Video game review by ERIK LEIJON

Everyone else is doing a best-of recapitulation, but since I can give my awards in four acronyms (GOW, FFXII, GRAW, DOA4), here are a series of final thoughts and less glamorous trophies to hand out.

Best game you didn’t play: MLB 07: The Show (PSP). The Show’s portable version has everything you could want in a baseball game (except for the franchise mode) but condenses it into a sleek, small package. The gameplay is airtight, and Matt Vasgersian’s play-by-play is more detailed than most console titles. Because of the limitations of the PSP, the useless frills that usually dot major releases are thankfully absent.

Most overrated gaming experience: Nintendo DS’s stylus pad. Let me preface this by acknowledging Nintendo’s refreshing desire to create innovative gameplay and the cross-marketing success of the DS. But damn if the best games on the DS: Tetris DS, New Super Mario Bros., and Yoshi’s Island DS, hardly made any use of the stylus pad, and many of the games that relied heavily on the pad felt less fulfilling (Phoenix Wright notwithstanding). Case in point: Which Wario Ware was better—the DS one or Twisted! for the Advance?

Series that needs to die: Sonic. With a heavy heart, I must pull the plug on one of gaming’s most hallowed institutions. Sadly, Shadow the Hedgehog, Sonic Heroes, Sonic 3D Blast and Sonic Shuffle all sucked, and Sonic the Hedgehog on the 360, just released, is the final straw. Sonic Adventure was decent, but it’s been downhill ever since for the speedy mascot that was once more recognized than Mickey Mouse. Playing a new Sonic game is like running into an old friend at the Chinatown entrance, squeegee in hand and a sign around his neck denoting services offered in exchange for weed. The days of blast processing and cartridges upon cartridges are in the past, and they ain’t comin’ back.

Most clone-ified game: Grand Theft Auto. Godfather, Scarface, Bully, Yakuza, Just Cause, Saints Row and Jaws Unleashed all borrow the same sandbox, open-ended gameplay made famous by Rockstar’s favourite son. Games like 50 Cent: Bulletproof and 25 to Life merely borrow the gangster-ific aesthetics of GTA. Some of those games were good, some of them bad—all of them conducive to “Grand Theft (insert one-word description of title)” headlines.

Best Gun: Leech Gun. There were many guns this year. Ones that killed, others maimed, some scalded and a few even shifted time, but the most interesting was the leech gun from the PC/X360 FPS Prey. Its firing abilities depended on what type of power the weapon absorbs throughout the level. You could freeze enemies, burn enemies or electrocute them. I didn’t get to kill as many people as I wanted to this year, but thanks to the leech gun, I always kept them guessing.

Best game to play if you only have 10 minutes: (tie) Guitar Hero II, Lumines II. If you’re at home and you have a bus to catch across the street in 10 minutes, a quick play of Guitar Hero II will stimulate your fingers, and allow for a brief moment of rocking. Lumines II is for when you’re actually on the bus, and you don’t feel much like staring at strangers, or pretending to check for text messages on your Blackberry.

Funniest news story of the year: Last February, the first-ever cyberspace gay pride parade took place in World of Warcraft, in retaliation to Blizzard (the developer) threatening to expel anyone advertising gay/lesbian/transgender meets in the general chat area. Keep reaching for that rainbow, citizens of Azeroth.

RIP: GameCube, PS2, Xbox, GBA.