As promised, I’ve followed up on my most anticipated games of E3 with an actual list of the top ten games of the show. I spent four days checking out games and interviewing executives at the Los Angeles media and game business summit. Clearly, I didn’t see everything. I didn’t even get to some of the games on the previous list. These games reflect my own tastes. I didn’t hold myself to any rules, like limiting the list to games that are coming out this year or ones that were actually playable. It’s just a list of what I can’t wait to play myself.

Gears of War 2 (Xbox 360) Microsoft/Epic Games, Nov. 2008. If video games got Oscars, this one would win for best art direction. While the first game was dark and gloomy in its depiction of a world of destroyed beauty, this sequel has brilliant colors and sharper lines. The original Gears title sold 4.7 million units worldwide, even though I thought it had a steep learning curve. But the more I played it, the more fun it was. Flamethrowers, big bosses, and swarms of enemies make this one more exciting and challenging. There is nothing as visceral as using a chainsaw bayonet to slice your enemy in half. And of all of the games that I played or viewed at E3, I stuck with this one the longest.

Wii Music (Nintendo Wii) Nintendo, fall 2008. Shigeru Miyamoto sure took his time with this game, which he first showed off to an audience in 2006. I was able to sit down with this game, which allows you hold the Wii controller and its companion Nunchuk to play the “air guitar.” I strummed a violin by going through the motions. I pounded on steel drums. This game has almost no learning curve, making it accessible to young kids and adults who have no rhythm and no idea how to play an instrument. In that way, it could promote freestyle play and be far more appealing for younger gamers than either the “Rock Band” or “Guitar Hero” series of music games.

Left 4 Dead (PC, Xbox 360) Electronic Arts/Valve, November, 2008. This game is set in a world where a pandemic turns everyone into a zombie. As a survivor, you are trapped in a city and must escape with a group of survivors. I played just a single round of co-op online play of this game with three other players. It was awesome. You have to work closely with the other players to take out the zombies. If you don’t synchronize your efforts, you’re bound to run out of ammo at the same time. The zombies are fast and so you can’t all pump lead into the same lead attacker or you’ll fall victim to the next ones. It makes for frenetic game play and a lot of repeatable fun as you await “Resident Evil 5,” the big Capcom zombie-killing game which was postponed until the spring of 2009.

Spore (PC, Mac), Electronic Arts/Maxis, Sept. 7, 2008. I got to look at this one up close for a few minutes and liked what I saw. It’s certainly fun to fashion your own single-cell animal or a big creature or a galaxy-faring race. But the game play is also entertaining. You can explore a planet and find that it is populated by creatures chosen randomly from the player-created Sporepedia. Then your species has to meet and skewer the other one in combat, or make allies of them. There is still a lot of this game that I haven’t seen yet. But so