Let’s get straight to the point: Fallout 3, despite its minor flaws, is the closest I’ve felt to inhabiting a real-life world inside a video game. It’s built for exploration and will deliver enough substance for at least a hundred hours of gameplay. On top of all this, enemies’ heads explode if you shoot them just right — and that’s pretty cool by itself.

I’m late to the review party (I was too busy playing the game), so all the superlatives have been used up, but Bioshock is the undisputed Game of the Year. The central plot is shaky at times, but the atmosphere created by the rich backstory and gorgeous scenery is the best I’ve ever experienced in a video game.

A surprisingly-good clone of the Grand Theft Auto games. The plot isn’t as good, though, and it suffers from some bizarre and frustrating bugs.

The new features are fantastic (practice mode, cooperative multiplayer), and there are some excellent songs in this version, but the game doesn’t jell the way the first one did. I am glad I’ve got a new plastic guitar to replace my old one — the whammy bar had broken off and the strum bar was getting a little flimsy.

For the first five days I owned an Xbox 360, this disc barely left the machine. On top of the ridculously-high replay value, this game is also a really fascinating look at what Japan thinks about American culture. The “Mark of the Sniper” scene (grab the game script and do a search) seemed to be a direct rebuttal to the 1992 Rodney Peairs/Yoshi Hattori incident.

Wow. This game scores very highly on my RTS rubric: full camera control, no forced micromanagement, sane multiplayer, and a forgiving learning curve. It’s so engrossing I’ll forgive it for indulging in the boilerplate “noun of noun” naming convention for World War II video games.