Well, this generation of console games has finally settled into a respectable plateau when it comes to being both productive and creative, after a seemingly never-ending series of shaky starts.

Remember launch time? The only thing that I remember that was worth playing on the PS3 was Resistance: Fall of Man, though I have trouble remembering exactly why I didn’t hate it. Though the Wii started off with a reasonable handful of decent titles, it’s still the Wii…other than the Nintendo-obsessed fans out there, serious gamers generally need more to excited about than a new Zelda and a new Mario.

Of course, the real gamer’s machine had a year’s worth of head-start to work on those minor things like not working for more than ten seconds, and not having any decent games.

Oh sure, the early-adopters got a few good Xbox 360 games before the rest of us…but even they didn’t have much to choose from at launch time, and the really good stuff had to wait until nearly a year or more later (coincidentally, right about the time Wii and PS3 were coming out…hmmm…).

Luckily, it’s a well-known gamer fact that a console doesn’t really start to reach its potential until right before it becomes obsolete. So, with that in mind, let’s plan for the final days for the Xbox 360, because its new games are looking very good indeed.

Update: While the 2009 Christmas season was actually somewhat dismal for releases, there was plenty of fall-winter releases to coast on (among others, Assassin’s Creed 2, Dragon Age: Origins, and Modern Warfare 2), and we have the excellent-looking and OTT tongue-in-cheek Bayonetta raising a lot of fresh eyebrows for the first of the year. Who knows, maybe it will be a good year for the Xbox 360 after all…and maybe they’ll finally release Alan Wake…