This is it, the official list of winners for the Game Critics Awards: Best of E3 2007. Before you jump to the full list, some stats:

- Rock Band leads with three wins including Best of Show. Mass Effect earns two including Best Console.
- Xbox 360 is leading platform with 11 wins, followed by eight wins for games playable on PS3
- Electronic Arts leads with six wins total, followed by Microsoft with three

Grats to Rock Band for Best of Show and LittleBigPlanet for Best Original. Hit the jump for the full, official and final list.

Last week we posted our nominees for the Game Critics Best of E3 awards. Today, the Game Critics announced which games were selected by all of the judges as finalists for the awards handed out for the show. Remember each judging publication gets to vote, then they take those votes, tally the scores and select the finalists.

Some highlights before you hit the jump:
Rock Band leads with five nominations, followed by Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare and Bioshock with 4 nominations each

EA leads publishers with 14 nominations, followed by Activision, Microsoft and Nintendo with 8 nominations each

Xbox 360 most nominated platform with 38 nominations, followed by PS3 with 29, PC with 21 and Wii with 14.

Hit the jump for the full break down and to post your choices. Keep in mind these games had to be playable at E3 to be nominated, meaning no Killzone 2, no MGS4, etc, etc. The final list of winners will be unveiled on Tuesday, July 31.

MCV is reporting, source-free, that next year's E3 will not be in Santa Monica.

Nosing around the story, something we've been asking execs about since last week, I hear that, that is likely true, but certainly has yet to be officially decided.

When I spoke with Robbie Bach, president of Microsoft's entertainment and devices unit and ESA board member, earlier this week about Peter Moore quitting Microsoft, I had a chance to hit him up for information about the future of E3.

He seemed happy with the format, but not so much with the logistics and said the future location would be on the agenda for the ESA's next meeting, set for later this year:

"My view is I thought there were some significant advantages for the new format. Certainly there are logistics that ESA will work on, but I personally liked the format a little bit more than the zaniness of e3s past.

Lets hope so, because E3 scavenger hunt is not a fun game to play on deadline.

All change again for E3 2008 [MCV]

Looks like we had a 48-way tie. So here's the deal. I'm going to leave it up to the 48 winners of the bet-off. Either I can do a random drawing and give the person selected the prize, ooor, we can do another bet-off among those 48 for what will be shown at Leipzig and I'll find some other cool prize to throw on top of what we're giving away for the E3 prize.

I'll give the 48 of you until this evening to decide. Just drop into comments (the 48 only please) and tell me which you would prefer. The full list of winners is after the jump. (A HUGE thank you to RDANEEL who went through the list and picked them out for us.)

Oh, I suppose you want to know what you won? I decided, despite the fact that I love them with all of my heart, to give away those super awesome, kick-ass Stranglehold lighters. On the one hand I'll be sad to see them go,but on the other hand it's good for the soul to give stuff you like away and I'm sure whoever wins they will really appreciate them.

Shigeru Miyamoto was all over E3 this year. As I mentioned in a post last week, one of the major benefits of this year's show was that developers seemed to have a bit more time to get chatty with the competition, seeing each other's stuff, even playing each other's stuff. It was certainly a kinder, gentler E3.

This tiny gallery shows Miyamoto's visit to the Ubisoft suite where he checked out Haze, Assassin's Creed (Yes, that's Jade there doing the demo. I bet she remembered his name) and other games. Oh, and that's him shaking hands with Ubi pres Yves Guillemot. Hit the jump for Epileptic Game's fantastic vid of "The Shiggy", Miyamoto's gamer's face while watching Haze... I think the game might have freaked him out a bit.

Kotaku was lucky enough to be added to the list of judges for the 2007 Game Critics Awards this year. The E3 judges, there's 36 of us, ramble the show floor and spend tons of time leading up to the show looking for what will end up being the best games of the year's expo.

It's a challenging task, and one meant to reflect each of the judge's publications, not just their personal views. The final vote for the 18 or so categories is due tomorrow and we just wrapped up. But before we lay Kotaku's hard-argued votes on your, I wanted to give the readers a chance to have their own say. Hit the jump to check out the categories and descriptions and then vote in comments.

A couple of rules: For most categories the games had to be playable. To nominate any games in a category you had to nominate at least three, but no more than five. This is true of all but the final two "special commendation categories." Each game can only be nominated in one "genre category". The votes Kotaku casts ( and remember we've already made up our minds) will be worth points toward the final decision by the Game Critics as a whole. Since each category can have up to five nominations, the first choice is worth five points and so on.

I've always viewed the Best of E3 awards with a bit of skepticism, mostly because I had no idea how they worked. Now that I do, I can say that they're not a trivial affair and that the games that earn them, probably deserve them.

When Microsoft goes to E3, they go big. In fact, they rented the entire hotel, The Viceroy, and dimmed the lights in romantic hypnotism. The locale was perfect, as if it were summoned from the ground by Peter Moore Don Mattrick himself. Doors were Xbox green, walls were...Xbox white. And even the carpet had X's. I originally thought they repainted the entire building, but PR informed me that The Viceroy had always looked that way. Well...before Microsoft spent the month before E3 cleaning the place up, as a cab driver informed me later. Oh, and that's Gizmodo's Jason Chen wearing an iPhone shirt before an interview with Moore.