Social Games for the Holidays

As the holiday season rolls around, so too the prospect of family gatherings raises its ugly head. Can you really take any more interminable afternoons spent staring blankly at assorted family members? Suggest an activity, and it just gets worse. Uncle Bob always wants to watch football. Grannie has been going on about watching the Tivo'd Macy's parade all afternoon. The kids are getting feisty. What's a good host to do?

Assuming you can rouse yourself out of your turkey-induced torpor, give one of these social video games a try. Each offers enough single-console multiplayer fun to keep even the pickiest group of relations amused for, oh, minutes at least. No matter whether you're in the mood for music, trivia, board games or good old-fashioned gunplay, we've got something for you and yours.

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Rock Band

Humanity has been using music as a bonding ritual for tens of thousands of years. Here's a chance to harness this timeless power to make your holiday party rock, and without the need for all those tedious scales. Rock Band comes with a guitar, a drum kit, a microphone, and about 60 of the hottest rock 'n' roll tracks around. Plug it in and prepare for one of the year's most unusual social gaming experiences. Whatever you do, don't miss it.

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Smarty Pants

If you've ever tried playing trivia games with your kids (or your parents), you'll know that trying to establish a level playing field can be tough. Smarty Pants lets each player set individual difficulty levels, and packs over 20,000 questions on all kinds of topics. Not only that, but the game's controlled with the Wii's intuitive remotes, and you can import your own Miis to serve as your on-screen characters.

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Halo 3

Halo is a mainstay of college parties all over the world, and with good reason -- its single-console multiplayer modes are loaded with variety. For best results with minimal complexity, club together with your Xbox 360-owning friends (or siblings) to gather two consoles, two TVs, eight controllers and some scraps of networking hardware to connect them all together. That way, you can set up the TVs back-to-back and play four-on-four team matches without your foes sneaking a peek at your quarter of the screen.

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Fuzion Frenzy

Wait, what? The same Fuzion Frenzy that was released for the original Xbox way back in 2001? Thanks to one of Microsoft's infrequent Xbox Live updates, you'll shortly be able to download this entire game to your Xbox 360's hard drive. Assuming you have a hard drive, of course. One of the most underrated Xbox titles around, it's everything you could want from a party game: full of diverse mini-games, easy to learn, and with plenty of opportunity for stabbing your friends in the back.

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