2005 BAFTA Games Awards Nominees Announced

This year’s BAFTA awards, a prestigious film/entertainment prize in the UK, have a specific Games division for the second year running. Game awards are presented in many categories: separate awards are given for Racing, Sports, Action/Adventure, Online Multiplayer, Children’s, Game Audio, Original Music, Animation, Technical Direction, Art Direction, Handheld, Mobile, PC, GameCube, PS2, Xbox, and Originality. The final Best Game category has no announced nominees, and will instead be presented to one particular game at the awards ceremony. If you want to narrow down the Best Game possibilities, however, it’s worth noting that the games with the most nominations overall are Burnout 3: Takedown and Half-Life 2, with six nominations apiece. Since Burnout 3 is eligible in multiple platform-specific categories as opposed to Half-Life 2’s one, Half-Life 2 may be considered to have the slight edge. After that, Halo 2 and Doom 3 both garnered 4 nomations, while Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, Metroid Prime 2, Donkey Konga, Fable, and the Euro-centric Eyetoy: Play 2 and Singstar / Singstar Party received 3 nominations each. The full list of nominations in each category, as well as the related Interactive awards (and, for that matter, the nominations in all the other divisions as well) are at the official BAFTA site. The winners will be announced at the ceremony held on February 25, 2005, in London.