t was another wild ride for the gaming industry in 2005. Two new systems made their entrance onto center stage, the Sony PSP and Microsoft Xbox 360, which made this past year an expensive one for early adoptees of new technology. Unfortunately both systems had their share of technical problems which served as a reminder that perhaps those extended warranties aren't such a bad thing....

Sure the past year introduced us to some relatively new terms for the video game lexicon such as "dead pixels", "3 red blinking lights of doom" and "Sorry you're just going to have to wait until March for your Xbox 360 pre-order" but no one could say that software quality was on the decline. Like most years in recent memory. 2005 saw its share of sequels, prequels, threequels, fourquels and whatnot, but there were also some incredible new games released that seemed to appear out of left field and we pretty much played every of of 'em. We also played some real crap. We'll let you know about those too.

How Voting Works: The staff was given only the various award categories and were allowed to vote for any games that they wanted to (without being given an already defined list). When the lists were returned we choose the top 5 games from each category which received the most votes (those become the nominees) and the game with the most votes becomes the overall winner for that award.

Select a category above and check out CCC's Best & Worst of 2005!