The Year in Games 2006 - March

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

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The thing about being first to the party is that you get first dibs on the treats, and for Microsoft that meant revelling in a growing library of games. While Ninety-Nine Nights and others were being shopped around in video form, one of the biggest games of the short life of the Xbox 360, Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, was on its way to the console in March.

Oblivion brought relief to starved Xbox 360 owners

Other Xbox 360 games drawing attention included Rockstar's Table Tennis game and Rainbow: Six Vegas. Both would end up to be big deals, if of varying capacity, when the eventually arrived later in the year.

Japan weighed in on its favourite games on all time in March, eschewing nostalgia for something a little more recent. Topping the not-all-obvious list was Final Fantasy X, just one of nearly 50 RPGs on the list.

RPGs were doing well on more than just consoles too. World of Warcraft, the big one in the MMO realm, was gaining an ever-larger audience - a trend that has yet to stop - and in March the subscriber base would balloon past 6 million users. A big part for the surge was the launch of the game in the East, especially in China, which was swallowing Blizzard's drug with a smile.

Nintendo was counting money with a smile in March as it had not one but two launches for the DS Lite in Japan. A shortage of colours meant that the three colour line-up was split over two dates in the month and both lured hundreds of people into the streets for a spectacle that would be repeated many times over the following nine months.

Sony, meanwhile, was overpromising again, with Sony Europe's David Reeves insisting that he was making sure the PlayStation 3 would arrive in Europe the same day as it launched in the US. Reeves said he was "very, very confident", but apparently that wasn't enough. The company did bait fans with its newly unveiled worldwide launch plans in March.

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