Osmos for iPhone & iPad

Osmos is simple.  You're a floaty-glowy bubble, squirting around in space.  You can absorb smaller bubbles, adding their mass to yours in the process, while bigger bubbles can absorb you to death.  In a representative round, the goal is to "become the biggest."  Off you go, absorbing bubbles to get bigger, which allows you to absorb larger bubbles, and so on ... and then you look up and an hour has passed.

The physics are great, and the gameplay is super smooth.  But the other winner is the soundtrack -- fricken excellent on headphones -- transporting you into a world of groovy bubbling grooviness.  The replay value is excellent .. so if you don't have a chance to listen to a level's music the first time through, you'll have plenty of other chances when you come back for more.

Super Meat Boy for PC

There's a section in the Bhagavad Gita about a million deaths that are fated to happen, right?  Super Meat Boy is like a pre-battle meeting with Krishna, if Krishna was a devilishly difficult platformer that packs in nods to other games, other game makers, and other gameplay styles at every possible spot.  It's an epic of game playing.  You'll find yourself gasping "argh" as you die just millimeters from the end of a level, only to smack the keyboard and start the level again.  Just one more and you'll get it.  Sure...  Keep your RSI braces handy -- you won't be able to stop playing this one.

Split/Second for PS3

Split/Second is a car racing game, and I'm hit-or-miss on my opinion of those, but I just finished playing this one all the way through. You know those crazy car chases in movies, where they're flying through an abandoned industrial sector, with stuff blowing up all over the place? It's like playing those scenes, yourself. You're racing on and off streets, with "real" cars -- but you accumulate powerups that let you trigger explosions in front of the competition, which plays like a kart racing game. The AIs match your skill well (if you pick slow cars, they pick slow cars) and the courses are varied enough to be interesting, but repeated enough to be familiar by the end of the game. And there's nothing like triggering an explosion moments before the finish line, to knock the opposition out and jump to first place just in time. Zoom!

ModNation Racers for PS3

In the words of days-gone-by search engines, "More like this!"  Sure, I'm a sucker for user-generated content, so I was looking forward to ModNation ever since last year's E3 demo, but it's lived up to my hopes.  It's great!
It's a fun kart racer, with balanced power-ups and smooth controls, and a few tricks that sometimes mean the race leader loses, right at the last second.  Everything you expect from a kart racer game.

But the track-creation tool is the really awesome part.  (Well, that and the car creation tool, or the character creation tool, actually.)  Like any good level generator, your first few are awesome because you don't care, then the next few are all messed up because you have something in mind, and then the rest after that work because you find a groove and the tools don't get in the way.  Then you go multiplayer and play your maps with other folks.  And then folks tell you what works and doesn't work about them.  And then you make more!  You gotta try this.

Red Dead Redemption for PS3

OMFG this game goes forever.  Red Dead Redemption is a third-person shooter where you're the gristled cowboy with a dark past who's fighting to go straight.  The main story is hours and hours, the scenery reaches for miles, side quests with real stories are littered everywhere, you can collect pieces of outifts, or tame horses, or shoot horse thieves, or save damsels, or get robbed by damsels.  It's a jillion things to do, and you could easily spend a month finding all the hidden bits.

Also, pardon the "gee wiz," but whoever did the lighting for it deserves a medal -- sunrise and lightning storms were my favorite.  They really nailed the Western genre.  The music is similarly on target, though after a few hours I turned it down so I could run Pandora on a laptop.  It's a remarkably pretty game, making it good for spectators, too.  Yeehaw!