Most-played 360 games of 2006

Epic's Gears of War has out-gunned Call of Duty 2, GRAW, and Oblivion for the title of most played game in 2006, Major Nelson's blog-site reports.

UNO also dealt a fine hand as the most purchased Xbox Live Arcade release of the year, followed closely by Street Fighter II' Hyper Fighting and Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved.

The main list is based on the number of users who played a game whilst being signed-in to Xbox Live, taken from data collected between 1st January and 29th December 2006. There is a slight difference between these rankings and the arcade-list's ordering however, due to one gamertag being able to purchase a title for multiple gamertags to play.

And in case you're wondering, Major Nelson is the alias of one Larry Hryb, and he works at Microsoft as the Xbox Live director of programming. He uses his blog as a way of communicating to fans various tidbits of information about Microsoft's online gaming service. He also has less gamerpoints than Eurogamer's very own Kristan Reed. Hurrah.

We recently compiled our own top games of 2006, in which Xbox 360 titles featured prominently. In our child-like excitement we also threw together a list of what we expect to dazzle our pants off in 2007.

Here's hoping this year's as good as it looks.