Kotaku reports:

"The International Film Music Critics Association have announced their 2007 award winners, and this year sees the debut of their Best Original Score for a Video Game or Interactive Media award, which recognizes the increasing importance of music in gaming and gaming as an entertainment medium. This year's winner is John Debney for the wonderful score to Lar for the PlayStation 3."
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Although Factor 5's 3D action flying game Lair has been available for months, players who could never come to grip with the Sixaxis controls may have a more traditional solution waiting in the wing. Recently, F5 president Julian Eggebrecht chatted with IGN about Lair's mixed reception at the marketplace and hinted at a future enhancement to the game.
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Kotaku's Brian Crecente writes:

"Our first-ever Game of the Year awards was a pretty straight forward deal. I asked all of the writers to submit a list of three games for each category and the three that showed up most in each category made it as a finalist. Once we had the list of finalists I asked each writer to go through and order the finalists and then tallied the vote. The one with the most points was named Game of the Year, the runner-up was named Not Quite Game of the Year. The game with the most votes for Worst Game of the Year received that dubious honor."

Super Mario Galaxy won Kotaku's Overall Game of the Year award. Uncharted: Drake's Fortune came as second, it won the Not Quite Game of the Year award. (Kotaku posted the overall results as a separate post, see the link at the Alternative Sources below for more details.)
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What makes a good video game? Strong visuals are important. Good controls are essential. A well-crafted concept helps too. These days, most games can boast at least two-thirds of that criteria.

So, then what makes a game great? Feeling. Emotion. Surprise. Interaction. Even addiction. It's a magical feeling when a game offers all these elements.

Here are the titles L.A. Times deemed the best experiences of 2007. Admittedly, they didn't play everything (because that would probably be impossible), but of the titles that did cross their paths, these are the ones that resonated most. Their favorites in order:

Best of the Year:
¿ BioShock
¿ Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
¿ Assassin's Creed
¿ Super Mario Galaxy
¿ The Orange Box

Honorable Mention:
¿ Halo 3
¿ Rock Band
¿ Ace Combat 6: Fires of Liberation
¿ Cooking Mama: Cook Off
¿ Lost Planet

Worst of the Year:
¿ Lair

Dishonorable Mention:
¿ Fusion Frenzy 2
¿ 300: March to Glory
¿ Tenchu Z

[ By Pete Metzger, December 21, 2007 ]
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Missing from the NPD November sales charts is Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, which only managed 117,000 sales. To be fair, Uncharted did have a better first-month than Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction (74,500 units), Warhawk (58,600 units) and Lair (46,500 units), but still fell behind Heavenly Sword's debut sales (139,000 units) in September.
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Amazon will be offering a video game deal of some kind for the next 10 days starting today. The offer is a Playstation 3, Blu-Ray remote, and the collectors edition of Stranglehold, for $399. Noteworthy is Lair only being $34.99 today as well.
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The sudden delay that saw Lair's UK release pushed back even further behind the US release was due to there being no age rating on the game discs, Sony has told CVG.

Sony told CVG last week, on the day before Lair was due to go on sale: "Unfortunately, due to circumstances beyond our control, the launch of Lair has been delayed very slightly."

But speaking to employees at UK retailer GAME, CVG has learnt that "the reason Lair has been delayed is because there is no age rating printed on the disk."
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Playstation 3 exclusive title Lair has been stores in America since the end of August, but the European version of Lair has still not been released yet. The game has been delayed multiple times, with no exact reason why. Rumor has it the European version would get an updated control scheme, where players could choose between the SIXAXIS-controls or the newly added analog controls.

Dutch website Insidegamer however can confirm that the European version of Lair won't feature analog controls either. In fact, Insidegamer can conclude in the video review that Lair is probably exactly the same as the American version. Why the game was delayed in Europe is still a mystery. Lair is slated to hit stores on November 16 in Europe.
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While Sixaxis pads across American are being put through their motion-sensing paces with Lair, UK gamers are forced to wait even longer as Sony tells CVG that the game's European release has slipped... again.
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Good old Lair for PS3 has been delayed by at least a couple of weeks according to retailers speaking to Eurogamer, with the game now listed as 23rd November by many.
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