These awards represent the best of the best--on their respective platforms, anyway. For those who aren't fortunate to have access to multiple gaming platforms, our platform awards are in many ways the most meaningful. Here's where we select five finalists on each major platform that we cover, and from them, we settle on just one game as the best of the year.

2006 was an exhilarating year in games and represented a major shift in the video game industry due to the new consoles hitting the market. As a result of this transitional year, in 2006 we're presenting more genre award categories than ever before. In turn, you'd better believe that some of the choices here weren't easy to make--but, then again, with so many great games to choose from, we were more than happy to revisit so many of our favorites before settling on the winners.