Enclosed after the jump is a 2008 gaming best-of list. You will not find Metal Gear Solid 4, LittleBigPlanet, Wii Fit, or most any other bloated, corporate crapware in this list. Sorry. I did mention a couple of those in my buyers' guide a few weeks ago, and I apologize for that as well.

Best Gaming Award: "Soulja Boy Award for Games To Play If You Drink And Get Drunk or Smoke And Get High"
GiantBomb.com isn't great, but it is good.

Best Interactive Art: Braid
No release this year better combines creative puzzles and artistic design with an emotional goal. It's remarkable when you press a button to make time rewind in Braid. It's more remarkable when, a few levels in, your attempts at memory recall are jumbled because some things don't follow you to the past. And when the character's emotional toil in the game catches up to express why this gameplay trick exists? The result is beyond literary.

But there's an important question to ask before diving in: when you close your eyes, can you see exactly how the original Mario jumps? His bounce, his weight, his gravity? You better, because this game demands that you jump all over the place, carefully, repeatedly, in tricky situations. Rewinding time helps here, but old-school frustration doesn't do Braid's storytelling any favors. Oh well. Still incredible.

Best Toy: World of Goo
On the other end of the spectrum—games as shameless toys—World of Goo wins handily. You're given clumps of stringy goo and are told to build towers, bridges, and ladders from point A to point B. Cartoony architecture. But you can't just throw digital Legos on a screen and expect success; here, half the fun is in the learning curve. Each new type of goo and each gameplay tweak is eased into the game so that most puzzles serve as an instruction manual without the player realizing it. The strain-to-satisfaction ratio is divine as a result, helped even more by a unified, quirky aesthetic experience that's more Seussian than any motion picture tribute in the past decade. With everything WoG gets right, consider it a living design primer.

Most Inconvenient Game to Love: Left 4 Dead
Do not play this game alone. Do not play this game with anonymous assholes on the Internet. Fanboys have complained about L4D's relatively small size, but there's a reason—it's hard to round up three other friends for this game's hour-long zombie kill-gasms, and you need a four-strong team to make it work. And as a short-burst group game, L4D spends its resources not on more maps, but on the thrilling bits that have made it infinitely replayable since its release last month. The game's balanced thrills do not wane. Shame that they damn near require a LAN setup in the basement—pizza is not optional.

Best Arcade Game: Primeval Hunt
At Seattle's GameWorks, Big Buck Hunter meets Jurassic Park. Not a typo; this showed up in town maybe a month or so ago. Shoot a Diplodocus in the head with a crossbow. Nail a T-Rex in its abdomen with a shotgun. Jonah will never have to write one of these posts again.

Best Game to Play Badly: Burnout Paradise
You can play this racing game the “right” way—win races, pull off stunt runs—and have a fine time. But Burnout Paradise is far more fun as a wreckfest. Fling your SUV off a bridge into a rocky river. Drive to the top of a parking garage and try to jump your car on top of a bus. Earn the super-powered van and clear the roads with your Bub Rub driving skills. It's the best-looking driving game of the year, which makes endless wrecks through a massive gameworld all the more satisfying. I have played no game more this year than Burnout Paradise.

Most Interesting PS3 Game: Pixeljunk Eden
The PS3 is a disaster, which is sad, because Sony's Santa Monica studio has been quietly pumping out gold for the thing—typically cutesy, 2D designs under the Pixeljunk moniker. Their Monsters game is a cool mod on the Desktop Tower Defense craze, but Eden, whoa boy. You hop around a living screensaver, revealing floral forms across the screen that you then hop and swing along. Up to three can play together. Music's awesome; progression is breezy and rewarding. Nothing transcendental here, but you're wasting your PS3 if you miss this.

Best Game For Assholes: Fallout 3
You can blow up an entire fucking town. And you should, asshole. Quit griefing me in online games, and go screw with the virtual citizens of post-nuclear Washington, DC instead. Fallout 3 has hookers, booze, and makeshift rocket launchers, too. Combine all three and write to Dan about it.

Most Interesting Wii Game: Cubello
This WiiWare puzzler isn't perfect, but who wants another recommendation for Smash Bros. or Mario Kart? For $6, you can get the first great 3D mod to the Puyo Puyo/falling-blocks puzzle genre. Cubello is a rare bit of joy in the Wii's otherwise awful 2008. Maybe Nintendo will smarten up and pound out a sequel next year, fixing blatant errors and adding an obvious multiplayer mode. Or maybe they'll fart out Wii Music 2: Caribbean Queen, and I will shit my heart in exasperation.

Best Fighter: Hulk Hands
No, not some Hulk video game. Go buy Hulk Hands and punch your friends in real life. Until someone makes a fighting game that does something new—uses the Wii remote for motion-controlled combat, or uses analog sticks to control individual limbs—everything else is a rehash, and you're better off with fake, green glove-fists. If you disagree, you are a fanboy who already owns Favorite Fighting Game Part 7, so what do you care?

Most Interesting DS Game: Space Invaders Extreme
Space Invaders finally gets some speed and replayability, and it's not a bastard to figure out. Play it to shoot stuff, or learn the new combo systems and go nutty for the high score. Professor Layton is a very close second, even if the game is worthless after one playthrough. And the new Phantasy Star game out this week in Japan is a treat—here's to hoping it sees American release next year.

Most Interesting DS “Lifestyle Application”: KORG DS-10
Lots of dinky, adult-focused stuff on the DS lately—like when CD games first came out for PC, and all you'd find on shelves were Mavis Beacon and Encarta. Guh. Same thing nowadays, with Jamie Oliver Cooking and the Quit Smoking game topping the current DS lists, but stuff like the fully-fledged KORG synthesizer actually proves worthwhile, as its touch-screen techno party is a rare case of requiring the DS. My hope for 2009? That the Quit Smoking game gets a sequel done in the style of those weird boy-boy touch-fests for Japanese DSes. You wouldn't want your habit to disappoint poor, shirtless Yahto, would you?

Most Interesting Gaming Machine: Xbox 360
The Xbox 360's Community Games portal is a monster, and it's the perfect platform to attract indie developers with any hope of making money, a huge contrast to piracy-stricken PC development. There are other big games on the Xbox as well, sure, and its Xbox Live Arcade selection is stellar, but the community portal is the most hopeful thing a major gaming corporation has done since id Software welcomed game modders with open arms in the mid-90s.

Worry not, computer purists. This award will go back to the PC as soon as someone comes up with an MMO that doesn't hang for dear life from Dungeons and Dragons' fender.