2008: Year of the game?

Being honest, 2007 was a huge disappointment for me. Games like Assassin's Creed, Super Mario Galaxy, Bioshock, Mass Effect and Call of Duty 4 Modern Warfare paled in comparison to everything that came before them, and you'd have to shove the pointy end of a loaded rifle into my rectum and threatened to pull the trigger before I actually played any of them. On the positive side there was Crackdown. And that's it. One great game worth playing, for a whole 365 days, 8 760 hours or 31 556 926 seconds of prime release time. But what about Crysis, I hear you cry (pun intended)? You could launch Crysis and its entire development team into the sun and you'd have to send my testicles along with them before I started caring. But that's a rant for another time.

So I was casually flicking through the latest issue of PSM3 yesterday when I discovered an 18 page extravaganza featuring 157 new games. Think about that for a second. 157 games on PS3 alone means there must be something good in there, right? Right. I noticed a few gems I'd either forgotten about or didn't know about to begin with. For example, The Getaway 3, Two Days to Vegas (new media released recently on Steel Monkeys' official site) and The Outsider (Splinter Cell: Conviction without Sam Fisher).
I'm going to go off on a limb here and spew out every good game I can think of that's coming in 2008, in no real order.
Grand Theft Auto IV, Mercenaries 2, Mirror's Edge, the Half-Life 2 modification NeoTokyo (pigs flying etc), Mafia II, Eight Days, Midnight Club Los Angles, Alan Wake, Red Faction 3, Rage, MGS4, Gran Turismo 5, Haze, Killzone 2, The Club, Frontlines: Fuel of War, Far Cry 2, Battlefield Bad Company, Fallout 3 and Rainbow Six Vegas 2.
And those are just the ones I'm interested in.

There is a little voice in my head screaming at me for writing this because the majority of them are sequels and soulless mush, the likes of which are slowly draining away all originality and creativity from the gaming industry, along with my will to live, but the sheer number of appealing titles has already bound and gagged the little bastard and beaten him until he can't move. I probably won't end up buying more than one or two of these, but it's always good to have choice, and a repeat of last year would have seen me hanging myself in a mental asylum for cases of unusually extreme boredom.

I'm almost a month late, but I'll say it anyway: bring on 2008!