2007 was a serious year for gaming with so many great releases that it was very difficult to decide just which games deserved to be called the best of the best. In a year when Call of Duty 4, Bioshock, Mass Effect, Super Mario Galaxy, Uncharted, Warhawk, Halo 3, Crackdown, Jeanne D'Arc, The Witcher, Rock Band, and many other great games are all vying for awards, you can see the difficulty in picking just what games deserve to be called Game of the Year.

In the end we picked games that did more than just entertained us - they gave us experiences we have never had before, moved some of us, provided us something beyond entertainment. We honored games that used mechanics that have never been used before, games that put a fresh coat of paint on genres that developers usually play it safe in and games that took chances. Not all of these experiences were perfect either; some of these games have fundamental flaws, some were niche titles geared towards a specific group of players, some fell short in their story-telling and some just fell short in the experience that they were trying to deliver.

But at the end of the process our writers - the people that have the most say here at GameShark - are satisfied with our 2007 Game of the Year Awards. As you read through our Genre Awards, our Platform Awards and our Special Awards I hope you will realize that the one thing we didn't do this year was play it safe or make choices based on name recognition or sales.

We hope you will join us now in honoring these games and the developers that brought them to you. Thank you!

- James Fudge, Editor in Chief, GameShark.com