7 days in gaming: stuff to get excited about in 2009

As we edge ever closer to celebrating the baby Jesus' birthday by overindulging on dead bird meat, cheap booze and spending too much of our hard-earned on overpriced and soon-to-be obsolescent (or broken) technology, the gaming industry works itself up into a veritable frenzy of excitement, based largely on the rather annoying seasonal habit of over-promising and under-delivering.

December is the time of year when gamers start to look back on the year just passed, so expect an inordinate amount of 'top tens' and 'best of 2008' lists over the coming weeks, as the review schedule starts to dry up from now to 'the holidays' and editors desperately look for content to fill their sites and magazines with. More excitingly, it is the time of year when many of us actually get the time in the week to play that copy of Gears 2 or Fallout 3 that has so far sat untouched, unloved and still shrink-wrapped since release.

And, seeing as everybody else is at it, here's a few handy top five lists from the week just gone to remind you what just happened, what you need to know to one-up your mates down the pub and what kinds of stuff gamers should already start to get excited about for 2009.

Aside from the all-too-predictable predictions that Wii is going to sell out AGAIN for the third Christmas in a row, here's TechRadar's top five gaming stories of the last week:

• If you don't want to use your PS3 for gaming (well, not all of the time) then you can now use it to watch telly instead, even if you don't have the awesome PlayTV yet, with BBC iPlayer now being fully PlayStation friendly and Sony launching its own downloadable TV show on PSN, to keep you abreast of everything you need-to-know in the worlds of PS3 and PSP.

• Ailing music weekly, the NME had a bit of a sideswipe at gaming this week, with one NME scribe pronouncing, rather controversially, that gaming was about w**nking, while rock'n'roll was about f**cking.
  Despite that, surveys continue to show that games such as Guitar Hero, Rock Band, Wii Music and others are encouraging ever more youngsters to pick up real instruments and learn to play and read music. One in the eye for Boris Johnsons of the world and the Daily Mail 'ban these evil games' brigade.

• Being bored at work just got to be a whole lot more fun, courtesy of Sega launching a free Flash games site and promises of a paid-for service on the way, bringing Sega's massive shed-full of back catalogue classics to a browser near you very soon. No more fiddling around with MAME behind the bosses back….

• Nintendo finally released its cutesy cult classic Animal Crossing: Let's Go to the City on Wii last week, with the new community Wii Speak microphone accessory and new Wii Speak channel also launched at the same time. It's a 'Marmite' game that you already know if you will love or hate, but it's good to see a new bit of Nintendo hardware, whatever your personal feelings about tending virtual flowerbeds.

• Finally, Valve boss Gabe Newell spoke some rare common sense about anti-piracy and DRM 'solutions' for PC games last week, particularly relevant when you consider that Will Wright's Spore (which came under attack for its shabby DRM) has the dubious honour of being one of the MOST pirated games of 2008. Doh!

And if all that wasn't anywhere near enough for you, here are TechRadar's top five bits of gaming news to get excited about for 2009:

• E3 is back next year and we should almost certainly see some interesting long-term predictions and genuinely exciting new developments from the likes of Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo and others. Microsoft, for its part, has already taken the initiative and started promising that it will 'break the bank' at E3 2009. The war of words begins right here, right now.

• Downloadable full games will become notably more popular in 2009, with Atari boss Phil Harrison noting last week that many of 'ver kids' today won't ever have even bought a physical CD, DVD or Blu-ray disc in their lives. Seems that Phil has changed his tune ever so slightly on the Blu-ray message since he flew the Sony coop earlier in the year.

• Also on a downloadable tip, Nintendo's DSi releases in the UK at some as-yet-unspecified point in 2009, with news this week that the new handheld machine has already been hacked in Japan, with R4DS-style carts already being sold by some renegade retailers. Expect a swift response to that situation from Nintendo's legal beagles very soon.

• Mobile gaming could well come into its own in 2009, particularly if middleware developers Unity are to be believed, with the promise of fully 3D games heading to Apple's iPhone. Though we need to see the games in action, before we get too ahead of ourselves on that front!

• Finally, Phil Harrison unveiled Atari's 2009 line-up last week, with a solid (if not groundbreaking) number of PC and console games on the release schedule and a date finally set for the release of the next proper Ghostbusters game (in June). The question on everyone's lips is of course – can Harrison spin his magic to save Atari from financial meltdown in 2009?

TechRadar certainly hopes so, as would be a sad day for gaming if the Atari brand was to finally implode!