Day 1 Game of the Year Award Winners

It's December 26th, and as we all start to recover from all that family stuff that comes hand-in-hand with Christmas, let's take a moment to reflect on the year that was.

You can do so right here, as today's the first day of reveals in our year-end awards. Also, there's a weird technical issue that's currently preventing this text from showing on the actual award pages, and we thought you might like to know why we chose the games we chose.

So while we attempt to get some engineers on the horn, here are today's winners!

Be sure to check the site at noon Pacific every day, as we'll be revealing new winners up until December 30th. Also, on the 30th we'll be posting our own personal Top 10 lists along with our final podcast for the year, which contains the epic deliberations that led to our final selection for Game of the Year.

Blowing things up is such a huge part of the games we play, it's easy to become totally jaded about most of them. But there are still teams up people out there looking for the next big thing in big bangs and booms.

Look at the team at DICE that worked on Battlefield: Bad Company, for example. Not only is a large part of the game built around you blowing holes in buildings to cut your own path through, but those explosions look terrific. Blasting out a wooden wall with your grenade launcher sends splinters flying everywhere, leaving behind a jagged, uneven. realistic-looking hole. Considering you repeat that action dozens of times over the course of the game, it's especially impressive that those explosions manage to look great every time you see them. On top of that, there are plenty of exploding tanks and Jeeps, terrific artillery attacks, and other such explosions to keep things looking varied and great. With all that in mind, Bad Company was an easy choice for the year's best explosions.

There are a lot of beloved, nearly forgotten classics from the annals of gaming that are ripe for revival on today's hardware. It's one thing to pump out a generic action game and slap that familiar old name on it for a quick cash-in. But it's quite another to pour your heart into truly recapturing the spirit of the original game while making it playable and fun by modern conventions.

It's obvious Bionic Commando Rearmed got the latter treatment from Capcom and the developers at GRIN. The game has "labor of love" written all over it, from the pixel-perfect color schemes of the characters and levels to the brilliant soundtrack based on the music of the original. Little touches like the nearly identical intro text and the hand-drawn talking heads stoke the fires of nostalgia all the more.

Oh yeah, its swing-based 2D action plays just as awesome as the original. Perhaps awesomer.

There were plenty of great classic retreads this year, but none of them made you go "Hey, this is way Bionic Commando!" like Rearmed does. (Nevermind that the rest all lack a bionic arm.) It's all about being faithful to the source material with a contemporary twist.

It might seem odd to pick a driving game for best multiplayer, since most multiplayer driving games tend to boil down to lap-times and checkered flags, but this is precisely what makes playing Burnout Paradise with others so brilliant.

You can still compete in standard online races, which are just as thrilling and full of stupendous car crashes as the single-player races. But the real fun lies in the cooperative challenges, which scale nicely from three to eight players, and which range from performing a series of specific acrobatic stunts to smashing the billboards that are scattered throughout Paradise City. The variety of the challenges is pretty great, and while they can get pretty tough, there's an easy pace to the action that makes Burnout Paradise a terrifically social experience.

Burnout Paradise also features one of the simplest, cleverest uses of the PlayStation Eye and Xbox Live Vision camera we've seen. Whenever you take down an online opponent, the game will snap a quick photo of the losing player, allowing you to ever-so-briefly savor the look of defeat in their face. It's great touches like this that turned Burnout Paradise into the game that we spent the most time playing together this year.

The winner of this category didn't have to be a great game to win; it just had to sound great if you described it to someone in a couple of sentences. We figure the initial pitch meetings for these five games were all pretty energizing.

Even amongst the others, Spore seemed like a shoe-in for this category on principle alone. It would be hard to devise a more grandiose premise than charting the entire four-billion-year lifespan of a species, from single-celled organism to spacefaring masters of technology. That kind of high-concept epic isn't attempted often in game design; leave it to Will Wright to be the first.

Luckily, Spore did turn out to be pretty special. The creature-editing tools and content-sharing interface anchored the game's community aspect in an unexpected way. And even if its five component games are a bit thin individually, they combine into a cohesive whole that certainly captures enough of that original idea to make the game memorable and influential for a long time to come.

In Liberty City, nobody's perfect. Indeed, it's the deeply flawed, self-aware nature of Niko Bellic that makes him such a compellingly tragic figure. For Niko's juiced-up lunatic buddy Brucie Kibbutz, though, it's his apparent obliviousness to his own shortcomings that makes him so awesome, and a guy we most definitely would like to party with.

Even if Brucie didn't have ready access to helicopters, fast cars, hot, perpetually pissed-off broads, and the classiest auto garage in Broker, his steroid-fueled enthusiasm could shake us out of the dourest of genocide-induced moods. Whenever we couldn't come up with anything to do on a Friday night, we'd just call up Brucie, knowing that we'd end up competing in some sketchy-ass illegal street race, lifting weights, injecting ourselves full of bull shark testosterone, and generally keeping it dangerously alpha.

Look, we obviously like Braid quite a bit. But that doesn't mean we want to hang out with Tim, the game's lead character. You just know that a call from him is going to result in an hour of you listening to him mope in the most pessimistic way possible.

"Hey buddy, don't worry! There are plenty of fish in the sea!"

"*sigh*"

"Dude, let's go use your time-rewinding abilities to win the pub quiz!"

"*siiiiigh*"

"Is it true that you invented the atomic bomb?"

"*groooooan*"

So you can see why we'd let this scintillating conversationalist go straight to voicemail.

Unfortunately, he's just going to keep rewinding time until we pick up.