2006 Top Xbox Live Games Announced

Major Nelson, of Xbox Live fame, today announced the top games on Xbox Live over the past year. There’s a few surprises in the lists, so I’ll post each of the tables, then discuss what they mean.

First up, the top Xbox Live Titles by GamerTag. What this chart shows is the number of individuals who have played each game. This only measures games for the 360 and not original Xbox games played on 360s.

2006 Top Xbox 360 Titles (Unique Users)

1	Gears of War
2	Hexic HD
3	Call of Duty 2
4	Ghost Recon 3
5	Oblivion
6	PGR3
7	Perfect Dark Zero
8	Call of Duty 3
9	UNO
10	EA SPORTS™ Fight Night Round 3

Unsurprisingly, Gears of War tops this list. Given that more then a tenth of all Xbox 360 owners have a copy of this game it’s basically. Hexic in second place is pretty much a statistical blip, since every single Xbox Hard Drive comes with a free copy of it. I was surprised by Perfect Dark Zero getting into the top ten, but it was a launch game, despite being pretty poor.

The Wii Bubble Bursts?

For a long time, the Wii was the holy grail of gaming, defended by a flock of rabid fanboys as soon as anyone mentioned the fact that it was an upgraded GameCube. Now the bubble has burst somewhat.

Yesterday, I reported on the latest Virtual Console games for Europe and expressed my belief that they were a pretty poor selection. At around about the same time, GoNintendo posted an extract from a Spanish language interview with Ernesto Fernánez-Maquieira, one of the managers of Nintendo-Europe. The only section of the interview that GoNintendo has in English is:

RG: One question about the Virtual Console: Many readers put hope in the Virtual Console to enjoy the classics that didn’t make it to the European Market such as Mario RPG for SNES. Is there any hope?

EF: We will see only games that were released in Europe in the past for the Virtual Console, and they will come in the same original languages that they were released.

This has some pretty big implications for European Gamers. Many people will find themselves unable to play classic games in their native language and NES, SNES and MegaDrive releases which were US or Japan only will not be released in Europe at all.

When the Virtual Console system was announced, many saw it as an opportunity to play games which they’d never been able to play before due to regional releases. It’s disappointing that Nintendo isn’t following Microsoft’s lead and creating a real games download service with new and updated content.

In other news, one of the bloggers at Aeropause has written a piece about using GameCube memory cards on with the Wii. Apparently, it’s impossible to transfer GameCube saves from the memory card on to the Wii system memory or to an SD Card. This is just short sighted of Nintendo and points towards some of the Wii firmware either being rushed or just not well thought out.

No console is perfect, unfortunatly far too many people had built the Wii up to be the ultimate gaming machine. It’s good that it’s finally coming down to earth, but it does seem that Nintendo have made some bad decisions regarding Virtual Console and the first release firmware.

[Thanks to Kerri from 8Bit Hero! for the link to the GoNintendo Story]