Mr.Farmville

Gamescom is over for another year, so here's some of the highlights of the last few days in Cologne.

Honorary award to these two, who were more than willing to have a fight every time someone pointed a camera at them.

And so, another year of Europe's answer to E3 comes to a close, and there was plenty of awesomeness on show from large and small publishers alike.

During or after shows like this, every site under the sun does the usual "Best Game" awards. Just to be different, here are some alternative awards to highlight the variety of things we got a chance to see and do in Cologne this year.

• The Malcolm Reynolds Award for Best Fusion of Anachronistic Technologies: Larian Studios' Dragon Commander, which fuses high fantasy with high technology, featuring men in armor, swords, axes, airships and a dragon with a jetpack.
• The Marmite Award for Thing I Thought I'd Hate But Actually Liked: Modern Warfare 3's Survival mode, despite being part of yet another military shooter -- a genre I'm not a big fan of -- turns out to be a lot of cooperative score attack fun.
• The George Lucas Award for Ambitious Proclamations Regarding Narrative Continuity: BioWare and their assertion that Mass Effect 3 will be an ideal entry point to the series despite it being the end of the trilogy.
• The Ubiquitous Currywurst Award for Repeating The Same Thing Most Times: EA's press conference, featuring the word "innovative" more times in an hour than you'd eat spicy sausage during a visit to Cologne.
• The Nolan North By Moonlight Award for Best Performance By Nolan North in a Game that Isn't Uncharted 3: Sly Cooper 4, which features Nolan North as one of the boss characters, not sounding like Nolan North for once.
• The Jason Wilson Award for Excellence in Strategy Games: Paradox Interactive, who have a strong lineup of immensely, frighteningly deep strategic games inbound.
• The Peter Molyneux Award for Ballsy Ambition: Snowberry's Masters of the Broken World, which features Populous-style god gameplay, Civ-style building and exploration and King's Bounty-style turn based combat all in one game.
• The Mizuguchi Award for Best Fusion of Music and Gameplay: Sound Shapes for PlayStation Vita, which offers retro platforming gameplay coupled with graphic-based music composition.
• The Phantom Award for Supposedly Big Announcement that No-One Cared About: Sony's proud proclamation at its press conference that FIFA 13 would support PlayStation Move, which elicited a completely silent reaction from the gathered audience.
• The SkyNet Award for Embracing Online Worryingly Wholeheartedly: Ubisoft and their attempts to diminish the distinction between "online" and "offline" -- even knowing that their DRM strategy, which wasn't mentioned but is clearly part of this plan, is not popular with gamers.
• The "PAF!" Award for Best Game Based on a European Comic: The Adventures of Tintin, which plays pleasingly like an old-school platformer but has appropriately HD-ified graphics for 2011.
• The Familiarity Doesn't Breed Contempt If You Add Some New Stuff Award for Adding New Stuff to a Familiar Thing: NCSoft's newly-revealed MMORPG WildStar, which combines fairly traditional MMO presentation and combat with some innovative new approaches, particularly surrounding character roles and quests.
• The Houston Mission Control Award for Outstanding Post-Launch Support: CD Projekt Red and The Witcher 2, which is getting a huge free upgrade on September 29.
• The Kratos Memorial Award for Angriest Game in Show: Asura's Wrath from Capcom, which is the most ridiculous thing you'll ever see, in the best possible way.
• The Deja Vu Award for Reveal We Already Knew About: Capcom informing us of two of the new characters for Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 that we already knew about.
• The David Cage Award for Cinematic Presentation: Namco's Ace Combat: Assault Horizon trying its very best to break down the barriers between cutscenes and gameplay.
• The More Console Games Need Level Editors Award for Having a Level Editor and Being a Console Game: Ridge Racer Unbounded, and its excellently simple but flexible City Creator system.
• The Gordon Freeman Memorial Award for Episodic Presentation: Capcom's Resident Evil: Revelations, which features a complete narrative divided into smaller, easily digestible episodes.
• The DC Universe Reboot Award for OMG WTF Did They Do to That Character?: Ninja Theory's Devil May Cry, which looks like fun but players are resistant to due to the team's stubbornness over Dante's redesign.
• The Browser Games are Games Too Award: Supercell's Gunshine.net, which provides a hardcore MMO experience right within your browser.
• The Latinum is the Source of All Evil Award for Best Free Star Trek Game: Star Trek: Infinite Space, which offers an excellently full-scale 3D MMO experience in your browser. For free.
• The George Orwell Award for Best Dystopian Future: TopWare's Scivelation, featuring an immensely detailed back story and promising looking gameplay, even at an early stage of development.
• The This Looks A Bit Like Borderlands Award for Looking A Bit Like Borderlands: Red 5 Studios' promising looking free to play MMO shooter Firefall, which combines open world PvE gameplay with PvP battles, and looks a little bit like Borderlands.
• The Better Late than Never Award: Gearbox, for adding a minimap to Borderlands 2, among many other things.
• The Game I'm Most Likely to Play with My Girlfriend This Year Award for Couch-Friendly Co-Op: Rayman Origins, with its amusing presentation, challenging difficulty and co-op friendly mechanics will be the ideal game with which to sit down with friends and/or loved ones and enjoy together.

This is just a selection of highlights from the show; be sure to check out the Gamescom hub page for the full list of stories from the last week.

Source: Daily News from GamePro.com