Now this is a pleasant surprise. Naturally, we all knew that a new franchise launched by Nintendo was going to attract a considerable amount of interest no matter what the actual product was. But the team-based third-person paint-'em-up deserved all the love it got, offering a friendly new slant on the online shooter genre that entails painting as much of the arena in your team's colour as possible. The fact that Splatoon is an IP, isn't multi-platform, and that it's platform is the ailing Wii U, is a testament to how a brilliantly-executed game concept can overcome seemingly every possible hurdle to become a hit. Sure, it had the little matter of being made by one of the world's best developers going for it, but to squeeze itself in among the huge, long-established AAA franchises that make up the rest of this list is an incredible achievement. Just goes to show that Nintendo still have as much magnetism for gamers as they ever did.