Ladies, gentlemen, Bassoon. Greetings to you all. Today I stand here, in my tuxedo and fancy underpants, the crown of selection upon my head. Coincidentally, it's an awards night. At your tables you will find a can of laughter, I advise you to shake it well and blast it at appropriate intervals.

So a patient at Peter Molyneux's hospital has been discharged and is reportedly very content with their surgery. They couldn't believe the hip.

Plenty more where that came from folks, so put down your guns and stop throwing cans at me, and let's get on to the awards.

Ugh, I'm having to scroll my screen left and right to see all of that image. ¬_¬

How long have we had that logo? I like that logo.

How big is your screen? Mine's only 13 inches and I can see all of it...

Clearly someone who has not seen the light and switched his board style to subsilver.

I'm using a 19" 1280x1024 - besides, I thought images resized on this forum..?

Meh, doesn't matter..

Do we have a large golden shaft we can give Skippy for the In Your Endo Award? If not, why not?

EDIT: Ahh internet, will you ever let us down?

So let's kick this off with the visual and lighting awards for Most Shiniest Game of the Decade. Coming in last, with a miserable 1 vote, was the positively grubby Fallout 3, which I have demonstrated my contempt for here by playing on the lowest possible settings because it kept crashing my computer.

Tied on a frankly hypocritical 4 each are Far Cry 2 and Far Cry, too, for services to barrels, helicoptors, guns, and EL FUEGO, the Foreign God of Fire.


BUT WAIT it gets even more even. The two top players were indistinguishable on 7, and so I present this award, jointly, to Half-Life 2 and Mirror's Edge. It is a trophy so shiny, it cannot be rendered in real-time by the human eye.

Notably, about a half-dozen of you abstained from this category as you either hated shiny, hated joy, or ran games on a modified potato. You could have made all the difference.

Two pair. If this were a poker hand, I'd raise you another nomination. So I will. Later

(anyone who wants to take an award, yell at me on Steam or be yelled at, by me, on Steam.)

A drumroll please, for the Strategy Game of the Decade! Category 13 on the voting, unlucky for some, such as...

Men of War!

Bringing up the rear with a single lonely vote from a militant David group is the game of tipped armoured cars, flukily one-shotted King Tigers, and lots of little men hiding in bushes.

In fourth place, with three votes, is Empire: Total War!

Maligned by some, adored by others, we can all agree on one thing: this is the most recent Total War game yet.

With a schismatic five votes and demanding the excommunication of all those who voted for Empire, it's Medieval: Total War!

Unquestionably the best of the old-style Total Wars, this game made enough of an impression on those who played it that it edges into third.

Scrambling to research Monotheism so it can train some Knights, but unable to put more than seven votes into research, is Civilization IV in second place!



And finally, in first place with a triumphant nine votes, and with no announcer bias at all, it's the armoured might of Corporal Company of Heroes!

The game that took the forum by storm in a way no other game has since Battlefield 2 died off, Company of Heroes holds high honour, even if FUCKING NAT NEGOTIATION puts paid to revivals. Although the aim might be in the reach zone these days, the sticky bombs are always in our hearts.

We salute you, Company of Heroes.

*salutes*

*bugle*

I'm not going to dispute Company of Heroes coming out on top because it clearly grabbed a lot of people in a way it didn't grab me, but who the hell voted for Empire. ¬_¬

Well, obviously Empire's better than Medieval 1.

Well there's no business in snow business so here I am. Let's see what the next award is.

*shuffles cards*


Most Hard Thinky Game of the Decade, which was named by a panel of experts who hate these awards. Uplink and Galactic Civilizations 2 smartly brought up the rear, which surprised, nay, perplexed me. If the reports I read were correct, Gal Civ 2's AI actually uses a small human imprisoned in a box, but apparently that isn't smart enough for you. Civilization 4 took a comfortable mid-table position and I would point out that most of that difficulty derives from the fact that the computer has obscene buffs on the upper echelons of difficulty. Then again I suppose it is a game that requires some obsessive optimisation and that is admittedly hard.

Penultimate in this minor accolade is the temporal platformer, Braid. I played through it on Sunday and it does neatly manage Portal's trick of making you feel very smart when you solve a puzzle, instead of like a monkey jumping through hoops with wild abandon. However this was either apparently not enough, or you hated that retarded alternate ending.

(Getting that piece represented my cerebral peak for the year)
Which means the ultimate difficult thing released in ten years is Paradox's Hearts of Iron 2. This is not only hard, it is enormous, an entire world split into about a million provinces and it's also laced with historical momentum meaning doing something out of the ordinary can be HARD. Congratulations to Hearts of Iron, to whom we present our highest honour, the Iron Jim award for Thinking.

I know. 3 absolute morons.

Empire is a better single player game than Company of Heroes. It's just fairly limited as a multiplayer game.