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Half-Life 2 Sweeps Bafta Games Awards

Posted by Zonk on from the those-wacky-british dept.

Ford Prefect writes "The British Academy of Film and Television Arts awards, or Baftas, are frequently considered Britain's equivalent of the Oscars. The winners of the second annual games awards were announced last night, and according to the BBC Half-Life 2 won six awards, including best game and best online game. No Katamari Damacy mentioned, Burnout 3 won three awards, and some plucky little upstart called 'Halo 2' won the prize for best Xbox game."

28 of 40 comments (clear)

  1. Game Awards? by Jeremiah+Cornelius · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Do J-Lo wear that dress?

    I ain't goin'...

    --
    "Flyin' in just a sweet place,
    Never been known to fail..."
  2. Bah... by badasscat · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Half-Life 2 won six awards, including best game and best online game. No Katamari Damacy mentioned, Burnout 3 won three awards, and some plucky little upstart called 'Halo 2' won the prize for best Xbox game."

    So, two derivative first-person shooters and a driving game - all sequels, mind you, however good they may be - beat out a wholly original, innovative, and fun concept in Katamari Damacy. I don't know what I can really take from this, except to say that gaming sure has changed a lot since I was a kid. And not really for the better.

    Personally, I would like to see approaches such as Namco took in Katamari Damacy better rewarded. I would like to see approaches such as most developers take in producing sequel after sequel in well-worn genres rewarded quite a bit less often.

    1. Re:Bah... by r00td43m0n · · Score: 2, Informative

      What is terribley sad is that Katamari Damacy did not even win in the Most Original Game category. Singster which is more or less a carbon copy of Karaoke Revolution by Konami did.

    2. Re:Bah... by filipncs · · Score: 5, Insightful

      It probably has more to do with the fact that Katamari Damacy isn't out in europe yet. It probably isn't even eligible.

    3. Re:Bah... by pforhan · · Score: 1

      I have to say, though, that Burnout 3 is no mere driving game. The *only* thing wrong with the game is the lack of System Link functionality (ie, requires XBox Live for multi-box playing).

    4. Re:Bah... by Palshife · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I've gotta respond to this, since I'm really sick of people calling Half Life 2 derivative.

      Half Life redefined first person shooters back in 1998. It and some choice others, like Deus Ex, chose to make the genre more than just lugging around strange weaponry and blowing away aliens. They gave story, scope, style, amazing graphics, and a sense of actually being in the game.

      Half Life presented itself as a constant flow of gameplay, giving you story and immersion. Now, because of that, you end up actually liking and caring about Gordon, the character you control. People may not want to admit it, but if Valve wants to make another game that uses those exact elements to play off of, they're perfectly free to do so. It was their idea in the first place. Who are we to say that they shouldn't continue refining it?

      Half Life 2 is the continuation of a great concept in gaming. I'm tired of people discounting it just because it isn't "wholly original."

      --
      Attention deficit disorder is a complicated issue, spanning several major... HEY LET'S GO RIDE BIKES!
    5. Re:Bah... by fondue · · Score: 2, Interesting

      1. Half-Life 2 is a sequel.
      2. Katamari Damacy is an original game.
      3. Half-Life 2 is still a better game than Katamari Damacy, insofar as they are comparable. It's also more ambitious in scope, more accomplished in design, implementation and artistry, and has a broader appeal.

      Originality isn't a silver bullet.

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      Preferences > Homepage > Customize stories on homepage > Authors > Zonk > Uncheck

    6. Re:Bah... by C0rinthian · · Score: 1
      Half Life presented itself as a constant flow of gameplay, giving you story and immersion.
      Waiting for cracks about load times...

      However, I completely agree with the parent.
    7. Re:Bah... by obeythefist · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I agree with your first two paragraphs.

      However.

      Half Life 2 doesn't do anything new in a PC game that hasn't been done before to death, from physics engine, graphics, sound, gameplay, even scripted events.

      Half Life 2 derives these elements of gameplay and plot from the original Half Life and from other FPS games in the genre.

      Therefore, Half Life 2 is a derivative work.

      I won't discount Half Life 2 because it's derivative. I'll discount it because of Steam, because Valve deliberately rigged the game engine so it wouldn't work so well on all hardware because they took $5M in payment from ATI, because Valve held back the game because the source code was "stolen" (I guess they couldn't work on it because they no longer had it when it was stolen away from them, huh). I'll discount it because the graphics engine didn't have the same power as the DooM3 engine (some of the lighting effects were awful). I'll discount it because when Valve goes out of business one day, we won't ever be able to play the game again. I'll discount it because the ending to the game felt half-finished.

      But to make you feel better, I won't discount it because it's yet-another-scripted-event-shooter.

      --
      I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
    8. Re:Bah... by birder · · Score: 1

      Amen. I enjoyed playing HL2, but the game really lacked a sense that you had any choise other than the single path you were led down. It was a graphically improved HL 1. I re-installed Blue Shift looking for a HL fix after and it's all there except the graphics are really dated.

      Contrast that to Far Cry. It had the usual FPS objectives (get from a to b) but you could approach them from multiple ways. When talking to my friends on how we beat a level someone always did it diffent than others. I was expecting HL 2 to be like that and in that sense was disappointed.

      HL 2 ending sucked as well.

    9. Re:Bah... by chrish · · Score: 1

      Sorry, 1 and 2 are facts, 3 is a collection of your opinions, which you're certainly entitled to.

      Everyone's opinions are different, and should never be presented as facts. I'm a hard-core PC gamer, and entirely uninterested in Half-Life 2 (tried the demo, uninstalled the demo), but I love Katamari Damacy.

      --
      - chrish
    10. Re:Bah... by Ford+Prefect · · Score: 1

      I was a bit disappointed with the linearity of Half-Life 2 as well - it does seem like a deliberate design decision, but I hope the release of Far Cry has shown everyone that multiple paths are possible, and that they can be fun.

      When I get more familiar with HL2 mapping, I'm going to be doing plenty of experimentation. It's definitely not an engine limitation... ;-)

      --
      Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
  3. Re:Katamari Damacy... by MBraynard · · Score: 1
    There has to be some constituency for it out there that is disconnected from the reast of the gaming public. Game reviewers tastes match mine - and while it has a decent rating, it ain't so high and certainly not worthy of nomination for best much less best.

    However, sometimes these tastes do diverge - I LOVED MTG: Battlegrounds.

  4. Re:Losers, all of them. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    The correct spelling?

    How can it be the correct spelling? The people hired to translate the game's title into English chose to spell it out as damacy. If the game was entitled Katamari Damashii, you'd be correct, but it's Katamari Damacy, so by no means is damashii the "correct" spelling. That's not the name of the fucking game.

  5. KD not available in Europe by Blackwulf · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Since Namco decided against releasing Katamari Damacy in Europe, that's why it wasn't nominated for the awards.

    It makes sense to only reward games that are available in your area. If a publisher decides not to release a game in your area, don't reward them with an award.

  6. Re:Whew by Ford+Prefect · · Score: 1

    I was beginning to think we'd go an entire day without having Katamari Damacy shoved down our throats.

    Sorry - I was trying to pre-empt the inevitable 'why wasn't KD mentioned? Waah!' posts. I've never played the game, and while it does sound like fun it doesn't sound as if it would be quite worth importing a suitable PS2 and whatever to play it...

    It was nice, however, to see another low-budget, high-concept, word-of-mouth success being rewarded, that being Halo 2. Zonk perhaps understandably edited what I originally had to say about it - the sarcasm was probably just a tad too strong... ;-)

    --
    Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
  7. HL2 by Lord_Dweomer · · Score: 1
    Half Life 2 is pretty and all, and I love Garys mod (REALLY creative idea), however, there simply needs to be more mod development for it. There's a lot of interesting stuff in the pipes now, and if any of it ever manages to get finished, that group will probably be able to gain a LOT more players for their mod than they woudl otherwise. Anybody here know of some good mods with a lot of servers for HL2?

    --
    Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
    1. Re:HL2 by obeythefist · · Score: 1

      A lot of modders aren't touching HL2 because they don't want to have to deal with the Steam engine. If I were a modder, I am sure I could find a bunch of different engines more suitable. I know the Unreal guys like it when people mod with their engine... and they don't make you wrestle with Steam to do it.

      --
      I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
    2. Re:HL2 by Ford+Prefect · · Score: 1

      A lot of modders aren't touching HL2 because they don't want to have to deal with the Steam engine. If I were a modder, I am sure I could find a bunch of different engines more suitable.

      I'm a modder, and my experiences with Source so far have been great. See my signature - so far I've built the geometry for a large, complex island map in just a few weeks of free time, starting from no knowledge of HL2 mapping whatsoever. I'm currently populating it with gameplay, and the new Hammer is far, far more streamlined than the old one. The new entity inputs/outputs system is brilliant, for a start, and there are loads of other minor improvements and tweaks that are greatly appreciated.

      The Source SDK documentation gives a fairly good description of the basics, but it's a bit lacking in stuff like HL2 entity descriptions. Fortunately, though, there are the sources for quite a few of the single-player maps available, as well as map sources and full DLL code for HL2 Deathmatch, so there are plenty of examples to work from. The entity configuration file (FGD) for HL2 has a lot of useful entity-specific help for use in Hammer - as a result, I'm managing to learn how things work rather nicely.

      There are also the VERC forums where a fair number of Valve developers actively contribute, answering coding and mapping questions.

      It hasn't all been plain sailing, though - Hammer still has serious issues on non-NT-based Windows, and needs a pretty high-spec machine to work well, for instance - and Steam updates have a tendency to temporarily break SDK stuff (usually easily fixed, though). Plus, some key utilities like GCFScape have had to be written by third-parties - but there's just about everything needed already available, and it's only a few months into the lifetime of the game. Plus, Valve has recently provided source code for many of their content production tools as well...

      Compared with some of my experiences with other games, things have been blissful. UnrealEd was just plain rank, Halo was an exercise in frustration and disappointment, and Doom 3 is a bit ... dead.

      For multiplayer games, Unreal Tournament 2004 is definitely a good base for mods and a worthy contender against Source, but for lone-mapper, single-player projects like my own, I can't really hope for anything better than Half-Life 2 at the moment. I get some brilliant artwork to play with, a pervasive, realistic universe and back-story to work on, and a quirky but undeniably capable engine. I'm happy, anyway. :-)

      --
      Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
    3. Re:HL2 by KDR_11k · · Score: 1

      You are aware that you're ONLY working from the PoV of a mapper? Mods involve more than just mapping and the other kinds of developers involved (artists, coders) don't sound very happy about the current system with the code requiring some form of Steam emulation and exporters for common 3d packages being barely implemented.

      Doom 3 is fairly easy to mod, the code is mostly clean and simple and the art pipeline is straight forward (except maybe for the Walk IK and AF stuff but setting up IK is never trivial). UT2004 has UScript and its extremely modular concept allowing for those fun mutators, the art pipeline is a bit more complicated, though. The code suffers from several layers of inheritance, they have the complete Unreal 1 code and probably lots of the UT1 code still in there and involved via dependencies which makes the code hard to read as functions are spread through multiple classes and often not logically in any way.

      --
      Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
  8. Clueless. by Scipius · · Score: 1

    WTF? Best Gamecube game is Warrior Within? Considering some of the excellent Nintendo first and second party titles released last year and they choose a mediocre multi-platform game?

    1. Re:Clueless. by Grey+Ninja · · Score: 1

      Look at the best GBA game as well. They must have picked the dumbest games they could find. Honestly, I don't know what's up with that. Personally, I think I would tip my hat to either Tales of Symphonia, Baten Kaitos, or Paper Mario 2.

      Prince of Persia 2 is on my list for being one of the worst games of the year.

  9. Re:Losers, all of them. by aendeuryu · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Last I heard, the only proper way to spell Japanese words was in Japanese. Ditto for Chinese and Korean.

    Romanization rules are frequently nebulous, and for good reason. Seoul, for instance, is often pronounced like "soul" in English, because people looking at the romanization don't realize that there are actually two syllables in the city's name.

  10. Steam by kwoff · · Score: 1

    It took me a couple hours to install Half-Life 2 because of that stupid online installation. After that, though, I have to admit that it's a pretty sweet game.

  11. Re:Losers, all of them. by Quobobo · · Score: 1

    On the topic of romanization: Well, you can either try to get it right, or just fuck it up like the translators of Katamari Damashii did. It's pronounced with a "sh" sound, and the i on the end is lengthened (that doesn't happen much in English though, so I can see why they'd drop that. Same thing happens with a lot of place names like Tokyo/Toukyou, Osaka/Oosaka)

    I'm 99% sure that the reason is a bad Japanese tendency to romanize "shi" as "si". The Japanese alphabet is a bit weird in what sounds it contains; it goes "sa, shi, su, se, so" for the "Sa line" of sounds. Same with T and H. So, often, you'll see "si" when the sound is actually "shi".

  12. Halo2 best Xbox? by JFMulder · · Score: 1

    They must not have played Ninja Gaiden. I'm still playing that game regularly a year after I bought it, while I sold my copy of Halo2 last week. All the poeple I know got bored with the single player quickly. I might have enjoyed XBox Live, but I'll wait for the next generation consoles to jump on the online bandwagon. and don't delude yourself into thinking people buy Halo2 for playing online. Most of poeple play by themselves.

  13. HL2 best online game... by obsid1an · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Best online game? Half Life 2? Am I the only one who sees the problem here? Ok, there is HL2 deathmatch but there's no way in that could possibly win any award. There's what, a whole two maps? One of them with some serious design flaws. CS:S is decent, but hardly award worthy.

  14. Re:Best online game? by KDR_11k · · Score: 1

    Well, it DOES have a multiplayer mode that beats Doom 3's in terms of being half-assed. I mean, people complained about how Doom 3 doesn't have CTF and the like and only has five maps for MP yet none is bothered that HL2 can only do deathmatch and team deathmatch and comes with two MP maps.

    --
    Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.