First off, Happy Birthday to us!!!  We're officially two now.  Every year from now on, we'll be posting this feature on the site's birthday.  In short, it's our own awards show, a combination of the Oscars and the Razzies if you will.  Stay tuned for some more birthday fun later today.  

Looking back over the first two years of trophies, there was quite a lot to choose from for each category.  With so many choices, we were glad this was set up in such way that we didn’t do that much work (except for a few days here and there).  Instead, we let the members do all of the nominating and voting.  What makes that even better, if you disagree with a winner, you don’t get to point at us.  We didn’t decide any of these.  Without further ado, here are the very first PS3Trophies Trophy Awards for 2010.  Happy Second Birthday to us!!!  Enjoy the party.

Easiest Individual Trophy 

To kick this off, let's start with the easiest awards.  These are the types of trophies you get in a youth soccer league where the philosophy is “everyone gets a prize”.  The first five nominees came from simply starting the game (Eat Lead’s “It’s Hazard Time” and Prince of Persia’s “Into the Storm…”), a few button presses later (Assassin’s Creed II’s “The Birth of an Assassin” and Burnout Paradise’s “Repair Your Car”), and even for purchasing the full version of the game (Diner Dash).  Fortunately, only one can win in this category, and the first winner is “The Birth of an Assassin”.  They don’t get much easier than this.  After a minute, and a few button presses, you'll have your first bronze trophy.

Winner: The Birth of an Assassin – Assassin’s Creed II

Easiest Action Platinum

Our showdown of the Easiest Action game variety is quite a mix.  There is the compilation of classics (Sonic’s Ultimate Genesis Collection), the highly anticipated sequel (Assassin’s Creed II), the game that was incredibly loosely based on a film (The Godfather II), the game even more loosely based on a classic poem (Dante’s Inferno), and Alone in the Dark: Inferno (to be honest, we’re not really sure what that was).  In the end though, there can be only one.  With it’s mostly story driven trophies and most of the rest being for random things you can do at almost any time and collection trophies that don’t take much time at all, it’s easy to see why Assassin’s Creed II takes this category home.

 Winner: Assassin’s Creed II

Easiest Music Platinum

The phrase “Easiest Music Game” is a relative one.  Depending upon one’s skill set, some people will find some games much easier than others.  While there were five nominees for this category, the bottom three had almost as many votes combined as the runner up.  The only two contenders for this category were Band Hero and Lego Rock Band.  Coincidentally, both games were aimed at a more casual, family friendly audience.  As a result, the trophy lists were much easier.  As for the differences between them…one has Taylor Swift and the other has Lego characters.  Obviously, the game with Lego in it has to be easier…right?  Right?  By a mere 15 votes, your winner is Lego Rock Band.

Winner: Lego Rock Band

Easiest Racing Platinum

The racing game category has given us plenty of choices over the first 18 months of trophies.  Despite there being quite a few family friendly racing games to choose from, one title ran…er, sped away with over 53% of the total votes.  Our winner here is the ultra simplified trophy list that was Burnout Paradise.  While the Xbox had a more balanced list, the Burnout trophies didn’t require you to find all of the billboards, gates, or even complete all of the licenses.  It was really the easy half of the achievements.  It’s actually kind of a shame really.  Even with the trophy requiring a PlayStation Eye, the list could be completed in a day.

Winner: Burnout Paradise

Easiest RPG Platinum

Based on the nominations, the only question here was how much Fallout 3 would win by.  The answer, over 130 votes with a 56% of the total votes.  Sorry Last Rebellion.  You may have been really easy, but very few people have played you.  Dragon Age, Marvel: Ultimate Alliance 2, and Final Fantasy XIII, you weren’t difficult, but couldn’t compare. 

So…yeah, Fallout 3.  To go along with the numerous quest trophies were the grinding, collection, and leveling trophies along with a couple of other gems thrown in.  There’s no challenge provided and no skill required by Fallout.  It’s fun to play and has a great storey, but the trophies are easy to collect.

 Winner: Fallout 3

Easiest Shooter Platinum

Despite there being so many shooters, and such a remarkably varied quality to them, there shouldn’t be much of a surprise what the winner here is.  Here are a couple of hints.  It has 12 trophies, 11 of which are gold.  You can finish it under five hours and in one playthrough.  If you guessed Terminator Salvation, you would be correct.  Come on.  Like there was another choice.  The Magic 8 Ball says no.  Seriously, it was Terminator’s award to lose.  Borderlands?  No, you took too long.  Wanted?  You were easy, but needed too many playthroughs.  Eat Lead?  You had too many that could be missed.  Bad Company 2?  Online trophies.  Yep, Terminator was the only answer here.

 Winner: Terminator Salvation

Easiest Sports Platinum

With quite a few good selections for the easiest sports game, we were never sure which way this category was going to go, but we had an idea…or so we thought.  Madden was easy to do in under 10 hours since all of the trophies were random things that can happen in a game.  Cabela’s Outdoor Adventures was mostly just following the campaign, but was short as well.  Ashes Cricket was an easy game, but took a little bit longer to complete.  The same goes with NCAA Football and Tiger Woods.  Although, Tiger had the two online grinding trophies that took a good amount of time to get through.

 Turns out, we have an upset on our hands.  It came down to a battle of two games in which the platinum could be earned in under 10 hours.  In the end, Cabela’s Outdoor Adventures with it’s hunting and fishing outlasted Madden NFL 10 to capture the award.

 Winner: Cabela’s Outdoor Adventures

Easiest PSN 100%

The PSN games don’t often come with ridiculously easy trophies, let alone an insanely easy complete list.  Whether it was the utter joke and laziness of Frogger Returns, the minutes of confusion during Linger in Shadows, or the button pressing of .detuned, they display just how easy these trophies can get.  Evidently, the 10 minutes of button pressing to whatever music is on your HDD in .detuned that takes the prize home.  Yes, that’s it.  10 minutes.  Button pressing.  Enjoy your trophies.  There are no skills required to play.  That makes sense since it’s not really a game, it’s a music application with trophies.

 Winner: .detuned

Easiest Overall Platinum

We come to the final easiest category and it turned out to be a showdown between two games that you can platinum in a few hours.  While there were other nominees, only two received enough votes to be contenders, but in the end the voting wasn’t even close.  You have the legendary, divisive Hannah Montana that is either just another platinum to a trophy whore or a game that casual gamers will laugh at you for playing.  And then there’s Terminator Salvation with it’s simplistic list and short, easy campaign.  Put it this way, who do you think would win a fight Hannah Montana or the Terminator?  Right.  Like I thought, Terminator Salvation wins it.

 Winner: Terminator Salvation

Hardest Individual Trophy

At this point, we’re going to switch from the easiest trophies to the hardest.  Each trophy here requires ridiculous amount of time, effort, patience, skill and luck to earn.  Every one of these is insane: Elite Campaign Legend in Wipeout HD, Auf Wiedersehen Petrovic in Grand Theft Auto IV, Battlefield: Bad Company’s I am Bad Company!, Eager Beaver in MAG, and XXL from Fight Night Round 4.

XXL sounds simple enough, yes?  Just the super-heavyweight belt online.  Here’s the problem, THERE’S ONE!!!!  One…for every player in the world.  One belt.  Getting matched up with a belt holder requires random dumb luck.  Beating them is even harder.  There’s a reason only a select handful of people have this trophy.

 Winner: XXL – Fight Night Round 4

Most Time Consuming Trophy

We’re taking a quick deviation from the extremely hard to the extremely time consuming.  Some of these require little skill, just the patience to see it through.  Others require both the skill and patience.  Curiously enough, two of the more time consuming ones didn’t reach the top spot, Wanted from Grand Theft Auto IV and that ridiculous grind to $5,000,000 and Ultimate Battler from Star Ocean: The Last Hope International as the potential 1000 trophy. 

Fortunately, there isn’t any controversy because those two were left out in favor the “Lord knows how long it takes” trophy, General from Warhawk.  Considering you need 275,000 points, don’t expect to finish it under 1000 hours, or anywhere even close to that.

 Winner: General – Warhawk

Hardest Action Platinum

Getting back to the Hardest awards, we begin to look at the hardest platinums out there.  The first category up, is Action.  Going in, it seemed like it would be a five way showdown.  Then one of those five never made it out of the nominations and a clear favorite emerged.  Three of the games came nowhere near having enough votes, so it came down to a showdown between Grand Theft Auto IV and Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2.  In the end, the brutal, ridiculous, unforgiving difficulty and insane trophy requirements of Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2.  Complete all missions, including the Ultimate Ninja missions?  *stares in disbelief* Complete all missions on Master Ninja difficulty with the highest rank?  *blacks out* NGS2, well done…and I don’t mean that in a good way.

Winner: Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2

Hardest Music Platinum

Possibly the most difficult category to judge going in, this one didn’t disappoint.  Music games are hard to judge because so much of it based on the player’s skills.  For someone that has five thumbs on each hand, these games are impossible.  The introduction of more instruments and ways to play has made this genre even harder to gauge.  Some people may be great at drumming, but not at singing or playing guitar (and every other combination).

The votes ended up closely packed together between all five of the very worthy choices.  Guitar Hero’s Van Halen, Smash Hits, and Metallica all offered extreme challenges that weren’t for the faint of heart (or the appendage inept).  DJ Hero provided a whole new spin (bah-dum-tsh) on the genre that few have mastered.  The Beatles: Rock Band provided a challenge that few expected until they saw the trophy list.  In the end, the challenge provided by Guitar Hero: Metallica, that also introduced Expert+ drumming with a double bass pedal, takes the crown home.

Winner: Guitar Hero: Metallica

Hardest Racing Platinum

Racing games are usually pretty hit or miss in terms of difficulty.  Some are extremely easy while others are a total stomach punch.  Since we had two years of racing games to look at, a couple of nominees weren’t just a stomach punch, but a groin kick and roundhouse kick to the head as well.

Most of the nominees were just time consuming, but not overly difficult (Ferrari Challenge, Midnight Club: Los Angeles, and Need for Speed: Undercover).  The two difficult choices were Motorstorm: Pacific Rift and Wipeout HD.  While Motorstorm is hard on it’s own thanks to the time trials and beating the developer times, Wipeout is pure evil at times.  From the AI that holds weapons and waits for you to pass them until the fire on Elite difficulty, the perfect lines that the AI racers take on Elite, the ridiculous lap time needed to Beat Zico, or the psychedelic challenge that is Zone mode, Wipeout is quite the mountain to climb (but one that feels fantastic to have completed).  Wipeout HD is your winner here.

Winner: Wipeout HD

Hardest RPG Platinum

Going into this, Hardest RPG was the category I was watching.  As a lover of RPG’s, the results were going to be fascinating.  We knew which games were going to be nominated, because let’s face it, it was obvious.  You had a pair of 1000 hour RPG’s on the table in White Knight Chronicles and Star Ocean: The Last Hope International.  There were the two 100+ hour RPG’s with varying difficulty (Cross Edge and Disgaea 3).  And then there was Demon’s Souls.  It’s legitimately hard and frustrating (remember, it only feels like you’re repeatedly running into a brick wall as the enemies kill you after a couple of hits and you have to reload from the start of the dungeon).  That first playthrough is utter hell.  Demon’s Souls pulls the shocking upset here.

Winner: Demon’s Souls

Hardest Shooter Platinum

The battle of the Hardest Shooters was always going to be an odd competition.  We’ve learned from our sister site that the most time consuming shooter is what usually takes the cake here.  MAG, Far Cry 2 (made even more difficult by numerous XP glitches, including have them reset for no apparent reason), Warhawk, and SOCOM: Confrontation (we’re talking about getting the platinum legitimately here) were the ones to watch for this year.  Call of Duty: World at War was the true wild card of the group.  Yes, it was a long painful swansong for Call of Duty in World War II, but that was mostly due to grenade spam and an AI for your side that spent more time admiring the French countryside than fighting the enemy.   

The winner, of course, is Warhawk.  From the insane time requirement to the crazy badges and ribbons that you have to earn, there really wasn’t much doubt which game would win.

Winner: Warhawk

Hardest Sports Platinum

There’s no contest here.  Yes, FIFA 10 and MLB 09 were time consuming.  Yes, UFC 2009 had a long online grind to get through.  Yes, the challenges in Virtua Tennis 2009 were tough.  But Fight Night Round 4 was on a whole different level.  As if beating the Career mode and then beating specific historic fighters on the hardest difficulty wasn’t enough, then came the online trophies.  In particular, there were the three belts trophies.  Hard by good design is one thing.  Hard by poor design is something else entirely.  Fight Night is hard by extremely stupid design.  Yes, what can wrong with having one belt, for each weight class, for each player in the world?  Surely not a small group of people hording the belts and then asking for payments in the form of PSN cards or games in exchange for the belts.  As if it wasn’t hard to enough to get a fight with one of the three people in the world holding a belt, they would ask that you pay out of your own pocket to get the win or they wouldn’t fight you.  EA Canada, well done for making virtual boxing as corrupt as the real thing (allegedly).

Winner: Fight Night Round 4

Hardest PSN 100%

This one was closer than what most people probably thought it would be, but it was still a landslide.  The other worthy contenders (and difficult games in their own right) were given a heavy dose of Pain.  With the brutal difficulty of some of the trophies (many of which are based on pure luck), Pain is, well…painful.  It’s not the easiest game to get into and it’s certainly not for everyone, but the trophies make it much less palatable for many people.

Winner: Pain

Hardest Overall Platinum

Take the toughest of the most difficult of the hardest platinums out there and put them in steel cage to find out who would win.  Fight Night Round 4.  Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2.  Street Fighter IV.  Wipeout HD.  Warhawk.  All four have their own claim as the most brutally difficult platinum trophy out there.  Nothing more needs to said about any of them…except for Street Fighter which has a number of ridiculously hard challenges that can only be described as soul crushing. 

But of course, the boxing game (with the previously mentioned horrible online trophy design that deserves to be mentioned again and again) takes the belt home.  Fight Night Round 4 is definitely a worthy title holder here.

Winner: Fight Night Round 4

“It Costs How Much?!” – Most Ridiculous Peripheral Requirement

Many games require ridiculous peripherals for unlock certain trophies when really, all that you should need is the game and your controller.  What some of these games ask for is utterly ridiculous however.  How many people just had a webcam lying around for Burnout?  What about a second turntable for DJ Hero?  Three extra controllers for Motorstorm: Pacific Rift.  How would you like to purchase some extra card packs for The Eye of Judgment? 

In the end, it was the Guitar Hero 5 trophy, Drumline that gets the honor of being the most ridiculous peripheral requirement.  What was that you ask?  Why having four drum sets lying around and completing a song.  Look, most people have MAYBE one drum set lying around.  Getting four though requires work, and a lot of it.  It’s either calling three friends over or dropping $300 for three extra drum kits.  The only conceivable way to do this is online, and the good luck finding a game.  Horrid, horrid requirement for a single trophy.

Winner: Drumline – Guitar Hero 5

Game With the Most Glitched Trophies

This is a category that we don’t like in existence.  We’d love to delete it, but we sadly can’t.  Too often, a game will launch with such crippling glitches that it ruins the experience.  While some of these are random and can be fixed with another play through, some need to be fixed by the developer.  But what if the developer is unable to fix the glitches?  Gamers, we have a problem. 

The three top vote getters in this category each deserve a mention here.  NBA 2K10 has Good Teammate which doesn’t unlock under any circumstances.  Unfortunately, Visual Concepts has been unable to fix this trophy and has seemingly given up on doing so.  That’s just inexcusable.  Ghostbusters had problems with Payday! and Gozer’s Most Wanted.  To their credit, Terminal Reality fixed it, but if you completed the requirements before the patch, the trophy won’t unlock for you…ever.  And then we have Mercenaries 2 (must...restrain...myself), your obvious winner here.  Nothing more really needs to be said, but it will anyway.  Not only did Pandemic never fix the numerous glitches (Tattooed Millionaire, Billion Dollar Babies, Damage Inc.), but they have since been shut down, and not a fix in sight.  Congratulations Pandemic, your former fans hate you and celebrated your closure.

Winner: Mercenaries 2: World in Flames

Worst Individual Trophy Image (Excluding Platinum Trophies)

The battle of the bland.  What an amazing collection of wonderfully boring trophy images we had to choose from this year.  Thankfully, Burnout Paradise and Just Cause 2 came with the same lackluster recycled images over and over.  Compounding the problem, the achievements on Xbox all had different images.  Thanks for the middle finger Criterion and Avalanche.  Then there was Alone in the Dark: Inferno.  We still don’t know what that game was though. 

A special mention needs to be given to the God of War series though (even though only the first one was nominated).  God of War had three chances this year to wow us with their trophy titles.  Such a creative game filled with unique trophies should have brought more to the table in terms of images.  None did.  The first two were excusable.  It was an HD rerelease.  Having second rate images didn’t seem so bad.  But God of War III was just pathetic.  Come on Santa Monica Studios.  You’re better than that.

Anyway, your winner is Blue Toad Murder Files for talking the laziest route possible, use the trophy icons Sony made.  There are really are no words to describe how lame those images are.

Winner: Blue Toad Murder Files

Worst Platinum Trophy Image

Early on, we discovered that everyone was mentioning the platinum trophy images in the regular trophy image nomination threads.  Since there was so much attention given to them, we gave them their own category.  Four out of five are pretty awful as well.  How Uncharted made it in here is beyond me.  That’s actually kind of nice.  Fortunately, that had a very few amount of votes when compared to the others.  I don’t know what a star has to do with the mafia, but ok.  Once again, there’s that same tiresome Just Cause 2 tile (thanks again Avalanche).  Trivial Pursuit…well, it’s a wedge. 

But the clear winner here is Call of Duty: Classic.  I mean, look at it.  Really?  That’s the best you can come up with?  An open lock.  Hope you didn’t spend too much time in Paint making that one.  It’s the kind of platinum trophy image where, after spending three minutes staring in disbelief, you search for a game that has a quick eight trophies to get it off your card as fast as possible.  Simply hideous.

Winner: Call of Duty: Classic

Worst Publisher for Trophies

With some games, you know the trophy list is going to be dicey just from looking at the publisher of the game.  Each publisher has that one shockingly bad list that makes them stand out.  While some may be fantastic, you always remember the bad ones.  Of all the publishers, two of them stood out above all of the others, Electronic Arts (EA) and Capcom. 

Capcom and their 100KB downloads to pay $5 to unlock content that you already bought.  Those wonderful presents were in Dark Void and Resident Evil 5.  The Bionic Commando list is just poorly, poorly set up.  While the Super Street Fighter IV list made us laugh, it’s really just Street Fighter IV as read by a cartoon character.

The honor though, goes to EA.  To say that EA has some glitchy lists would be like saying the sky is blue.  Bad Company.  Army of Two: The 40^th Day.  Mercenaries 2.  Fortunately, they also have shockingly grind-tastic lists too.  Bad Company.  The Saboteur.  FIFA 10.  And for good measure, they pulled the Lord of the Rings: Conquest and FIFA 09 servers after just over a year making the online trophies impossible to get. Congrats EA, you’re the worst publisher of trophy lists.

Winner: Electronic Arts

Worst Trophy List

How exactly does one define what the worst trophy list is?  Let’s make a quick checklist.  Lazy.  Uncreative.  Easy.  Simple.  Boring.  Well, what game is that?  Why Terminator Salvation, of course. 

Terminator and it’s 11 gold trophies, nine of which were just completing each chapter of the game (the two for beating it on medium and hard).  Can you imagine the meeting where this list was made?  “So, we need to add trophies to this game.”  “Just make them for completing each chapter.”  “That’s nine trophies.”  “Yep.”  “Can we do that?”  “Why not?  Make it work.”  It doesn’t help that the game was bad as well, but this list provided a platinum trophy that appears in almost everyone’s collection.

Winner: Terminator Salvation

Most Original Individual Trophy

I can’t imagine that writing trophy lists is exceptionally fun.  Every now and then though, you have a stroke of brilliance.  Those trophies that require you to do more than complete a piece of the story or get x kills with a certain gun are the most fun to unlock.  To reward those genius moments of the developers, we have this category.

All five of the nominees are worthy.  From thatgamecompany’s Flower asking you to not play the game for seven days (or reset the PS3’s calendar for the impatient of you, tsk tsk) to Visceral’s Dead Space asking you to forego checking out the other guns in favor of just one.  And then came Gearbox’s Borderlands asking you to step on a boat and never forget (preferably without the swim trunks and flippy-floppys though, Pandora is a harsh place).  The two that came down to the wire were Bad Company 2’s The Dentist that asked you get a headshot with the repair tool online and Fallout 3’s demented trophy for placing a live grenade or mine while pickpocketing someone, aptly called Psychotic Prankster.  It was VERY close, but Psychotic Prankster squeaked it out.

Winner: Psychotic Prankster – Fallout 3

Best DLC Trophies

Downloadable content.  Some people love it.  Some people loathe it.  And then there are others that see it as a force of evil that should be stricken from the lands.  Fortunately, most of us enjoy getting to spend extra times in our favorite games and quite a few large games enjoyed massive post-release support.  Amongst those were nominees Burnout Paradise, Fallout 3, Borderlands, and Call of Duty: World at War. 

The winner goes to LittleBigPlanet.  Specifically, it goes to the Metal Gear Solid 4 Level Pack.  While most of the trophies were the standard LBP fare of collecting prize bubbles and acing levels, a few caught our eye.  The speed run boss trophy was a fantastic challenge, as was accumulating 3,750 points in the VR Survival game.  Then there was QuickFire Artiste for firing 40 paintballs in 5 seconds which was mostly about how quickly you can press R1 repeatedly without blowing a ligament.  By though, the best in the set was Thrifty Painter.  Here you had to complete one of the chapters and fire less than 125 shots, effectively asking you to play the level as Solid Snake would.  Kudos to MediaMolecule for such a fantastic DLC set.

Winner: LittleBigPlanet – Metal Gear Solid 4 Level Pack

Best Individual Trophy Image (Excluding Platinum Trophies)

We’re not sure what some of our members were thinking when these images were nominated.  Let’s just say it’s an interesting mix.  If you had to choose a winner between Vault boy sticking a lit bomb in someone’s pocket (Psychotic Prankster from Fallout 3), a phallus (PAIN’s Harder Dicks Bals), a gold plated cartoon version of the infamous Zico (Beat Zico from Wipeout HD), a half naked woman (BlazBlue’s Hands Where I Can See Them), a silhouette of a person standing in front a huge city holding two guns and wearing a crown (Grand Theft Auto IV’s Wanted), which would you choose?  Clearly, most of our members here are male because the half naked chick won.  Coincidentally, this same image won the Achievement Award on x360a.  To quote one Dan Webb, “I’m guessing it was the surreal art style that won the voters over on this one, right? Right?” We agree.  That must be it.

Winner: Hands Where I Can See Them – BlazBlue

Best Platinum Trophy Image

The one extremely nice thing about the trophy system is that feeling of accomplishment when you unlock a platinum trophy.  Of course, you want an awesome image to accompany that feeling.  You want that image to reflect your moment of pride and be something that you want to show off.  Some aren’t, but many do that job well.  Our five nominees do that very well (despite there being one wild card).  Killzone 2 has an awesome looking ISA medal.  Batman: Arkham Asylum has, well…Batman.  LittleBigPlanet gives a platinum smiling Sackboy.  MAG gives a stunned “HUH?!” as you unlock a stick figure with it’s tongue sticking out (really, a stroke of brilliance by Zipper Interactve. All of the trophies up until then were standard…and then you get that).  And then there was Vault boy presenting you with a trophy. 

The voting ended up being close as this was the most balanced category.  Fallout 3’s platinum trophy takes it home though.  Honestly though, any of those would have been fantastic choices.  Some of the ones that couldn’t make the cut were excellent as well.  Really, there could have been 15 nominees in this category.

Winner: Fallout 3

Best Publisher for Trophies

This isn’t even close.  Sony wins it.  I could humor the other nominees, but it would be pointless.  There was always going to be just one winner here.  I knew Sony was going to win once I saw how lopsided the nominations were.  So, let’s spend some more time with Sony. 

Since trophies were introduced, Sony has published some fantastic lists.  Yeah, Uncharted and Uncharted 2 were nearly identical and uninteresting.  But Flower, Echochrome, Heavy Rain, the God of War trilogy, inFamous, Killzone 2, LittleBigPlanet, the PixelJunk series, and Wipeout HD were all fantastic trophy lists.  Kudos to Sony for not only publishing such amazing games, but also for the trophy lists that make the games even more enjoyable.

Winner: Sony Computer Entertainment

Best Trophy List

We’ve been building to this for the entire showcase, the best trophy list.  The pinnacle of the Trophy Awards.  How would we define a good list?  Originality, balance, and a good showing of effort from the developer.  A nice mix of story, random, collection, and grinding trophies.  Since we’re going to really focus on the top three, the bottom two nominations just get a mention.  This year, the two that don’t quite make the cut are Borderlands and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.

Batman: Arkham Asylum - Rocksteady’s Batman game has such a well rounded list whose only weakness is in its difficulty.  The list encourages you to fully explore the game from searching all through Arkham Asylum to find the Riddler clues to completing the Freeflow and Predator challenges.  The random trophies were the list shines though.  Jumping on the back of a Titan and knocking down 10 thugs is just spectacular.  Catching a Batarang?  Bat-tastic.  Really, it’s such an amazing list that some developers should look at it and take a lesson from it.

LittleBigPlanet – Most of MediaMolecule’s masterpiece are standard fare.  Complete the story, find the prize bubbles, etc.  The trophies ask that the players explore every game mode and get the most out of Play, Create, Share.  That completing all of the story levels earns you a trophy called Just Beginning is correct.  All of the Creation options are highlighted from making a creature, to getting your level certain numbers of plays and hearts, and even viewing all of the tutorials.  Playing the community levels is another part with trophies asking you to leave comments, tag levels, or be amongst the first 10 to play a level.  I haven’t even mentioned the unique trophies that, for example, ask you to place a sticker on another player.  It’s a varied list that’s a whole lot of fun to play through.

Fallout 3 – Bethesda’s relaunching of the post-apocalyptic role playing game came with a wonderfully varied list that asks you to explore the breadth of the Capital Wasteland and the different moral choices you can make. Most of the trophies are quest related and there are a few grinding trophies to acquire.  To ask that you reach certain level marks with good, neutral, or bad karma shows off the depth of the moral choices and the dialogue choices that can lead you in one direction or another.  A large number of the quests are off the main story and require some exploration through the Wasteland to find and complete.  And by the way, there’s a trophy for exploring too.  The list is greatly varied, and even though it may take longer than the other nominees, they don’t get old.

_____________________________

All of these lists were fantastic, but Fallout 3 takes the title home.  Bethesda, congratulations!!!  You deserve all of the praise you can get for making such an excellent trophy list.

Winner: Fallout 3

Upcoming Game With the Most Potential

We close this with a look towards out on the horizon.  This fall and early 2011 are looking like their going to be amazing and some of the best that we’ve seen in a long time.  You should be aware that the nominees were decided before the E3 announcements started to roll out.  Because of that, there’s only one Sony exclusive on the list, Gran Turismo 5.  The other nominees are Dead Rising 2, Brink, and Final Fantasy Versus XIII.  The winner though, has so much potential based on the history of the people working on the game and because of the previous entry in the series.  Your choice here is Fallout New Vegas.  The folks at Obsidian have huge footsteps to follow in from Fallout 3.  They’re up to the challenge though. Many members of that studio worked on the original PC Fallouts.  Hopefully we’ll see an entertaining and interesting list (as well as a game) out of them this October.

Winner: Fallout: New Vegas

Thank you to all of you who participated in this in some form or another.  The first 18+ months of trophies were fantastic and produced some stellar fun.  Who knows what the next 12 months holds for gaming.  Based on the release date calendar, some of the best games we may see.  Congrats to all of the winners for 2010.  Until next year when the 2011 edition rings in the site’s third birthday.