IGDA have announced their nominees for this years Game Developers Choice Awards, there are a few surprises in the lineup, but it will be very interesting to see who wins what. Biggest shock was the lack of Counterstrike in Best Game division.

I have placed a * next to the one I think should win in each division:

Rookie Studio Award

Counter-Strike team (Counter-Strike) ***
Free Radical Design (TimeSplitters)
Massive Entertainment (Ground Control)
Nihilistic Software (Vampire: The Masquerade - Redemption)
Planet Moon Studios (Giants: Citizen Kabuto)

Humm this one is a tough call, for the best storyline in a game, Giants wins hands down, and have shown awesome game design skills. However given sheer success of a game, CS has to win this division.

IGDA Award for Community Contribution

Chris Crawford
John Carmack *** (Carmack is GOD!)
Michael Abrash
Robert Huebner
Warren Spector

Not a tough call at all, Carmack is awesome, there is one name that is missing from this list that came as a shock to me that he wasn’t nominated.. Pop Quiz! Who was it?

Original Game Character of the Year

Cate Archer (No One Lives Forever)
Kabuto (Giants: Citizen Kabuto) ***
Ulala (Space Channel 5)
Seaman (Seaman)
Tamale Loco (Tamale Loco @ shockwave.com)

Well kabuto wins this one hands down, though Cate Archer was pretty awesome, she was basically a rip off, Kabuto wins for sheer uniqueness! (gobble gobble!)

Excellence in Audio

Michael Sweet - BliX (music)
Jason Hayes, Andrea Pessino, Glen Stafford & Matt Uelmen - Diablo II (composition) ***
Fumitaka Shibata - Samba de Amigo (music)
Naofumi Hataya & Kenichi Tokoi - Space Channel 5 (music)
Kaemal Amarasingham & Eric Brosius - Thief II: The Metal Age (sound effects)

There are several games that I think should have made it to this list that didn’t, music is a hard one and is far more defined to personal taste than gameplay ever will be.

I'm going for DiabloII, because the music really did set the atmosphere for the game.

Excellence in Game Design

Harvey Smith & Warren Spector - Deus Ex (game design)
Sean Clark & Michael Stemmle - Escape from Monkey Island (puzzles)
Shigeru Miyamoto & Eiji Aonuma - Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask (gameplay)
Ragnar Tornquist - The Longest Journey (story)
Neversoft team - Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 (gameplay)

Cant really make a choice here, some of these games I haven’t played, therefor its unfair to judge based on a limited selection within the nominees.

Excellence in Level Design

American McGee, Jim Molinets & team - American McGee's Alice ***
NOFL level design team - No One Lives Forever
Michel Ancel & team - Rayman 2: The Great Escape
SSX level design team - SSX
Christopher Foster, Tom Odell & team - Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force

Humm, this one is a close call, Star Trek gets killed because of the limits imposed by the number of shaders used to do all the cool stuff in the level had the effect of reducing the size of the level. SSX!?! wtf? Gobo must have bribed someone! NOLF has the hard job because for the main part we are comparing the map to real environments, and that reduces its impact, I would have to say Alice for Map design, some of those maps are awesome.

Excellence in Programming

Yu Suzuki & team - F355 Challenge (physics)
Scott Guest & Andy Astor - Giants: Citizen Kabuto (graphics) ***
Visual Concepts dev team - NFL2K1 (networking)
Martin Brownlow - Sacrifice (graphics)
Sims programming team - The Sims (AI)

Planet Moon did a fantastic job of finding a balance between huge open area's and framerate, something got a bit dodgy on AI in base maps, but the graphics were great considering the sheer open area's and detail used.

I would have to say it would be very close between Giants and Sacrifice on this one, Sacrifice will probably even win, but I didn’t enjoy it as much.

Excellence in Visual Arts

American McGee - American McGee's Alice (art direction)
Tomonobu Itagaki, Hiroaki Matsui & team - Dead or Alive 2 (animation)
Ryuta Ueda & Kazuki Hosokawa - Jet Grind Radio (art direction)
Joby Otero - Sacrifice (art direction) ***
Insomniac art team - Spyro: Year of the Dragon (art direction)

Sacrifice hands down baby, the graphics on this really stood out from almost every game this year, I wouldnt have put the DOA2 animations in this list...

Game of the Year

Deus Ex (ION Storm Austin)
Jet Grind Radio (Smilebit)
No One Lives Forever (Monolith)***
Shenmue (Sega AM2)
The Sims (Maxis)

And the ultimate in gaming awards, the IGDA game of the year.. Odd choices really, I was quite surprised about some of these. Hard for me to chose, some I have only read about, however NOLF would win in my book on addiction factor.

Game Spotlight Awards

American McGee's Alice (Rogue/EA)
Counter-Strike (Counter-Strike team) ***
Crazy Taxi (Sega AM3)
Deus Ex (ION Storm Austin)
Jet Grind Radio (Smilebit)
Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask (Nintendo)
NFL2K1 (Visual Concepts)
No One Lives Forever (Monolith)
Sacrifice (Shiny)
Samba de Amigo (Sega Sonic Team)
Seaman (Vivarium)
Shenmue (Sega AM2)
SSX (EA Canada)
The Sims (Maxis)
Virtua Tennis (Sega)

Would have to be CS, no other game has generated as much intensity in on line gaming since Quake1, and even that didn't involve the kind of numbers that CS does today, sure would be a great game to spotlight.

Wrap up

Well that’s my thoughts on the IGDA nominees for this year, lots of interesting games have come out last year, many trying to find new gameplay techniques, some with allot of success, some just didn't work, those that I would class that just didn’t work would be the new 3D RTS games coming out, the whole hud/unit interface just isn’t working.

With some new hybrid games that allow for differing views like Giants, and Rune, it seems that developers really are trying to shift away from standard traditional game styles and find something that works unique to their game.

Equally, with the recent announcement and look at the doom 3 engine, just a glimpse is enough to see that the bar is being raised, and those developers with games stuck in the development cycle like TF2 and Duke, are going to have a exceedingly limited life span as they get swamped by the next gen engines.

Humm didnt meen to write that much, check out the nominee list here. I would also be really intrested in what you guys think, agree with me? disagree with me?

f*** me, thats a big post i feel sorry for you if you wrote it out if you cut n paste, bleh. Yer i agree with your pics heh. gw ooher

HUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGE POST.

Is there an over rated hunk of crap division? If so put CS down for it. While your at it, also put CS in the "MORE BUGS THAN A MS OS" category.

yeah but its fun.

I don't think Counter-Strike should win the Rookie studio award. The only reason why the game is so popular is because its a free add-on, the other guys you actually have to pay for therefore less people are going to play it.

I think it should go to Giants. This game is actually polished especially when compared to CS.

f*** me dead term, you're worse than saint :)

you could have at least stuck it in the FEATURES catagory and linked it...

giants is ok but its kinda bugged and annoying

that post was waaay too long for the main news page. sifnt feature.

anyway .. I reckon alice was severly underated in terms of level design and storyline, it s***s all over everything else this year.

Nolf was rad, but yeah its not original, take any given 60's James bond movie.

Giants is way overrated, sure it was kinda funny, but the gameplay was really linear, and lets face it, it ran like s***.
yeah once I upgraded my pc it ran okay, but compared to the 150fps im getting in a q3 timedemo, giants is terrible.

The base building singleplayer missions in giants were gumby, and kabuto really wasnt all that spectacular.

And Kabuto is no more original that Cate Archer, sure cate was just a female bond, but she had a background and personality, Kabuto was just a godzilla.

and As far as storylines go, Vampire the Masquerade was far better than anything else in that first category.

that post was waaay too long for the main news page. sifnt feature.

haha, when b2 said it was big, I was thinking Saint sized big.

Its good CS didn't get into the best game category, because really, its not actually a game. All the other games have been coded from the ground up; CS, while involving coding, is fundamentally just a mod sitting on top of an already completely written engine.

I dont agree with the CS team getting the rookie award either for the same reason, its just a mod. When you compare it to pretty much all the other games in the category are original games. Sure you could argue vampire just used the quake 2 engine, but they didn't just use it as is and build their game as a mod on top of it, they bought the engine, re-wrote it and totally changed things to make it their game. CS is just a free mod written on top of the Half-life engine, inheriting every advantage and flaw of the engine, with no ability to change it.

Not taking anything away from the CS team's effort; love it or hate it you gotta acknowledge the amount of time and work thats gone into CS. But I dont feel it should be included in game development awards, mod development awards definately, but not game development.

Anyway, thats my rant, I couldn't be bothered commenting on the rest cause I didnt read them cause term's a bitch and made his post too damn long!!! :)