Is E3 really finished? After weeks of planning and scheduling, a frenzied four days of press conferences, meetings, and demos—not including dozens of games played—we're finally done. While there still may be some coverage coming from our interviews and hands-on time with the games, this is as good a time as any to present our E3 awards.

This was a big show filled with games, parties, lines, headaches, and, of course, celebrities. What rates as a Golden Ars? Here are our picks.

Why is the issue of sexual orientation so explosive that the very act of saying the word "gay" or "lesbian" is sometimes against the rules? Bioware found itself on the wrong end of this controversy when a community manager gracelessly began locking threads that discussed the issue, and then claimed that there simply were no gay or lesbian characters in Star Wars. Maybe those words don't exist in galaxies far, far, away, but the characters often do: Bioware themselves created a game with a character who laid down with another woman as with a man.

Sony was a part of a similar controversy after the words "gay" and "Jew" were edited out of Home, the company's social online service for PS3 owners. And Microsoft made headlines when the company banned a player who self-identified as a lesbian, claiming any notice of sexual orientation was against the terms of service.

In some ways it's unfair to take the world of gaming to task for its immature handling of gay and lesbian issues. After all, it's hard to find a game that takes any kind of relationship seriously. This is an art form that knows how to show two people killing each other nearly perfectly, but seems to turn into a bunch of fifth-graders when dealing with a kiss, much less when that kiss is between two men or two women. It's clear that something has to give, although companies only seem to pay attention after receiving the wrong kind of attention for their policies.

Twenty years ago this week, Nintendo released the Game Boy, its first handheld video game console. Excited Japanese customers snatched up the innovative monochrome handheld by the thousands, which retailed for 12,500 yen (about $94 at 1989 rates) at launch—a small price to pay for what seemed to be an NES in your pocket. Nintendo initially offered four games for the new Game Boy: Super Mario Land, Baseball, Alleyway, and Yakuman (a mahjong game), but the number of available titles quickly grew into the hundreds.

Later that year, the Game Boy hit the US at $89.99 with a secret weapon—Tetris as its pack-in game. Selling over a million units during the first Christmas season, the Game Boy proved equally successful in the US, and that success was by no means short-lived: to date, Nintendo has sold 118.69 million units of the original Game Boy line (not including Game Boy Advance) worldwide, making it the longest running dynasty in the video game business. So in honor of the Game Boy's twentieth anniversary, we give you six reasons why the Game Boy dominated the handheld video game market during most of its astounding two-decade run.

Once made up solely of bizarre, quirky titles that gained little more than cult followings, the music game genre has arguably become the strongest area in all of gaming over recent years. Titles like Guitar Hero and Rock Band consistently top the charts despite their high price tags, earning absurd amounts of money for publishers and developers. But these games weren't overnight successes. The rise to prominence of music games has been a long time coming. Join us as we take a look at the history of the genre, and at how it grew from being something quirky and Japanese-only to a red-hot global phenomenon.

We've all heard the argument repeated by pundits and politicians in the post-Columbine era: teens who play violent video games are at an extreme risk of being corrupted by the violent media they're exposed to. It's a theory that certainly seems to resonate with concerned parents in particular. After all, no one wants to knowingly endanger their child's mental well-being, especially with something that seems like an innocent pastime. But in an argument that will probably make game critics' heads explode, a new book believes that young boys who are struggling in school may need more exposure to violent media in order to do better. The author of The Trouble With Boys, Peg Tyre, claims that the recent anti-violence efforts of the past decade are actually doing more to hinder boys' development than help them.