LucasArts, which has resisted the digital distribution movement in gaming for the past several years, is jumping on board. The company today unveiled a partnership with Valve’s Steam distribution service to sell back-catalogue games online.

Ten titles will be part of the initial round, which will go on sale this Wednesday, July 8. The games, listed below, are a mix of older adventure games and more recent titles.

• Armed and Dangerous
• Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis
• Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: The Graphic Adventure
• LEGO Indiana Jones: The Original Adventure
• LOOM
• Star Wars Battlefront II
• Star Wars Republic Commando
• Star Wars Starfighter
• The Dig
• Thrillville: Off the Rails

LucasArts has made a recent vow to revitalize its portfolio of games. In addition to the distribution deal with Steam, it is also working with Telltale Games to create content revolving around its popular “Monkey Island” franchise for the Wii, Xbox 360 and PC.

Expect more titles to be added to Steam (and possibly other digital distribution services) in the coming weeks and months.

Personally, I’m gonna hold out for “Grim Fandango”.

While the world has been waiting for a major studio to jump deeper into the video game space, no one has given the telecom sector much thought. Maybe they should have.

Verizon has launched a summer promotion in New York, Massachusetts and Rhode Island, giving customers of its broadband and FiOS Internet service access to more than 1,400 games for $9.99. (Customers in other states will still pay $14.99.)

Turns out this isn't a new service, as we initially reported. It's just a promotion for an existing one that hasn't received a lot of publicity. Still, Verizon's increased visibility in gaming is worthy of investigation.

Customers can either play the game via their Verizon Internet connection or download a title to their laptop and take it on the road (though you’ll have to be connected to the Internet to play, presumably to authenticate the license).

If the concept sounds familiar, that’s because Time Warner gave it a whirl a couple of years ago with GameTap. (Full disclosure: I was one of the people who helped with the initial planning of GameTap, during my days at CNN.) Subscribers had access to a wide variety of games for a monthly subscription fee. Time Warner sold GameTap in Sept. 2008 to Metaboli, a European digital distribution service provider. The service is still available today.

There are some key differences, though.

This July Microsoft is releasing a new collection of "Gears of Wars 2" add-on content (details here).

The retail version will include the Flashback, Snowblind, and Combustible map packs, which cost $5, $10, and $10, respectively, to download on Xbox Live, along with the new "Dark Corners" add-on, which has a new campaign chapter and seven multi-player maps. Cost: $20. A great deal.

But for gamers who already own those map packs, Microsoft is offering "Dark Corners" by itself for digital download. The cost: $20.

Eh?

Let's get this straight: People who download via Xbox Live get a portion of the content available at retail for the exact same price. And remember that distributing content on XBL costs substantially less than selling it at retail, since there's no manufacturing costs, no shipping costs, and no retailer to split the proceeds with. So Microsoft's profit margins are much bigger on that $20. Sounds like a major rip-off to me.

In fact, customers who have already bought the map packs and now buy "Dark Corners" are paying over twice as much as those who buy the entire retail package. Even allowing for some kind of discount on the first three map packs over time, that's pretty damned bad.

Considering that the people who download content on XBL are probably Microsoft's most loyal customers, it sounds like the Xbox 360 maker is giving fans a little financial chainsodomy.

I'm just putting together a piece for NPR that features an interview with Paramount's senior VP of interactive (essentially the top video games guy) John Kavanaugh and noticed that he dropped an interesting tidbit that won't make the final piece: The studio is making downloadable games based on "Top Gun" and "Days of Thunder" for Xbox Live Arcade and Playstation Network.

It's not Paramount's first experimentation with those "classic" (as long as I can remember seeing a movie in theaters I refuse to call it "classic" without quotes) franchises as games. There's already a "Days of Thunder" iPhone game and one about to come out for "Top Gun."

For Paramount, which is taking a "crawl, walk, run" approach to games, as Kavanaugh puts it, moving those franchises to XBLA and PSN is pretty obvious. After releasing a slew of iPhone games, the studio is taking the next step into downloadable titles with "Star Trek: DAC" and the upcoming "Warriors." If you have well known franchises that fit perfectly into casual video game genres -- flying and racing -- well, it's not too big a leap. (Not like doing, say, a "Watchmen" game in which you awkwardly shove the film into a familiar video game genre).

Plus, really, can there ever be enough games where you get to live out your fantasies of being Tom Cruise? When there's a "Cocktail," or "Eyes Wide Shut" game, I am so there.

Paramount is also trying its hand at casual titles targeted at female audiences. I forgot to link to it when it was published, but Leigh Alexander wrote an excellent and amusing review of Paramount's three-pack of games based on "Clueless," "Mean Girls" and "Pretty in Pink." Check it out.

As everyone prepares for NPD's report of what was likely a slow- to no-growth March for the video game industry (thanks largely to tough comparisons to last year's mega-hit "Super Smash Bros. Brawl"), I'm particularly struck by this point made by research firm EEDAR in its sales preview:

I've previously written about how important I think DLC is becoming to the Xbox 360 / Playstation 3 business model. To take a recent example, I'm told by a good source (though Rockstar hasn't confirmed) that "Grand Theft Auto IV: The Lost and Damned" has sold around one million units on Xbox Live. That's over $20 million in gross revenue and would be approximately $14 million for Rockstar, if it hadn't already done a $50 million deal for two DLC chapters with Microsoft.

"Call of Duty: World at War" similarly sold a million-plus units of its "map pack 1." That's over $10 million in revenue and more than $7 million forActivision (given the way Bobby Kotick drives deals, I'm willing to bet Activision gets more than the standard 70% from Sony and Microsoft). 

Most importantly, the margins are much better for both pieces of DLC than standard retail games. While they arguably have one-third and one-sixth, respectively of their original games' content (thus justifying the consumer price ratios), the production budgets are much lower than that. After all, they reuse the same engine, art style, user interface, asthe retail titles. That stuff is expensive to design.

For most AAA 360/PS3 games to make an extra 10% in revenue, with higher profit margins, by next year, is a very big deal. But we'll never understand just how important it is. At least not in a systematic way. BecauseNPD doesn't track download sales. Microsoft and Sony, the sellers in this case, guard that data jealously.

Sure, occasionally they or the publishers issue press releases when they have a big hit, as with "World at War." And publishers will inevitably give Wall Street some insight into their DLC revenue as it becomes an increasingly important part of their bottom lines.

But the numbers will be scattershot. We won't have any comprehensive tracking the way we (kinda) do with NPD.

Add PC sales, cell phones, and Web gaming to the growing amount of DLC and there's a huge video game industry outside of the retail consoles sales NPD tracks. Which means the figures upon which most of us analysts, journalists, and other interested folks rely are becoming less representative of the business, particularly its high growth areas.

More and more, it seems like the the NPD figures are becoming for the video game biz what box office grosses are for film: An important set of data that shows only one part of a dynamic and diverse industry.

The latest mini-controversy over downloadable content involves "Resident Evil 5's" online"versus" mode. The actual amount of content downloaded for players' $5, 1.8 MB on 360 and 351 KB on PS3, is so small that it has many wondering if it's just a key to unlock content already on the disc.

Capcom's answer is that it's new code, though it does reuse assets on the disc.

But the real answer is: Who cares?

I mean, sure, we all want the best possible value for our $60. But game publishers don't owe us anything. If the DLC is already on the disc and unlockable via a code -- as happened with the costumes in "Street Fighter IV," for instance -- it just means it got made before the game was released and the publisher wants to avoid bandwidth costs to deliver it (especially if they have to pay Sony for that bandwidth).

Why is it less offensive if that content is finished a month or two later and delivered via download at the same price? There's no rational answer to that question, of course.

AsI've written before, DLC is a way for publishers to increase their margins and defray the high costs of development for the PS3 and 360 and their relatively small install base compared to the PS2,Xbox, and GameCube base last generation (the Wii, of course, requires separate development from 360 and PS3 and isn't too supportive of DLC).

It seems particularly fair in the case of online multiplayer. It's easy for those of who play games a lot and use Xbox Live or PSN to forget that millions of people own a 360 or PS3 and never connect it to the Internet. Why does Capcom, or any publisher, have to eat the cost of delivering all those potential customers a feature that they'll never use? At least if they're delivering a good enough value for the initial $60 (which, based on the game's 4 million initial shipments, many people seem to think Capcom is).

With DLC, publishers are extracting dollars out of the minority of a game's intial audience for whom more content is worth more money. That's capitalism and there's nothing wrong with it. It's called price discrimination -- trying to segment products as much as possible to get more money out of people willing to pay more. It's why you can buy half price tickets to a Broadway show if you're willing to wait on line the day of the performance and get the least desirable seats in the house.

If customers don't like the practice, they can and should complain about overall game costs. Or, better yet, just don't buy the DLC. But nitpicking about whether DLC is truly all downloaded avoids the real issue and displays a rather ridiculous attitude of entitlement that gamers need to lose.

I hesitate to ascribe any meaning to this comparison, since they're very different activities in very different games with differing time commitments and financial costs. Plus one of these includes two systems and the other is an exclusive to the smaller of the two.

Nonetheless, I couldn't help but find these two recently released statistics fascinating when paired together:

Important? Pointless? I have my biases on the importance of downloadable content and general interest in creating platformer levels, but I'll let you readers decide.

Paramount's "Star Trek: D.A.C." game will be all-out, top-down, multi-player space battles.

That's the word from three of the folks behind it, whom I just sat down with at GDC. I reported a few weeks ago that the downloadable game will come out along with the movie and will be a top-down space action title.

But unlike most movie games, it turns out, this one doesn't replicate the story of the film, or even tie into it. There's no single-player campaign. "It's all multiplayer, team-based battles," explains Ben Hoyt, a senior producer with Paramount Digital Entertainment, which is publishing "D.A.C." (And no, I didn't find out what that stands for). "It's designed to be quick and fast-paced. There are multiple ship classes and battles and several different game modes."

Up to 12 people can play the PS3 and 360 downloadable game, which features battles that are inspired by the movie, but not seen in it. Some of the starship designs, as well as the music and sound effects, are taken directly from the film, though.

"Star Trek" fans will remember that the movie was originally supposed to come out in December, but got delayed to May. That's good news for people looking forward to the game,which has been made on a tight schedule. The studio chose to make a downloadable game, rather than a disc one,  so that it could get a high quality title in time for the theatrical release (Just as Warner Bros. did with "Watchmen"). But even that would have been very difficult to get done by December, given that they've been working long hours to get it complete for May.

"We had it structured to develop the game for December," recalls Dave Baranoff, who oversees interactive for "Star Trek" director J.J. Abrams' production company Bad Robot. "But the push of the movie sealed the deal that we would be able to get out a quality game title we all believe in."

Those extra five months won't only help with polish, but have may have played a role in some of the major gameplay decisions. "Going in we said it was going to be a certain way, but luckily we ended up with time to explore and come up with some different things," notes Josh Glazer, Chief Technology Officer of developer Naked Sky.

"D.A.C." marks something of a step forward for Paramount. The only games it has self published previously are iPhone titles. So it's negotiating its first distribution deals with Sony and Microsoft  for this title.

It's also, in a bizarre corporate twist, a licensed game for Paramount, even though it's releasing the movie. When Viacom split into CBS and Paramount, CBS held onto the interactive rights for Captain Kirk et al. So Paramount is actually licensing the property from CBS, much like traditional game publishers usually license properties from studios like Paramount.

But there was one potential barrier bigger than CBS, Sony, Microsoft, or any release date standing in the way of "Star Trek: D.A.C.": J.J. Abrams. As with most movie-based games, the director, along with producer Bryan Burke and others involved in the project, have seen designs and given notes along the way. But the game never got an official greenlight from the director, and thus the studio, until there was a playable version that Abrams came in to try and approve.

"That was a scary meeting," admits Hoyt. "It was do or die for the game." 

Obviously it was "do." Gamers will find out whether they agree with Abrams' call in May.

P.S. Electronic Arts announced today at GDC that it's developing a "Star Trek" mobile game tied to the movie. But after initially offering to show the title, it backed out. So I don't have any more information than the fact that it's in the works

Updated with screen shots, finally.

It's basic economics: Huge supply and limited consumer attention means low prices. That's why there's a price war amongst the 6,000 games in the iTunes app store. Look through the top 100 paid titles and you can't help but notice that 98 of them are $5.99 or less. Some of the highest quality titles are shockingly cheap. Warner Bros. "Watchmen" game is just 99 cents. EA's "SimCity" is only $5.99. The awesome tower defense game "Fieldrunners" is only $2.99. 

At those downloads, you have to sell a lot of downloads to make a profit (at least if you're anything more than one person working at night). Making even $100,000 on a $5 game means that, after Apple takes its cut, you need to sell nearly 30,000 copies. That's no easy task in a space where the very best selling games, like "iShoot" and "Super Monkey Ball" have sales in the mid six figures. The top titles might be moving enough units to turn a profit even at a low price. But the sales charts fall off rapidly after the top 100 or so. There are a lot of iPhone games making not a lot of money.

And the iTunes "shelf" only makes matters worse. The number of games that can be featured in the app store on the iPhone is miniscule. If you don't have the connections or luck to get featured, there's only one other way to get noticed: hit the top of the popularity charts. What's the biggest hindrance to that? A high price, for one thing.

How then, can developers and publishers afford to invest in high quality titles and make a profit? Today Apple came out with a fantastic answer as part of the iPhone 3.0 software update coming this summer: in-game downloadable content. I've already written about how DLC has become absolutely crucial to the business model for AAA Playstation 3 and 360 games.

On the iPhone, it could make an even bigger difference. In the current retail model, publishers still need to sell a game to a consumer for $50 or $60 before they can make more money off of DLC. But with a digtially distributed iPhone game, developers can give consumers exactly what they are demanding: the core game cheap, or even for free. Then the game makers can start making money off that base by offering downloadable content. Razor and blade, meet the iPhone.

As movie studios increasingly publish their own video games, and confront the reality that they usually can't publish a quality AAA game on a film's production schedule in time for theatrical release, downloadable is the new trend.

Warner Bros. did it with "Watchmen: The End is Nigh" and now Paramount is doing the same with its "Star Trek" film reboot. I've actually been looking into this project for a little while, trying to nail down all the details, but they came out today in a surprising way, via leaked art for an insert in the upcoming season one blu-ray release.

As the art indicates, the game is coming out in May and it's being published by Paramount and produced by Naked Sky Entertainment, an L.A. based developer that made the game "Roboblitz."

Based on conversation I've had, it appears the game has been in development for under a year and it's aimed for release on Xbox Live Arcade and Playstation Network (the 360 and PS3's downloadable services) day-and-date with the film on or around May 8. Perhaps no surprise given the relatively short development cycle, it's probably not a fully 3-D adventure, though it is obvious from the artwork that players control the Enterprise in space battle.

Interestingly, Paramount's deal to do a "Star Trek" movie game is entirely separate from Bethesda Softworks' license to do its "Star Trek" games and Cryptic's upcoming "Star Trek Online." Latter two are licensed by CBS, which still owns the TV show, while Paramount, which was previously part of Viacom with CBS, has the interactive rights tied to the movies.

"Star Trek: D.A.C.," as the game is called, will be the biggest self-published title to-date for Paramount's young interactive group, which just started getting into games last year. So far it has only released several iPhone games, as well as three casual PC titles it co-published with Legacy Interactive.

I expect I'll have more details soon on what the game is like, how the downloadable title came together in under a year, and what the hell D.A.C. means.

Looking at this past fall's AAA releases for Playstation 3 and Xbox 360, you've got games in all genres, you've got sequels and originals, you've got hits and flops. But all of these them, save for a handful, have one thing in common: paid downloadable content.

I went through the list and I could come up with only four major releases for the two high end consoles that haven't released, or announced, paid DLC: "Left 4 Dead" (only free DLC so far, though paid is surely on the way), "Pure," "Saint's Row 2," and "Resistance 2" (no nothing yet for those).

It's a pretty remarkable evolution from just a year ago, when big games like "Assassin's Creed," "Bioshock," "Uncharted," "Kane and Lynch," "TimeShift," "The Simpsons Game," and "Ratchet and Clank: Tools of Destruction" all came and went without paid DLC.

What's the reason? Well, in a word, it's this . As theSlate article explains, the cost of development for the PS3 and 360 has ballooned compared to the last generation (the article actually purports to be explaining all of the videogame industry's economic woes, which it obviously doesn't since there's not even a mention of the Wii. But for our purposes, it works).

As anybody in the video game business will tell you, that's just the start of the problem. Sales for these high end titles are falling thanks to a hugely competitive market and the relatively low install base compared to the last generation (the Playstation 3 lagging behind the PS2; the 360 about equal with the original Xbox; and the Wii requiring completely different design from the others, unlike the GameCube). That's why so many publishers are fretting so much about anything that isn't a sequel to a huge franchise like "Call of Duty," "Halo," or "Grand Theft Auto." The results are more often "Mirror's Edge" than "Left 4 Dead."

(The Wii is of course a different animal. There's not a good distribution system for DLC and development costs are significantly lower. The challenge for most publishers who aren't Nintendo is just selling discs in the first place.)

Despite those dynamics, publishers aren't able to raise prices. We've been at $60 for 360 and PS3 titles since this console generation begin and, amidst a recession, we're unlikely to change anytime soon. The pressure is going in the other direction, in fact. If a game isn't a best seller, publishers have a tough time keeping it at $60 (witness EA's recent price cut for most of its 2008 releases).

DLC is a major solution to this problem. Not because the additional revenue is all that significant. "Call of Duty 4's" heroic map pack appears to have been the most successful piece of DLC so far, selling 1 million copies on Xbox Live alone in its first nine days ($10 million in revenue). Assume a few hundred thousand more copies after those first nine days on 360 and then on Playstation 3 and you get maybe $15 million or so. Given  that "CoD 4" sold over 10 million units at retail, earning over $600 million, that's not much. 

But it's hugely profitable, much moreso than the game itself, because the production costs are much lower. That's true whether you're talking about new in-game items (like "Dead Space"), a new area with missions (like "Fable 2's" Knothole Island) or even an entirely new story set in the same world ("GTA IV: The Lost and Damned").

When consumers measure the value of DLC, the default seems to be comparing the content to the total in the retail game. If the DLC costs $10 and it takes about five hours to play, while the $60 retail version took about 30 hours, that seems like a fair value. Except it doesn't cost close to 1/6 as much to produce. A lot of the costs baked into that $60 aren't actual level production. They include early prototyping, character design, controls, mechanics, camera position, menus, and of course all the things they tried that didn't work.

With DLC, that stuff's all done. The controls, the camera, the engine are the exact same in "Operation Anchorage" as the rest of "Fallout 3." All the developers have to do is build new assets in the same aesthetic they've already used and maybe design some new missions. That couldn't cost more than a few hundred thousand dollars. Maybe a few million in the case of a really big piece of DLC like "The Lost and Damned."

(By contrast, for an original downloadable game like "Watchmen: The End is Nigh," the publisher has to take on all the costs of a normal game. So it's no surprise that game costs $20, but only has a few hours of actual gameplay, about the same as the $10 Knothole Island.)

It gets even better for publishers. Not only is it a lot cheaper to produce DLC compared to the selling price, but the there's no costs to manufacture the game and ship each copy to a retailer. And after all that, you don't have to split the revenue as widely. On a typical $60 game, about $20 goes to the retailer, $20 to the console manufacturer (Sony or Microsoft or Nintendo), and $20 to the publisher.

For DLC, however, the publisher only has to pay approximately 30% (negotiable, of course) to Microsoft or Sony. That means it's getting literally twice as much on the gross dollar as it is for a disc game. (It's a little different for the first party games Microsoft and Sony publish themselves, of course, but the same principles apply).

No wonder virtually every major 360 and PS3 game now has DLC. All the publisher has to do is build another level or some new maps -- or in the case of some games like "Tomb Raider; Underworld," hold back stuff originally intended for the game -- and the game can be significantly more profitable.

Most of it isn't too innovative -- typically it's new missions or geographical areas that extend the game, or maybe some new items you can use. But we're starting to see developers think creatively. "The Lost and Damned," for all its flaws, introduced new characters that fit smoothly into the universe "GTA IV" created. I'm really impressed by EA Sports' idea to put out a compressed version of "NCAA Basketball" that centers entirely on March Madness.

DLC sales don't show up in NPD charts or any other regularly publicly disclosed data. And they're not certainly not significant enough to turn a flop into a big hit. But for those games on the margin, the ones that sell OK but not great, it can make the difference between loss and profit for a publisher, transforming an unattractive economic model into one that's worth the investment.

(Part of our series counting down the top ten videogames of 2008 -- with interruptions for the most disappointing and most overrated -- according to Variety critics Leigh Alexander, Tom Chick, Chris Dahlen and Ben Fritz. Full details are here. To check out the rest of the list, click here. Most importantly, vote for your favorite games of 2008 in the Cut Scene reader awards here.)

These are not games we thought were bad, or even disappointing. They're the videogames that Variety's critics found fell the shortest of what most other critics and/or the public thought. It also, interestingly, the only category in this whole process in which all four of us agree about a game.

Chris Dahlen

Grand Theft Auto IV (Rockstar / Rockstar North)

It’s a lie to say that sandbox games let the player “do anything they want”; they still have an underlying vision, as we saw in "Fallout 3." So what’s "GTA IV’s" vision? That the American Dream ain’t perfect? That consumerism infects our lives? That talk radio lies to us? This is dimestore cynicism. It’s easy to admire the parts – the drunk effects, the jazz fusion station, the consistently interesting mission design, the Ricky Gervais cameo, and the way the cars go so much faster when you hit the highlife. But the sum ain’t there.

LittleBigPlanet (Sony / Media Molecule)

A niche game for budding game designers, disguised as an all-ages, endless dreamscape. And here’s a question: why do the games that bet big on user-generated content consistently expect users to dive into specialized skills such as platformer level design, puzzlecrafting, or 3-D modeling, when the two types of content that real life people actually put on the web – text, and photographs – are neglected?

Castle Crashers (The Behemoth)

It’s not like me to bash an indie. But "Castle Crashers’" single-player campaign was repetitive and undistinguished, and four-player co-op was good for maybe an hour – an hour that’s now better spent with "Left4Dead."

Ben Fritz

Fallout 3 ( Bethesda Softworks / Bethesda)

When fans rattle off all the awesome things they saw and did in “Fallout 3,” I can hardly argue. But I don’t understand why all the tedious, old-fashioned RPG tasks in between don’t bother them more. Whether I’m agonizing over how to distribute all my points and perks after finding out I made a bunch of bad choices the last time I leveled up, working through a dialogue tree with one of the information repositories known as “people,” struggling with the mediocre combat, or just trying to find the stuff I need so I can move on, 80% of “Fallout 3” is a slog to get to the 20% that’s actually worth experiencing.

LittleBigPlanet (Sony / Media Molecule)

The ultimate problem with “LittleBigPlanet” is that it’s impressive, but nothing more. Wow, sackboy is cute. Damn, those level-building tools are remarkably easy to use. Holy cow, that user created level looks just like a working calculator / a lamborghini / “Duck Hunt” / “God of War.” But there’s nothing remotely engaging about the experience, unless you’re in that small minority with dozens of hours to kill and the desire to make an awesome platforming level.

Patapon (Sony / Sony)

The fact that you push four buttons to a beat and everything's really cute doesn't make up for the fact that this is a painfully simple RTS with absolutely no substance.

Leigh Alexander

Professor Layton and the Curious Village (Nintendo / Level 5)

Why are charming little animations an excuse to glorify the sort of dull school workbook designed expressly to validate Mensa wannabes?

LittleBigPlanet (Sony / Media Molecule)

It's adorable, I'm heartened by the vision behind it and couldn't be more impressed with Media Molecule and its beautiful execution. But at the end of the day, I'm a fan of video games because I want the professionals to make them for me. I don't want to make video games, I don't really care what my "friends from the Internet" have made, and I often wonder how many people really do care -- and how many people just leapt on board the bandwagon of positive sentiment surrounding an effort they admired. 

Tom Chick

Grand Theft Auto IV (Rockstar / Rockstar North)

One of the most amazing realizations of a real-world-ish place and one of my favorite games this year. Also the setting for a poorly told
story and uninspired gameplay, and the subject of a system-shattering
PC port.

LittleBigPlanet (Sony / Media Molecule)

Awesome graphics! And those little sack people are so cute I could just eat them up! Now where's the game? 

Braid (Number None)

This is not a game that moves and it's not very accessible. You need to have a stomach for old-school platformers and mental brick walls. Which is a shame, because the place Braid eventually goes is sublime.

Coming Monday morning: The best videogame(s) of 2008

(Part of our series counting down the top ten videogames of 2008 -- with interruptions for the most disappointing and most overrated -- according to Variety critics Leigh Alexander, Tom Chick, Chris Dahlen and Ben Fritz. Full details are here. To check out the rest of the list, click here. Most importantly, vote for your favorite games of 2008 in the Cut Scene reader awards here.)

Ben Fritz

Left 4 Dead (Valve and EA / Valve)

For those of us who thought Epic, Bungie and Insomniac had taken multi-player action as far as it could go, Valve delivered a genuine paradigm shift. Every single element of “Left 4 Dead,” from the level design to the resource distribution to the menus to the integration of zombie movie tropes to the dynamic A.I. not only encourages, but compels cooperative gameplay. They also make it the most genuinely scary interactive experience of 2008, because you never know what's coming next and whether your team has the guts to survive.

After dozens of successful online campaigns, however, "Left 4 Dead's" most lasting impact on me is its demonstration that great videogame design can overcome even that most intractable of foes: the Xbox Live asshole.

Leigh Alexander

Persona 4 (Atlus / Atlus)

This was the year that the industry seemed increasingly willing to back-shelve traditional Japanese mechanics and genres -- but as it did last year, the "Persona" series proves it's way too early to call the Japanese RPG a relic. "Persona 4" adapts to modern, fashionable visual and music just as deftly as it updates staid, conventional game mechanics. But it's most broadly impressive for its poignant cultural subtext and commentary on interpersonal relations -- markedly adult, even while it's all wrapped in a widely-accessible high school hipster story.

Tom Chick

Saints Row 2 (THQ / Volition)

This is the paragon of open-world city-havoc sandboxes. It's a pitch-perfect example of a game that accomplishes exactly what it intends to accomplish. It's crass and generous and spectacular, stuffed with stuff to do, usually involving the liberal application of chaos. Like the first "Saints Row," it out-"Grand Theft Autos" the best of them: "Mercenaries," "The Godfather," "Scarface," "Bully," "Grand Theft Auto" itself, and even "Crackdown." If there is a better realized vision of a city as a massive free-wheeling incendiary playground, I haven't seen it. And the fact that I can play almost every corner of "Saints Row 2" cooperatively is almost obscene. Really, Volition? You're going to go that far above the competition? That's just showboating.

Chris Dahlen

Braid (Number None)

Jonathan Blow's long-awaited debut had a nice window in late August to get critics’ and fans’ attention - most famously, Soulja Boy. It has passionate advocates, myself included, yet I wonder if we’re outweighed by the players who made fun of the writing or grew frustrated with the platforming. Blow has objected to people who criticize the game for what it's not, rather than taking it for what it is - and in my experience, "Braid" is an elegant, brilliantly-designed puzzle game where each problem has an exquisite "ah-ha" solution, and the story that started out so sweetly turns troubling and confusing by the epilogue. Is Blow ultimately full of shit, as his detractors (and blogosphere sparring partners) claim? A prize goes to the critic who can get far enough ahead of him to prove it.

Coming Friday: The most overrated videogames of 2008.

Coming Monday: The best videogame(s) of 2008

Coming tomorrow: Most of you will have too much of a hangover to read this blog anyway

(Part of our series counting down the top ten videogames of 2008 -- with interruptions for the most disappointing and most overrated -- according to Variety critics Leigh Alexander, Tom Chick, Chris Dahlen and Ben Fritz. Full details are here. To check out the rest of the list, click here. Most importantly, vote for your favorite games of 2008 in the Cut Scene reader awards here.)

Tom Chick

Fallout 3 (Bethesda Softworks / Bethesda)

I didn't do this intentionally, but once I'd arranged my list I realized that my top four games of 2008 are all powerfully imagined and skillfully created open worlds, with rock-solid infrastructures of good gameplay and an unwavering emphasis on freedom. Here are almost unprecedented juxtapositions of developer creativity and player freedom ("Grand Theft Auto IV" would have belonged among this rare company if Rockstar had either written a better story or designed a better game). "Fallout 3" is the most contrived of the four, proceeding apace along the usual RPG trappings like dialogue trees, fussy interface muckery, and occasionally clunky world building. But it's an unforgettably bleak and epic experience, brave enough to be barren and gray, but crammed with stories, vignettes, characters, and sights. Some fans of the "Fallout" series were worried that it would be "Oblivion" with guns. "Oblivion" should be so lucky.

Chris Dahlen

Left 4 Dead (Valve and EA / Valve)

The brilliance of "Left 4 Dead’s" co-operative play lies in the way that even strangers learn to work as a team, knowing their survival is at stake.  And if you play with friends, you get a rare chance to see their true character come through. I never get sick of reading about people's experiences in the game – Daniel Purvis’ tale of cowardice under pressure is my favorite - because the same few elements can afflict you in so many ways. Sort of like browsing old chess games, with a much, much scarier queen. 

Ben Fritz

Braid (Number None)

If nothing else, “Braid” entranced me with a quality I never knew videogames could possess: relaxation. Spending hours pondering, experimenting, and rewinding time while figuring out brain-bending puzzles to the tune of a wistful cello solo and the sight of swirling watercolors was a wholly unique and utterly invigorating experience. Themes of loss, regret, and forgiveness are subtly woven and then masterfully brought home, even if the epilogue is unbearably pretentious.

Leigh Alexander

No More Heroes (Marvelous and Ubisoft / Grasshopper Manufacture)

It's shamelessly bizarre, heavy-handed, clunky and incisively brilliant from beginning to end, a loving send-up of the very gamer culture that eats up the deprecating self-references with glee. Little moments of genius abound: the actually joyous use of the Wii's controls, the necessity of playing an entire stage hanging upside down from one's couch, and the population of villains who, given only brief cameos, seem more exciting and fully-realized than all of the grave animated robots we've been fed all year.

Coming tomorrow morning: The third best videogame(s) of 2008.

(Part of our series counting down the top ten videogames of 2008 -- with interruptions for the most disappointing and most overrated -- according to Variety critics Leigh Alexander, Tom Chick, Chris Dahlen and Ben Fritz. Full details are here. To check out the rest of the list, click here. Most importantly, vote for your favorite games of 2008 in the Cut Scene reader awards here.)

Leigh Alexander

Mega Man 9 (Capcom / Inti Creates)

In today's era of blisteringly sharp next-gen, why on earth would Capcom ape the NES era -- staticky scan lines, brutal difficulty and all? Because, given that today's audience endlessly compares new franchise installments to their rosy memories of ancient predecessors, it's a damn great idea to just give them what they want. "Mega Man 9" reminded most players what a feat it was that they fell in love with such a punishing medium, re-instilled the youthful love of frustration -- and beyond nostalgia, actually managed to show off some of the best level design the series has ever seen.

Tom Chick

Patapon (Sony / Pyramid)

No game this year that had me grinning as consistently as I grin when I play "Patapon." I love these little guys, and in return, they love me. They dance and sing for me. They talk to me. As I drum them their rhythm, which is really all the gameplay there is here, their little eyes roll around. They jump and sway. They charge forward. The colorful sky fills with their arrows. I feel terrible as they're stamped into the ground or stabbed by evil patapons. I consider which one gets which hat and which sword. I dole out horses carefully. Did I mention that I love these little guys? The simple fact about "Patapon" is that it makes me happy. Not since "Katamari Damacy" has a game been so purely and simply joyous.

Chris Dahlen

Rock Band 2 (MTV and EA / Harmonix)

A strong platform saw key improvements. The single-player band mode made it easier for me to play alone; the no-fail mode and freestyle drum trainer made the game accessible to my three-year-old. (Who doesn’t dream that their kid will grow up to be a drummer?) And the addition of hipster essentials like "Mission of Burma" to the music store proves yet again that Harmonix is staffed by genuine, signed-in-blood rock snobs – just the way I like ‘em.

Ben Fritz

World of Goo (Various / 2D Boy)

Plenty of games nailed “cute” this year, but “World of Goo” dismisses that for something much harder to achieve: atmosphere. A simple building mechanic is tied to an impressively diverse set of puzzles, making this a game worth playing even if it was set against a blank white wall. But its the sinister music, the off kilter designs and those disturbing notes from “the sign painter” that bring to mind the delectably unlikely influence of “Edward Scissorhands.” Who knew little green balls of goo could be so creepy?

Coming Friday: The most disappointing videogames of 2008

Coming Monday morning: The fifth best videogame(s) of 2008

Coming tomorrow: Christmas.

I've still been waiting for a chance between all the games I've been reviewing to finish playing "Braid" and then, maybe, write something thoughtful about it on this blog. But in the meantime, I've realized it may not be such a reflective, thematically consistent, relaxing and thought provoking videogame experience as I've thus far imagined. It all depends on your state of mind, really: