that you know what the game is all about. I always recommend reading GameSpots reviews before reading my own verdicts. Im not here to tell you how to play a game. Im just telling you whats good and whats bad about a game you already know. In this case you can find GameSpots review here

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+ The Dead or Alive girls look nothing short of amazing. They look amazing in their own DoA´ish doll-like way of course and thats whe way it should be. The amount of detail put into the girls bodies and their animations are jaw-dropping and must be seen to be believed.

+ The Breastphysics. Exteme some might say, but set the "age option" in Options to minimum and those extreme breastphysics will actually be toned down to somewhat realistic breastphysics (that is of course assuming that the girls have some plastic implants in their breasts). Anyway. High or Low settings, the bouncing in this game is indeed very pleasant to the eye and adds to the smooth animations for the girls. I think this is the first game I´ve played where each of the breasts are animated seperately wich is a huge step forward. I would have liked to see that they are pushed together when pressed against something like a tree or the beach instead of going straight through the object though..

+ The vacation feel of the game. The sun, the beach, the many many swimsuits, the half naked women, the Piña Coladas, the fruits, the summer-sports and the very inviting water. DoAx2 is a game that will warm up the room you are playing it in. The game look fantastic in the pure tropical holiday sense of the word. Its very relaxing to look at. Team Ninja has made a hands down incredible job in capturing this sweet feeling where all the stress in the world is just forgotten in a minute.

+ Again, the work put into the girls and how they are integrated into the minigames. The minigames are made so that you can study and drool over your fav. girls while you are playing it. The camera angles and the way their bodies will interact with the minigame. You dont have to be Japanese and into Hentai to enjoy it. People holding this AGAINST the game are just trying to be special. This part of the game are supposed to be enjoyed and even people saying they´re hating the game because the amount of skin shown are deep down enjoying looking at Kasumi running as fast as she can down the beach to grab a flag.

+ The game has a very "guilty-pleasure" feel to it. It is fun to buy sunglasses and hats and play dress-up with your girls.....hey, dont look at me like that !

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- The minigames are nothing more than games made to show off the girls. When it comes to the actual fun of playing the minigames only the wave race delivers. Every game except the wave race are over in 30 seconds or less and they are hard to both learn and master. Not because they are hard but because you are given no instructions how to play it good and the camera is as said before, set to watch the girls and not to give a good overview of the minigame. Beach Volley are next to impossible to play. Its all about luck and you have no idea whatsoever how to aim and control it. Tha AI is also a story of its own. Its really not YOU that decide whether you win or lose. Its the AI that decides if youre going to win. If you won the last flag sprint, the AI will be cranked up to impossible and win the next one. There is no way to actually get good at this game, just play it and let the AI decided your wins and losses.

- The wierd friend and partner-system. To play partnergames you have to have a partner and to keep your partner you have to buy her gifts that just takes money off your bathingsuit account. If you dont keep her happy with gifts and by winning she will leave you. A very frustrating and boring aspect of the game. The same goes for the friends system. You can, for no other reason than Achievement Points, get friends on the island. You have to send them gifts and bathing suits and HOPE that they accept them. Different girls like different things but there is no indicator as to what when you are playing. And even if you send them the right stuff there is a chance they will not accept it and hate you anyway. It all boils down to you not caring at all about either the partner or the friend system because why bother? It gives you nothing and it dosent contribute to the game expeience at all.

- The gameidea are not meant to hold for very long. There is no goal with the game. You cant really beat it. You complete your vacation in 14 days (a couple of hours). Then you have to go back over and over and over again with the same girl to get more money by playing the same boring minigames you´ve been playing for hours and hours already to get more swimsuits. The only actual GOAL of this game is to get more swimsuits and it is only fun for so long.... Everything else just feels like meaningless layers put onto this that you never care about. Its a relaxing vacationgame..sure, but still, it gets repetative and boring relatively quick.

- The 360 Achievements. OK, so you do need a motivator to keep playing this game but sadly the achievements are not that motivator. One single achievement in this game can take around 20 hours to get..and there are 46 achievements in total... Its all direcly tied to buying swimsuits. You have to buy every single suit with every single girl and then send every single suit to all of the other girls so that they can all have each others collections. Its a process that could surely take THOUSANDS of gamehours in this game. If you´re REALLY into this game you might finish off 2 or 3 out of 46 achievements. You have to buy suits for millions of Zack-dollars for one single DoA girl. To get that money you have to play wave race over and over and over and over again since that is the only minigame that really gives any money. Sure, the others give you money to but not nearly as much. Suffice to say, the achievements try to lenghten the game to insane lenghts.. Pointmaniacs beware. Stay faaaaaar away from this game. Not even Rumble Roses XX were this bad.

- No Single-console multiplayer. A thing that could have lenghtened a game like this alot would have been Mario Party style hot-seat multiplayer. Playing Butt-battle with a friend could have been really fun.

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Final Score: 6.8

This game is amazing to look at and there is so much love put into the girls, their animations and their bodies that you can feel it spreading the love throughout the room. But when it comes to actually deliviring a fun game, it falls a bit short after the initial vacationfeel has worn off after about 10 hours tops. The game makes the best screensaver ever tho.  Something you want to leave on just to make your TV happy !

Note about my Final Verdicts. They are not meant to be reviews on how you play the game and what its all about. My verdicts always assumes that you know what the game is all about. I always recommend reading GameSpots reviews before reading my own verdicts. Im not here to tell you how to play a game. Im just telling you whats good and whats bad about a game you already know. In this case you can find GameSpots review here

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+ Perfect control layout and an excellent learning curve combined with a smooth camera ensures a very pleasant experience free from annoyances that such things otherwise might cause.

+ Gameplay that changes and evolves with the player that makes this game totally accessible and fun for people of any age. If you´re 10 years old you might not be able to attract more advanced Piñatas to your garden but you probably will have just as fun with your worms and squirrels since you´re so young. You wont care if your next tree is a new kind of tree as long as you´re planting a new tree. If you´re like me, grown up, you will enojoy gaining levels, getting Master Romancer for every speices and making sure your every tree is watered, that every challenge is completed and that your garden looks as good as it possibly can. The game will also adjust the difficulty after your playstyle. The 10 year old wont have to defend his garden from nearly as many badguys as the grown up playing the same game.

+ So very very charming Piñatas. Everything from their animations, to their facialexpressions to their sounds makes them all so very cute, funny, charming and alive. They will melt even the coldest of hearts in the blink of an eye. The first time you see a Buzzlegum sitting on a flower and sleeping...Im telling you, be prepared.. The Piñatas will constantly bring a smile to your face when you´re playing this game.

+ Smart combination of Dungeon Keeper influenced creaturemanagement gameplay and Theme Park style building. This together with the whole story of the Piñatas makes for a strong and original gameidea.

+ Wonderful graphics. Sure, this engine cant compare by far to the Unreal 3 engine and the likes but the overall quality of the graphics are excellent and its combined with a really sweet design. Everything from the Tower in the background to the clouds to the design of your Piñatas and their homes. It all feels very "Rare" (the company behind the game). Overall, the really cozy, happy and bright design of the game can be compared to the launchtitle Kameo - Elements of Power wich, just as VP, had a very warm feel to the graphical design that really made you warm inside and gave you the fairytale feeling that few other games can give you if they´re not coming from Nintendo. I couldnt help but notice that the home for the Ape Piñatas are taken from Donkey Kong Country to the SNES. An old Rare title that was one of my favs back in the day.

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- To much loading between menus. If you want to check the info on a plant or a Piñata it will LOAD. If you want to enter a shop it will LOAD.

- Overall the menus feel a bit sluggish and laggy and it feels like you´re doing more menubrowsing that you want to be doing. Peter Molyneux should really have looked into this game and made the interface more integrated into the game. (just look at "The Movies" from Lionhead Studios. WOW theres a good ineterface). Here you´re just flipping in between menus to do the easiest of things. Also i would have liked an option to lift up my animals and move them around.

- I miss a system for quickly finding a specific animal and as the interface works now you often miss when you want to select a pinata since some of them are moving around very fast. When you finally select one it might also bug so that it wont go where you´re telling it to go.

- The Pathfinding for the AI is pretty broken at times. Sometimes Piñatas will completely ignore orders and sometimes their goal is to far away and they will just return to sleeping or whatever. Very frustrating.

- The game sometimes falls into some serious pits of boredom where no new piñatas are entering your garden, no new trees can be planted and no new things can be done with the races you already have. There are some hours in VP where you are just sitting around doing nothing but looking over your garden and smiling at the cute animals. Some might like this and i think the game was intentionally designed like this. If you want things to happen around you all the time when you´re playing a game, VP is not for you. This is a very laid back and relaxed game that you by no means should be playing when you´re in a hurry. You need to be able to enjoy the sometimes very slow pace of the game. Maybe build a fence? Dig a pond? Feed your Buzzlegum a flower ?

- The Garden is to tight and small. I want to be able to plant MORE trees and flowers but after a while it tells you cant plant anymore because the garden is getting to packed. I look out over my garden and i see like 5 trees in it... The garden really never turn in to the huge garden that I want it to be. You are actually best of just selling pinatas and plants off and concentrating on 1 or 2 races at a time and a couple of trees at a time. NOT the way I want to play a game like this. The scope and size of the game is overall a dissappointment.

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Final Score: 8.0

Very cute, very charming and very relaxing for people of any age. But it has a seriosly crippled interface and it can be way to slow for some to find the motivation to keep playing.

Just when I thought I could finally put World of Warcraft to rest after way over a year of pretty hardcore playing they go and revamp the Honorsystem so that you can now buy Honor rewards for Honor. So now im back grinding honor pretty hardcore. So if anyone is wondering where I am on XBLive or if anyone is wondering why there will be a lack of blogging for some time ahead im back in the WoW Battlegrounds again, after 46000 lifetime kills. I just have to get some PvP Epics now that you dont have to keep a rank to get them. Damn it. I DONT have time for WoW but at the moment I dont have a choice. Im actually considering Burning Crusade now to. So a big Xbox 360 pause is coming up. I need to play ALOT of Viva Piñata and Dead or Alive Xtreme 2 but the last couple of days Ive been playing something like 8 hours of WoW per day. Something I promised myself I would never do again... My Mage needs some new Shoulders, a chest and a High Warlord Staff.