The Sandbox

Webkinz are taking over the elementary school crowd. The little stuffed animals come with a serial number. When you enter the number on the webkinz.com site, your kid gets to play with a pixilated version of the pet in a virtual space. It's sort of a younger version of Neopets, but without the insidious advertising.

The Webkinz business model is to vest the kids in their animals, and compel them to collect more and more and more. This is a *huge* phenomenon and incredibly innovative - the Web 2.0 answer to Cabbage Patch dolls and Beanie Babies. Webkinz fly off shelves.

...does anyone really want to buy a PSP because it has a Darth Vader stenciled on the back? I mean, what am I missing here? There's a picture, that you could probably find as a sticker, of a character whose evil badass nature has been forever ruined by the fact that he apparently killed, not children, but "younglings", in an utterly insipid movie. Otherwise, it's a PSP. If you don't have one, you're not missing a ton: get a DS instead.

I bow before our new End of Year Best-of list overlords. Here's my short list of my favorites of 2007:

1. Lord of the Rings Online. Because I worked on it for four and a half years to ship it, and have worked on it since then, and it's clearly the best MMO of 2007. No personal prejudice here, no sir. But I'm playing it, which says a lot about a game that I've worked on (which I seldom play post-launch).

2. Rock Band. My childhood dreams of drumming, stifled by my parents who desired peace and quiet in their house, are now finding outlet, and obliterating my wife's goodwill towards me.

3. Portal. Great little game. Suffers from the "giant thick client to play a teeny-tiny game" problem, but who cares when it's this fun? You want thin client, play Flash Portal.

4. Super Mario Galaxy. I used to disdain Nintendo, early in my gaming career, as nothing but Cute. Jeebus, was I an idiot.

5. God of War 2 / Heavenly Sword. They're the same game, with different avatars of destruction. But they're both onslaughts of epic annihilation that appeals to the little kid in me that still writhes with excitement when I see shiny things.

6. Bioshock. Great art direction. Gameplay and story were sort of meh, but they tried.

7. Team Fortress 2. TF is back, and it's still fun. I miss EMPs, though.

8. Phase. Addictive little iPod game. Five bucks well spent.

Not on the list, but still decent: Halo 3, Assassin's Creed, Mass Effect. They're really good, but I was not inspired to finish any of them, so I can't feel good about giving them a final score.

Didn't play: Call of Duty 4, Crysis, lots of other things. I only have so much time.

It was a good year for games. 2008 will have some work cut out for it: Metal Gear Solid 4 doesn't look so "ZOMG" these days, now that we've seen other games that look just as good.

More categories for this article than I thought possible... it's about everything.

Leigh Alexander is very much worth reading, when you're in search of thoughts on the game industry. Two recent articles are the case For and the case Against this new world of entertainment media convergence. Is this intertwining of games, web, movies, television, cell phones, GPS, fresh baked bread, and the fat pipe connecting your checking account to media producers' coffers, is this good for games?

Leigh gives the definitive maybe. I mostly agree.

From Gamasutra.com: for the second month in a row, the PS3 has outsold the XBox360 in North America. The interesting thing is that I'm guessing this has a lot more to do with the fact that it's pretty much the cheapest Blu-Ray player out there, or at least the cheapest that anyone knows about, because as you can see on the software chart at Gamasutra, there's only one PS3 game in the top ten, compared to six XBox titles. And the PS3 title, Devil May Cry 4, is behind the XBox version.

This says folks aren't seriously gaming on the PS3s they're buying, they're finally buying hi-def DVDs players, now that the format war is over.

[via 1up] Microsoft may be looking to unload its crushing hardware cost burden onto other folks, and license other companies to produce XBox consoles. As an exercise in expanding the brand, it's a brilliant move: XBox consoles are expensive, and Microsoft has already established a serious presence with the console and with XBox Live. Now they can continue to make the pie bigger by inviting hardware competition in increasing the platform's spread, driving costs down, and hopefully resulting in better quality (not to mention quieter, sheesh) consoles. Let's hope it happens.