The Players

It was a good year for games, and Ciara O'Brienand Joe Griffinhave had a ball playing them. Let's hear it for 2010

IT’S BEEN an exciting year for gaming, with technology to make games even more immersive coming to the fore. Where Nintendo led, Microsoft and Sony followed, each putting their own particular spin on motion-sensitive gaming. But regardless of what way they implement it, the end result is the same: gaming is being opened up to a wider audience, as it should have been all along.

3D gaming also made it on to consoles this year, although Nintendo’s delay in getting its 3Ds out for Christmas might prove costly for the firm. It’s not too surprising that Sony has jumped in with 3D games for the PS3, given that the company is also heavily involved in selling the hardware to match it.

Already titles such as Gran Turismo 5and Call of Duty: Black Opshave stereoscopic 3D capability, and given the glimpse of things to come we got at E3 in June, it's about to get a lot more interesting.

Ciara O’Brien’s 10 best games 2010

1 Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood

2 Call of Duty: Black Ops

3 Read Dead Redemption

4 EA Sports Active 2

5 Heavy Rain

6 Fallout: New Vegas

7 Gran Turismo 5

8 Just Dance 2

9 Super Mario Galaxy 2

10 Kinect Sports

AMID ALL the brouhaha for Sony’s Move and Microsoft’s Kinect, it’s too soon to tell what long-term impact they will have. Eagle-eyed readers will notice that my top 10 list of the year includes exactly one game that needs the new control system.

The breadth and scope of games expanded this year. Red Dead Redemptionhad even greater ambition than Rock Star's Grand Theft Auto series. Heavy Rainasked gamers to partake in a murder mystery with weighty moral dilemmas, and it was rewarded with more than one million sales. And let's not forget the uniquely haunting Limbo.

It was a beautiful year for games: sales of casual and hardcore titles were healthy, and media coverage was more appreciative and less hysterical than usual. We’ve had plenty of reaction (good and bad) to our first year in The Ticket, but we welcome it all! Thanks for reading.

Joe Griffin’s 10 best games 2010

1 Red Dead Redemption

2 Limbo

3 Heavy Rain

4 Battlefield: Bad Company II

5 Modnation Racers

6 God of War III

7 Plants vs Zombies

8 Dance Central

9 Split/Second Velocity

10 Angry Birds