Here are some of my favorite games of 2011; there ought to be something for just about any player except hard-core shooter fans (who have all bought Battlefield 3 or Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 already) and superhero fans (who are playing Batman: Arkham City).
The microconsole's games are also designed to appeal to a different type of gamer, as opposed to the high-performance, hard-core 3D shooters built for the PS4 or Xbone.
Both games leaven their core first-person shooter dynamics with some spectacular sequences in which you are controlling the guns on a fantastical, futuristic combat vehicle, like a train, a robotic walker or a space frigate.
The company previously worked on some of the Mortal Kombat games and will also release a first-person shooter called Damaged Core for Oculus.
The release of Left 4 Dead in 2008 helped popularize cooperative multiplayer among survival horror games, although it is mostly a first person shooter at its core.
The gloriously irreverent tone of this side-scrolling shooter neatly supports its core mechanic: using time travel to create undulated chaos.
It brings together the four core games from the acclaimed sci-fi shooter series, each of which has undergone various applications of spit and polish, with Halo 2 enjoying the most impressive reworking.
There's also an ambition to add longevity to player vs player encounters, to get out of the twitch core rut that some well-known military shooters have ploughed.
At its core, Spec Ops: The Line is a cover-based shooter in the mould of Gears Of War, although comparing its gameplay to Epic's testosterone-juiced fragfest is doing the latter something of a disservice.
And what do even outlandish, sci-fi shooters like Halo tell us about the core appeal of the genre?
