Pepsiman (Level 23)

Award: "Most Japanese Game to Not Resemble Anything From Japan At All," for taking the Warring States Period, an era in Japanese history that is as pivotal to the country's direction as the Civil War was for the US, and making it completely unrecognizable... and then getting people to believe it was based on real events. Sure, the actual people involved are there, but when you have guys like Tokugawa Ieyasu riding around on Gundams in what is supposed to be the early 1600s, you should probably presume that some liberties were taken in adapting the era to video games.

Award: "Most Forgotten Single-Player Campaign By Its Own Developer," for featuring a completely separate mode from the multiplayer that was being exclusively marketed and hyped heavily by the Ubisoft PR machine. Rarely does the inclusion of a single-player mode catch anyone by surprise, but given how the game had been presented in the months leading up to its release, somehow Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood manage to make it something entirely unexpected, despite the series' penchant for being a solo affair.

Award: "Most Relevant Game A Year After Its Release," for being able to utilize DLC well and keep the game in the public's consciousness well after it had come out in October 2009. Not all of the scenarios were winners, especially Mad Moxxi, but Borderlands continued the trend that Fallout 3 started and helped prove that, you know, when EA isn't handling it, DLC isn't always so bad. Maybe.

Award: "Most Spoiled Ending Prior to Release," for Microsoft unwittingly letting Reach's ending slip in a Halo novel published nearly 10 years ago. People already knew what was coming before the game had even been announced. Talk about broadcasting your game plan well in advance of enacting it.

Award: "Most Anti-Gravity Game," for letting you use a grappling hook to pull yourself to the ground while you're falling and not result in any damage being taken. Only people who truly hated physics and everything it stood for would dare to implement such a brazen and misleading feature in their game.

Award: "Most Consonants Bought Without Also Getting a Vowel," for saying suck it to Pat Sajack and his Wheel of Fortune and just buying six of the same letter to complete the puzzle that is the game's title.

Award: "Straightest Game Ever," for being such a literally straightforward game in both narrative and level design, arguably to its detriment. The second year in a row it's won this same award, Square-Enix should actually be pleased to get this redux, as it means one less joke about sexually ambiguous character designs in its games. I TOOK THE HIGH ROAD ON THIS ONE.

Award: "Most Relevant Use of Yoshi Since Yoshi's Cookie," for giving the fruit-eating dinosaur an actual purpose in life that didn't involve just being the condescendingly cute mascot people play when Mario and Luigi have already been taken. Sometimes we all need our time in the sun to be reminded that we're still appreciated by someone in the world. Next up: Shy Guy?

Award: "Best Use of Glitches to Enhance the Gameplay," since things like the donkey lady and the flying bird people must have been intentionally designed into the game, right? Right. And they help make the tale of John Marston and all the more surreal, moving, and engrossing.

Award: "Best Game About Babies to Not Have a Z Anywhere in the Title," for Majesco's supreme courage in bringing out a game in such a competitive market and choosing to boldly defy naming conventions in the genre for the sake of still having a soul. Runner up for: "Best Waste of a Dubbing Budget," for just employing some random Japanese woman with questionable phonetic skills instead of any number of gaijin who would do a better job by default.

Award: "Best Game to Warrant a Serious Review Somewhere," for somehow provoking IGN into giving it a 7.5/10. It's okay, IGN. I don't think anyone would have been hurt if you hadn't done that one.

Award: "Most Likely To Dethrone Konami Once and For All," for taking the one genre of music games Konami still had a decent grasp on away from them and doing the entire dance game thing from scratch. Ubisoft might have gotten a head start on this with the Just Dance line of games, but the only good thing those games have going is that they once got Suda 51 to play them.

Award: "Best Use of a $20 Bill," for forcing anyone who wanted to buy the 1200-point WiiWare to pay for 2000 points and keep 800 points left over, regardless of whether they wanted them or not. A great use for a great payment system!

Award: "The Space Invaders Extreme Award for Making the Old Awesomely New Again," for taking the original Pac-Man formula and making it beyond batshit crazy. Bombs, ghost trains, constantly changing mazes, and more ghost trains are all the stuff that Pac-Man dreams are made of.

Award: "Best Use of Itagaki Feminist Philosophies," for, accordingly to some people, taking a largely silent and somber woman, and making her an absurdly submissive lackey. This accomplishment is something Team Ninja should be especially proud of, since they were able to extract such sentiments from people without even having Itagaki around anymore for the game's production. Apparently his studio learned well from him and have taken his ideas about women to heart.

Award: "Most Efficient Use of a DVD's Space," for taking a disc and literally copy-pasting the SNES game's ROM entirely unaltered. No changes to the control layout screens, copyright dates, or anything else to make it feel slightly more modern. If you do your research, you'll realize that the remakes of all three games take under a megabyte in space. It might be a little more with the inclusion of an emulator, but still, by no means are those discs feeling the squeeze.

Award: "Most Desperate Game," for Sega's various attempts to prove to fans, skeptics, and skeptical fans that what they had on their hands was, in fact, a good game. When the game's marketing campaign actually more or less implies that Sega will commit seppuku if it isn't well-received, you know that they're trying really, really hard to make a game that will be accepted by the masses for once.

Award: "Best Sequel to Shenmue," for taking a beloved Sega character and inserting him a Mario Kart clone, making it his first appearance on consoles in years, a moment most bittersweet for fans of the Shenmue series. At this point, considering their choices for moving on are Sonic and Sega All-Stars Racing or Shenmue Town, the former still might be the lesser of two evils and the better pill to swallow.

Award: "Most Original NES Game Released This Year," a highly competitive category, but one that No More Heroes 2 nevertheless wins by allowing the player to spend vast swaths of the time having Travis do part-time jobs that are rendered in 8-bit graphics. The rest of the game might be rendered in polygons, but we'll just chalk that up to being technical wizardry with NES hardware that's just being emulated on the Wii. Yep.

Award: "Best Endoscopic Sim," for achieving what was once thought to be impossible and making the act of sticking a tubular camera inside someone's body a legitimate gameplay mechanic. Once thought to be an unachievable holy grail in the real of medical video games, now anything is truly possible in the genre, thanks to the achievements of Atlus' seminal Wii game.

Award: "The Rapelay Award for Keeping It Classy," for being a game where your objective is to go off and fetch (probably) an underaged girl's panties in order to prove your valor as man, or penguin, or something. Nothing says sexy quite like going through a lady's underwear drawer.

Award: "Best Pointing and Clicking Game That Wasn't Actually an Adventure Game," for Telltale's attempts to bring its innovative use of mouse clicks first seen in games like Sam and Max to unexplored territory: the poker game. Now you have to do something other than click through dialog boxes galore to get the funny people on the computer screen to talk!

Award: "Most Innovative Use of the D-Pad," for making one of the directions devoted entirely to making the adorably bonkers rabbids just lose it and scream their lungs out. A simple feature with a surprising amount of impact, the ability to make your rabbid scream on command changes how you approach platformers and minigame collections on a fundamental level.

Award: "Best Unlicensed Version of Blue's Clue's," for making Vinny do what he was born to do on camera: to play the role of a children's television host. Watching somebody hide remotes inside a studio has never been more educational!

Award: "2010's 2011 Sexiest Game of the Year," for proving that the only thing a Japanese developer has to do in order to make their game relevant to the West is to actually take advantage of humanity's innate horniness. The gameplay could otherwise be obtuse as hell for all we care because, hey, BOOBIES AND SEX POSITIONS EVERYWHERE.

Award: "Most Likely to Remind You That Your PS2 Still Exists," for being an SRPG/dating sim-hybrid originally released in Japan back in 2005, but only just made it to North America this year because, hey, that makes sense or something.

Award: "Most Demanded Game That Was Not Hypocritically Abandoned by the Fans," for proving me wrong and eliciting supporters who actually stepped up to the plate and actually bought the game like they promised, despite the content cuts. Apparently they did a good enough job to justify bringing over Yakuza 4 as well. And Sega didn't even have to ask!

Award: "Quickest Game About Time Travel to Beat the Telltale Back to the Future Episodes to the Punch," for totally being another game about a time-warping Delorean that came out months before Marty McFly and company could get on the scene. Bonus points for having British people in it!

Award: "The Wiimote Award for Shoehorned Motion Controls," for Sony's decision to make Quantic Dream patch in controls for the PlayStation Move instead of making DLC that would expand the game's narrative like what had originally been planned. Just because an idea can work doesn't mean it should be nevertheless pursued.

Award: "Best Sequel Nobody Really Wanted..." for being a solid game despite the sheer apathy a lot of people had towards it because, hey, the original game was already a pretty fulfilling experience on its own. The constant price drops and discounts on it so soon after release are probably indicative of its overall place in the series, which is to say, not super fondly remembered.

Award: "Best Sequel Nobody Really Wanted Either Until That Other Sequel Came Along And Made This One Look Rad By Comparison," for going the proper route in choosing to not be a direct sequel to the original game. It's probably all the better off for it.

Award: "Best Reference to Old-Timey Communism," because we all know the cat is really supposed to be called "Chairman Meow." There are screenshots that prove this fact.

Award: "The Third Time Really is the Charm Award," for being the third release of a seminal RPG that still somehow manages to be relevant and cram in significant new content for fans who previously experienced the original game in some form. It might have been excessive and not entirely necessary, but it was as good an excuse as any to actually get out that PSP. Runner up for: "Most Square-Enix Like Game," for proving once and for all that Persona 3 may very well become Atlus' very own Final Fantasy I and II if it's ever in a real bad pinch. Coming soon to your iPhone... PROBABLY!

Award: "Most Console-Like Game That Probably Should Have Really Been on a Console," for once again reminding people that under no circumstances is a PSP the ideal way to play conventional Metal Gear Solid games, a shame when considering that 4 finally managed to show how very possible it is for a Metal Gear game to actually control well and be more fun because of it.

Award: "Most Likely Game to Make People Track Down a Delorean," because as it turns out, the 80s and 90s were an all-right time for video games. When downloading ROMs of those games it cribs/references just isn't enough, there's this downloadable game that will do all the nostalgia-making for you!

Award: "Best Game Everybody Gives Too Much Credit," since, dude, parts of that game are real, real janky. A game can still be awesome and have busted parts, but it's best to keep it relative. You're either a bad person or Jim Sterling if you seriously make this your number one game on your official GOTY list.

Award: "Most Complex Game That Wasn't Railworks," for having a battle system, that while thoroughly enjoyable, certainly requires getting used to. Certainly not for those expecting accessibility from the get-go, Resonance of Fate expects you to either pick up all the nuances yourself or find the one place that will actually train your properly, a location whose optional nature makes it extremely easy to miss. A rewarding experience, but a harsh one nonetheless.

Award: "The Need For Speed Award," for having so much speed and still giving you the impression that it could actually go even faster just because it can. And then it does go faster. Ow.

Award: "Most Meta Game," for having dialog in the demo that not only acknowledged it was a demo, but then humorously made sure you knew it was a demo, just in case you had mistaken it for the real thing. Bonus points for that dialog not just being on the screen where the game arbitrarily pleads with you to buy the full version immediately.

Award: "Best Game I Have No Award For," because I don't think anybody needs to see that meme uttered yet again.

Award: "The Fallout Award for the Best Depiction of War," for showing that even when your home land is on the brink of falling apart from a civil war that could potentially result in widespread genocide, it's all going to be okay because you still have your unrealistically happy-go-lucky friends at school to hang out with! And that makes life in that country awesome and carefree! Always and forever!

Award: "Best Text Adventure Game," for its inclusion of Zork as a playable Easter Egg. Now fully playable with the power of your console's software keyboard!

Award: "The Nowhere to Go But... Hell if I Know Award," for justifying the existence of a third numbered Rock Band game so thoroughly with the ability to use actual instruments that it's really, really hard to know where Harmonix will go with it next. My personal hope: playable didgeridoos.

Award: "Best Game Pepsiman Already Has," for being so cheap used in Japan way before the English version came out that I just said, "TO HELL WITH IT!" and more or less ensured I'd never actually buy an English copy. That's probably too bad, since I imagine the chicken-head-dude-manbearthing is still pretty awesome in English.

Award: "Best Game About Tamagotchis That Actually Had No Tamagotchis In It Whatsoever," for taking that glorified pedometer that is the Pokewalker and making it a much better idea than it has any right to be. Now you don't have to choose between raising your Pokemon or (pretend) exercising! Another lifelong predicament resolved!

Award: "Best Worst Game," at least according to Entertainment Weekly. Because apparently when you grade a game in your magazine a B , that's the lowest of the low without a doubt! It's like 8.8, but the magazine did it to itself.

Award: "The Trauma Center Award for Most Innovation in the Area of Surgical Gameplay," for showing us just how immersive of an experience it can be when you have to stab your own eye socket. This, ladies and gentlemen, is clearly why video games are art.

Award: "Best Sequel to a Party Game Starring Pac-Man," for Namco-Bandai's efforts to remind you that, actually, this is not the first time Pac-Man has hosted virtual board game/minigame parties. Pac-Man Fever clearly lives on in this game.