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

There have been few surprises along the way, from all three sides: When the Wii took (casual) center stage with the Wiimote, Sony eventually zigged with the Move and Microsoft ultimately zagged with the Kinect.

I’d like to join everyone else in expressing what a quantum leap all this “motion” stuff was, except for one little fact: I like being alone, sitting down with a controller, and pressing buttons. Strike two. When I want to move around with other people, I’ll go to the gym or I’ll go to a club and dance; those two sometimes lead to…other sorts of movement. Social and fun, sure, but not much to do with video gaming. When I want to strap on snow boots and skis, I’ll actually go skiing. Until then, analog sticks and buttons work just fine.

Plus, half of my fascination with video games has been the graphics, which pretty much disqualifies me from ever owning a Wii. Oh, it’s not exactly last-generation technology, but it may as well be last-generation graphics. Strike three.

That left the PS3 and Xbox 360, and to be honest I don’t think that the PS3 ever really recovered from the yearlong head-start that Microsoft got. While it took most of that year to fix the technical issues and release some worthwhile titles (most of which had seemingly been delayed since launch time), I had a very difficult time convincing myself to buy another expensive console.

In fact, if God of War had been an Xbox game, I could have ignored Sony completely.

Anyway, 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.