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Special Award: Hardware Development: nVidia
The nVidia story can be summed up in a single word: redemption. This graphics chip-maker entered the PC industry on a sour note four years ago with its ill-fated NV-1 multimedia processor, which aspired to be a Ginsu, cutting through all kinds of media, but wound up as table scraps. Undaunted by the setback, nVidia, then a privately funded company, knew it had one more shot at success in this brutally competitive market. So nVidia aimed squarely to accelerate Direct3D, and later OpenGL, and decided to forgo a proprietary API. The company scored. And it scored big with the RIVA 128, proving that a card that accelerated only standard APIs well could thrive. More recently, nVidia unleashed the RIVA TNT, the first 2D/3D board to challenge the supremacy of the mighty Voodoo2. With its latest, the TNT2, nVidia will remain a tough competitor throughout this year.
Special Award: Musical Score - WWII Fighters
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Don Veca and the sound team at Jane's Combat Simulations deserve special recognition for creating a flight sim in which you don't immediately want to disable the music in flight. In fact, you may end up spending time exploring the sim's virtual museum just to listen to the superb recordings of big-band music.
Once you're in the air, the orchestral soundtrack follows your actions like a movie soundtrack. Break from the pack and head off into the sunset doing aerobatics and you'll get inspirational, uplifting melodies. Hit a patch of flak that starts to send your buddies dropping to the ground in flames, and the score will respond with a dark, foreboding passage. Head home after a successful mission and you'll hear patriotic tunes that will make you proud that you've done your part in the world's last "good" war.
Special Award: Quick-fix Gaming - Big Race U.S.A.
Some things are best enjoyed in small doses: fine brandies, a child's unconditional love, the commemorative boxed set of Wilson Phillips recordings featuring the group's ground-breaking work with Tom Waits. Just a brief taste of these things is enough. In the past year, the best, quickest way to bring a smile to your face was by playing Empire's Big Race U.S.A.
Absolutely ideal for those ten-minute spurts of freedom during the workday when your boss wasn't looking, Big Race U.S.A. provided a delicious, retro gaming experience second to none while it set a new standard in PC pinball. With incredible physics, a host of tweakable options, and gameplay that was a perfect blend of reward and challenge, Big Race U.S.A. also proved so incredibly addictive it might as well have shipped with a set of cranial meat hooks.
Next: Coaster of the Year
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