GamesRadar's 2008 Platinum Chalice Awards

GamesRadar has posted their "Game of the Year" awards for 2008, though they buck the trend and call them their "Platinum Chalice" awards. Fallout 3 gets the "Most Satisfying Gore" and "Game of the Year" awards, while Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood scored the "Best Soundtrack We Didn't Expect Runner-up" mention.
Weary critics have called it (Oblivion with guns,) but that's both a gross oversimplification and. not so bad. Oblivion was an incredible game, and guns make virtually everything better (Zelda with guns? Hell yes). But Fallout 3 can't be epitomized with three words. It's a carnival of '˜50s themed sci-fi neurosis - a cornucopia of Cold War delirium, radioactive cola, atomized entrails, and careening limbs. It's drugs, robots, lasers, bounty hunters, raiders, warriors and giant mutants. It's the stuff that consumed our grade school notebooks - the naïve but compelling dreams of listless children with ball-point pens.

It's simple: Fallout 3 delivers. The story is hearty (but only as prominent as it needs to be), the combat is refreshing and addictive, the character development avoids banality and the air is ripe with a perfect mixture of radiation and gore. It doesn't rely on the reputation of its predecessors, but it doesn't deny them. Hell, even its bugs have a sort of charm (the technical ones, not the radscorpions - those bastards can suck it).

When, on more than one occasion, you walk into work looking unhinged and delirious because your consciousness was only just ripped away from the succulent innards of a game (by your damned alarm clock), you know you have a winner.