Editors's Choice Awards.

Another year has come and gone, a year that has given us great games, good news and sad news (for the gaming world) all in all a year that will be remembered as the first decade of "next generation gaming". By next generation gaming, I mean a new era in the way we play video games, we've seen breathtaking innovations such as kinect, play station move, and the wii. We've also seen the rising of new genre of gaming: social gaming whose developers -spearheaded by Zinga- try to attract new audiences with varying degrees of success, however this will also change the way we see video games.

Each quarter of this year has shown great titles for all consoles, in truth, developers creativity has grown in some cases, whereas in others it has faded to be nothing but the glimpse of a brighter past. But what has been the driving force for such an explosion of creativity and attention to detail that we weren't accustomed in the old days? (for me these days are the early 90's, so i'm still a relative new comer to this world). The answer is simple, developers and publishers have realized since the beginnings of the industry that this market shows potential to grow exponentially giving them higher earnings than before, but as always it's a double-edged blade, for it has decreased the feeling of some games making them nothing more than poor titles that are only useful to flood the market.

By now most of you will have seen the Editors's Choice Awards, many will be pleased with the results, others will not.

Fortunately below the Editors's Choice Awards are the Readers's Choice Awards which shows the number of votes for a title, this makes most of us realize that the editors think quite differently from us, and that is something to be praised, for that is their job, to analyse a game thoroughly, so that we may use their advice when we make an investment in our entertainment.

All Gamespot editors are unique individuals, with their own ways of reviewing and analysing a game, we all have our editors of choice (mine being Kevin VanOrd) and we may agree or disagree with their viewpoints, that is something natural.

But when I saw this year's awards I was shocked it appeared that consensus finally appeared among the editors, theirs is a difficult lot, but being able to declare a single -great- game as game of the year, is something that has displeased many, pleased others, and caused great discussions in the forums and comments.

I can not say I agree with the editors, Red Dead Redemption is an awesome game, of that there is no doubt, but I -and a great many of this community- doubt that it's such a masterpiece that it wins in almost every category it has contended.

Rockstar, being great developers themselves, must be pleased, but surely for each of the categories that were contending there are better games than RDR, for once I'd like to mention the readers's favorite: Mass Effect 2, surely some people think the same as I do. Still, I don't want to sound like a hardcore fanboy, we have other titles such as God of War III, which could have surely won the best PS3 game this year, but didn't. This raises an important issue, do our beloved editors agreed on RDR, or were these awards biased? I surely don't know, nor am I accusing anybody, it's just an issue that has come to the attention of many.

Still, I respect the reviewers and GS staff in general, it's just that I find it quite strange that such a thing would happen, but there it is, it happened.

Readers's Choice Awards.

This category will show the true meaning of democracy, whereas in the previous awards the choice was made by a select few (humor) this time the community will get its opportunity to get even and to decide the game of choice for this year.

I expect a heavy amount of discussion and debate, where the the term fanboy will be exploited in a horrid manner, nevertheless it shows the great contrasts that make the GS community one of the best in all gaming sites. Naturally we won't miss the halo fan, the mass effect fan (*cough* me) red dead redemption fan, and so on.

At the end only one thing matters, if you are giving me precious minutes of your time to read this, and to visit this site, then you like, or even love video games, they have become an important part of your life (I still have my life and other issues which I must see to, however they have indeed become an important part of my life). Perhaps you like them because they make you dream of things that can not be, they distract you from the harshness of our world -being an internationalist I need distraction from all the horrors I see and learn- and take you to a world without limits, where it doesn't matter who you are, how you are, all it matters is that you enjoy the time you spent playing a videogame.

Video games will continue to evolve, for that is the path mankind must take, evolution or destruction, and with the new breaking technological wonders, we don't know how far this marvelous industry will go.

I sincerely thank you for reading this, and I apologize if any mistake was made, since english is not my mother tongue.