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Warshaw Awards Celebrate 2003's Gaming Missteps
Thanks to Shacknews for their feature revealing The Warshaw Awards for 2003, celebrating "some of the worst missteps of the year" in videogaming. The awards are named after Howard Scott Warshaw, creator of the famously poor E.T. for the Atari 2600, and victors include Namco for R: Racing Evolution, which "eschews virtually everything that Ridge Racer fans had come to expect", David Duchovny for "quite possibly the worst [voice acting] I've ever heard from a mainstream actor" in Ubisoft's XIII, and the IGN gaming website for their "obscene McDonald's advertising campaign."
Sincere? ... HEY, WAIT A MINUTE! That's Metroid Prime!?!2 _lg.jpg
http://www.cedmagazine.com/ced/2003/1003/10a.htm
Hey, this looks good. Look, they got screens of their interface
http://www.cedmagazine.com/ced/2003/1003/images/a
Either they're idiots, or that's some blatant bullshit right there. And blatant BS is what I'm betting on.
You can get a lot more photos here, not all of them are renders. Notice also that the game in the windows is not being played, merely viewed. It could be a demo video being played, or a static screenshot, or (far more likely) the screen is a mockup and the consoles haven't reached the beta testers yet (they haven't). In case you haven't noticed, all screenshots get touched by photoshop before going out to the general public, just some more than others. Mocking up an interface that doesn't exist, and that hasn't gone out for refinement, is perfectly acceptable. The choice of Metroid Prime for the screenshot was a stupid one, but at least they have good taste in games.
We shouldn't put the Phantom on that list until 2004. I'm curious to see the size of the flameout.
The ______ Agenda
Honestly, that was better than "A Boy and His Blob." At least you could see the hole in E.T. "A Boy and His Blob" consisted of walking around, throwing unmarked colored jellybeans at your blob. Eventually you would map out what every one did. From then on, you had to walk up to every wall, floor, ceiling and other surface in the game, feed the blob the appropriate jellybean, walk through blindly, and see if you fell to your death. This task wasn't made any easier by the limited number of jellybeans... As if someone was going to cheat and use 3 ladders from "ketchup" instead of two.
In this case, "fall in hole, die, reset" wasn't just a mistake, it was the gameplay. The only merciful thing about the game was that it was one level long, and the second half of that level was a series of copout, easy training screens that should have come first. Why Nintendo Power hailed it as the second coming of your deity of choice is anyone's guess, but I'm guessing money.
The ______ Agenda
Warshaw was the guy that made the worst 2600 game ever (E.T.), and the best 2600 game ever (Yar's Revenge). If you need a tiebreaker, he also made Raiders of the Lost Ark, which was a pretty good game.