Mass Effect 2 Wins Top BAFTA Game Award, Heavy Rain Takes Three Categories

EA and Bioware's Mass Effect 2 won the award for best game at the British Academy of Film and Television Arts game awards ceremony tonight, while Sony and Quantic Dream's Heavy Rain won three other prizes, including ones for technical innovation and story. Mass Effect 2's win follows on the title's Game of the Year award at last month's the AIAS Interactive Achievement Awards, which also saw the game recognized for best story and best role-playing game. Heavy Rain was the only game to take home multiple BAFTA awards from among the night's 16 categories, also winning for best original music after receiving six nominations. Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, which led the BAFTA nominations with seven nods, took home a single award for best action game, while Activision's Call of Duty: Black Ops took home the retailer-sponsored and publicly voted-upon GAME Award from among six nominations. Playdead's dark XBLA puzzle-platformer Limbo didn't win a single award, despite four nominations, while Nintendo's Super Mario Galaxy 2 won the award for best gameplay from among its four nods. Playfish's My Empire won BAFTA's first-ever award for best social network game. Grappling-hook-based indie platformer Twang!, from That Game Studio (which now goes by Marklund Games), took home BAFTA's Ones To Watch Award, which is granted in association with Dare to Be Digital. Microsoft's Kinect Sports was the only Kinect title to win an award on the night, earning note as the year's best family game. Peter Molyneux was awarded this year's BAFTA Fellowship for being what BAFTA CEO Amanda Berry called "one of the leading figures in the development of video games as an art form and an inspiration to the next generation of creative minds." A full list of tonight's winners: Action Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood Gaelec Simard – Ubisoft Artistic Achievement God of War III Stig Asmussen, Ken Feldman, Cecil Kim – SCE Santa Monica Studio Best Game Mass Effect 2 Development Team – Electronic Arts/BioWare Family Kinect Sports Development Team – Microsoft Games Studios/Rare Gameplay Super Mario Galaxy 2 Koichi Hayashida, Yoshiaki Koizumi, Takashi Tezuka – Nintendo/Nintendo Handheld Cut the Rope Efim Voinov, Semyon Voinov – Chillingo/Zeptolab Multiplayer Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit Development Team – Electronic Arts/Criterion Games Original Music Heavy Rain Normand Corbeil – Sony, Quantic Dream & XDev Studio Europe Social Network Game My Empire Development Team – Playfish/Playfish Sports F1 2010 Development Team – Codemasters/Codemasters Birmingham Story Heavy Rain David Cage, Guillaume de Fondaumiere, Scott Johnson – Sony, Quantic Dream & XDev Studio Europe Strategy Civilization V Jon Shafer, Dorian Newcomb, Brian Wade – 2K Games/Firaxis Technical Innovation Heavy Rain David Cage, Guillaume de Fondaumiere, Scott Johnson – Sony, Quantic Dream & XDev Studio Europe Use of Audio Battlefield: Bad Company: 2 Patrick Bach, David Goldfarb – Electronic Arts/DICE Ones To Watch Award Twang! Jocce Marklund, Annette Nielsen, Linus Nordgren, Marcus Heder, Thomas Finlay (That Game Studio) GAME Award Call of Duty: Black Ops Activision Blizzard UK Ltd/Treyarch