In the likely event that you dismissed E3 as a travesty and haven’t been following any stories since the now-tiny event closed its doors, you likely missed the announcements last week of the critics’ Best of E3 choices. The awards, which are determined by a group of journalists in the North American press, are meant to highlight particularly outstanding games in the hopes of ginning up even more public interest before the titles make their debuts. For the most part, the winners in this year’s show were quite worthy (Fallout 3, LittleBigPlanet), but Variety editor Ben Fritz has some beef with a couple of choices, particularly the critically acclaimed Mirror’s Edge and the eagerly-anticipated Gears of War 2.

"The only winner I really disagreed with was Mirror’s Edge for best original game.

"To me it seemed more gimmicky (A hot chick in the future who does parkour!) than substantive to me, the first person perspective really didn’t work for a game where you’re trying to manipulate a character through complex spatial puzzles, and the challenge often felt more about timing (can you jump off this ledge with enough speed at the very last second?) than brains."

That wasn’t all though, as Fritz went on to take a couple shots at Gears of War 2, ultimately calling it "Gears of War 1.5."

"The improvements are so minor over Gears 2 [sic] that I was really surprised to see my fellow critics pick it over Resistance 2, which strikes me as a much more dramatic leap forward in campaign and multi-player."

Anyone else agree with Fritz that Mirror’s Edge is overhyped and Gears of War 2 is just more of the same? I can see his points about Gears, as what I saw of the game didn’t show a lot of innovation, but I strongly disagree about Mirror’s Edge, as it seems to be just the sort of thing gaming needs. Here you have a unique set of gameplay mechanics and an original story, with a strong female protagonist to boot. Seems to me these should be the types of games we encourage and promote if we want gaming to move beyond the sequel-fest it has become in recent years. Just my two cents, let’s hear yours.

- Via CVG