10 Video Games You Can Count On

There is no way to sugarcoat it: the 2009 holiday season (which in the video game business begins in September) appears to have the weakest lineup of big-budget titles in the last several years.

But that is not necessarily a bad thing. In recent years many game publishers have been far too enamored of the idea that a big game can succeed only if released after Labor Day. The problem has been that so many major games were being released within weeks of one another that excellent games sometimes went unnoticed.