Xbox Live Topped By Halo 2, CoD 2, XBLA By Pac-Man

Via the weblog of staffer Larry 'Major Nelson' Hryb, Microsoft has announced the top ten Xbox 360 games currently being played over Xbox Live for the week of August 14, 2006, as well as the top titles for the the original Xbox being played over (or while connected to) the online service. Once again, Activision and Infinity Ward's World War II first-person shooter Call of Duty 2 topped the list of Xbox 360 titles being played over Xbox Live. Interestingly, the second most played game on the list is Capcom's Dead Rising. Though Live aware, and featuring the a modicum of Xbox Live features, the game is primarily a single player experience. The third most played game over Xbox Live for the console was Ubisoft's Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter, followed by Sega's futuristic mechanized strategy shooter Chromehounds and Bethesda Softworks' role-playing game The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion in the fourth and fifth positions respectively for the week. Players were suiting up and taking to the field with Electronic Arts' college football title NCAA 2007 ranking as the sixth most played Xbox 360 title over Live for the week, followed by EA's Battlefield 2:Modern Combat and Square Enix's MMORPG Final Fantasy XI. Interestingly, the demo for Dead Rising, which ranked last week as the third most played game over Xbox Live, continued to prove popular as the ninth most played game over the online service for the week. EA's in-house port of the PC strategy title The Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle-Earth II, absent from the chart for the last two weeks, rounded out the current chart in tenth. In addition, this week Major Nelson released data concerning the full versions of games being played over Xbox Live Arcade, of which the recently released Pac-Man topped the chart. The iconic character beat out Capcom's popular 2D fighting game Street Fighter II' Hyper Fighting, which was the second most played arcade title for the week, followed by UNO and Geometry Wars Evolved. Namco Bandai's 80s shooter Galaga ranked fifth on the list, beating out Konami's much-loved arcade amphibian Frogger. Cloning Clyde was the seventh most played arcade title for the period, followed by Marble Blast Ultra and Bankshot Billiards 2. Popular puzzle game Zuma completed the list in tenth. Turning to the original Xbox, Halo 2 unsurprisingly retained its ironclad grip on the top spot of the chart, and again ranked as the most played game across both platforms as well. EA's Battlefield 2: Modern Combat was the second most played Xbox title on the chart for the week, followed by Ubisoft's Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell Chaos Theory and the Xbox port of Counter-Strike. Konami's popular soccer title Pro Evolution Soccer 5 scored the fifth spot on the chart, followed by another Ubisoft title, this time Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six 3: Black Arrow. No doubt reflecting the brewing anticipation for this week's release of Madden, Madden NFL 2006 was the seventh most played Xbox game for the week over Xbox Live, followed by LucasArts' Star Wars Battlefront II. Microsoft's popular racing game Forza Motorsport was the ninth most played Xbox title over the online service, while the list was rounded out by Ubisoft's Rainbow Six 3 in tenth.