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Gears of War Sweeps AIAS Awards
GamesIndustry.biz reports on a very successful night for Epic Games, which garnered no less than eight awards for their 360 console shooter Gears of War. In addition to awards like 'Best Console Game' and 'Game of the Year', feathers in Epic's cap include 'Outstanding Character Performance Male' for John DiMaggio's Marcus Fenix and 'Sports Best Online Game Play'. Epic's CliffyB and Michael Capps were onhand to accept the awards, and were elated by their success: "The thing is ... being on the outside of this industry looking in as a kid, and wanting to be part of it, and then being able to be here and get an award from all of these talented people who've been in the business for so long, finally to be a part of it, to be recognized like this is absolutely unbelievable. We could not be honoured more." Other impressive winners for the night included Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Fight Night, Rainbow Six, and the Wii. The full list of awards winners is available on the article.
but while I can understand why they'd give awards for the other categories, and while I love Bender/Wakka John Dimaggio's work...
I can't see Marcus Fenix being note-worthy. The VA did a pretty good job with what he had, but the writing wasn't really there to making any special character performance possible, at least IMO.
The character is awfully generic. Big strong soldier-guy with a bad attitude. Gruff. Not particularly special.
*possible spoilers*
While the idea of his father being an important scientist having the potential for an interesting story, it didn't make it into the game. Much of the story is implied, but never expressed in any detail (You don't even know anything about why Marcus chose to disobey the order, and why nobody knew about his father's maps till you stumble across it).
It's like some billionaire's skanky daughter winning some beauty contest.
Let's just sum up this 'blockbuster' of a game:
The most egregious example of outright marketing lies with fake screenshots. I challenge you to find an ACTUAL in game screenshot on the net. Epic has flooded the media with bogus 5k by 5k 16xAA marketing shots claiming they are 'real'.
The single player game is an utterly retarded run of the mill braindead 8 hour snorefest. Watch some clips of the game if you have any doubts what a complete turd the game is.
Online play is a complete joke. The game can only handle 4 vs 4 players. The game has massive lag problems due to there being no dedicated servers - 50 dollars a year for what again Microsoft? And there is a persistent disconnect problem.
The online play is so fucked up that people have given up playing ranked matches or gone back to tired old Halo 2.
Think I'm exaggerating, just google around for what other players are saying about the game.
After six years in the console market Microsoft entire strategy seems to be nothing more than:
Make one big shooter with lots of that cool shiny metal armor and spend as much cash as necessary to buy awards and reviews for the game.
Although I haven't played Gears of War, I am a very happy owner of boxed copies of Unreal, Unreal Tournament, and Unreal Tournament 2004. The games are fantastic, the editor is even better, and they're produced by a group of extremely creative, intelligent, and generally wonderful human beings.
If you don't have a copy of any of the UT series, I strongly recommend them...the original UT is probably the best of the lot, but UT 2004 is also very enjoyable. If you get the original UT, I also like the Bullet Time and Unreal4Ever modifications, both of which were still available from FilePlanet last time I checked. There are also some fantastic user-made maps here, and the community there are interesting and very talented people.
It looks to me like these guys just took one look at Gamerankings, saw that GoW had the best ranking for the year, and then decided to give half the awards to it on that basis alone.
Many Bothans died to bring you this sig.
I loved Gears Of War, but I don't think it should have beat out Oblivion in the graphics categories. Gears of War does look great. However, Oblivion could be awe inspiring at times. Bethesda needs a better hype machine.
Gideon Emery's voiceover of Balthier for Final Fantasy XII this year is so much more meaningful, colorful, not to mention a far larger work that even the whole of Gears couldn't compare. All in all, if there's one award this year that FF XII should have definitely walked away with, it was voice acting. Probably several others as well. Gears was a phenomenal game, but I don't think that means it should sweep the awards the way it did. Its voice acting was spot-on, but not deserving of any sort of special honor in my opinion.
:-P
On top of that, Cole's dialogue was best
I like basketball!!1!
Graphically, I thought the game was amazing (on a big screen HDTV at 1080i, mind you). I never looked at any of the screenshots you were talking about. I just played the game and was constantly stunned by the visuals. It still amazes me that a console can render such good graphics in real time.
The single player was a blast. I played through the game with a friend in split-screen co-op mode (which is effectively the same as single player) and we had a great time. It was challenging in some parts, easy in others, but overall the story was very engrossing and entertaining. I didn't feel like the game was too short, either. It felt just about right. Anything else would have just dragged on forever.
After I beat the game, I tried out the online play. Most of the matches I have been in were 4 on 4, or 3 on 3, or sometimes 4 on 3. I have never had any problems with online play and have never been disconnected once. I'd say that I've played online perhaps 20 times. Maybe not as many as some people, but I consider 20 to be a lot - with each session lasting maybe an hour, or until I got bored.
Have you actually played the game? Anecdotes are fun.
Overall Game of the Year
Gears of War (Epic Games/Microsoft Game Studios)
Ka-Ching!
Console Game of the Year
Gears of War (Epic Games/Microsoft Game Studios)
Ka-Ching!
Outstanding Achievement in Animation
Gears of War (Epic Games/Microsoft Game Studios)
Ka-Ching!
Outstanding Achievement in Art Direction
Gears of War (Epic Games/Microsoft Game Studios)
Ka-Ching!
Outstanding Character Performance - Male
Gears of War (Epic Games/Microsoft Game Studios)
Ka-Ching!
Outstanding Achievement in Online Game Play
Gears of War (Epic Games/Microsoft Game Studios)
Ka-Ching!
Outstanding Achievement in Visual Engineering
Gears of War (Epic Games/Microsoft Game Studios)
Ka-Ching!
Action/Adventure Game of the Year
Gears of War (Epic Games/Microsoft Game Studios)
Ka-Ching!
Listening to Epic talk about this shame is like having to listen to some guy bragging about what a stud he is after paying a prostitute to fuck him.
Yeah Epic, you're a bunch of studs!
I notice in TFA that the category honors "performance," and yes, the voice actor for Fenix was good. Quite good, actually.
"Character development" was an entirely different award, and LoZ got it, so quit yer bitchin', fanboys.
> Okami has a better art style then Twilight Princess.
So Twilight Princess took the lead in art style from Okami ?
That doesn't sound right to me.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
I just picked up GoW last week. As a long time UT / UT2003 / UT2004 PC game player, I was definitely interested to see what Epic has been delaying UT3 for. I've been enjoying the game and overall think they did a very good job with it. I think they made a traditional shooter a little different with the way the whole "cover" system works...and then of course the chainsaw action is fun to mess around with.
Is it worthy of all the awards it seems to win everyday? I don't know, but at this point, it has become easy and almost expected for whatever game award it's up for, it will win. Kinda like the Oscar and other movie awards...there is always one or two movies a year that all the award shows just fawn all over.
Either way it's a fun game and I'm enjoying playing it. I don't know if it's the best game EVAR, but worth it if you like a good shooter. Character development and story isn't the greatest, but I've seen worse. The gameplay makes up for it IMO.
They infused the character models with actual character. Exceptionally difficult when those characters are people. There's a reason you can't see the Master Chiefs face, they weren't just paying homage to DooM. In Gears of War, they did it not once, but multiple times. They didn't talk like marrionetts, they didn't move like them. And then the snap-to with Y scenes, and talk and walk scenes brought the story from cinematic sequence to something participitory and in the game. And not to mention, the writing. People run it down, but it was a hell of a lot better than most military themed shows/movies, let alone games. Okami is beautiful, and wonderful, and all that, but it's a lower bar.
Look around on all the popular console discussion boards and you will see Microsoft and Epic getting laughed at for this disgusting show of marketing payola. This is the type of shit that makes Microsoft so despised by the vast majority of console developers. Not that anyone who does console development gives a damn about these or pretty much any other game awards, but to crow about spending the cash necessary to land all these awards just reinforces everything console developers already despise the company for.
Wow. So many RPG geek haters on this one. GoW rocks hard so quit hatin' just because your sensitive constitutions can't handle hard kore shootemups. Grow a pair and then you can comment.
Terrible karma and aiming lower, which in this environment of one-sided reason, is higher.
EXACTLY!
Lester Speight had a much more memorable character in Augustus Cole. Apparently these people don't know the value of having an Office Linebacker around. :-(
All favorites aside, I think GoW did a marvelous job of getting everything right, and very little wrong. Yes, there are a few bugs and quirks. Overall, however, this is a very polished game and has rightfully earned its crown when compared to the rest of the stuff released these past years. The only thing I can ding it for is storyline, which seems almost blissfully forgotten amid blaring chainsaw massacres and curbstomps.
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GAME OF THE YEAR! Impress your friends! Shoot things in the same way you have for only 300 or so other games! It's like Halo 4 only Halo 4 is in the future! This is the now!
While we are at it, let's give John Carmack another award. INNOVATION!
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/content_page.php?aid= 22479
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?st ory=12559
I'm sure with ethics like that they are really judging the games by their content and not lest say how much the companies "donated" this year.
This award ceremony is nothing but an Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences fund raiser and advertising campaign.
There's plenty more organizations that have yet to hand out their awards for last year's games. Give them some time, your picks might win some awards as well.
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
Capcom should just pay up. Joining was not an issue for Activision, Big Huge Games, BioWare/Pandemic Studios, Buena Vista Games, Day 1 Studios, Electronic Arts, Epic Games, High Moon Studios, id Software, Insomniac Games, Microsoft, Midway, NCsoft, Nintendo, NovaLogic, Oddworld Inhabitants, Pi Studios, PlayFirst, RedOctane, Sega, Sony, Spark Unlimited, Square Enix, Stormfront Studios, Sucker Punch, THQ, TT Games, Take 2 Interactive, Ubisoft, Vivendi/Universal Games, or Warner Bros. Interactive.
This is just a stupid canard to try and dis MS. I don't think GoW was a good game at all. They won because the judges were stupid, not because they were bought.
And to hear Capcom complaining about this is even more pathetic.
Nah, he was complaining about lagging games online games due to no dedicated servers. Saddly something Wii owners don't even have the luxuray of complaining about yet. Hopefully Smash Brothers / Battalion Wars II will be great, but for now fans are stuck with waiting.
Gears looks significantly better than Resistance: Fall of Man. While I admit this isn't an entirely fair comparison (Gears is a title for a mature system, while Resistance is a launch-title), there's no denying that the level of detail in Gears goes way beyond that in Resistance.
It is an unfare comparison, not due to Gears Being a second wave game, but because the type of game. Comparing Resistance to Rainbow 6 Vegas would be a better comparison. R6V is still a better game, and I would suggest prettier, but gears was designed from the ground up (by the nature of the gameplay) to look better than anything else. Mark my words, Halo 3 won't look as good as Gears of War.
The game design was built around small environments with a limited number of people on the screen at once. It was a consious design choice that allowed the individual level of detail sky rocket while not killing the frame rate. That's why online is limited to 4 on 4. Personally I'm completely fine with that. I would just prefer to be able to take a group of 4 people I know into a ranked match against a squad of 4 people that all know eachother.
I'll admit that the game is too short (yes, 8-10 hours is probably a reasonable estimate), but what's there is great.
It is short, and we want long engaging, great games but given the alternative would you rather an 8-10 hour game that keeps you engaged, or a a 20-25 hour game that gets stale, and repetitive? My only complaint about the game was that so much of it is nonsensically thrown together. We don't need no stinking story... Bah!
Indeed, this is the same John DiMaggio who voices Bender. I didn't know that until I saw his name in the story summary.
Dewey, you fool! Your decimal system has played right into my hands!
Not to nitpick an obvious troll who's never played the game, but its not a first person shooter. It's a third person shooter with a cover system that, for better or worse, does not have you "shoot things the same way you have for only 300 or so other games".
Its also f-ing gorgeous. I have impressed my non-gaming friends and relatives by showing them it for 5 minutes.
All that being said, its obvious you don't like any shooter games since they all play the same to you. Enjoy your RTS (wait, they play all the same too)... er, Zelda (wait, that one has the same plot every time)... bah, just go read a book... just no fantasy since by your justification its all just Tolkien redone over and over.
You didn't like GoW, therefore the judges, reviewers and players were stupid to like it.
Most films are photo-realistic already, yet for some reason art direction is a fairly major department. Many photos themselves are considered art. Of course photo-realistic games can have good art direction (and photo-realism can actually help convey the art better than, say, a TRS-80 could).
"Art" has little to do with the manner in which it is expressed. It is that which provokes an emotional response in the viewer, simple as that.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
There is a big difference though. The USA Triathlon requires a membership to compete in their races that costs $40 for two or three year increments.
To quote from the article I linked that you obviously did not read
"Does our company really need to pay tens of thousands of dollars in order to present awards to our own games?"
Seth Killian
Capcom Entertainment Inc
Also you don't have write in votes to get a runner to compete in a triathlon. In this case let's look at what happened in last years awards
"For last year's awards, so many voting members of the AIAS were upset that Resident Evil 4 was completely left off the list for awards consideration, that the members themselves wrote in the game. Upon seeing the results of the write-in votes, Capcom Entertainment was contacted by the AIAS and told that the game would still not be eligible for any awards unless the company joined the organization. Our company was told, in essence, "Pay to play," a sentiment echoed in the quote from the AIAS representative."
Seth Killian
Capcom Entertainment Inc
So according to Seth they pretty much said "hey we would like to give you an award. Pay us tens of thousands of dollars to do it please." Quite an interesting racket they are running there.
emmys, addys, and many many other "talent, skill, and performance" awards require either a membership or a large fee to submit to be judged. That was a very large surprise to me when I submitted my first tv emmy stuff this year.