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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."
The VGAs are definitely better than the CGAs, that awards show is only in 4 colors, all of them ugly.
Another "me too" awards show. Following the crowd. We all know oblivion was a shiny turd and if people are still patting it on the back it shows they've learned nothing.
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!
It's disappointing how many people have given Oblivion absurdly overblown praise. What does it say about the current standards for greatness when such a flawed game averages 93% on GameRankings? The UI, the hand-holding quest system, the idiotic conversations and behavior caused by "Radiant AI", the lack of any kind of meaningful choices...and on and on, not even including the bugs. TES was so promising; I played Daggerfall for years. And this is the direction you decided to take the series? A mediocre game system with tons of *stuff* thrown in? Sigh. Maybe someone else will make the series that TES could have been.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
Remember folks, this is the same advert--I mean awards show that gave awards to Resident Evil 4 (PS2) for game of the year without mentioning the superior Gamecube version and King Kong the video game before it was even out on store shelves. Oh and who can forget the award going to the 'Most Addictive Game Fueled by Mountain Dew' /rolleyes
Did somebody pay somebody else to have this terrible game given the award or are simply all the others even worse than Oblivion?
Before you mark this as flamebait:
If you compare Oblivion with its precedesor, Morrowind, which was good but not ultimately great, Oblivion has -everything- worse than Morrowind, with exception of graphics. Worse gameplay, more shallow plotline, smaller quest tree, lower quest variablity, fewer guilds, worse stability, fewer skills, spells, cities, NPCs, and above all no point in advancing the character, because the enemies are chosen depending on your level and growing harder faster than you gain advantages from high levels, meaning you are punished for progress, the longer you play the harder it gets.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
It really isn't. Just read the only honest review on the net: The Review.
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.
The AC wasn't referring to FPS Optimizer, in fact, but to Timeslip's Morrowind Graphics Enhancer. As of version 3, MGE can indeed render landscape to the horizon in the same way that Oblivion does. Yes, you can see all of Vvardenfell from the top of Red Mountain. It's not by any means perfect -- it doesn't render objects and buildings nearly far enough away (they pop into existence about 30 metres away) -- but it's still a very impressive achievement, and regularly updated.