Two of the biggest games since the last Holiday season Nintendo's Super Mario Galaxy 2, sequel to one of the highest-rated and most successful games of this gen -- 2007's Super Mario Galaxy; and Remedy's Alan Wake for Microsoft's XBOX 360, the long awaited aspirant to be the new Standard of Excellence in the survival horror genre, are set to release this month.

Mario is perhaps the greatest character in the entire history of video games. Surely Galaxy 2 will stand proudly among the many successful titles that bear his name.

Alan Wake was shown at E3 2005 and quickly gained a standing amoung xbox fans that thought it would stand up there with the greatest of all Xbox games including titles such as those in the Halo series and Gears of War.

Which of these two titles do you believe will be the biggest game of May and possibly the Summer months of 2010? Which one will receive the best review scores? Which one will sell the most?

I think they'll both be very successful and popular, with scores for MG2 and AW reaching a metascore of 94 and 92 respectively.

I'll base my judgement on SMG2: some reviewers will say it's better than the first so they'll givi it an higer mark, some others will say it's not as revolutionary as the first one, so the metacritic score should be about the same as the first...and few game arrived there, so I think SMG2 will have a better average score.
Salewise I believe in the power of NSMBW, which IMHO brought the character of Mario into many new houses...even if this game is 3D, probably many people will just see their new hero and buy it, and have a good surprise. Plus the userbase is bigger than 2 years ago. So I think SMG2 will have better sales than Alanwake too.

SMG2 will beat Alan Wake in critical reception and also sales.

Seems an easy guess, so I'll stick with it too :p

SMG2 will win reviewers, but to the fans Alan Wake will be far superior IMO.

Alan Wake!!!

Reviews should have SMG slightly higher. Sales won't even be close. SMG will have 3-4 times the sales of Alan Wake. I expect Alan Wake sales to be similar to Heavy Rain as its a new IP.

I believe SMG2 93% Meta and maybe 7 million lifetime sales.

Alan Wake 94% Meta and 3 million lifetime.

SMG2 will likely be the best game released this year and even better than SMG but have lower review scores. It will likely sell much better than Alan Wake but this year and lifetime.