There’s the off chance that a brilliant sleeper hit will jump into the spotlight and capture our hearts this year, but for the most part we can fairly accurately predict which games are going to consume all of our free time in 2008. So, in the spirit of giving, and giving awards, which is so popular this time of year, we present The Preemptive 2008 Game Awards. That’s right, we’re awarding this year’s best games in advance, and at the end of the year we’ll simply pretend to have forgotten that we ever wrote this article so that we can give out the real 2008 awards.

Note: Taking into account the fickle nature of videogame release dates, we can’t guarantee that any of these games will actually be released this year, but we can hope.

Best GTA IV competition

Winner: Prototype
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In GTA IV you play a reluctant immigrant-gangster in New York. In Prototype you play a crazy shape shifting anti-hero who’s battling aliens with awesome special powers in New York.

Prototype could revitalize the sandbox genre with a whole new take, slightly less shallow than Saints Row and Crackdown, and definitely more original than GTA. We’re especially excited about the ability to impale advancing soldiers with concrete spikes.

Runner up: Saints Row 2
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We don’t know much about Saints Row 2, but we’ve been told that it will "revolutionize player freedom and open world online gameplay" and include “true open-world online multiplayer.” If these claims are true, it could present GTA IV with some serious competition, but we’re a bit skeptical - mainly because we still remember the first game.