Christmas isn’t a time for playing free games. It’s a time for watching Chevy Chase movies while wearing questionable sweaters, or for thumb-tacking tinsel into the roof lining of your Fiat 500. The only games you should play, in fact, are the new, expensive ones under the tree that you’ve been waiting for since early November. So instead of pointing you towards a no-budget marvel today, I thought I’d gather together a few vague thoughts on the past year (and perhaps one or two on the year to come).

If you want to think of this as an awards edition, by the way, try and imagine David Bowie and Bill Pullman as the hosts, because they’d totally be who I’d have called in for the job.

Most surprising trend in 2009
2009 was the year that advertising games suddenly decided to get their acts together. Titles like InFamous: Precinct Assault and Dragon Age Journeys were both polished and rather generous offerings, while Littleloud Studios’ Minutemen, a Watchmen tie-in, was arguably far smarter and more elegant than the official videogame. Online ads have to work a lot harder for your attention than television and print equivalents, and this is probably going to be an interesting area to watch in the new year too.

Most intriguing trend for 2010
At its developer conference in October, Adobe announced that ActionScript 3 would allow users to export their projects as iPhone apps. For the hundreds of Flash designers already porting their titles across in a far more fiddly manner, this is undoubtedly good news, but it also suggests that an already crowded App Store is just about to become even harder to navigate. iTunes is hardly an ideal storefront for games as is, but it’s not unreasonable to worry that the iPhone’s glittering gems are likely to get buried even deeper in 2010.

Most unexpected pleasure
For the most part, iTunes is a navigation disaster, but browsing through the titles you’ve already downloaded on your iPhone or iPod Touch can be a strangely enjoyable experience, the tiny brightly-coloured game logos turning Apple’s slab of elegance into the vivid shelves of the world’s prettiest sweetshop. The pathetic truth is that – for me at least – a nicely designed icon makes a download a lot more likely.

Most dependable site
Founded by two men named Kyle, the Experimental Gameplay Project is a maddeningly potent congregation of geniuses, the site’s monthly themed design competitions throwing out quirky wonders like Ergon/Logos, as well as being responsible for world-beaters such as Canabalt. Check out the results of the recent Numbers challenge to get a sense of game creation at its most fleet-footed.

Most worrying number
Collectively, the human race has destroyed 59,180,012 One-Dot Enemies worldwide. I’m only to blame for 11,109 of those.

Most potent time-waster
2009 will most likely go down in history as the year we encountered the cruel, amoral voice that howls at the centre of the universe, a siren song so inexplicably intoxicating no-one can escape its grip. It’s called Bejeweled Blitz, incidentally, and its union with Facebook is distinctly frightening.

Best free non-game
It’s astonishing to think that Nintendo’s dazzling Flipnote Studio won’t cost you a penny – unless you factor in the £160 you’ll pay for a DSi to use it on – as the company’s animation package is exactly the kind of product it could probably get away with charging full-price for. Effortless to use, and - by Nintendo’s standards at least - easy to get online with to upload your sketchy movies, Flipnote is almost too good to be true.

Best free game
Lavish and gently corporate, Free Realms probably isn’t the kind of thing that comes to mind when you think of free games, but it costs nothing to play, and it’s streamlined enough to run on a wide variety of computers. Granted, its chirpy take on comic fantasy may leave a lot of adults slightly cold, but it’s an undeniably brilliant concept, generously implemented, and a bold move that suggests the venerable bulk of SOE, creator of EverQuest, is an outfit to keep an eye on in the year ahead.