Gears of War tops GDC Awards list

Epic Games' Gears of War has won three awards at the annual Game Developers Choice Awards, including Best Game - with Capcom's Okami and Nintendo's Wii Sports also picking up multiple honours.

Gears of War, which was published by Microsoft Game Studios, also picked up the gongs for Best Technology and Best Visual Arts at the prestigious awards ceremony, held last night in San Francisco.

Okami and Wii Sports picked up two awards each. Both games were honoured in the Innovation category, alongside independent title Line Rider, while Okami picked up an award for Character Design, and Wii Sports' second gong came for Game Design.

Other notable awards went to Guitar Hero 2, for best audio - following on from the original Guitar Hero's win in this category last year - and to Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess for best writing.

Iron Lore Entertainment, creators of RPG / RTS title Titan Quest (which was published by THQ) were recognised as Best New Studio.

The Game Developers Choice Awards are the industry's most notable gongs, and as they are voted for by developers and game creators, are the closest thing which videogames has to the Academy Awards. In recent years, the awards have been highly praised for being focused on creativity, where other awards events have been slammed for being driven by commercial interest.

Awards were also presented last night to four individuals for special contributions to gaming - with Shigeru Miyamoto, who made a keynote speech at GDC earlier in the day, being given a Lifetime Achievement gong, while Greg Costikyan was this year's recipient of the Maverick award.

George Sanger was handed this year's Community Contribution award - while the First Penguin award, which is given to innovators who took creative risks in the games field, went to Tetris creator Alexey Pajitnov.