Incoming: Giant Bomb's Game of the Year Awards Begin Tomorrow

OK, we're down to it. By this time next week, we'll all live in space and video games played on things like "televisions" won't matter anymore. But let's celebrate what little time we have left with a set of awards designed to commemorate the best and stupidest things that happened in the world of video games throughout 2009. Here's what you can expect.

Starting tomorrow, we'll start posting the site-wide awards in categories such as Best Big-Ass Ramp, Character We'd Most Like To Party With, and The Brad Shoemaker "I'm Callin' It" Award For Best Use Of Zombies. There will be a short daily podcast to go along with these, where we discuss a bit about what we were thinking when we wrote all of these dumb joke categories. We'll also have videos with each of our top 10 games of the year, presented in a countdown format.

This will continue up until January 1, when we'll post the heavy hitters, our platform-specific awards and the overall Game of the Year. Along with this, there will be a Quick Look for each winner and what will probably be the longest podcast we've ever recorded, where you'll get to hear our deliberations for all of these major categories.

Mark your calendars accordingly!

OK, while I've got you here, I'm going to quickly dig through the achievements data and tell you what the most popular achievement for 2009 was. Keep in mind that we only have data going back to around May or so, and this is dictated by traffic coming to the site, so it'll be skewed in favor of tricky achievements.

In a landslide, the most popular achievement on Giant Bomb is... 

Borderlands - You're on a boat!

...yes, this not-so-subtle tribute to The Lonely Island, which requires you to go to the watery part of Borderlands, sneak around the back side of the area, and hop on a boat, has inspired more people to seek out its location than any other. In fact, Borderlands also has the most popular achievement list page on the site. Congratulations to Gearbox for clearly understanding how to write achievements in a way that keeps people interested in the game. I've been writing quite a few achievement-like things lately, and I can say that it's tougher than it looks.

Here's the top 10 most popular individual achievements for the whole year.

1. Borderlands - You're on a boat!
2. Garry's Mod - Secret Phrase
3. Batman: Arkham Asylum - World's Greatest Detective
4. Borderlands - My Brother is an Italian Plumber
5. Borderlands - 12 Days of Pandora
6. Prototype - Self-Deception
7. Halo 3: ODST - Naughty Naughty
8. Borderlands - Fully Loaded
9. Borderlands - Made in New Haven
10. Assassin's Creed II - Show Your Colors

 That's a pretty good spread across multiple games, but Borderlands is clearly dominant.

OK, now you know what we'll be up to over the next week. We'll be back in the office on January 4, at which time we'll probably jump into some of the new upcoming stuff like Darksiders, Dark Void, and Bayonetta, which should have been called Dark Bayonetta just to make my "dark games of January" threesome work. Darkmy of Two: The 40th Dayrk? OK, fine, I'll drop it.