Portal wins ‘best video game’ award

A still from Bioshock, that won three awards

San Francisco: Valve’s Portal and 2K Studio’s Bioshock dominated the eighth annual Game Developers Choice (GDC) Awards as video game-makers heaped laurels on the action puzzle and morality-probing shooter titles.

Portal was voted the best video game of 2007, and took home awards for innovation and design excellence on Wednesday.

In the game, players must solve a series of puzzles by transporting their characters through a maze-like network via “portals” made with a “portal gun.”

Bioshock, the brainchild of 2K’s creative director Ken Levine, won top honours for story writing, visual arts, and audio.

“I wanted to challenge people a little bit,” Levine said of his game, set in an under-sea city fallen to ruin amid scientific chaos, which has been lauded for its play and potentially disturbing moral choices.

Urban action game Crackdown was voted the best game to debut in the past year, while flash-based Flow, which features a worm-like organism devouring others to evolve, won in the newly-created Best Downloadable Game category.

Science-fiction shooter Crysis was honored for having the best technology. The award for Best Handheld Game went to Nintendo’s Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass.

“It’s pretty incredible,” said Ralph Baer – ‘the father of video games’ – who built the first ever home video game console and was honoured with the GDC Pioneer Award. “The talent curve in game making is going straight up to heaven. There is no telling what we are going to see in five years.”