In the past couple of months, Chris and I have gotten our Xbox 360 back from Microsoft and also acquired a Wii, so we’ve been doing the console gaming thing rather more frequently than usual. I though I’d mention a couple of the games we’ve been working our way through, although I’ll note that I’m aware we’re missing a lot of the recent good stuff. (There is, of course, a solution to that problem.) Note: those of you who are close friends and/or relatives who like games but do not already own these games should probably avoid buying them between now and late December. I’m just saying.

Bioshock: We’re making very slow progress with this one because we’re sharing a save file between the two of us, which means we only play when both of us are home, and not busy, and not in the mood to play or watch something else. But what we’ve seen so far is great, and absolutely lives up to the high expectations I had. I’m not a huge fan of shooters, particularly on the console, but I make exceptions for remarkable games. This is a remarkable game.

The Orange Box: Five games, of course, but worth buying for Portal alone. I can’t remember the last time I loved a game so fiercely. And Half-Life 2 is another shooter that’s so good I like it despite its format. You have heard all of this from other people long before now, but it’s all true.

Viva Piñata: For someone with my moderately obsessive tendencies, this is pretty much the perfect game. Chris finds it frustrating, but for me it was like discovering the Pokémon games all over again. Though I reached level 50 a while back, I can still frequently be found carefully nurturing improbable flowers and shouting obscenities at recalcitrant paper animals.

Beautiful Katamari: We skipped the previous two Katamari games, thanks to the untimely death of our PS2 right around the time that WoW came out. Perhaps you’ll find this one lacking in novelty if you’ve played the predecessors, but we were delighted with it. This is another one I’ll probably come back to, as we’ve completed the primary storyline but left many of the smaller objectives untouched.

Super Mario Galaxy: The sole game I brought home with our brand-new Wii, apart from the Wii Sports pack-in. We’ve only just started it, but it’s delectable. I plan to dig more seriously into it over the long weekend.