The Year in Games 2006 - June

We take a look back at the highlights, lowlights and things we'd rather just forget about the past year.

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June began as expected, with executives at Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo hurling abuse at one another, each calling the other out for the chinks in their next-gen strategy. While the rest of the planet was enjoying the World Cup, Sony's Phil Harrison brushed off speculation that the tilt-sensing feature of the Sixaxis was a rip off of Nintendo's idea, even though developers admitted at E3 that Sony had let them know only two weeks before the show that they would be including the new control scheme.

Brain Training began its dominating run this summer

Sony's David Reeves let out another howler, saying that his company wasn't concerned with keeping the massive slice of the video game pie it had built up over the last decade. Reeves suggested Sony's motives were altruistic. Cynics said it was pre-emptive damage control, as Sony was sure to lose ground to Microsoft and Nintendo.

But it was Sony's Ken Kutaragi who would make the most outrageous statements about the PS3. Before pricing was revealed, he suggested people should work harder to afford it. Then he started talking about the console as a PC, with a user-decided upgrade path.

P L E A S E   V I S I T   O U R   S P O N S O R :

Quite apart from all this console hullabaloo, Nintendo was doing what it does best - selling games. Two of its summer offerings proved the point. New Super Mario Bros, a mild evolution on the theme, was a hit all around the world in June, while Dr Kawashima's Brain Training began a bafflingly long run of consistently impressive sales that would end up making it one of the biggest games of the year.

One-time video game icon Lara Croft was resurrected in June, as Eidos confirmed that it was working on a 10th anniversary edition of the popular action game. Rockstar was also looking ahead, announcing that the graphics engine in its Table Tennis game for Xbox 360 would be used for Grand Theft Auto IV. According to Sony, though, Grand Theft Auto just wasn't that important.

(Continued...)

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