It's that time of year again. Last year's response to our Game of the Year post was so enthusiastic that I thought it would be worthwhile to give it another go. So, once again, some of the Slashdot folks have come together to offer up our 'games of the year'. Scuttlemonkey, Scott Collins, Chris Brown, CmdrTaco, and myself have all put together quick blurbs about the games we couldn't get enough of this year. When you're through reading those, it's your turn to speak up. What was the game you couldn't put down? The next-gen consoles really came into their own this year; was it one of those games, or something for the PC? In your opinion, what was the best game of the year?

mkosmo writes "News.com.au is reporting that Steve Irwin was killed in a freak accident while filming one of his well known documentaries. Surprisingly it wasn't a crocodile, it was a sting-ray."

modapi writes "StorageMojo is reporting that a company at Storage Networking World in San Diego has made a startling claim of 25x data compression for digital data storage. A combination of de-duplication and calculating and storing only the changes between similar byte streams is apparently the key. Imagine storing a terabyte of data on a single disk, and it all runs on Linux." Obviously nothing concrete or released yet so take with the requisite grain of salt.