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Oblivion Takes Top Honor At Spike VGAs
Last night was the taping for the 2006 Spike TV Videogame awards, and Bethesda Softworks' Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion took best game. Gamespot reports on the rest of the pack, which saw the Critic's Choice going to Twilight Princess, and Epic's Gears of War pulling down several top honors. For a blow-by-blow, Joystiq's event liveblogging post might interest you. It sounds ... pretty awful. From that article: "9:25: 50 Cent intros the 'Best Human Female in a Video Game' in a sort of slurred 'here's my drink' English. We'll have what he's having. It's unsure if he even knows what he's talking about."
Oblivion might not be the best game to come out this year necessarily, but even saying that is still my own opinion. Twilight Princess, Gears, FF XII, and Oblivion have all set some sort of standard and that says something. Debating which is the best boils down to taste and privileging of some features over others (multiplayer, graphics, engaging puzzles, etc). From joystiq's report it appears the award show was overall quite terrible, and I wouldn't have been surprised if Best Game had gone to Madden NFL. At least we were spared that :-) Certainly there are other things to be upset about than Elder Scrolls IV getting *yet another award.* Such as maybe all the really tasteless humor.
I like basketball!!1!
Morrowind, which was good but not ultimately great
On the contrary - vanilla Morrowind is good, but what the modding community has done to it is simply incredible, and I would argue does earn it the "great" moniker. The graphics have got constantly better with re-texturing and re-meshing efforts, the gameplay mechanics can now be as deep as you want (hardcore RPer? Make it so you have to eat and sleep, and try going out catching and cooking your own food), and so on.
Recently some clever guy even modded Morrowind's graphics rendering so it displays land to the horizon instead of fading it out into impenetrable mist a few hundred yards away. The game gets instantly more immersive, and it doesn't even affect the performance. People are going away, playing Oblivion, then coming straight back to Morrowind. Even the flawed masterpiece that was Daggerfall never had this level of community love.
I guess as a developer in that environment you give them exactly what they want.
Maybe if you're just in it for cash, sure.
If you're making great games, and absolutely want to do things right, you include such a system, you disable it, then add a cheat code to turn it back on.
Everyone wins.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
I played it on the PC and XBox 360, all the way through both times. I even got the full 1000 points on the 360, and I completed 2 guilds and the main quest on the PC. I did not encounter a single bug. I don't find it hard to believe they played it 'long enough for the judges to see what they're judging'.
It had bugs, there's no doubt. But they were most out of the way things and the majority of gamers did not experience them. Don't be fooled by the vocal minority.
The game was enough fun that I spent over 100 hours on it without getting bored. Not many games can claim that for me. It's easily first place.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
The first time I looked at this years' entrants, it took all of 5 seconds to dismiss this entire contest as irrelevant; namely, it just took a quick glance at the "best soundtrack" category. GTA? Scarface? Guitar Hero 2? MADDEN!? This, when this year celebrated one of the most outstanding soundtracks in a game that I've heard in years: Bully, from Rockstar Games. The music accompanying your schoolyard antics is outstanding, managing to be original, appropriate to what you're doing in-game at the time, and non-intrusive while still having enough of a melody to keep you humming it hours later. How do these other canned collections of whatever random crap was cheap to license even belong in the same category? Perhaps what I'm really lobbying for is a seperate "best original soundtrack" group, but frankly, I don't see why any of the four games actually up for this award deserve any sort of recognition at all. Honors like these should reward the best examples of creativity in an industry, not just pay lip service to who chose the best trash to recycle from other sources.