Left me wishing I had enough time and luxury to jump straight back in and take the entire journey again. It's destined to enter the annals of gaming's classics in years to come.

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is so immense and chock-full of content that we could conceivably rant about it for pages, but to do so would only detract from the time you should spend physically playing it.

LittleBigPlanet is gaming’s equivalent to YouTube: an unprecedented channel of collective talent that offers a level of creative freedom never before seenin a commercial videogame. It does for the platform genre what Half-Life did for shooters and what Gran Turismo did for racers; injecting innovation into a rapidly-staling genre and paving the way for the future of the side-scrolling platformer.

For all its achievements in aesthetics and game structure, perhaps the most significant feature of Red Dead Redemption is the way Rockstar has invested the experience with such a sense of nostalgia and poignancy, by stripping the open-world back to an era in which the telephone is the height of technology, an era which, in all its naivety, doesn’t yet realise how fast the tide of progression and modernity will be.

The Last of Us is the type of game that could only be crafted by a developer willing to take risks. Were Naughty Dog to have thrown its money at yearly iterations of Uncharted, it would likely still have found its audience, but with The Last of Us it has struck out in a bold new direction that asks some very big questions about some of the fundamental aspects of videogame culture and the relationship that exists between gamer and game.

For all its achievements in aesthetics and game structure, perhaps the most significant feature of Red Dead Redemption is the way Rockstar has invested the experience with such a sense of nostalgia and poignancy, by stripping the open-world back to an era in which the telephone is the height of technology, an era which, in all its naivety, doesn't yet realise how fast the tide of progression and modernity will be.

When it comes down to it though Bioshock Infinite is a labour of love, a staggeringly impressive achievement and an example of the invention and singularity of vision that so many big budget games lack. I

Batman: Arkham City isn't the surprise that the first game was and instead has to live up to the hype and remain fresh by bringing in new ideas whilst building on the old ones. This sequel handles the challenge admirable, making for what is so far the closest thing gamers have to a definitive Batman experience.

Everything about the game – plots, combat, progression, characters – comes together in a tidy, satisfying package.

It's this blissful sense of nostalgia that makes Street Fighter IV the runaway success that it undoubtedly is. Street Fighter hasn't changed per se – at heart, it's still the very same game you played all those years ago - but it's been tweaked and enhanced to within an inch of perfection.

Though it doesn't do anything particularly revolutionary, the level of artistry is so far beyond anything we've played recently that it almost doesn't need to. Standing uniquely in the busy Christmas schedule and indeed within 2008 as a whole, Fallout 3 is an experience to savour.

The story may be overambitious, inconclusive and undermined by some queasy sentimentality, but the fine-tuning made to the game's core shooting and cover mechanics make Gears of War 2 Epic's finest work to date.

Pure Nintendo magic.

Still nobody does this better than Harmonix, and with Rock Band 3 they are at the top of their game.

But for now there're very few games that can match God of War 3's cinematic sensibility, its dynamics, its carnage.

Despite its unquestionable quality however, the praise we can lavish on Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception is tempered slightly by a sense that the template might be reaching its breaking point and that even more treasure could be found with a little more diversity to accompany the astonishing moments of technical and cinematic wizardry.

Super Street Fighter IV is a celebration of the Street Fighter series that adds a final, glossy lick of paint to the already sublimely polished original and, while it is unlikely to woo new fans, those already hopelessly addicted to Had?ken’s and Tatsumaki-Senp? Kyaku’s will be in their absolute element.

There is a wealth of content growling under the proverbial hood, but the game comes perilously close to lacking any real enthusiasm to show us exactly what it is that makes it so special.

Fire Emblem Awakening is a truly absorbing experience; a game which can make you fist-pump in victory and shout in horror as you watch zombie archers pick off your last Pegasus knight, all while you plan on how you’ll do it all better next time. And for what is essentially a board game-type RPG where little men and women run around a grid, that is pretty damn impressive.

Never mind videogaming, Chrono Trigger is one of the great recent examples of storytelling in any medium. In short, it's everything role-playing games are meant to be, sucking you into a unique world until your identification with the game is inseparable from the characters and their goals.

The Ico & Shadow of the Colossus Collection does an excellent job of re-mastering the original games, but its greatest success is that it does so without the tweaks ever taking centre stage; it is the original games that make the package so essential.

The level of polish that has been applied to LittleBigPlanet 2 is as apparent as we've come expect from the series, with no stone left unturned in upgrading each facet of the game's design.

Still nobody does this better than Harmonix, and with Rock Band 3 they are at the top of their game.

FIFA 10 is a game that’ll make you run around your living room, shirt pulled over your face screaming in unbridled delight. It’s a game that’ll make you fall in love and obsess over its every detail. It’s a game that’ll make you smash your pad in anger, swear like a sailor and curse the day you bought it.

It’s a flawed work of art, but a work of art nonetheless.

Countless lauded exclusives have spectacularly flopped since the PS3’s launch and the console’s market share is still less than glowing; there’s a sense that for history to repeat itself twice with another Killzone debacle, given the expectations, the jaw-dropping preview footage and the hordes of illiterate fanboys chomping at the bit, would have been catastrophic. Instead, the end result is nothing short of triumphant.

It's not the perfect shooter by any stretch, if indeed such a thing could exist, but as a multiplayer effort there's every reason to expect the game to reach far into the coming year and beyond.

At no point does Forza Motorsport 4 feel as impactful as its predecessor did two years ago, but that certainly doesn't mean it's an inferior game. In fact, its refinements and production values are executed so well that it is arguably not only the best game in the series, but the best driving simulator on the market. If you missed out on the third entry, then Forza 4 is highly recommended. But if you're not quite ready to delve back into an experience that is largely unchanged from the last outing, then you might not find much worth coming back for.