Listening to Weekend Confirmed since it came back, I'm liking the discussion about Good and Fun in games; their Jeff will talk about games being more Good than Fun, or vice versa. I've been keeping what started as a top ten list for the year (currently at 19 and counting), and as much as there's still a few weeks left, my top ten are pretty much nailed down for the year. 
I don't know their Jeff's definition of Good, but I'm going with this: 
- A Good game is mechanically sound; it may have a slowdown here and there, but overall it's capable of doing what it was designed to do.
- The mechanics of a Good game should, at minimum, not get in the way of the player doing common tasks in the game, and at best they should make those tasks more enjoyable. As much as I didn't care for what I've played of Gears of War, the reload mechanic was a perfect example of doing something right; you can hit the reload button and just get it done, or you can try to time it for a little bonus.
 
Obviously Fun is a lot more wide open than that; I had fun with third person games, first person games, tower defense and even a point and click adventure this year, so that's open to interpretation from game to game.

The jockeying in the list at this point is largely a question of the balance between Good and Fun. Out of the current list, I can easily say the top four games ( ME:2, Splinter Cell:Conviction, AC:Brotherhood, Alan Wake: ) are both good and fun. 
 
Right now, Fable III sits at that half-way mark, where it starts getting into weighing and measuring Good and Fun. 
I had a good amount of Fun playing Fable III, and I think for the most part it was a Good game. There are a few places though where the mechanics, and the interest in a certain vision got in the way of the Fun. 
I can understand why the sanctuary room was done; it makes all of the things that would normally get done in a menu have a more concrete feeling. The problem I think is that it doesn't really fit a game with so many choices and options. I only had about 8 weapons total I think, but there's at least one post out on the GB forums from someone complaining about what a pain in the ass it is to scroll through things when you have 100+ weapons. I can sympathize a bit; I regularly had 10 or 15 friend quests going at any one time, and having to warp back to the sanctuary to choose the next one each time, instead of having the game default back to the storyline was Not Fun. 
 
The next two down the list are in a bit of Flux: Singularity, and BioShock2. Both FPS, which historically I haven't been into. In both cases I liked the story, and the if there were specific mechanical issues, I don't remember them at the moment. Oddly, I think the straight ahead nature of Bioshock 2 that made it more enjoyable for me than the first one, is what's keeping it just below Singularity. I liked the sense of purpose in Bioshock2 that I didn't feel in the first one, but at the same time, I liked the story in Singularity better. Maybe it's just that I like sci-fi and time travel better than one long rescue mission, who knows. 
 
Under that is Alpha Protocol. This is the poster child in my list for being more Fun than Good. While this is almost exactly the sort of game I would love, it has enough little problems and issues that it's ending up on the lower end of 10. 
 
Below that, Split/Second. I had fun with this one, but in the same way that it's hard to measure a comedy against a bunch of dramas, it's hard to measure a racing game against a bunch of adventures and shooters. I think if there had been more tracks, or if the placement of the explosions had been more varied, this would have scored higher on my list. 
 
And at the bottom of the top ten: Red Dead. 
I've posted a few opinions on this on the site before, but as much as the mechanics were good to me, the progression of the story, especially starting in Mexico, just killed it. Maybe it was a marathon session with the game, but after getting through Mexico, it stopped being fun. 
The mission structure stood out like a sore thumb, and as much as there was an open world with lots of little side quests to do, I didn't feel that I was in particular control of what I was doing as far as the story. 
Maybe bringing up such objectionable characters as the government handlers was done on purpose, to wrap you up in the sense of powerlessness that John Marston felt, but one of the reasons I play games is to have some freedom to do what I want to do. Sure, shooting those guys might have ended the game, or made it so that I didn't see my family again, but as I know I've seen in at least one other blog (maybe was it Sweep?) talking about how the ending part with Marston doing chores and helping the family out could just as well have been put at the start of the game; at least that way there's a potential that I as a player would have some interest in saving John's family beyond his repeatedly telling people that's what he was after. Speaking of which, it also occurs to me that if it wasn't for his talking all the time about how much he really wanted to be back with his family, I might not have felt such a disconnect when I couldn't, in fact, shoot someone in the leg to motivate them into helping me. 
I think this was a really Good Game, and I have some good memories of it, but compared to the ones above, it just wasn't that fun. 
 
Having said that, there's a good buffer below RDR, such as Lara Croft, Dark Void, Transformers, Case Zero, Sherlock Holmes, Blur, and a few others.