The nominees for The Most Pointless Awards Not Given By SpikeTV have been announced. No real surprises here, but there never are.

The strategy nominees are:

Sid Meier’s Civilization Revolution (Firaxis/2K Games for PS3, Xbox 360, Wii)
Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts (Relic/THQ for PC)
Halo Wars (Ensemble Studios/Microsoft Game Studios for PC, Xbox 360)
Universe at War: Earth Assault (Petroglyph/Sega for PC, Xbox 360)
World in Conflict (Massive Entertainment/Sierra for PC)

Isn’t it interesting that three of these are being cross-developed for the 360, and two of those three are RTS? Halo Wars, I’m fairly sure, has the console as its primary platform which makes it even more intriguing. CivRev is the only title of the five not available on the PC.

I guess I am now professionally obligated to try the World in Conflict MP beta. I hadn’t payed a lot of attention to this game until Dave Long wrote some stuff about it, and a colleague emailed me last month to ask if I’d played any preview versions.

The thing is, World in Conflict was a nominee in 2006, too. So was Bioshock, a Best in Show nominee two years running. Mass Effect and Hellgate: London return in the RPG category. Mass Effect won last year.

This is my big issue with the E3 Awards. I guess there’s nothing wrong with honoring games on display for marketing purposes, but there should be a one year limit on nomination, and only games scheduled to come out in the next calendar year should be eligible. Why? Because this would restrain the feeding frenzy over stuff still years away from completion. People were all excited about Spore, and now? How do these awards help the industry if they are given at a point so far from release that people forget about them? How do they help consumers, when the hype is for a game too far in the future to allow sound judgment?

I’ve never been to E3, so maybe you have to be there to get what these prizes are being based on. But I don’t see it. What are these awards honoring? Quality product or quality displays?