What was the best "sleeper" game of the past year and what made it stand out?
Not sure if it qualifies as "best", as I didn't play it, and the reviews were fairly tepid, but ".hack" for the Playstation was a milestone of some kind, in that it was a game that takes place within a game. (In it, you play a MMORPG from the future.) Recursiveness like that suggests the medium is getting mature enough to be ironic and self-aware; progress!

Who, in your opinion, are consistently the best game developers and what makes them so?
I'll have to pass on that one, because I can't think of any developers at the moment that are consistently successful. (Everyone has a mediocre title every now and again!)

If you could give game developers 3 tips that might help their games receive more critical-acclaim, what would they be?
Speaking as someone who often writes about games for a mainstream audience, has a pretty good sense of what interests them, and wants games to earn wider recognition as a popular art form, I'd name three A's:

Accessibility. This goes to interface, hardware requirements, and content: Make games easy to play (but hard to master), able to run even on relatively low-end PCs, with stories/premises that a mainstream, non-gamer audience can understand and relate to. (Those are pretty much the very principles that have kept The Sims on the bestseller charts for over 2 years.)

Awareness. Somewhat related to the above, this strikes me as the biggest challenge of the game industry: getting around this impression that it lives in a vacuum, with utterly no awareness of issues and events outside its very narrow focus on fantasy/scifi/sports/abstract military conflict, which make up the content of almost all its titles. It's not so much a matter of mentioning current events in cutscene dialog, but creating games that reflect, respond, and comment on issues and ideas that are very much important and pressing to the world at large. Films do this. Television does this. And until games do this, as well, they will always remain in the ghetto of juvenile medium.

Ambition. The two questions should always be, "What important events or aspects of the human experience can the game medium model in a way that's so compelling, no other medium can surpass it? And how can I implement some of them in my own game?" The "Omaha Beach" level from Medal of Honor suggests one answer: interactively dramatizing significant moments from history. Black and White suggests another: interactively dramatizing the role of religion in society. There are an infinite number of other answers, that have yet to be pursued.

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