Gameshark.com presents its first annual Game of the Year Awards, honoring the best interactive entertainment that 2006 had to offer across every platform. 2006 was a grand and wonderful year for gamers. Besides being introduced to two new next-generation platforms that offered new and innovative ways to play games, current generation platforms saw some of the most innovative games ever conceived. There were in fact so many great games that it was rather painful picking a limited amount of titles to honor.

For our first annual awards we decided to use a top five system for every platform, allowing us to honor more games but also honor one title in particular for its outstanding achievements. But beyond our platform specific top five awards, we also chose an Overall winner - the best of the best - and selected specific titles in a handful of genre awards categories. We rounded out our awards with a special awards section to allow our writers to give specific honors in their own "unique categories" just for fun. But enough talk, let's get right to revealing our GOTY 2006 Award winners: