GS.com GOTY Overall Xbox360 PS3 PS2 PSP Wii NDS PC Genre Awards Special Awards Strategy Game of the Year: Galactic Civilizations II Dark Avatar Stardock's Galactic Civilizations II is one the strongest turn-based 4X games ever made and Dark Avatar just builds upon that foundation. While technically an expansion, Dark Avatar is a required purchase for fans of the original because it does more than just add new races, and few other bells and whistles. It's like a brand new game which is why we decided to give it the award for Best Strategy Game and not just Best Expansion of the year. It deserved more than that. Dark Avatar makes a lot of subtle changes and additions to the base game, but there are a handful of new goodies that really shape it into something special: Planetary environments, espionage, asteroids mining, mega events, and racial super abilities. These are not just small trinkets thrown to fans of the original game but large design overhauls that change the entire dynamic of how it plays. When you consider the new additions as well as the stronger AI, graphics, and interface tweaks and you have a strategy game that's simply hard to beat. We can't wait what Stardock comes up with next when the Twilight of the Arnor expansion is released in 2008. - William Abner GameShark.com Review Roleplaying Game of the Year: Mass Effect While there was no shortage of good role-playing games in 2007, there is no question that Mass Effect sits at the top of the genre. BioWare has crafted one of the most compelling pieces of interactive entertainment ever, a tour de force of gaming that deserves every bit of praise heaped on to it. More than just an exciting space adventure, Mass Effect is an incredible piece of interactive fiction that depicts a life-like alternative reality filled with dynamic characters. A real-time combat system, superb script, and gorgeous visuals come together for an unparalleled role-playing experience. What distinguishes Mass Effect from other role-playing games is the emotional connection it establishes through the course of is epic story. Characters feel real and interactions have meaning and consequence. Other games have attempted to do this before, yet none have succeeded to the degree that BioWare's title does. The fact that this has been accomplished not in an established franchise, but as a wholly original game makes it all the more impressive. There's no question that Mass Effect is a title that will endure well beyond 2007 due to its inventive gameplay and compelling narrative. - Tracy Erickson GameShark.com Review Action Game of the Year: Uncharted: Drake's Fortune Perhaps the year's most overlooked title, Uncharted: Drake's Fortune also happens to be one of the best not just on PlayStation 3 but across all platforms. Often likened to a cross between an Indiana Jones film and a Tomb Raider game, this hyper-realistic adventure from Naughty Dog manages to be a bit more. Unbelievable visuals top nearly anything else on PlayStation 3 and the sheer quality of its action surpass anything brought to the table by other action-adventure games in 2007. In a year packed with so many stellar games, Uncharted finds its way into the spotlight for the fluid feel of its gameplay. Fantastic voice acting, well-written dialogue, and an organic sense of storytelling lend a naturalness to the game that is often missing in action games. All of this comes intertwined with fast-paced action scenes and platform jumping sequences that are both interesting and challenging. Although many of its individual concepts are borrowed, Uncharted brings them together in a way that no other game has done before and with such immense quality. - Tracy Erickson Expansion of the Year: Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts The series that just keeps getting better - Opposing Fronts takes the already fantastic Company of Heroes design to a new level by adding campaigns for both the British Second Army and German Panzer Elite. Balance is the name of the game here - the new armies are brilliantly designed, adding more maneuverability and making them unique to the original game's retinue. Balance isn't always about making things even, but by allowing each faction to form its own identity, which this expansion does in spades. Add in top shelf multiplayer support and THQ simply made one of the best RTS games on the planet that much better. When an expansion can beat our games like Medieval Total War 2: Kingdoms and Age of Empires III: Asian Dynasties - you know it's a darn good game. - William Abner GameShark.com Review Best Original Game Concept of 2007: Portal We are at a time of evolution in our hobby. Slow, gradual change rules the day. Sequels and follow-ups dominate gaming, and the biggest titles of the year can usually be relied upon to be either a sequel or a retread. Thus it's become a rare thing to encounter something genuinely new, something startling and surprising. Portal is one of those rare things. With a gameplay mechanic as simple as it is original, Portal changed the way three dimensional spaces are viewed. After Portal, I will never again see a platforming game without wishing, secretly, that I could just fire off a pair of portals to skip the whole thing. Portal isn't just a novel concept, though. The game isn't a one-trick pony - it also brought a surprising warmth to a genre usually obsessed with body count, and created characters gamers will be quoting for years to come. GLaDOS put it best when she said, 'This was a triumph.' - Michael Wedge GameShark.com Review Adventure Game of the Year: Undercover: Operation Wintersun PC adventure games aren't terribly hard to find, but ones that discard mystical fantasy-lands and obtuse puzzles for real-world settings and common sense deduction are few and far between. Those that manage to do all that while delivering likeable characters and a fun story are even more scarce, but you need look no further than our Adventure Game of the Year, Undercover: Operation Wintersun. Placing you into the sensible shoes of a brainy professor who finds himself entangled in a dangerous spy game during World War II, Wintersun sets itself apart from its point and click brethren not only by providing puzzles that actually make sense, but also cheekily tossing a few red herrings your way. It's smart, but not unfair, a rarity in a genre that delights in difficulty for difficulty's sake. - Susan Arendt GameShark.com Review Online Multiplayer Game of the Year: Halo 3 Halo 3 caught a lot of flak when it was released. The single player campaign was castigated for having you cover the same ground more than once, and the plot was called incomprehensible. All of that may have been true, but only if you weren't playing it the way god intended: in four player co-op mode. Whatever the sins of the single-player campaign might have been, they were largely absolved when you and your friends could hop into four tanks and blaze a trail of carnage across rolling alien plains. Whether or not you understood who the precursors were, or why a hologram kept hijacking your eyeballs every hour or two, you understood how awesome it was to use the flamethrower to torch several hundred Flood, and maybe a couple of your buddies if they didn't get out of the way fast enough. As awesome as the multiplayer action in Halo 3 was, it paled in comparison to the groundbreaking suite of community tools that Bungie brought to the party. It was Bungie that catapulted Xbox Live into a must-have accessory for the original Xbox, so it's somehow fitting that it took Bungie to really show what Live on the 360 was capable of. For the first time, a console title has some of the same freedoms as a PC title. With Halo 3, console gamers could upload photos or videos of their best multiplayer moments, create and share brand new maps and gameplay variants, and download their friends content as well. Brand new functions in the core Xbox Live code let you see who was playing with your friends, and send them your best videos. As if all of that wasn't enough, you could go worldwide with your content, as every piece of media you recorded and saved was automatically uploaded to the Bungie website and saved in your profile. With the release of the first Halo, Bungie showed us the online console future, and with Halo 3, they've done it again. - Michael Wedge GameShark.com Review Shooter of the Year: Call of Duty 4 Infinity Ward can do no wrong. Each and every Call of Duty game they have done (1, 2 and 4) has been at the top of the heap for games released at their time. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare is no different. I was lucky enough to play this on both the computer and Xbox 360. Obviously the computer is capable of larger resolutions, but the 360 version also runs with no slowdown and the graphics are still top notch. Word is the PS3 version is also a testament to Infinity Ward's greatness. Although the single-player portion of the game is relatively short (haven't all the Call of Duty single-player sections been short?), it is a fantastic experience and shows that Infinity Ward is just as good doing a modern time game as they did with World War II ones. I feel as if I'm right there on the battlefield with bombs exploding around me and having the modern day weapons at my disposal. The part that puts this game over the top though is the multiplayer aspect. There was honestly no other game that came out this year that had a multiplayer component like this game. Even as people found problems in the multiplayer section, Infinity Ward listened and worked on putting out fixes on all the platforms. That is a testament to how much care the team gives to their games. There was no other "pure" FPS game that could stand up to Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare this year. - Loren Halek GameShark.com Review MMO of the Year: The Lord of the Rings Online It was a fairly thin year for big name MMOs, but Lord of the Rings Online rode the wave of a fantastic license combined with familiar yet well executed gameplay to win our MMO of the Year award. With the ability to not only play one of the standard Middle-earth races at the start of the events of The Fellowship of the Ring but also the choice of playing as a monster to thwart fellow adventurers, the game does throw in a few innovations to the standard MMO mix. Add to it great graphics and the fact that it's the best videogame representation of Tolkien's world - ever - and you have a recipe for a fantastic game. In the end, yeah, it plays a lot like World of WarCraft. But Lord of the Rings Online has Black Riders and The Shire, and that goes a pretty long way. - William Abner GameShark.com Review Rhythm / Music Game of the Year: Rock Band Rock Band is the first rhythm game to try and tackle the experience of playing in an actual band, and from the first drum solo it proves that it can hit nearly every goal rhythm gamers demand. The guitar and bass pieces of the game stick to the tried and true Guitar Hero formula but what steals the limelight is the ability to not only play the drums using the standing peripheral but also to grab the microphone and belt out some Jet loud enough to wake the neighbors. Other games have tackled the same instruments individually, but when Rock Band is fired up and you have three friends playing alongside you the effect is pure magic and incomparable to any other rhythm game on the market. Rock Band's strength doesn't come from its selection of instruments though, but rather from the fact that it is easy to approach. Each player's difficulty level can be individually dialed down to accommodate for those of us who aren't human metronomes, letting players of mixed skill levels play together just as well as those who are at the same level. The single player mode is great fun itself, but the fun found in the multiplayer Band World Tour mode is where Rock Band really shines as a true champion of the genre. - Tony Mitera GameShark.com Review Sports Game of the Year: NBA 2K8 Picking a sports game of the year these days is like trying to pick the best chili at a cook-off. Most of them taste pretty much the same as they did last year but there are usually a few that stand out. That's today's sports games - digital chili. This year a few did in fact stand out: NHL 08, NHL 2K8, Out of the Park Baseball, and MLB: Power Pros. NBA 2K8, however, was the most "complete" of the entire lot. What helps make the game stand out is that the AI mimics each NBA team to a tee. The Suns play like the Suns. Kobe shoots the ball whenever the mood strikes; The Spurs slow it down and run things through Duncan It's uncanny. Sporting remarkable graphics, better control, fantastic online support via Xbox Live, a deeper franchise mode and for the most part rock solid gameplay, NBA 2K8 is without question the best professional basketball game ever developed and that alone is enough to make it our Sports Game of the Year. - William Abner GameShark.com Review Racing Game of the Year: Forza Motorsport 2 Many games capture the power and aggression that often comes with wheel to wheel racing, but few capture it's more subtle of undertones as well as Forza 2. Not that the game doesn't have more than its fair share of moments where high performance cars are edging each other out for the checkered flag, but Forza 2 also manages to capture the personality and grace of each car represented in the game. The cars handle, corner, and race in a manner that captures both the realism as well as the passion of the sport. At its core the game is a simulation racer with a bevy of options to allow for players to customize both the look and performance of their ride. The multiplayer gameplay is just as deep, making it a title that remains a reliable source of entertainment long after the player has mastered the offline experience. Online or offline, Forza 2 is a spectacularly solid racing sim that fulfills both the depth that gamers expect from the genre as well as the overall level of fun that comes from a great game. - Tony Mitera GameShark.com Review Best Indie Game: Armageddon Empires Set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, Armageddon Empires is one of the finest strategy games of 2007, indie game or not, and should sit on every turn-based strategy fan's desktop. It will remind PC vets of games like Panzer General (and maybe Fantasy General for that matter). It basically plays like a boardgame or a collectible card game but in a structured, turn-based format that is ideal for solo gamers (there's no multiplayer at all; no PBEM or hot seat) who are after a challenging, deep, and yet flexible game design. Interestingly, the units in the game aren't depicted as individual pieces but rather as "cards" similar to what you'd find in a booster pack of Magic: The Gathering or a similar card game - complete with keyword abilities, deployment costs measured in the game's five resources, all salient statistics, and top-quality genre artwork. This is top notch stuff. Armageddon Empires is what most indie games should strive to be, and is our pick for Best Indie Game of 2007. - William Abner Boardgame of the Year: StarCraft Board Game StarCraft embodies everything a modern, forward-thinking boardgame design should represent; it's finely detailed, hugely thematic, and filled with interesting choices and refined mechanical concepts yet it remains remarkably light on its feet and playable in a completely reasonable amount of time for even the most harried gamer. The components, artwork, and physical presentation are best-in-industry caliber and the use of the StarCraft license really demonstrates a level of respect, understanding, and commitment that completely upturns the "licensed boardgames suck" rhetoric. Above all else, StarCraft is an amazingly fun and replayable game that really represents the best the hobby has to offer not only for seasoned veterans but also for the newly interested. - William Abner GameShark.com Review Best Downloadable Content: Catan Take one of the most beloved board games of all time and slap it onto Xbox Live and what do you have? Well, you have the most addictive Xbox Live Arcade game around. Catan is a mirror image of the Settlers of Catan board game and whether you are a novice or a longtime veteran, this port is absolutely brilliant. Big Huge Games did the game right by adding nice graphics and sound, a colorful tile map, and enough options to keep it fresh. It's just as good online as it is on the table. Even better, if you can't find people to play with online there's some tough AI opponents waiting to take you on so there's always someone to play with! How's that for convenient? - William Abner GameShark.com Review Best Musical Score: Bioshock I may be an oddity in that the music in a game is vitally important to me. Much like motion pictures, I find that a game with a poor score will not score as highly in my book as one that has a really good one. BioShock certainly created a new room in the excellent category for me. Composer Gary Schyman created an altogether immersive musical experience to go along with the overall soundfield of the game. The beauty of the BioShock soundtrack is that 12 tracks of it are available for free download from right here. You too can experience the musical beauty of BioShock even if you've never played the game. The music makes you feel like you are in the underground utopia of Rapture in the 1950s. The same musical style from the time period is duplicated by Schyman's compositions and makes you feel as if you are part of the environment as you go through the game. The score also gives you a sense of tension as you continue on through Rapture not knowing what is around the corner in front of you. The best music in a game is one that floats in the background. You notice it, but it doesn't overpower the experience, instead it compliments it. BioShock is a great example of this and next time you play any game pay attention to the music, you might be surprised by how much it sways how much you like the game. - Loren Halek GameShark.com Review