By: The GameSpot Editors

We're pleased to present to you GameSpot's ninth annual Best and Worst of the Year Awards, in which we recognize the most noteworthy achievements, good and bad, from the past 12 months in gaming. We have nearly 50 different awards in all, spread across five different award categories, so you'd better get cozy before you dig in. And, of course, you also have the opportunity to sound off in our annual Readers' Choice Awards, as well as share your thoughts in our community forums. Thanks for joining us!

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About These Awards

These awards are an annual tradition whose format is designed to reflect GameSpot's status as one of the only true multiplatform gaming publications in the world. As you probably know, we extensively cover every major gaming platform--the PC, the Xbox, the GameCube, the PlayStation 2, the Game Boy Advance, and more. But because our editors--and most of our readers--ultimately enjoy and have access to more than one or even most of these gaming platforms, we're really not concerned about what platform a game is on so much as whether or not it's any good. So we ignore platform distinctions in our Special Achievement Award, Dubious Honor, and Genre Award categories and have instead selected what are truly the best of the best (or worst of the worst) as our finalists for these exclusive and discriminating awards.

Our decision-making process in determining the best games in each category, and the categories themselves, was as focused, involved, and intensive as ever. We considered every game released in North America during the 2004 calendar year and took into consideration our review scores for those games (especially our Editors' Choice Award winners), how our perceptions of those games might have changed over time, and many other key factors. All of GameSpot's editors involved themselves in the deliberations, and all decisions were made through continued debate, rather than through voting. As we're sure you'll notice, games that were released earlier in the year were not neglected in favor of more-recent releases. Also, in many cases you'll see that we nominated multiple versions of the same game for a particular distinction, wherever applicable.

Enough explanations--on with the show!

Next: Year in Review, The First Quarter >>