My “Best Games of 2006” Post.

I played a TON of games this year, on the PC, DS, and XBOX360. Here are my top 5, and mini-reviews of them.

Follow the jump for the rest of the details!

	5. New Super Mario Brothers (Nintendo DS) My brother and i played this a TON this year. well, he played it a ton during my wedding week when i had it home. I still play it occasionally. There were tons of places where i literally “LOL’d”, causing laura to wonder what i was laughing about. Being that she wasn’t into mario bros, the things i thought were funny she didn’t really get. The giant mario powerup was the best, i wish it would have lasted longer! I still haven’t gotten through all of it. The minigames are pretty awesome too. This was the only DS game that made my top 5, but thats only because i have like 4 DS games. I’m really psyched about the upcoming Dragon Warrior game though. I played all of the american versions of those on the NES.
	4. World of Warcraft (PC+Mac) What can i even say about WoW? If you don’t know, i can’t explain it to you. Its a great game, aside for the “hey, take this book to that guy over there” quests. Very pretty, very consistant art direction. Each area has a different feel and works very well. Things start to get old after a while, especially when your friends (ahem!) out level you and leave you behind! 🙂 WoW for me comes and goes in waves. My top character is level 51, while a couple friends have second characters nearing 60 now! The game also works on my MacBookPro, so i could play while i was away from home, as long as i had reasonable network access!
	3. Call of Duty 2 (XBOX360) After playing through CoD2 on hard, i just HAD to finish it on Veteran and get all the achievement points. Playing on Veteran was amazingly hard at times, a couple times i almost flashed back to 7th grade and smashed the controller on the ground. The guns sound realistic, the audio is great. the things people say and do make you feel immersed while playing, even though it does get a little repetitive. But hearing someone yell “jerry behind the bunker to the southeast!” makes it so much easier to find who’s shooting at you when you can’t see them! Not being able to throw grenades back, but the computer guy right next to you can didn’t make a lot of sense. Watching someone pick up a live grenade and just begin to throw it when it goes off and they pinwheel backwards was awesome, and watching explosions fling people never got old.
	2. Dead Rising (XBOX360) Dead Rising was one of the most innovative games i’ve played in a long time. At first i hated the “one save” system, but it did force me to make serious decisions, decisions about which people i would try to save, and which i’d have to let die. The whole photography angle, trying to get pictures of interesting places and things (and underwear!) was clever too. I’m not going to say more here, as i’ve already said it on this post all about dead rising!
	1. Oblivion (XBOX360) I spent more hours on oblivion than anything else on a console ever, that i’m aware of (Asheron’s Call beats it for computer games, but i’ve been playing AC on and off and on for like 7 years, so i don’t really count all of that time…) When I got it from gamefly, i thought i’d play it for a week and send it back. I think i had it for like 8 weeks. I finished all of the main quest arcs, and did a ton of side quests. By the time i got done with it i just couldn’t handle any more jobs! I played an extra hour just so i could get the armor you get from finishing the main quest, for which you then have to wait 2 ingame weeks to pick up after you finish the main questline… only to be dissapointed by how it was worse than the stuff i made myself from daedric armor, and it didn’t look cooler either. boo! The best questline in the game was the assassin’s guild, by far. I got to one of the last parts (don’t want to push any spoilers!), and i actually yelled out loud, “noooo! i’m too late!”. I was actually hoping i might be able to do a part faster and get a different ending, but nope! I also was kinda disappointed when a couple main people died near the end, but that makes it a better game. I only wish there would have been a little more different eq. Enchanting stuff was cool, i wish i could have made cooler looking stuff too.