As I type this, I’m waiting to board a plane that’ll be taking me from sunny St. Lucia back to frigid, snow-shocked New York City. (Another storm’s supposed to hit on Christmas, apparently.)

I knew I’d be away and had sent in my ballot for Crispy Game of the Year vote ahead of time. Now that it’s all over, I thought it might be interesting to see what I picked and why.

The following are in ascending order, meaning that the list goes from least-loved to best-loved.

 5. Left 4 Dead 2

Vancouver feels like a very new city. There's big, fancy buildings going up everywhere and the people I met when I visited all seemed very bright and chipper and eager to help. (Except for Jones, that is.) Jones has long been regaling me about the development scene in Vancouver and it kind of makes sense that there'd be a cluster of video game production houses in this new-feeling city. Video games are a forward-looking industry and Vancouver's got the kind of vibe that seems to fit the medium.

Let others have their Madden, NBA or Bigs franchises. Tekken games are my sport.

Ever since Tekken 3 in college, I’ve spent hours in the various games’ Practice Modes, working out my own ways to link moves together. That hasn’t changed much over the years. It’s happened that Lei Wu-Long’s become my main guy. My Tiger Woods, my Michael Jordan, if you will.
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Fry It or no, I’m going to be playing Tekken 6.

Games on the iPhone are a wonder to behold and sometimes, even a joy to play. The iPhone’s pretty much single-handedly resurrected mobile gaming into a category worth caring about and all of the major players in the industry recognize that. During their last product event, Apple specifically called out Sony’s PSP and Nintendo’s DS handhelds while touting the iPod Touch as a superior experience. Traditionally, Apple hasn’t made many waves in the gaming space.

Folks seem to love Arkham Asylum. (I certainly did.) So there’s much Twitter-ing and discussion about the game. If you’ve roamed around the web, other people will direct you to read Grant Morrison’s classic graphic novel Batman: Arkham Asylum–A Serious House on Serious Earth. I say *pfah* to that.

One of the reasons Crispy Gamer's one of the best game journalism sites on the internet is because we've got kick-ass editors. (Take your bows, Ryan & Elise.) They keep us on track and honest, as well as doing the demanding job of trimming the fat from our articles. 

Fight Night Round 4 came out more than a month ago. By all rights, I should've moved on. When I mentioned that I was still playing it to Scott Jones (who penned our review), he exclaimed, "You're still on that?!" I can understand his surprise, though.