By: The GameSpot Editors

We are very pleased to present to you GameSpot's eighth annual Best and Worst of the Year, in which we highlight the most noteworthy achievements, good and bad, from the past 12 months in gaming. If this is your first year with us, welcome! We hope you'll enjoy the show and come away with new or renewed interest in what certainly are the year's finest games (as well as a few of the most despicable). If you've been with us in years past, welcome back! And get ready for some new twists, as we continue to adapt our annual awards to best fit this constantly evolving industry.

We invite you to discuss this feature in our official Best and Worst of 2003 forum.

"We've made some important changes to the award categories this year, which we feel best reflect GameSpot's status as one of the only true multiplatform gaming publications in the world."

Though these awards are an annual tradition here at GameSpot, we've made some important changes to the award categories this year, which we feel best reflect GameSpot's status as one of the only true multiplatform gaming publications in the world, and also reflect the direction in which we believe the gaming industry is headed. As you probably know, we extensively cover every major gaming platform--the PC, the Xbox, the GameCube, the PlayStation 2, and the Game Boy Advance. But because our editors--and most of our readers--ultimately enjoy and have access to more than one or even most of these gaming platforms, we're really not concerned about what platform a game is on so much as whether or not it's any good. So, for the first time ever, we've opted to ignore platform distinctions in our Special Achievement Award, Dubious Honor, and Genre Award categories and have instead selected what are truly the best of the best (or worst of the worst) as our finalists for these exclusive and discriminating awards.

As a result, we have fewer award categories than last year, though there are still more than 40 unique awards here. What this also means is that for the first time in GameSpot's history, we have chosen one and only one winner for our highest honor: Game of the Year. Every year prior, we've split the award between console and PC games. This year, and henceforth, we believe console and PC gaming are inexorably intertwined. In 1996, GameSpot started out as a purely PC-focused publication. Today we give each major gaming platform equal footing, but we will always acknowledge and respect the PC platform as the one that started it all for us. However, even our once-PC-centric editors today are interested in games across the board, so we felt that this was the perfect year to build the bridge between these seemingly different styles of gaming.

Our decision-making process in determining the best games in each category, and the categories themselves, was as focused, involved, and intensive as ever. We considered every North American game released during the 2003 calendar year and took into consideration our review scores for those games (especially our Editors' Choice Award winners), how our perceptions of those games might have changed over time, and many other key factors. All of GameSpot's editors involved themselves in the deliberations, and all decisions that were made, were made unanimously through continued debate, not by voting. As we're sure you'll notice, games that were released earlier in the year were not neglected in favor of more recent releases. Also, in many cases you'll see that we nominated multiple versions of the same game for a particular distinction, wherever applicable.

Enough explanations--on with the show!