E3 2009: Top Ten Games for 2010

This long developed game finally comes to America in spring 2010, on both Xbox 360 and PS3. Some of FF XIII's new characters have already been unveiled: a young female warrior named Lightning; Snow Villiers, a fiery guy who wears a bandanna over his head, who is also the leader of NORA, a resistance group going up against the government of Cocoon; and Sazh Katzroy, a cheery laid back guy who wields a pair of pistols, also a member of NORA. This will be the first major Final Fantasy game for the next gen consoles, so the amazing cinemas and visuals in the game should be an entirely new experience with HD to top it all.

It's major news when Square Enix is launching Final Fantasy XIV the same year that Final Fantasy XIII will be released. What's also a surprise is that FF XIV will be an MMORPG, just like Final Fantasy XI. Since Square Enix already has several years of MMORPG experience under the belt by working on Final Fantasy XI (one of the few successful MMORPGs), there should be less concerns and hopefully this ambitious project will be a far superior online game. So far it looks like some of the same races from FF XI, the humans and Galkas, make a return as it was shown in the FF XIV trailer. Final Fantasy XIV will be available on the PC and as a console exclusive on the PS 3.

For the first time ever, a wireless skateboard peripheral will be packaged in a Tony Hawk game, called Tony Hawk: Ride, for the Wii, Xbox 360, and Playstation 3. So for those folks who hate standard controllers that forces them to press button combos in skateboarding games, standing on a physical skateboard-like device in Tony Hawk: Ride might be just for you. The device is meant to capture your movements on screen; the accelerometer and four infra-red cameras in the skateboard peripheral will help you move right and left, and perform moves like ollies and kick-flips, so hopefully you feel like you're actually skateboarding.

ModNation Racers is both Mario Kart and Little Big Planet, a combination of kart racing and user generated content. Coming to the Playstation Network, ModNation Racers is part of Sony's “Play. Create. Share” genre, where players can create and customize content in video games and then share them with others online.

The game allows you to customize your racers, who look like cute Munny figurines, as you can change their faces and skin color, as well as dress them up with new hairstyles, outfits, and other wacky accessories. This will be not a classic kart racing game, as you can even customize your cars and race tracks and share it online with other players; the racetracks customization should be just as deep as what you can do with the avatars.

The racetracks can be created from the ground up: choose which direction the roads should go, surround them with mountains, forests, lakes, and houses if you want; adjust the landscape to determine how high and low the roads should be; you can even decide where the sun should shine its brightest at. LBP was the first of this new genre and ModNation Racers is the next follow up to Sony's goal of bringing the best lineup of user generated content games.

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