The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess Publisher:  Nintendo Developer:  Nintendo

Why It Rocked: We recognize the irony in this award. The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess is a GameCube game that was ported to and enhanced for Wii near the end of the title's development cycle. Were a third party to port over a game originally designed for another console, we would not expect high quality from the finished product. That said, we're talking about Nintendo and we're also talking about a game that spent more than four years cooking, so to speak. Twilight Princess is an absolutely gorgeous GCN game and it's a visually impressive one by Wii standards, too. The game spits out enormous, stretching worlds filled with characters and objects, and features a spectacular style complemented by a host of texture effects like advanced particles and stunning bloom lighting. It's definitely not perfect. Textures blur up close and polygonal models generally lack detail. But as a complete package, Twilight Princess is still a graphical treat and we feel that it demonstrates the potential of Nintendo's new system better than any first wave competitor.

Runner-Up:  
Red Steel

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