Nintendo sweeps Golden Joysticks with five awards

Dennis Publishing's annual Golden Joysticks award ceremony saw Nintendo storm home with five statuettes for its shelves, with public voting for the awards this year topping 88,000 registered votes.

As well as gongs for Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker (GameCube Game of the Year) and Mario Kart: Double Dash (Most Wanted Game for Christmas), Nintendo took awards for Publisher of the Year and Hardware of the Year (for the GBA SP), while legendary Nintendo designer Shigeru Miyamoto became the first person to be inducted into the Golden Joysticks Hall of Fame.

While Nintendo - which has recently been celebrating a very significant revival in the GameCube's fortunes in Europe following a price cut last month, and now claims to be number two in console market share terms in every major global territory - certainly had a successful day, it was also a good day for two British-developed hits.

Both Championship Manager 4 (PC Game of the Year, Best of British) and Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (PS2 Game of the Year, Ultimate Game of the Year) took two major awards each, as clear an indication of the strength of the UK games industry as you could hope for.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, giant retail chain GAME walked away with the Games Retailer of the Year award, while the Xbox award went to Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, the Handheld award went to Advance Wars 2 and the Online Game award was picked up by Battlefield 1942.

Capcom's Viewtiful Joe received the statuette for "Unsung Hero Game of the Year", ahead of No One Lives Forever and another Capcom title, Steel Battalion. And 2004 certainly looks set to be the year of the first-person shooter - with Half-Life 2 taking the award for Most Anticipated Game for 2004 ahead of FPS game rivals Doom III and Halo 2.

The awards were presented at a ceremony in the ballroom London's Park Lane Sheraton, with the event being hosted by TV comedian Phil Jupitus. A selection of highlights from the event will be broadcast on MTV later this week.