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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May

The success of the Brain games is undeniable. Even today, more than 18 months after it was released, Dr Kawashima's Brain Training for the DS continues to be one of the most popular games week after week in the UK. So it wasn't a surprise when in May Nintendo announced a few sequels, including More Brain Training for the handheld and Big Brain Academy: Wii Degree for the Wii.

Another DS game come good was Pokémon Diamond/Pearl. This first full Pokémon game on the DS was already a massive success for Nintendo in Japan and sales figures released during May showed that it was doing similarly in the US. Europeans, meanwhile, turned to importing the game, something Nintendo is not a big fan of.

Sony was getting more attention in May and it was positive for a change. The reason was Home, a new online virtual world service (think Second Life but with more games and less sex) that made its debut at the Game Developers Conference earlier in the year. In May, Sony started showing it off to the press, but reports from some insiders already playing the beta version being tested suggested that it wasn't coming along as well as Sony would have hoped.

Prospects seemed to be better for Grand Theft Auto IV, a game Rockstar was finally starting to promote after months of secrecy. Most of those who saw it early were immediately struck by the immense scale of the project, though the realities of developing something so ambitious were underlined when Rockstar spoke about the difficulties in getting the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 versions of the game to play the same. That wasn't stopping Rockstar from looking to the launch of the game, and in May the company detailed the contents of the special edition package.

For the Xbox 360, that was the future. The present was all about Halo 3. The multiplayer beta go underway in May but not without some technical hiccups. Things did finally settle down and Microsoft extended the beta phase to make up for the mishap. The company also announced an October release date for the full game - earlier than some had expected.

Going the other way on the calendar was Spore, the galaxy-building new game from Sims creator Will Wright. Already being built up as the next big thing in games by some publications, Spore was to suffer several delays during the year.

For real-time strategy fans, May was all about one game - StarCraft 2. After weeks of speculation, Blizzard finally confirmed that it was working on the long-awaited sequel. Fittingly, the announcement was made in South Korea, a country where people have taken their enjoyment of the game to new level, building professional leagues and multiple TV channels around it.

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