Game of the Year: Xbox 360's BioShock isn't just a scary horror game with girls in pigtails sucking spirits out of corpses with the tips of medical needles. It's a broadly cinematic outing, populated with crazy-talking demons in a creepy Art Deco otherworld, where you sneak around and kill your way to the end. It succeeds at every ambitious turn.
Couldn't Have Lived Without It: Xbox 360's Shadowrun operates unlike other online shooters. After every 10- to 20-minute battle, you lose all the guns and magical powers you just gained and start over from scratch. This sounds pointless. But once it got under my skin, I wanted to play nothing else all summer and fall.
Overlooked: Raw Danger! (PlayStation 2) looks terrible and seems unbelievably simplistic at first. But it's a lot of fun, as a waiter guides people to safety during torrential flooding. Also, SingStar Pop is a fantastic karaoke series, and Kororinpa: Marble Mania spruces up the marble-madness style with easy to impossible challenges.
Reissue: Resident Evil 4 (Wii) reminded everyone why 4 is one of the best four games of all time. It's scary and intense, now interactively murderous with the Wii wand.