Long read: The beauty and drama of video games and their clouds

"It's a little bit hard to work out without knowing the altitude of that dragon..."

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Official ECTS Awards

"Well we didn't vote for you"

The Official ECTS Awards were announced during the recent London trade show, with the main prizes voted on by a panel of journalists, not including ourselves. As such the winners don't necessarily tally with our own opinions, which we'll be giving you tomorrow, but the companies which took home gongs from the show are obviously very excited about it all, and have been bombarding us with press releases for the last two days accordingly.

Rage's "contagious" puzzle game Denki Blocks took away the all-important "Game Of The Show" gong as well as "Best Handheld Game", and Kemco's Universal Studios got the Best Console Game award, perhaps because it was virtually the only GameCube title in evidence and journalists are traditionally Nintendo fanboys. Somewhat more understandably CDV's impressive looking action-strategy game Project Nomad got "Best PC Game", and Funcom walked away with the "Best Multiplayer Game" gong for Anarchy Online. Obviously the "expert panel" hadn't yet seen Midgard in Funcom's back room suite when they voted for the awards though.

There were also a host of other awards which had been voted on in the run-up to the show, with UbiSoft taking Publisher Of The Year (perhaps simply a vote for the biggest publisher to actually bother turning up to ECTS this year), Sony taking Console Of The Year with the PlayStation 2 (well duh) and Max Payne picking up a best PC Game Of The Year award for Take 2. Predictably enough Black & White and Gran Turismo 3 walked away with most of the readers-choice awards from across Europe which were announced at the event, except for the typically individualistic (or just plain awkward, depending on who you ask) French, who preferred Giants and ISS Pro Evolution 2. Meanwhile on the hardware front NVIDIA walked away with the Best PC Hardware award and PC Format's Best New Kit gong; hardly surprising given how little competition there was for them this year...

Oh the sheer excitement of it all.