Before long, we’ll be inundated with the end of year wrap-ups, and I’ll post my 2006 strategy retrospective in a couple of weeks. If I had a podcast, I’d try to do a roundtable thing, but in lieu of that, feel free to email me comments or opinions.

Of course, some people take the opinions of their readers seriously and solicit their responses to polls. But even in a large poll with a dozen choices for each question, annoying things start to pop up.

1UP’s poll, for example decides that beat-music games, life sims and flight simulations have so much in common that they can be put in the same category. “Which is better? Elite Beat Agents, Nintendogs or Microsoft Flight Simulator?” Sure, we do this all the time when we choose an ultimate winner, but this is a genre vote. It just becomes a huge catchall category – which shows how far the flight sim has fallen.

And what about those times when a multi-platform game is noticeably better on one than another? If you think that FIFA 2007 was great on the PC but forgettable on a console, you still have to vote for the full package. And how come Armadillo Run doesn’t make the puzzle list?

The biggest curiosity is in Gamespy’s categories. The learned editors there decided to break strategy games into RTS and non-RTS categories. Fine. Except Rise of Legends is in the non-RTS category. By their definition, it’s a “hybrid” I guess because of the campaign game. But let’s not be crazy. This isn’t like the Total War games, where the campaign is inherently turn-based with serious city and army building; in the Rise of Legends campaign the story is just moving from one RTS encounter to another. They might as well toss in Rise and Fall: Civilizations at War because its campaign has an adventure/shooter part. And the only chance for a flight sim to win is in the Overall PC Game of the Year category.