My top five retail 360 games of 2007.

- Mass Effect
I can see the opinion of people who can’t look past this game’s many, many flaws. Weird, irritating loading times,  weird conversation choices, repetitive sidequests… blah blah blah. What I liked about this game was the look of it. Going to dozens of little planets and looking at their sky inspired me so much that all I could think about for months was going to space. Yeah, I’m a giant nerd. Yeah, this game should’ve been in the oven a while longer. But the incredibly immersive universe they created, from the Citadel full of aliens to the awesome red dawrf-scorched skyscapes of backwater planets with a marine outpost plopped somewhere near the middle, drew me in and didn’t let me go until the end. And, actually, the story was pretty good. The last fifth of the game has a couple of plot twists that rival KOTOR in sheer awesometude.

- Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
In contrast to Mass Effect, here’s a game that is polished to near-perfection. The single-player game is a stunning piece of videogame storytelling which uses the inevitable lack of control over parts of videogame stories to crushing effect (and I mean that in the good way). It may not be a very long campaign, but it is one that you won’t hate starting over right after you’ve beaten it. It’s that good. The number of really, really memorable moments in the game is massive. And that’s not all, either; the multiplayer, in my opinion, is the most solid multiplayer FPS experience on the console. Forget people’s complaints about the “levelling up” system. You start with everything you need to play well. In fact, I find the more you think like an actual person who actually doesn’t want to die, the better you do. At early levels, I was crushing people because I’d slowly crawl through grass up to snipers and quietly take thme out form behind. The bonuses you get as you level up are more like shiny toys and less like real advantages. This is the only game I play on Xbox Live Arcade anymore.

- The Orange Box
Two first-person shooter titles on my list is kind of crazy, because they’re definitely not my genre, but this is almost definitely their year. Half-Life 2 got a really awesome conclusion. Team Fortress 2 had things that I loved about it (well, mostly just the videos… I find it looks boring in gameplay, and worse, I don’t really enjoy playing it. But, the use of voice in the multiplayer FPS format is just stunning). Then, there’s Portal. I’m not sure if it’s even worth extolling the virtues of this game at this point, because it’s been said much better by pretty much everyone else (I’m looking at you, N’Gai and Totilo) (…he said, as if they were actually reading this). But, if you haven’t played it, it really feels like a monumental step for first-person shooters in spatial innovation, as well as video games in general due to its tone and storytelling. It may be only four hours long at best, but without Portal, I doubt Orange Box would’ve placed in my top five.

- skate.
I’ve only started playing this recently, but I am completely enchanted by it. I realized that I spent upwards of an hour trying to land one specific fliptrick to grind last night. When you do something properly in this game, the sense of satisfaction is awesome. It is excruciatingly difficult at times, but at the same time, always feels kind of hazy and calm, like spending a lazy sunday outside kicking around a real skteboard (I assume… I never had one). The advertisement is a real irritator, and the stick feels a bit random at times, but other than those little niggly issues, this is a game you can sit down with and not stop playing until something forces you away– be it five minutes or five hours later.

- Stranglehold
I won’t pretend this is a game you should own, but I really feel like everyone who loves awesome singleplayer games should give this one a rental. It’s really fun to watch, and even more fun to play. The John Woo attitude just oozes out of the game, and kind of plays out like a really long Woo movie. It also plays out, more importantly, like a perfectly paced action game. It’s never exhausting, and there’s only one point where I found it boring (and that may have been my own fault for not getting where I was supposed to go). It’s difficult at times, but never repetitive. The mini-game mode fits in flawlessly and keeps things fresh. The “tequila bombs” have a suitably dumb videogame name and are each really stupidly fun to use. Play this. Thank me later.

Stay tuned for top five 360 Arcade games, DS games, and top three PS2 and low-end-PC.