First-Look, Behind-the-Scenes Featurette
Friday, March 18, 2011
Call of Duty, Heavy Rain Top BAFTA Video Game Awards
The "Call of Duty" franchise continued its wave of success Wednesday when its latest release won the Game Award of 2010 at the British Academy of Film and Television (BAFTA) Video Games Awards in London.
The PS3 game "Heavy Rain," meanwhile, took home three top awards.
"Call of Duty: Black Ops" won the Game Award, which is the only award at this ceremony voted on by the public, and the third year that a "Call of Duty" game has received the honor. "Black Ops" was released in November, and has since topped $1 billion in sales, while players have logged at least 600 million hours of play time.
"Can't thank all you voting fans enough!" Josh Olin, community manager for Treyarch, the studio that created "Black Ops," tweeted earlier today.
Meanwhile, "Heavy Rain" won BAFTAs for original music, technical innovation, and story.
"The whole team is very, very proud!" Quantic Dream, the French production company that created the game, said on its Web site.
It was Bioware's "Mass Effect 2," however, that took home the BAFTA for best game. It was lauded by the jury as a "combined achievement of technology, art, design [and] audio… a beautiful complete gaming experience."
"Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood" took home the action award for its "exhilarating chases [and] heart-thumping shadowing missions."
"Civilization V" won in the strategy category, the second BAFTA for the series. "Civilization Revolution" won in this category in 2009.
For less violent games, "Kinect Sports" won the best family game, while "Super Mario Galaxy 2" won for best gameplay. The original "Super Mario Galaxy" won the best game award in 2009.
The video game BAFTAs added a new social network category this year, and the award went to "My Empire," a Greco-Roman themed city-building game for Facebook.
Other winners included:
Handheld: Cut the Rope
Sports: F1 2010
Multiplayer: Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit
Audio: Battlefield: Bad Company 2
Artistic Archievement: God of War III
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