Games of 2010: God of War III
Stay another deity.
Could any of the other platform holders made God of War III or Uncharted 2? Would any of the others have given so much backing to a title like LittleBigPlanet? Have Microsoft or Nintendo commissioned anywhere near the amount of the quality download titles in the same way that Sony has on PSN? While it's still the exclusives that make the PlayStation 3 so desirable, it's the example set by games like God of War III - and Sony's willingness to share the combined tech and know-how of its own studios - that inspire the third-party developers to up their game.
As the era of the HD consoles matures, with no replacement hardware in sight, we are seeing a general rise in standards across the board - certainly from a technical perspective - but more than that, we are reaping the rewards of top coding talent remaining on the same platform. Four years into the PS2's lifecycle, the PS3 and Xbox 360 were already well into gestation and the best developers were already contemplating moving onto the new platforms, if not actively making the transition. That isn't happening this time. The investment in terms of time, money and talent is all being concentrated on the consoles you already own.
God of War III won't be the first or indeed the final hurrah from the Sony Santa Monica team for PlayStation 3. Instead it is just the beginning: the years spent building GOWIII will almost certainly have given the team more than enough experience to create a successor that pushes back the boundaries of the current console generation still further. That game, just like GOWIII in the here and now, will also serve as a standard bearer for the quality of technology we can expect to come from the team's competitors both within Sony and without.
As Eurogamer's technology editor, nothing will excite me more than the announcements of PlayStation 4 and the NeXtbox, along with the new gaming possibilities those pieces of hardware will represent. However, God of War III is the best argument there is that the current generation of consoles still have so much more to offer.