GameSpot's E3 2005 Editors' Choice Awards
Design by Collin Oguro
This year is very much a transition year for the video game industry, with all three major players on the console side revealing their next-generation hardware at or just before E3. So not only did we get our first glimpse at the future of video games, but also we got a look at what should be the last major games to be released on current-generation hardware. GameSpot covered the show with almost reckless abandon, penning more than 1200 stories, encoding more than 1000 movies, and posting more than 12,000 screenshots for more than 1100 different games! We also threw in 24 hours' worth of coverage direct from the show floor, bringing you candid booth tours, live game demonstrations, and live interviews with the industry's hottest developers. If you attempted to read all that content and watch all the movies back to back, it would literally take years.
So how does one parse all that E3 information down to what's important, in this, one of the most pivotal years in gaming history? That's what these E3 2005 Editors' Choice Awards are about. In this feature, the GameSpot staff brings its considerable amount of collective experience at covering E3 to bear, distilling all of our coverage down to its most important elements and showing you what the biggest names and events were at E3 2005.
About These Awards
Like a fashion show or a car show, E3 is very much about immediate impact. Companies tailor their demonstrations to quickly and forcefully get your attention. Considering the cacophony of noise in a convention center full of people, and music blasting at full volume, publishers pretty much have to structure their trailers and videos to be as flashy as possible. So what does this mean in the end? The games that present themselves well aren't necessarily the best games in the end. We must also remember that most games shown off at E3 are in very early stages of development. In a nutshell, a Best of Show award from GameSpot is no guarantee on the final quality of the game. That said, it's quite an accomplishment in itself to impress us in the midst of so many other games and distractions on the E3 show floor, and that's worth the recognition of an award.
For the sake of clarity, games that are eligible for GameSpot E3 2005 Editors' Choice Awards must be in some type of playable state. Developer-led demonstrations where we never touch the controls ourselves are still eligible. Any game can win an award as long as it is apparent to us that the project is being played in some kind of real-time state. Games that are present at the show only in the form of trailers or prerendered movies are not eligible. We also tend to favor original, never-before-seen games. While the long development cycles of today's gaming industry mean that many games are exhibited at E3 for two or even three years, it's only natural that we'd be more impressed by games that are completely new to us.
With all that out of the way, we've divided our E3 2005 Editors Choice Awards into four primary categories:
Special Achievement Awards
This category is for recognizing games and trends that don't neatly fit into any genre categories. You'll also find our picks for the best videos, hardware highlights, and top news of the show in this category.
Genre Awards
These awards recognize excellence within a particular genre. Note that some genres are inherently more competitive than others, and that we do not subdivide our genre awards among platforms. In recognition of GameSpot's platform agnostic stance, all games between platforms compete with one another for genre awards.
Platform Awards
With the introduction of the Gizmondo and Xbox 360 platforms, we have more platform awards than ever before...11 in total. Note that we did not give awards for PlayStation 3 or Revolution games, as there weren't any available at the show in a playable state.
Game of the Show
This category is self-explanatory. We give you our take on the game that impressed us the most at E3 2005, and we also recognize nine other worthy finalists.
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