Part of the joy of gaming for me has always been the release schedule.  No matter how intoxicating my current gaming fix is, the allure of being whisked away to a wondrous new world or revisiting an old favourite is simply irresistible.

The first half of 2008 has been extremely weak; GTA4 was gaming nirvana but the gap between it and everything else could be easily navigated by the space shuttle.  The months of October and November however will bring to our shores a mother lode of gaming goodness with a very heavy co-op focus as part of the deal.

Checking the release schedule now, from this week’s Mercenaries 2 there is a minimum of 12 games I would like to obtain before the end of November.  No my wife doesn’t currently know this.  So to make things interesting I decided to ‘pretend’ I could only play 5 and justify my decisions.  It wasn’t easy to narrow my choices to so few and I will probably insult some good friends with this list but here goes.