Golden Joystick Awards unveiled

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota
By Dan Whitworth
Newsbeat technology reporter GT5, Fallout: New Vegas and Portal 2 were all among the winners Portal 2 has been crowned the ultimate game of the year at the Golden Joystick video game awards.

It beat competition for the top prize from the likes of LA Noire, Call of Duty: Black Ops and Gran Turismo 5.

With more than two million votes cast across 14 categories, organisers claim it is the biggest video games award ceremony in the world.

However this year, with no game winning more than one award, there was no particular standout title.

Angry Birds continued its seemingly unstoppable rise to the top of the smartphone gaming world, with the best mobile award for its Rio edition.

The biggest seller of the last 12 months, Call of Duty: Black Ops, had a quiet ceremony by the series' standards, picking up just one award, best shooter.

Continue reading the main story Action/Adventure: Assassin's Creed: BrotherhoodMobile: Angry Birds RioRole play: Fallout: New VegasMMOG: World of WarcraftFighting: Mortal KombatRacing: Gran Turismo 5Sports: FIFA 11Strategy: Starcraft IIMusic: Guitar Hero: Warriors of RockFree-To-Play: League of LegendsDownloadable: MinecraftShooter: COD: Black OpsOne To Watch: Elder Scrolls V: SkyrimInnovation: Nintendo 3DSOutstanding Contribution: Sonic The HedgehogUltimate Game: Portal 2

In the best sports game category FIFA 11 pipped its rival Pro Evolution Soccer.

But the big winner at the awards was Portal 2 - a first person puzzle-platform game that sees players trying to make it through a series of chambers by using a special gun to create portals.

The game has also been praised for its humour, with Stephen Merchant - from The Office and Extras - providing the voice for one of the characters.

Sonic 'honoured'

Arguably the second most significant prize is the one to watch award, and that went to Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim - good news for its makers ahead of next month's release.

Meanwhile, the outstanding contribution gong was won by Sonic The Hedgehog, who is celebrating 20 years since first being unveiled by Sega.

David Corless, Sonic brand director, said the hedgehog was a timeless character who had transcended video games and whose appeal had been extended by the boom in smartphone gaming.

"It's quite rare in any forms of media that TV or cartoons for kids can endure for such a long time. Even in a video game it's quite rare.

"The fact that Sonic is still around and still doing as well as he is is fantastic, and testament to the little blue blur as we call him."

Mr Corless added that Sonic's traditional rivalry with Nintendo's Mario was now a thing of the past.

"It was a Blur versus Oasis thing about 10 or 15 years ago, but they recently joined forces and appeared in some games together.

"We've put all those dark days behind us," he joked.

Follow our technology reporter Dan Whitworth on Twitter

Technology

New Automobile

Read More

Meet the Winners of This Year's Tech Humanitarian Awards

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota
We Care Solar's Lauren Stachel demonstrates its "solar suitcase," which provides lighting and power to medical clinics in developing nations.

On Thursday night at the Santa Clara Convention Center in the heart of California's Silicon Valley, more than 1400 people attended the Tech Awards, a gala that celebrated not companies or products, but rather people and organizations that are using technology to make the world a better place. In their eleventh year, the awards are a program of San Jose, California's Tech Museum and are presented by semiconductor manufacturing equipment giant Applied Materials in association with Santa Clara University's Center for Science, Technology and Society; TIME was a sponsor of this year's edition.

(MORE: Big Thinkers: TED2011 Videos Worth Watching)

The evening's first honor, the James C. Morgan Global Humanitarian Award, went to Jeff Skoll, who was hired by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar to become the online auction company's first employee and first president in 1996. (Previous winners include Bill Gates, Al Gore, and Jordan's Queen Rania Al Abdullah.) Skoll became a billionaire when eBay went public in 1998, founded the Skoll Foundation in 1999 and has invested his wealth in tackling the planet's most serious problems—and helping others to do so—ever since.

Skoll is the creator of the Skoll Awards for Social Entrepreneurship, which provide cash grants to worthy projects in a hundred countries. His Skoll Global Threats Fund concentrates on addressing climate change, water scarcity, pandemics, nuclear proliferation and the Middle East conflict. And in 2004 he created Participant Media, a movie production company whose films—from Charlie Wilson's War to Waiting for "Superman"—are all inspired by social issues. Its films have received four Academy Awards and eighteen nominations; for one week this September, two of them—Contagion and The Help—were the first and second top-grossing movies at the U.S. box office.

"The genius of Steve Jobs made it easy for consumers to think different and act different," Skoll said as he accepted the award. "It is my greatest hope that we can make it easy to do the right things." He explained that he had been inspired to take on ambitious goals as a teenager when his father, diagnosed with life-threatening cancer, told his son he was sorry about the things he'd never done when he had the chance. Happily, the elder Skoll recovered and attended yesterday's festivities along with his wife of 53 years.

(PHOTOS: The Long, Extraordinary Career of Steve Jobs)

The Tech Awards also honored fifteen laureate organizations from around the world, which competed for five $50,000 cash awards funded by Microsoft, Intel, Nokia and other major tech firms. The winners, announced at Thursday's ceremony, were:

AguaClara, an initiative of Cornell University that was honored for building gravity-powered water-treatment facilities that provide safe drinking water to 20,000 people in five communities without the need for electricity.

PhET Interactive Simulations, the University of Colorado's group that teaches students from elementary school to universities via animated "science projects" that have been translated into 64 languages.

Universal Subtitles, a collaborative platform for captioning online videos that brought 25,000 videos on subjects such as the Arab Spring and the Japanese Tsunami to the deaf and hard of hearing in its first nine months.

We Care Solar, whose "solar suitcase" provides lighting and power to clinics in Africa, Asia, and Central America that might otherwise be forced to deliver babies and conduct other medical care by candlelight.

Eko Financial Services, which aims to democratize financial services by allowing  800,000 clients in India, such as migrant workers, to access bank accounts via inexpensive mobile phones.

This year's fifteen laureates, whose representatives spent a week receiving business training in Silicon Valley, are among 245 organizations from around the world that have been recognized by the Tech Awards since 2001.

News

Debt Financing

Read More