For a gaming year that started out with a bang, 2010 has stumbled to the finish line. Of course, it's impossible to ignore the outrageous success of the recently released Call of Duty: Black Ops--but aside from that title, most of the second half of 2010 remains forgettable.

A reason for this lull in quality console games is likely the bombardment of motion-gaming initiatives from Sony and Microsoft. In a way, these product launches ostensibly carved out a release window that saw plenty of Kinect and Move-friendly titles but forced conventional "button-games" to take the backseat. Was this the reason for the sharp drop-off in the fall of 2010

Regardless of when in the calendar year these top-notch games were released, 2010 did see some excellent efforts for each platform as well as few surprises along the way. Like in 2009, sequels seem to highlight our list, with a few new franchises breaking into the top 10, too. We also think portable gaming suffered in 2010, with only a few titles being released that are even worth mentioning.

Of course, no top-10 list is complete without honorable mentions, so please click through to view some titles we'd like to recognize but that didn't quite find their ways into top-10 placement. As always, be sure to sound off in the comments section if your list is different from ours!

Honorable mention: