The nominations for this year's Best of 2006 awards are now up and the virtual voting booths have officially opened!
We'll be taking your votes for the next several days up until the dawning of the new year when we present the very best in casual gameplay that we enjoyed throughout 2006. Play along or just browse through the nominations and relive those cherished moments from the year.
You'll see we are doing things a bit differently this year. This being our third annual best of the year awards, we wanted to dig a little deeper than our previous efforts. We hope you will be pleased with what we have in store. Click.
Hey Jay -
I'm relatively new to your site -- but there's one game that I can't get enough of... Sudokucombat. Has that one been around for awhile? If not, may I have a write-in vote for that one?
Thanks for all your efforts! Happy Holidays!
Youch... it's been a good year for casual games: some very very hard choices I had to make in there! So as not to prejudice anyone else before they've voted, I'll hide my thoughts:
can't remember my stupid typekey login...
but anyway, Merry Christmas to everyone and exspecially you Jay, for making this site more and more addictive every day!
Thank you Jay and Co., for all the great finds this year.
I came across the site in August and have been hooked ever since. I played lots of point n click games, especially the room escape type.
voted for :
not in the list :(
- 'OUT file #01', one of the best room escape games, imho
- Chronon, very clever idea and real cute
Happy holidays from Belgium
i've had my votes, althought there was 2 sections i couldn't decide so left them.
I was surprised that no grow games were there.
Wow, so many great games! This is going to take me hours to work my way through them all and decide (*mischevious laughter*).
Jay, I hope you keep all these links listed like this after voting has closed! This is a great reference.
Write-in votes accepted, waahoowaa. =)
Valarauka - yes, admittedly, the strategy category is a bit of a hodge-podge. It's true that Dice Wars needed some competition, and since Combat Heaven and Bowmaster allow you to apply some strategy toward your choices for upgrades, that was the reasoning for including them. Trilinks, well, that's a Tonypa game and it was nice to include that one, too. Forgive us that not everything fit like a glove, we did the best we could. =)
Keith, good suggestion. We will be adding a page following each list of nominations with the winner(s), as picked by us and by everybody else.
Jay, you've mentioned several times that room escape games were your most requested games - why no category for just these?
FGM
Folks, please help us get the word out about this. If you have a Digg account, please DIGG this story.
Thank you! =)
Fairygdmther - this year we grouped the room escape games in with point-and-click. Perhaps we should have a category especially for escape games. We'll have to keep that in mind for next year. Thanks for the suggestion! =)
You should have put hapland 1 and super serif bros in!
umm... curses? The link doesn't work for me.
Eeeks! What link doesn't work?!
Gameman - Hapland 1 was soo last year. In fact, it landed in the top 5 of the Best of 2005. Super Serif Bros is a nomination this year in the puzzle category.
Damn you, jay! Why do you make me decide between Bowmaster Prelude and Combat Heaven?
I think those two game together make up a majority of the time I've spent playing games on this site, and I've played just about every game on this site.
Oh well, Combat Heaven wins, just because it takes longer to finish (read: collect all the weapons) than Bowmaster Prelude.
I'd like to extend a huge thankyou, firstly to all of the people who contribute to this site who were tasked with boiling down all the games on the site to the 40 or so you see here, it certainly was not an easy task.
Secondly I would love to thank all the fans of the site, especially those who contribute in their own way through the comments system.
My final thank you has to be to Jay, for all the work he puts into the site, this year has seen many improvements to the site, my favourite of which has been the IRC. Keep up the great work Jay, we all love you.
Here's to an equally fantastic 2007!
Happy Christnukkwanza!
Some of those decisions were really hard. x_O
It's going to be interesting to see who wins for each of the categories. =O
Capuchin - If you hadn't pestered me about an IRC channel for the site for months, then it might've never happened. =)
The page didn't seem to want to load in Mozilla Firefox, but I was able to vote in IE.
This has been an excellent year for games, and makes it all the harder to choose between them. Some of the choices ones were forced to make were heartbreaking, such as... well, i won't impose my opinion.
"The page"... which page? This one? One of the 15 voting pages?
The voting form was successfully tested in: Firefox (1.5), Firefox (2.0), Opera (9), Safari, Camino, and IE (7).
So, I don't really understand why you encountered any issues at all. :/
What type of game is line rider because I think #2 should be nominated.
Ninjaz - you bring up a good question that I'd like to point out for anyone curious.
Line Rider and Line Rider Beta 2 are the same webtoy, and should be considered the same when voting.
Likewise for DofI's sand games (listed under DofI Blog in Webtoy). I believe that grouping them all together as one entry is far better than adding one for each iteration he created.
Also, in Interactive Art or Fiction, consider all of Zarf's iFiction references in that review, as well as all 3 of Inanimate Alice when deciding.
We will be considering the best piece included in each review that referenced multiple pieces, and you should do the same when voting.
Line Rider is fun, but does it qualify as a game? There doesn't seem to be any competition involved.
I was also disappointed not to see Chronos.
Cost of Life doesn't work for me.
Josh - they changed the link for the game (Cost of Life). Thanks for pointing that out. It should be fixed now. cheers!
Or rather, Chronon. It's not so surprising that I didn't see "Chronos."
Yes, redfox, I agree it's disappointing not to see one of On's creations in the line-up this year.
Chronon was a very interesting game, very original and unique. It was also highly ambitious and suffered some problems as a result. For example, the game is very confusing to solve since actions performed can be negated easily and without warning. Also, the objective of the game is not clear without learning from someone else that had struggled through it first.
I miss Sanchosisland. The best game this year!
How about a category for best overall game of 2006.
Update