Welcome to this year’s Pocket Gamer Awards. As has now become traditional, we kicked things off by announcing our shortlist. These are the games we feel represent the finest examples of pocket gaming from the past 12 months – anything that got reviewed on Pocket Gamer between January 1st and December 31st, 2011, qualified – and you can check out the selection below. (If you’re wondering, we deliberately leave it a little while before we select these so that we can take each game in context.)

For this year, we altered our approach a little, in that we allowed all of the formats to fight it out for supremacy within the categories. Each format still got a chance to shine in individual ‘Game of the Year’ selections, but outside of that it was a free-for-all where games were judged on their respective merits.

Which brings us to another revision. In addition to the usual contributions from every member of the PG team, this year we also called upon a panel of experts made up of key representatives from within our industry to help lend a hand in the judging process.

More people meant more opinion, so we spent a few weeks deliberating over the contenders before deciding on the winners (announced at a special event held during GDC at the beginning of March).

You can check these out below. If you don’t agree with what you see, remember that we’re also running the Pocket Gamer Readers’ Choice Awards 2012, which this year have also been tweaked to ensure our readers get more of a voice. So get stuck in.

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