For the sixth year in a row, I have tallied the number of video games I played in the last year. For the sixth year in a row, it's an absurd amount.

While Portal 2 walked away with Kotaku's official game of the year award for 2011, Kotaku commenters held their own damn awards this year and they ended with a resounding chorus of "FUS ROH DAH".

It's been a lot of fun cataloguing and recognizing the best video game music of the year. We've gone from AAA blockbusters to indie games, sweeping melodies to ambient synths, heroic themes to dread-soaked atmospherics. Some of the games built music into their gameworlds, while others brought in full orchestras and…

We love video games here at Kotaku. We love them so much. We think they had a good year in 2011, although it was a pretty weird year. We had the PlayStation Network going down. We got a 3DS and, at least in Japan, a Vita. We got Minecraft and Duke Nukem Forever and even the first brand-new Assassin's Creed game in...…

After several weeks of debate, discussion, and deliberation, Kotaku's 2011 Game of the Year Award came down to a simple vote, and the majority voted for science.

The hardest thing at the end of the year is to parse yourself from the hype you're experiencing and think back to the games you played during the summer, the spring, and yes, 2011's early months.

2011 saw its share of disappointments, but it was also a year that contained a good number of nice surprises. Some were games we just didn't see coming—they snuck up on us and grabbed us with their excellence. Others were games that we thought were going to be terrible or at best so-so, but which would up being…

2011 is coming to an end. Best of lists and worst of lists, it's time to look back at the year that was.

What Valve did this year seemed impossible: they improved on the perfection that was the first Portal. That feat was accomplished, surprisingly, by making everything about players' return to Aperture Science less perfect. We got a scuffed-up, messier experience that resonated more deeply than any other game this…

This may sound off-key coming from the guy who nominated the 12th edition of annual sports franchise for overall GOTY last year. But I'm inclined to say "None of the above," this year. I prefer for these honors to truly mean the game, at minimum, was the best at what it did. This year's big games, nearly all of them…

I played a ton of games in 2011. More, probably, than any other year of my life. So when it came time to choose the best from among them, I spent a lot of time thinking back, sifting through the triumphs and the frustrations, the unexpected joys and the unfortunate disappointments.

This year has been good to gaming. Hold on, let me restate that. This year has been amazing to gaming.

Oh look. Somebody is voting for Skyrim as Game of the Year. How shocking.

What was the best game of the year, according to those of us here at Kotaku?

Some of us think that 2011 was a good year for video games because Arkham City, Skyrim and the new Zelda weren't half-bad.