After the results of the Game Critics Awards were announced two weeks ago, we reached out to several winners for their reactions and some updates about their games in progress. In the Best Strategy Game category, Tom Clancy's EndWar beat out several established franchises and studios. We emailed some questions to Michael De Plater, creative director at Ubisoft Shanghai. Here are his responses:

EndWar was up against some pretty formidable competition for Best Strategy Game, including Ensemble and EALA. Are you surprised that you won?

We were very proud to be in such impressive company. In particular I am a massive fan of the Warhammer 40K universe and of Relic. In fact every one of those teams has been making great strategy games for years and the game they each took to E3 this year looked like one of the most polished and fun titles they had ever built. On the other hand I definitely thought we had a good chance of winning if people got some hands on time with EndWar because I think it's a fun game and everyone is waiting for the genre to break through on console. Also Ubisoft put together a really great team with a lot of depth of experience. Todd Owens, our lead level designer had worked on Command & Conquer Generals and Battle for Middle Earth and I'd worked on Rome Total War, while the rest of the team had experience on top quality tactical and military games like Ghost Recon, Rainbow Six and Brothers In Arms.

As a team that is new to building strategy games, what are the biggest challenges that you faced?

That's a good question and it's hard to be precise about what the biggest challenges were, because there were a lot. From the obvious one of making a successful strategy game on console through to the one you highlighted above of going head to head with competitors with a decade or more of experience at making 90 percent games. I think ultimately all we could do was to turn the challenges to opportunities. The fact that we hadn't made a strategy game before freed us from a lot of baggage associated with PC RTS games which helped us focus on genuinely making a game from the ground up for console. Plus fact that lots of guys on the team didn't have strategy game experience allowed us to bring elements of the design, production values and attention to detail of other Clancy games like Ghost Recon. When you zoom in and look at our units, the infantry especially, they are approaching the quality of detail and behavior of an FPS.

In my Edge column, I wrote that "[EndWar's] voice-driven command-and-control system demonstrates that it might do for real-time strategy games what Halo did for shooters: create an experience that's so compelling that the genre itself tips irrevocably in the console's direction." Did I oversell EndWar's potential?

To read the rest of our Q&A with Michael De Plater, click on the link below.

After the results of the Game Critics Awards were announced two weeks ago, we reached out to several winners for their reactions and some updates about their games in progress. In the portable category, Resistance: Retribution won the award for Best Handheld Game. We emailed some questions to John Garvin, director of development at Sony Bend. Here's what he wrote back:

Resistance: Retribution was up against some distinguished franchises in Castlevania, Chrono Trigger and Puzzle Quest, not to mention a cult favorite in Rhythm Heaven. Did you expect to win?

I did expect to win, actually, mostly because our two previous Syphon PSP games had won so many awards, and we had not shown a game at E3 since The Omega Strain. All those DS franchises are great, but we're pretty unique, I think, in that what we attempt to do, against all odds, and maybe against common sense even, is to create a full-blown AAA console "character action" experience on a handheld. To me, the console experience is all about production values, variety of gameplay, length of game, and just the depth of the experience. It means spending the money on detail, using full, SAG acted voice, high quality rendered sequences; it means having a full size team of engineers working on a large variety of gameplay features so the designers can mix it up each level; it means a schedule with enough time in it to polish everything. Other handhelds tend to go for a more "mini game" experience that can be done with smaller teams, less time, less money.

What do you make of the fact that all of your fellow nominees were on DS, and none on PSP?

I attribute our ability to build this kind of game to Sony's dedication and support for the PSP. As a first party developer, our goal is to showcase what the PSP can do. Sony also makes "handheld style" games like Patapon and Loco Roco, but our studio's job is to push [PlayStation founder Ken] Kutaragi's original vision for the platform: creating games for a console in your hand. Resistance: Retribution could not be done on the DS, just like Dark Mirror and Logan's Shadow could not have been done on the DS. So to get back to your question, I think critics respond to Resistance: Retribution because it is a unique experience on the handheld, something that can't be done on the others--and our game shows a commitment to quality with high production values and polished gameplay.

Describe the aiming/camera system for Resistance: Retribution, and explain the process by which you arrived at it.

To read the rest of John Garvin's responses, click on the link below.