Well, it's been another tumultuous year for the videogame industry with some major hardware launches (PSP, Xbox 360), some minor hardware launches (Gizmondo), plenty of truly excellent games and some abmominable turkeys. And in the background, throughout the year, Gamesblog has probed the key news stories like a grimly fascinated schoolboy, gingerly poking at roadkill with a stick.
Before we get started on 2006, here are the key Gamesblog moments of the current year, taking in everything from all-female gaming clans to the rights and wrongs of in-game advertising. Why not sit back, relax and take a nostalgic journey through the last twelve months? After all, the Christmas TV has been rubbish this year, all your presents are broken and you've completed the Grand Prix mode in Mario Kart DS - what else is there to do?
Part two tomorrow!
The New Games Journalism Sadly, my most controversial post of the year was a list of other people's writing - the infamous Ten unmissable examples of New games Journalism. This response to Kieron Gillen's NGJ manifesto (commented on by the man himself, here) was taken far too seriously by a lot of inexplicably angry videogame writers - who went on to exhaust themselves uncovering new synonyms for 'self-indulgent'. The list was even parodied by videogame comedy site, UK Resistance. Most sensible people, including Kieron himself, soon tired of the eventually counter-productive NGJ label and moved on. But it got people talking about videogame writing and therefore did its job.
Frag Dolls and women gamers Aleks kept the whole 'gender in gaming' debate very much on the agenda throughout the year with several posts, including three from the Women's Game Conference in Austin (Women's Game Conference part 1, Austin day 2 and Gaming "grows up": digital ladies hit the centrefold). Her reports on both the UK and US Fragdolls also drew lots of contrasting opinion - some of it from the Fragdolls themselves... Central to the whole topic is whether the 'women gamers' category need exist at all - aren't we all just gamers now? It's like the hand-wringing Radio 4 has been doing over Women's Hour for the past decade - and equally unlikely to be resolved.
Hot Coffee Rockstar's failure to remove some unused sex scenes from San Andreas sparked really the only videogame controversy of the year to interest the tabloids. The fact that a few moments of consensual sex (which you had to actively unlock through a time-consuming and fiddly process) enraged governments throughout the world said volumes about how videogames are perceived by non-gamers. Yes, it's okay for people to shoot, run-over and kick in the heads of virtual humans, but have sex with them? Unacceptable. How very, very weird. Anyway, we covered all this in a series of posts, starting with Hidden sex shame of GTA, continuing here and here, and then culminating in my dismissive, Videogame controversies are boring.
Xbox 360 vs PS3 Aleks' early attempt to compare the specs of these two next-gen heavyweights drew plenty of comments, many of which added real insight and valuable detail into the comparison. A few days later, I commented on Sony's PS3 hype-mongering at E3 (Has Sony's PS3 really beaten the Xbox 360?) - you know, just to wind people up again. This one is set to run and run and...
DS vs PSP Greg stoked the fires of handheld rivalry this year with a couple of timely posts - DS UK and PSP problems - the latter attracting some memorably sharp intellectual debate ("PSP STINKS AND IS OBSELETE IT HAS ONLY ONE SCREEN AND NO TRUE D-PAD OR ANOLOG YOU CARNT CONTROL THE GAMES ON IT ITS EVEN WORSE THAN PS2 CONTROL PAD," wrote someone called Belly Boy). It's interesting to look back on these arguments several months later - after a string of fabulous DS games (Nintendogs, Mario Kart, Advance Wars...) and a relative paucity of must-have PSP titles.
