Call up your friends, grab some extra controllers and get ready for the return of Nintendo's fan service franchise, Super Smash Bros. Brawl. Does the third installment of the series take fighting to new heights, or are we treated to more of the same?

If you're reading this I'm assuming that you're a gamer. Perhaps your taste lies in homegrown first person shooters or maybe you anxiously await the new iteration of Madden every year.

Let's face it, video game movies usually suck (see article here). For every guilty pleasure such as Resident Evil there is a House of the Dead, Street Fighter, and Mario Brothers stinking up this niche genre. What keeps going wrong?

The fastest growing genre in video games is ''brain training,'' a genre no one had even heard of before last year. But it only takes one smash hit - in this case, Nintendo's ''Brain Age'' - to launch an armada of imitators.

When future archaeologists look back on the games of the 21st century, they're likely to be confused by the convoluted myths we've created. Who is this Zelda, and why must Link find her? How do magic mushrooms make Mario powerful? Why is Pac-Man on the run from his ghosts?

After watching everyone from gamers to grandmas fall under the spell of ground-breaking Wii games during the holidays, Nintendo fulfills its promise to continue the flow of fun for veteran and new gamers alike. Nintendo's first-quarter lineup is filled with new games that expand the breadth and depth of the Wii library and build on the kind of fun that has made Wii such a smash hit.

There has never been anything like it. Independent U.S. sales figures released by the NPD Group today confirmed a red-hot launch for the new Wii system by Nintendo, and the crowning of the portable Nintendo DS as the best-selling video game device of any type for both the holidays and all of 2006.

2006 was a great year for video games. While years that see new home consoles are successes, this year in particular proved that video games are becoming mainstream faster than you may realize. While a lot of it has to do with the Wii, a system vying for the position of “console anyone can play,” the fact that a huge entertainment company like Sony is showcasing their new format of media on PlayStation 3 says something. Now that officially every mainstream game has been released in 2006, here are the 20 best games of the year:

In a result that will surely send fanboys into a rage, action-RPG The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion beat out favorite Gears of War for Game of the Year at Spike TV Video Game Awards 2006. You can watch the star-studded event on Spike TV this Wednesday, December 13, at 10 p.m. ET/PT. List of nominees below, winners in bold:

For video gamers, it was the month that was -- November 2006, the first time all three new home systems (Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Nintendo Wii) would be available to consumers, along with three established portable game devices (Nintendo DS, GameBoy Advance, PSP). It was a month that belonged to Nintendo.