2007: The Year in Games

Join us as we take a look back at all the big stories that made 2007 one of the most exciting yet for games.

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February

As the mild winter pressed on in the UK, Capcom took advantage of the season by pushing its Xbox 360 shooter Lost Planet: Extreme Conditions. The game topped the charts in the UK, helped along by what seemed like a generous advertising budget. A report out of the US showed just how generous, claiming that Capcom had spend about as much as it did to make the game to advertise it.

In one of the many denials-turned-facts to blemish the media in 2007, Rockstar revealed that it was working on a PSP port of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories, after adamantly insisting only days before it had no plans to do that.

Sony was in familiar territory in February, staving off negative attention from the press over the not-so-thrilling debut of the PlayStation 3. Launch plans in Europe, revealed in January, irked some would-be buyers who asked why they shouldn't also have the choice of buying a cheaper version of the console.

The reasons became clear later in the month when Sony revealed that the PlayStation 3 released in Europe would not be completely backwards compatible with all PlayStation 2 games - something that US models were capable. That was because Sony decided to introduce the first of several hardware changes, which in this case included removing some of the PS2 chips that had been included in the first models of the PS3. This meant that Sony had to come up with a kludge to gets older games working on the system.

Despite the brouhaha over the exact nature of the hardware, there was still a contingent of gamers hell-bent on picking up a PS3 as soon as possible. All of the major retailers started taking pre-orders in February, even as Sony executives were having to fend of calls from observers for a price drop on the still-new system.

Sony's troubles had knock-on effects for other companies too. Some who had committed to making games that were exclusive to the console started to rethink their strategies. Among these was EA, which announced that the once PS3-exclusive action game Mercenaries 2: World in Flames would now be coming to Xbox 360 as well. It was one of the first of several software blows to Sony and the PS3 during 2007.

Among the games getting the most attention in the UK in February was Final Fantasy XII. The Square Enix RPG was arriving months after it came out in the US but fans nevertheless hit the streets and pushed it straight to the top of the charts.

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