Awards 2007: Game.co.uk Team Awards

Yep, Virtua Tennis 3. I almost went for Halo 3… but alas, even more than Bungie’s blaster, Sega's racket-swinger is the high profile second sequel this year that’s not only met my expectations, but exceeded them.

For me, Virtua Tennis 3 is to sports sims what Tetris is to puzzlers. It’s nigh-on perfect. Simple on the surface, but deviously deep and engaging against an opponent of equal skill. The 20 pro player roster is brilliantly balanced. Online ranked matches are unbelievably tense affairs. Multiplayer minigames are a hilarious diversion. World Tour is tantalising stuff. And it all plays immaculately close to the real thing.

Having been at Tim Henman's Davis Cup swansong earlier this year, I should know!

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This was a triu-NO. I'm not going to fall into that (if you don't get where that was going, just one more reason to buy the Orange Box and play Portal to completion.)

Portal is an absolute joy, from start to finish. It could so easily have just been a puzzle game with a quirky gameplay mechanic, and even then it would have been fantastic, but it's so much more than that. It manages to pack more personability and character into a game that will last you maybe 1-and-a-half to 2 hours than most games have in their entire 15-20 hour journey. And the fact that it all comes from an inanimate cube that cannot talk and will absolutely not threaten to stab you, and an ever-present but increasingly batpoo-mental mechanical voice, just makes it all the more astonishing.

It's fairly common for a game to capture the minds of the "community" for a short time but it's rare for their hearts to be stolen in much the same fashion. And Portal has done it.

Sod it. This was a triumph.

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I was one of those panicking players who were only level 40 when the release date for The Burning Crusade was announced. I then dedicated my days to grinding like a fool, ready to not just walk but dive through the Dark Portal into Outland!

It was a gamble that could have gone so wrong but I was not disappointed by what I found.

The gear is so much cooler and with the addition of arena you can take pwning noobs to a whole new level!

I’ve not stopped playing except to eat, sleep and work since, which is why it is my Game of the Year!

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Bioshock is without a doubt the best game I played in 2007, it looks stunning and while it appears on the surface to be just another FPS, Bioshock's deep sandbox gameplay and superb storyline blew everything else out of the water, including Halo 3.

Bioshock excels at creating atmosphere and tension in its fantastically-realised world of Rapture, while providing many videogame moments that will stay in the memory for as long as that first infamous sighting of a Resident Evil zombie chewing on a corpse's neck...

Review: "It's hard to elaborate quite how real Rapture feels - how complete, how detailed, how defiantly imaginative and yet utterly believable." Read the Review

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