Of the 41 major college bowl games, 16 are owned by ESPN. All but three are televised by ESPN or ABC. And even the worst bowls are still ratings gold.

That’s another year of video games down, and I don’t know about you, but my fingers are sore from all the button-mashing and joystick rotations. Games seem to be getting longer, sprawling between 60 and more than 100 hours.

The gaming obsessives at CNET and its sibling sites ZDNET, PCMag, Lifehacker and Mashable put their heads together and chose their absolute faves that were released this year.

It was a rough year for Microsoft’s gaming division, but there are still some great games to check out.