Half-Life 2 named game of the year in AIAS Awards

Valve's PC first person shooter Half-Life 2 has won the overall Game of the Year award at the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences' awards ceremony, with the title also picking up eight other awards in different categories.

The critically acclaimed title won the award for Innovation in PC Gaming and the Outstanding Achievement gongs for fields including Art Direction, Animation, Game Play Engineering and Visual Engineering.

Bungie's Halo 2 was named as console game of the year, and picked up outstanding achievement awards for Sound Design and Online Game Play, while the Innovation in Console Gaming award went to Namco's Katamari Damacy - which also picked up an Outstanding Achievement award for Game Design.

Other winners of the prestigious Outstanding Achievement awards included Big Blue Box' Xbox title Fable, which held up the British end at the awards with wins for Original Musical Composition and Character or Story Development.

Nintendo dominated the handheld categories, with Super Mario 64 DS voted as Wireless Game Of The Year, while Metroid :Zero Mission was Handheld Game of the Year, and Blizzard won a gong for World of Warcraft, which walked off with the Massively Multiplayer Game Of The Year award.

The AIAS awards were presented at a ceremony last night at the DICE Summit in Las Vegas, which also saw EA, 3DO and Digital Chocolate founder Trip Hawkins being honoured with induction into the Academy's "Hall of Fame".