The Preemptive 2011 Game Awards

This human (or evil android) common sense also gives us the power to make educated guesses as to which games of 2011 will get award-giving gamz jarnlists like ourselves all riled up. They’re just guesses, of course. There are games in 2011 which will surprise us, and at least a few haven't even been announced yet. And several of the games we’re excited about (we just listed 100 of them, by the way) will be delayed. But that isn’t going to stop us from handing out stupid awards. We love handing out stupid awards!

Entries written by Chris Antista or Brett Elston denoted by sudden, dramatic changes in writing style.

WINNER: Journey

Guesstimated Award Probability: 78%

Maaaan, I ‘aint tellin’ you to stop believin’ or none of that, I’m talkin’ about the otherJourney. It’s like an existential experiment man! They’re like, exploring the nature of human connection, alienation, and all that, like, with sand you know? Like the grains of sand represent all the people in the world, right - it’s a metaphor, man. We’re so connected we’re disconnected! We’re just blowin’ around in the wind, bumpin’ into each other, and [bong rip] like, I don’t know man, it’s pretty deep stuff.

Deus Ex is a great series, but have you ever met anyone who’s really into it? If not, talk to someone who just saw Inception. Now imagine that Inception was released eleven years ago, and all you did to initiate the conversation was mention that you had a weird dream.

Replace “weird dream” with “anything tangentially related to anything,” and you have a hardcore Deus Ex fan. Nanotechnology, conspiracy theories, the Illuminati, artificial intelligence, The Art of War, causality, sun glasses, hair, air, whatever.

Pokémon is the MMO for people who only like interacting with other people when they want someone else’s heroin. The rest of the time they're interacting with their own heroin. Little, furry needles of heroin. Catch ‘em before they scamper off into someone else’s vein or something.

Not only that, but Black & White's main story is exclusively stocked with brand new varieties of heroin, plus there's Wi-Fi video heroin, three-on-three heroin shooting contests, and all sorts of other reasons you may find yourself and your DSi in the corner of a dilapidated apartment listening to The Velvet Underground.

MMOs are designed to be life consuming monsters, so any upcoming MMO could become this year's college drop out pill, but we're putting our money on Guild Wars 2. Get this - there's JUMPING. We know. PlanetSide: Next isn't a bad bet either.

I saw id’s new engine – id Tech 5 – running on a 360 with my very own eyes. I don’t have much to say about the actual game, but damn, did that engine ever look fancy. And if you aren’t hyped enough for id’s new era of making pixels appear on a screen really well, Camack said in 2008 that since Doom 4 is only shooting for 30 frames-per-second, as opposed to Rage’s 60, it’ll look even better. Well, actually he said that it'll have "three times the graphics richness," but we're going to go ahead and assume that means "better."

Runner-up | Crysis 2

I wasn’t particularly captivated by Crysis, but it sure looked good. I may or may not have more fun with Crysis 2, but at least I know that it will also sure look good.

First, notice how it's the future. It has been proven that everything looks cooler in the future. Also, it's in a city instead of a jungle. Cities look cooler than jungles, especially if you're color blind and all that green looks sepia-ish anyway. Also, the font used for the game's logo is a true 1080p font!

Better unzip (ha?) your pants, because Atlus is pushing console limits with the sexual content of Catherine. It definitely isn't the most explicit game planned for release this year, but it may be the best semi-explicit game... like, one you'll actually want to play.

It may not be released outside of Japan – who knows – but if it isn't, we’re sure puberty will find away to play it, even if it means learning Japanese. Screw the internet, looking at boobs is more fun when you have to work for it!