Video games: Day of reckoning follows year of hype

The year-end report for video games held surprises as next-generation systems took a back seat to the old standbys.

For the video game industry and players, a big day came recently when market research firm NPD released its annual retail report of hardware sales and top-selling console games of the year. Here's who really rules the video game roost in the United States: a TV football analyst who young players might not even realize was once a coach, John Madden. For the second year, a version of "Madden NFL" football from Electronic Arts topped the charts, with 2.8 million games sold for Sony's PlayStation 2. The top version of "Madden" has placed no lower than third every year since 2001.

In the same vein, Sony deserves credit for the continued strength and popularity of the now-venerable PS2, priced at $129. Sony has taken a lot of heat for the lackluster inauguration of its PlayStation 3, but the PS2 was actually the top-selling home game console during the holiday season. Half of the top 10 games of 2006 were for the older system.

In looking at last year's breakout hits, the first game that comes to mind is "Gears of War," the intense, sumptuous third-person shooter for the Xbox 360 that lived up to all the considerable hype that Microsoft had generated to promote it. It came in at No. 3 for the year.

But perhaps the more interesting and far-reaching newcomers to the top 10 list were two games for Nintendo's portable DS unit. While much attention has focused, deservedly, on innovations in Nintendo's new Wii home console, the DS has not so quietly taken over the buzz in the handheld game market, beating Sony's more powerful but less fun PlayStation Portable (PSP).

With 1.6 million units sold, the DS was the top-selling game machine in the country overall in December, beating out even the PlayStation 2. The PSP, meanwhile, sold fewer than 1 million units last month, according to NPD.

And although a new DS "Mario Brothers" game ranking at No. 2 was not a surprise, perhaps even more impressive was the No. 7 showing of the DS game "Brain Age," which in some ways is hardly a game at all. While Sony and Microsoft continue to cater mostly to the hard-core young male gamer, Nintendo has staked its future on bringing a much broader demographic to the game world.

Of course, top 10 lists are telling not just for what is on them, but also for what's missing. And in 2006, there were two games in particular from famous developers that scored well with critics, but failed to crack the top sales echelon.

Rockstar Games tried mightily to prove that it deserved to be known not just as the company that makes "Grand Theft Auto." It failed. "Bully" seemed well made, creative and whimsical (you have to like a video game set at a dysfunctional boarding school), but it didn't fly off the shelves.

The other slightly disappointing sales result came from the "Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion," the sprawling single-player role-playing game from Bethesda Softworks. Those results, however, are a bit easier to explain. Many people who like that sort of game prefer to play them on PCs rather than on consoles, and PC figures were missing from the NPD data.