Welcome to the 2011 OXM GOTY Awards! All this week we’ll be running down our picks from the best in games, concluding Thursday with OXM’s 2011 Game of the Year. Check back here for the full list of winners. Or, if you're having a hard time waiting, you could just go ahead and buy the January edition of our magazine, which has our full list of winners, bonus categories, but in a handheld, easy to fold-up and put in your pocket edition.

Today we're kicking off our GOTY Awards by honoring the developers, writers, and those more on the backend of games, be it for crafting an awesome story, inventing a memorable character, composing resonating music, launching new technology and just generally doing all the creative things to make our overall experience better. 

Best Story: Catherine 
(Runners-up: Batman: Arkham City, Dragon Age II, Portal 2)
Few games tackle the twisted, tangled world of adulthood as their subject matter — and even fewer put the kind of weird, wacky, and undeniably Japanese spin on it that Catherine, Atlus’ cinematic puzzler, does. This tale about the love triangle foisted upon an unsuspecting everyman spins together mystery and horror in a way you’d expect to get from a Twilight Zone–esque TV show (a notion suggested in the game’s intro).

Catherine always kept us guessing — whether in cutscenes illustrating the day’s dilemma, in evening time sorting out the chaotic lives of the supporting cast, or in nighttime struggles up block-towers to better understand what nightmare realm we were in. And with its choose-your-own-adventure format and eight different endings, its structure mirrored its theme: that the choices we make as adults are usually pretty murky, and their results are often just due to attempts at survival in a big, uncertain, and scary world.

Sure, the other contenders for the Best Story crown may have had more complex characters and relationships (Dragon Age II); led us along a surprising, incredibly well-executed path to deeper character knowledge (Portal 2); or given us an amazingly epic adventure (Batman: Arkham City). But only Catherine delivered a bildungsroman of a videogame: its true-to-life moments of shooting the breeze with friends, figuring yourself out through chats with strangers, and juggling the needs of significant others — combined with the surreal juxtaposition of the “nightmare” puzzles and their monster-of-the-night — gave us a unique, virtual echo of the struggle toward maturity.

Developer of the Year: Double Fine Productions
Rocksteady Studios (Batman: Arkham City) and Epic Games (Gears of War 3) both had great years as developers at the top of their game. When we thought about who really surprised and impressed us in 2011, though, our thoughts kept coming back to Double Fine. Unlike the powerhouses we just mentioned, Tim Schafer’s studio didn’t have one singularly mind-blowing game we can cite. Instead, it had a year of constant output and creativity. Two more spawn of their Amnesia Fortnight meetings — quirky puzzler Stacking and action-y tower-defense game Trenched — continued Double Fine’s successful march on Live Arcade. Meanwhile, the enormously charming Sesame Street: Once Upon a Monster represented three firsts: the developer’s first licensed game, its first kids game, and its first Kinect game. What’s next? At this point, the studio seems capable of anything.

Best Art Direction: El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron
Runners-up: Bastion, Child of Eden, Rayman Origins, Stacking
Every one of the games considered for this award brought amazing and original visual design to the Xbox 360 in 2011. Some had luscious animation, others had unique style, but El Shaddai epitomized excellent art direction. Every level brought a brand-new look to the table, and it all worked within the game’s bounds. We enjoyed the gameplay, but the visuals were the true star of El Shaddai — we kept playing to see what the next stage would bring.

Best Music: Bastion
Runners-up: Shadows of the Damned, Child of Eden, Stacking, ilomilo
2011 was not only a year of spectacular games — it was also 12 months packed with spectacular game music. From the rockabilly goth of Grasshopper’s Shadows of the Damned to the euphoric remixed J-pop that gave Child of Eden so much of its emotional punch, there was no shortage of excellence to choose from. But even in a field with ilomilo’s whimsical windchime-like tracks and Stacking’s old-timey flourishes, one game was our clear winner. Darren Korb’s fantastic compositions help tell the tale of Bastion like no other, using melancholy vocal tracks and western-flavored guitar licks layered over inventive electronic beats. It’s masterful stuff that left as powerful an impression on us as Bastion itself.

Best New Game Tech: L.A. Noire’s MotionScan
If you’ve played L.A. Noire — heck, even if you’ve played it and hated it — we bet you’re nodding knowingly at this award. Thanks to MotionScan, Noire’s new facial-animation technology that uses 32 cameras to capture HD footage of an actor’s face, the game’s interrogation scenes reach a stunning level of realism. Muscles twitch, lips curl, eyes dart nervously (and look alive) — in short, lots of little details you’d see in a real-life conversation are right there on the suspects’ faces. As a result, you feel like you’re talking to actual people in a way that, say, the Mass Effect games can’t touch. Now that this achievement’s been unlocked, it’ll be hard to go back to other games with lots of up-close chatter.

Best 3DTV Support: Gears of War 3
Both Crysis games better brought their worlds to life in 3D; Batman: Arkham City got a subtle extra layer with the glasses on; and Assassin’s Creed Revelations’ 3D made Leaps of Faith a little more breathtaking. But it’s Gears of War 3 that best exploded out of your shiny new HDTV this year. The game’s dramatic setpieces became places you felt like you could reach out and touch, and the bulky COG characters were given a physical presence and context within the Lambent-overrun world of Sera that brought its destroyed beauty to life. Sh*t yeah!

Best Voice-acting: Dragon Age II
(Runners-up: Batman: Arkham City, L.A. Noire, Portal 2)
Virtual characters require a lot of work to make them as endearing as the ones in Dragon Age II. Hawke’s motley band of companions could’ve easily relied on the great dialogue and one-liners written for them. But ping-ponging between humor, conflict, and romance in a way that’s believable — and usually within the span of one conversation — demands genuine voice-acting talent. Not only did DAII’s impressive voice actors nail it, but they also sound like they had an absolute ball doing it.

Best Character: Wheatley (Portal 2) 
(Runners-up: Vincent Brooks (Catherine), Grayson Hunt (Bulletstorm), The Gunstringer (The Gunstringer)
It’s not every year we crown someone so amazingly dim-witted as our “favorite new character.” But the surprisingly dense Wheatley charmed the Aperture Science jumpsuit off of us with his idiotic antics. His path from hand-wringing savior to, well, what he becomes by the end of Portal 2 (hint: he’s still a moron, just a more ambitious moron) makes him all the more memorable. We can’t wait to see what role any future Portal saga will have Wheatley assuming — though we can safely guess it won’t be “rocket scientist.”