That has been my feeling for this period of gaming as well.  Most of the big games made in this era were not made for me.  The new motion control games like Wii Sports were fun, but I wanted them to have more depth.

The only game in the poll or the list of extended games that I really liked from this year was Final Fantasy XII.  To me it was the last great home console Final Fantasy game.  It marks the end of the SNES/PS1/PS2 era when Final Fantasy games were all amazing.

As a fan of linear Zelda games Twilight Princess is one of my favorites in the series. The somewhat slow start is made up for by the fantastic second half of the game.
The title screen music when wolf Link howls still gives me goosebumps.
The art style have not aged as well as Wind Waker and it is a shame that it does not feature orchestral music. Comparing collecting tears in Twilight Princess with the similar task in Skyward Sword also make it feel a bit dated, the experience in Skyward Sword is some of the most intense moments in the series while in TP it feels like a drag.
Skyward Sword is the only other 3D Zelda that can match the quality standard of the dungeons in Twilight Princess. SS made an obvious downgrade when it comes to the companion character but an equal upgrade in its portrait of the titular character Zelda.
The Wii version of TP had some motion controls in swinging the sword and aiming the bow and felt seamless to use. Skyward Sword was designed around motion controls which was sort of a hit or miss. For me it was a hit for the most part. Pretty much the only thing that I thought bad/unnecessary was the use to rotate "keys" to open dungeons.
TP and SS is my favorite 3D Zelda games. Been meaning to replay SS in order to confirm or deny it as my favorite, but I will always remember my first playthrough of that game as the best first run of any game.
Got a bit off track comparing my favorite of this year with other games in the series instead of comparing it to the other games released.

New Super Mario Bros is a game I enjoyed a lot when it came out. But I cannot remember almost anything about it standing out. The release of multiple very similar Mario games just drown this one into fuzzy non-distinct game that just exists. Playing "poker" with Luigi as the dealer is stuck in my mind at least.

Okami was so beautiful. I played the Wii-version and without even trying any other version it felt like the paintbrush could not work well on other systems. But I lost interest before beating it. Don't know why, I probably got a bit turned off by the very Japanese feeling around the game.

Wii sports is phenomenal. My brother still plays the golf game regularly. Easy to pick up for anyone and about as deep as the puddle left in the cup of tea after you finished drinking all the tea.

My runner up for the year is Elite Beat Agents. One of very few games that made me tear up. If someone said a music game could have such great stories I would not believe them. I still play the game, one track each Christmas, You're the Inspiration. Such magic.

FF12 hands down for me. Of which I played in 2007 as it only came out in the UK then. More and more these get confusing due to Japanese releases vs PAL. As a UK gamer, I was either playing last years games or nothing as this is around the time I moved 200 miles to get a job, house hoped from my mates to shared house and my gaming consisted of a PS2 with a portable monitor (on which I think I mostly played KH2), I think I still have that monitor too in a box in my back room.

I played a lot on the list and out of the list in the end and the extras but would like give a def mention to Valkyrie Profile 2. Out in 2007 in the UK (october so late) but 2006 in Japan. It has amazing graphics for what it was on but when I first played I kinda got stuck and couldn't get through it. About 7 years later in like 2014, I got it again (as in I traded it in long ago and bought it again), looked up a guide to help me get pass the crux of where I was stuck and the played on. In the end, ended up loving it. An amazing story, unique gameplay and world. It's a shame following titles haven't captured that style for me, the recent entry I played the demo of to me it was just another generic hack and slash, nothing like VP2 at all.

Twilight Princess is one of my favorite Zelda games, so I vote for that. Okami and Gears are both incredible too.

The lacklustre years continued for me. Especially since I wasn't initially interested in Wii. Like I wrote earlier console gaming, both home and handheld, were far from my mind at this point.

From the poll, I only played Zelda Twilight Princess when it released. The game was great though, I was glad Nintendo got back to a style (not necessarily "graphical") that suited me better after The Wind Waker had disappointed me years earlier. Even in the greater context of the series, this game features what are probably the best dungeons and some of the best bosses in it, and maybe even in gaming as a whole. The Temple of Time, the City in the Sky, the Snowpeak Ruins and my personal favourite the Arbiter's Grounds along with the epic Stallord boss are piece by piece, masterpieces. And it wasn't even like the dungeons of the first act were slouches either. They also feature some of the most unique item uses. I played it on GameCube initially, because that's the console I still had laying around. It needed some dusting off though. Later, when I did get a Wii, I replayed the game's Wii version multiple times. The motion control in that was simple but effective. The game would repair some of my faith in both Nintendo and the 'validity' of console gaming.

Next to Twilight Princess I would later also play Wii Sports and New Super Mario Bros obviously after we finally had a Wii, and tiny bits of Okami (like, a tiny bit over a decade later) and The Elder Scrolls Oblivion. From the 'other' list I only played small chunks of Call of Duty 3 when we got a PS3, before I realised these kinds of fps's are barely playable with a controller, and returned to CoD1 and 2 on PC. I also had Wii Play on Wii because it came with an additional Wiimote (if I remember correctly), but I hardly played that game.

So this year was basically all Twilight Princess for me, and PC didn't bring much that interested me either while I just continued playing older games, except for one other new game. That game was Medieval II: Total War. I was already into Rome Total War very much by this point, and Medieval II was as excellent of a game. Based on Rome, I could pick it up and play immediately, and it opened up my interest in medieval history. Or rather re-opened this interest because I had been interested in the period before as a child because "castles are cool". I played Medieval II a lot, and for years. It is hard to say which one of the two, Rome or Medieval II, is 'better', because they are so similar, but I would often still say 'Rome'. It is in the tiniest of details; like how in Rome the regions all have an actual, accurate name instead of being called "x Region". I would later go on to fidle with the game files to add more regions and actually give them real names. Rome got a great (and underrated I'd say) sequel many years later, and I'm still for Medieval II to finally get one as well.

Still though, because Twilight Princess reminded me of earlier days when "gaming was good", console gaming at least, and gave me a spark of hope that it might again be sometime in the future, and just simply because it was an awesome game, my vote is The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess.

Ah yeah Motorstorm released in December in Japan. What an awesome game, topped by the second installment (with 4 player split-screen added as well!), fell flat in the third :/

Motorstorm introduced the festival vibe which FH took to cringe levels lol. In Motorstorm it was basically just background to select vehicles and tracks. An awesome selection of very different vehicles that somehow balanced each other out in strength and weaknesses. Quite an achievement to have motor bikes and full on trucks balanced on the tracks thanks to the many different paths you could take. Great boost mechanic and kicking people from motorbikes and quads lol.

Quite a beautiful game too with mud physics and all. I wish this series would come back along with PGR and Burnout. Those were the days of arcade racing!


I guess I'm the heathen that didn't enjoy Twilight Princess much at all. Looks like it's running away with the poll yet after Wind Waker, TP was a disappointment. The art style, the music, the sounds, all yuck to me. I'm not a fan of moody Zelda games. But fair is fair, many people didn't like Wind Waker for its art style. Skyward Sword looked great again but had to eff it up with mandatory motion controls lol. SS did have better dungeons than Wind waker. I guess I'm still looking for the perfect Zelda game :)

Completely agree about the MotorStorm series - 1 was a refreshing entry to the genre for the reasons you mentioned (plus a good start to the then-new generation with its visuals), Pacific Rift fleshed it out and added a lot more content, and then sadly Apocalypse went off the rails and was really mediocre. I did enjoy the Vita MotorStorm RC game though.

It's been over 10 years since then, so about time the series got a reboot.

Straight up Okami for me.

Honorary mentions to Rogue Trooper and Prey.

Hitman Blood Money, triumphal and phenomenal game, the best Hitman game by far, I played on PC/PS2/PS3/PS4 many times over.

This poll is another example of how this site has many Nintendo fans compared to others, Zelda is winning easily when I remember correctly that Gears won most of the media awards in 2006