Welcome to the 2011 OXM GOTY Awards! We’ll be running down our picks from the best in gaming all week long, concluding on Thursday by naming OXM’s Game of the Year 2011. You can go here for the full list of winners.

(Most of) today's OXM 2011 GOTY Awards celebrate the year's best online content, whether it be the games you can download from your couch or the multiplayer experiences that allow you to test your mettle against the Xbox Live community. And then there's the greatest measuring stick in gaming -- Gamerscore. We wrap it all together with the best download of 2011 -- the Xbox Live Game of the Year!

Best Achievement of the Year: “Alpha Vs. Omega” (Dead Rising 2: Off the Record) 
Our favorite kinds of Achievements reward players for doing something intriguing that they wouldn’t ordinarily do in a game, and Off the Record’s “Alpha Vs. Omega” (20G) fits that description spot-on. To earn it, you have to keep the very first survivor you meet (Denyce) alive for most of the game — long enough to have her attack the second-to-last Psycho (Sgt. Boykin). Whether you do that by having her fight alongside you the whole time or by locking her away somewhere and periodically feeding her until that fatal confrontation, you’re still altering your playthrough in a major (and interesting) way — much as players did to snag Left 4 Dead 2’s “Guardin’ Gnome” Achievement. We like!

Best Co-Op Multiplayer: Portal 2
(Runners-up: Dead Island, F.E.A.R. 3, Gears of War 3, Saints Row: The Third)

You: “Wait…what? How do we get up there?”
Friend: “Um, maybe if you just move over onto that platform, shoot a portal at that wall…no, wait. You need to put a portal over to the right.” [Uses portal gun to mark the spot to shoot.]
You: “But, if I do that, where do I put the exit portal? Oh, hang on! I get it! I just need to put one portal there, then put the exit over there. That way, you can drop through here, and you’ll bounce on the repulsion gel to reach that platform.”
Friend: “Hell yeah! We are freakin’ geniuses!”

Only one candidate in this category made us feel like Nancy Drew with an astrophysics Ph.D. every time we puzzled out a solution in tandem with a buddy. Thank you, Portal 2. Our parents would be so proud of us.

DLC of the Year: Freddy Krueger
(Runners-up: Battlefield: Bad Company 2 Vietnam, Deus Ex: Human Revolution — The Missing Link, L.A. Noire’s “Nicholson Electroplating” and “The Naked City” cases)
Call it a guilty pleasure — he is, after all, a sadistic serial killer — but we love everything about this downloadable fighter for Mortal Kombat. We dig his brutal, flesh-rending slash attacks. We love his Fatalities, which involve pulling an opponent into the ground (followed by a Nightmare on Elm Street−style blood geyser!) or throwing them into a blazing furnace and slamming the door shut, amputating their upraised arm. We even like his Babality, where he’s a tiny tot with trademark claws and red-green sweater. But what we like most is that while he follows the fighting-game tradition of borrowing a popular character from a different license (see: Spartan in Dead or Alive 4, Ezio in Soulcalibur V), he also fits perfectly within the Mortal Kombat universe, as if he’d always been there. Now that’s how you do DLC.

Indie Game of the Year: DLC Quest 
Read about it over at Indieverse!

The Harmonix Award For Best Fan Service: Zen Studios
(Runners-up: Obsidian (Fallout: New Vegas DLC), Behemoth (Castle Crashers’ Pink Knight DLC), Capcom (Dead Rising 2: Off the Record)
“Who?” some of you will ask. And that’s okay, because the makers of Pinball FX 2 (and its predecessor) seem like the very opposite of gloryhounds. What they’ve focused on — continually, with 10-plus add- ons since PFX 2’s release — is supporting this XBLA game with a steady stream of new tables, including the occasional freebie. For keeping this mini-platform going for over a year now, we salute them.

Most Bizarre Avatar Items (Three-way tie, shown above)

Best Multiplayer Game: Battlefield 3
(Runners-up: Gears of War 3, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, Assassin’s Creed Revelations) 
The past year was bliss for competitive-multiplayer fans, coughing up a cascade of high-quality opportunities to shoot friends and strangers for XP. From Gears of War 3’s endlessly inventive means of carving up Locust (or COG in Beast mode) to shiving hooded chumps in Assassin’s Creed Revelations to ratcheting up your rank in Modern Warfare 3 — if you have a Live Gold membership, it’ll get a hell of a workout for months to come. But dull single-player campaign aside, Battlefield 3’s the game whose squad-style matches — along with the scale of its maps and the potential for sheer carnage via its suite of vehicles — ensure it’ll never be deleted from our hard drives.

XBLA Game of the Year: Torchlight
(Runners-up: Bastion, Dungeon Defenders, Ms. Splosion Man, Trenched)
Who needs friends on Xbox Live when you have a wide world of solo plundering and monster-bashing to do? Deceptively simple dungeon-crawler Torchlight doesn’t need any fancy-schmancy multiplayer or convoluted combat engines or, well, an epic storyline, for that matter. This isn’t one of those grandiose role-playing experiences packed full of love interests and moral choices. Instead, Torchlight caters to a different side of our gaming brains — the one that lusts after loot and leveling, that compartment of gray matter that treasures swapping goods with merchants and imbuing their armor.

And it’s this pure, Diablo-esque experience that kept us glued to our couches and made us mop up nerd drool when the inevitable Torchlight 2 was announced earlier this year. In 2011 the XBLA domain housed plenty of competition, ranging from the silly, equally addicting platformer Ms. Splosion Man to Trenched’s and Dungeon Defenders’ action/tower-defense hybrid play to the sublime hacking, slashing, and storytelling in Bastion. But it’s Torchlight’s superbly executed, no-nonsense approach that put it over the top.