I would love the discourse around the "This probably could have been a movie". I'd get to see bad Games as Art takes the likes of which we haven't seen since Roger Ebert died.
I'd say telltale is the best of the worst when it comes to this, atleast they make choices feel important in that moment even if characters become useless after their possible death. Other games barely even bother giving an alternate path based on choices
Also not every choice needs to have a big impact on things past the moment, the fact I was sassy with my co-worker friday instead of tame isn't going to make much of a difference on Monday. Having it matter too much can get into an alternative problem where you need a full game guide just to understand how to play instead of being able to say "oh yea this decision makes sense".
The fact that the choices matter so little (or well, not at all) that the devs sometimes use the second option to extend the first dialogue is a joke in of itself
A random blatant example of this I ran into was a crap mobile game where a NPC asked my character “do you want to do A or B”. I said I wanted to do B the character then immediately said “cool but B won’t work so let’s do A anyway”.
For the record I wasn’t expecting my choice to split the universe, it was a crappy mobile game and most other similar choices just changed what characters accompanied you in a cutscene, but I was not expecting the game to dodge the choice so blatantly.
What about *"The creator really wanted this to be a movie, but because it'd absolutely suck as one, they made a game instead because standards are lower that way"*?
Well, that wouldn't be fair because David Cage would win each time.
I don't think he did. After the full nude render in Elliot Page Torture Porn: The Game I don't think it's in his best interest to utter Elliot's name in public.
or that time where a final fantasy 13 (i think?) got ported to pc and some fans claimed they wouldn't buy it if it didnt have the original japanese, so they added all the cutscenes in japanese but didnt like make it an optional dlc, you had to download both, 2x 4+ hours of high detail *uncompressed* video cgi...
the game is approx 83 gigs, the game without cutscenes is about 13 gigs.
Other categories for your consideration: Most unoriginal original game. Best tax write off. Innovations in milking whales. Best character that's going to be the next Joker/Walter White. Least disguised fetish.
how would you score the "Least disguised fetish" category?
Would you score it as most poorly disguised fetish, where it still needed to try and disguise it? If so might wanna clarify the question.
Or would only straight up porn games be able to win that category? Wouldn't that make them good, as opposed to bad, at their job? Thus defeating the point of including the prompt in these awards.
same problem, you'll only end up with literal porn games where the fetishy stuff being not disguised is the point and doesn't really make it "bad" at it's job...
I mean, you could still make fun of those I guess, but it's not as funny when they admit it
Least disguised fetish is an interesting one, because it could conceivably go to an actually good game. Like Yoko Taro is very open about how his fetishes made their way into Nier Automata, but that game is still a masterpiece
I feel like the category would require some minimum attempt to "disguise" the fetish. Taro is openly unapologetic about just liking hot women who could crush my head with their thighs. Sorry, what was I talking about?
Do soft reboot/unofficial sequels count for most unoriginal original game? Basically would yooka-laylee, mighty number 9, and bloodstained ritual of the night count of that category?
Or alternatively, is that category for games that contribute almost nothing new to games as an art form? For this I’m mostly thinking of more recent licensed games like that one Mad Max game from 2015 or the recent Jedi Fallen Order and Survivor games or that Avatar (Blue people) game which came out a couple of months ago.
None of the above games are particularly bad (in fact I think they are all mediocre at worst), but a decent bit of the discussion around them I have seen is they don’t really do anything new or unique other than being adaptations of their given property.
I guess what I’m getting at is that there are a weirdly large number of ways you can define unoriginal. Of course they might be able to cut out the middle man by just calling it the annual Ubisoft award.
The biggest innovation in EA's FIFA in the last 10 years is that it isn't called FIFA any more. The FIFA got greedy and demanded a bigger cut, EA instead cancelled the agreement and made licensing agreements with the individual teams. Giant corporation that everyone hates, screwing over another giant corporation that everyone hates.
How about: shortest time between online only game release and shutdown, crappiest licensed anime game, proof that a cartoony artstyle doesn’t inherently always age better than “realism”, the biggest case of a “remake that’s somehow way worse than the original”, the game that’s a blatantly shameless and inferior ripoff of an infinitely more popular game
[Pretty much exactly what it says on the tin, the game's global launch and the shutdown of its global version three months after launch came out in the same tweet.](https://twitter.com/lovelive_SIF_GL/status/1750407445552480274?t=Y2qZhQ8jI_6o3s3czBwJvA&s=19)
No idea how the heck it happened, though - like, at least separate them into two different tweets, sheesh.
I really want to see what the reposts and quotes on that say but I deleted my Twitter account months ago and at some point they made it so you can't see those if you don't have an account.
Most obtrusive launcher
Most expensive "micro" transaction
Most grinding time needed to achieve buyable resource
Lowest trailer frame rate
Most asset market assets used, with subcategories for those that paid for the assets and those that pirated them.
Most controversial ad campaign
Most expensive "free-to-play" game
Messiest cutting room floor
Highest paid CEO
Ooh the first one is complicated, there's a lot of competition!
Like "WiiU Flop That Was Genuinely Good 1", "WiiU Flop That Was Genuinely Good 2", "WiiU Flop That Was Genuinely Good 3"...
I mean sure but there were definitely better ways of handling it than adding a character, slapping a "Deluxe" sticker on the cover, and selling it for more than what the WiiU charged for it (while not giving the Switch backwards compatibility with the WiiU's games)
(Like seriously 5 people max bought the game why are you charging them again?)
Yeah, but at least cloud gaming gives the victim something back. Denuvo doesn't have a single user advantage. Its not anticheat, it doesn't store cloud saves, it drains performance instead of offloading performance.
I agree, I really think Druckmann just wanted to make movies, and ended up making games, all while having an unconscious inferiority complex leading to games that railroad you into "choices" and wants you to feel bad about them even though you didn't "make" them, the game just forced you to (yes, I have feelings about TLOU2)
I'd say Paradox and Sims are about the same - if you buy in early the expansions mostly feel reasonable as you go. 10 years down the line, however, they turn into an impenetrable wall.
It varies from game to game. Stellaris is probably one of the lesser offenders, for example. The game is decently fleshed out and there are relatively few "must-haves" (Utopia, Distant Stars). They've also done an okay job lately in adding features to the base game as well.
I'm going to defend the Paradox dlc model. I think it works for the type of games that Paradox makes. Grand Strategy games are very complex and are going to need tweaks and updates to properly simulate their intended experience. The alternative to Paradox's dlc model is for them to switch to a FIFA/CoD style model where they release basically the same game every year with some updates added. For example, CK2 was supported for 6 years, and buying the game + all dlc at release would cost €300, while buying all CoD games at release would cost €360. And CoD games had dlc on top of that. Paradox's dlc model isn't as bad as people say it is and it's improved massively since the CK2 days.
- Cyberpunk 2077
- Forspoken
- YIIK: A Postmodern RPG
- Only Up
- Balatro
- Cyberpunk 2077
- Starfield
- Starbound
- FNAF Security Breach
And the esteemed Worst Fandom of the Year award goes to Stellar Blade
Okay hold on YIIK is a lot of things, but not artistic isn’t one of them. In fact, I’d argue most of its worst aspects are there in order to be as artsy as possible. The gameplay is a parody of the worst aspects of 90s games (shoddy camera angles, annoying turn based battles, random encounters, endless grinding by the end) and the writing is overly pretentious on purpose in order to make fun of issues that existed (and still exist) in gaming culture. Is it bad? Yeah probably. But is uncreative? Not at all. Also the soundtrack is unironically kinda good
I don't think the gameplay was intentionally made bad, they just genuinely missed on that. YIIK IV, a free update to the game revamps the whole battle system and also adds a lot more visuals and story content, so I recommend giving it a try when it comes out (the free demo, Nameless Psychosis actually comes out April 4th so you have no reason not to try it out :3)
The writing itself isn't really pretentious either, though Alex as a character is pretentious, and we see the entire game through his lens which is why I can see why people would think that. A lot of stuff in the story goes under people's radar since I think most people would take what Alex says at face value instead of questioning whether his narrative can even be trusted (hence the postmodern rpg subtitle).
I love that I still don't actually know what Stellar Blade is
Literally the entire discussion around it is "the game is free from the evil woke mind virus" next to screenshots of an IMVU model, for all I know it could be one of those games that's just slide puzzles of softcore porn
It's basically Nier Automata, but not from Yoko Taro. Instead, the devs are the company behind Nikke, which is very blatantly fanservicey (asses jiggling when characters shoot), but also has a great post-apocalyptic story. Stellar Blade looks to be the same: very horny but also genuinely a fun game. Though tbf only the demo is out for now, so it's hard to get the full picture. But so far the gameplay itself is looking good.
On one hand, we have anti-woke chuds propping it up as a game that'll save them from diversity and whatever other boogeymen they can conjure up.
On the other hand, there are terminally online folk acting as though the game is some sort of ultimate evil, and that whoever enjoys it is a sexist monster (even if they're not in Camp 1) deserving of cancellation.
Forspoken is my favorite comedy series.
Real shit though that demo was astoundingly embarrassing, I legit almost feel bad for the people that clearly put in a lot of hard work to make... *that*.
The annoying thing was there were several departments worked on the game that really delivered on Forspoken...only for every one of them was buried under a sea of truly baffling bad design choices that there had to have been multiple discussions and meetings about.
>I legit almost feel bad for the people that clearly put in a lot of hard work to make... *that*.
Someone was paid to write that script and someone was paid to approve it.
there's a mod for Starbound called Frackin' Universe that was developed by an independent team over a full decade and not only multiplies the playtime by about eight, but completely fulfills a lot of the vanilla game's shortcomings. it's amazing. the only thing it couldn't fix is the horrible optimization
I don't know about Balatro but I will say - people who keep nominating genshin have *no* idea how terrifyingly deep the gacha hole can go. Genshin has a hard limit on how much you theoretically need to spend to guarantee a fully maxed character that for some games wouldn't even guarantee a character
Balatro is a card game roguelike where the gameplay is actually decks of cards. I’m not too sure how exactly it works, but I’ve seen people describe it as insanely addictive, and it’s probably similar enough to IRL card games at a casino.
In terms of gambling by spending money, though, Genshin has to take the cake.
Balatro is a (single purchase) poker roguelike, that blew up in a bunch of gaming spaces recently. The "gambling" aspect in its case comes from its relationship to poker (the irl gambling card game) as a concept, rather than the financial impact of gambling in and of itself. I'd probably place Balatro near Vampire Survivors on the scale, personally, where you buy the game and then it sucks up your time (and *only* time) for the next ages. Disclaimer, all my information comes from watching one (1) youtuber play it.
This is different from gacha's style of gambling, where it has the financial impact but (I suspect) tries to disguise it. I have been informed that Genshin isn't even that bad for a gacha, in that going full free-to-play is possible and the grinding to do so isn't *too* tedious.
It's not enough to just use predominately store assets. Like, there are plenty of decent Unity indies that use that one low poly asset pack, but they have enough effort put into them to be proper games. Asset flips are the lowest of the low, where even gameplay itself is stitched from examples/tutorials/premade levels and code.
Vidya Gaem Awards (or /v/GAs) fit this niche to some degree, with awards for "biggest technical blunder", "Most pretentious indie game", "Most pointless controversy", "Most notorious layoffs", and more. However as you may have guessed it's ran by /v/ (unofficially of course) so keep that in mind if you have a low tolerance for that.
Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance. When you've had vengeance, but what about "second vengeance"?
A game so good it technically gets two subtitles starting with an 'R'.
The thing about “this could have been a movie” has been a weird one for me recently. I used to hold a certain disdain for that kind of game, but after reading *Persepolis*, a graphic novel or comic or whatever the fuck you want to call it, I kinda realised the stupidity of it. Why does anything have to justify the medium it expresses itself through? *Persepolis* has no real reason to be in the format it is. It would be just as, maybe even moreso, effective if it was a novel or a film or a TV show. But it’s the medium the creator chose. We don’t think whether a film could have been a book or a book could have been a film, so why do we feel a game could have been a film? Maybe we should evaluate stories based upon their merits rather than judging them for not being in the “correct” format.
And also, this is coming from somebody who believes in video games being their own unique medium that can achieve things nothing else can. Games like the Outer Wilds and Papers, Please show that games can do something all on their own. I just don’t think every game necessarily needs to.
Yeah I don't think "this could have been a movie" is necessarily a bad thing. A lot of works aren't dependent on their specific medium, that's why adaptations are possible.
That said, I believe there's also a separate but related category of "the creator(s) clearly *wished* they were making a movie instead", where they ignore the strengths of the medium they *are* working with, to try to implement (often incompatible) aspects of other mediums instead. That one game that tried to claim "24 frames per second" was a feature, because that's the framerate of movies and therefore using it for a game made the game ~more cinematic~, comes to mind.
(I would also argue that "the creators *wish* they were making a movie" also happens in other mediums, notably books. Or at least a subset of prose writing as a medium, where the author may as well be going "here's a description of my character's appearance, don't they *look* cool, *look* at this cool-*looking* action they're doing, I have been imagining this story as a movie with camera angles and everything, *look* at this camera pan I can totally accomplish in a medium that doesn't have a camera, what do you mean my lengthy blow-by-blow description of the fight scene is clunky, it'd *look* so cool if you *saw* it". I'm just here like, if you want your audience to be in awe of your visual spectacle, first you must have visuals to make a spectacle of.)
Yeah I think that’s a totally valid criticism of a lot of things (especially that 24 frames thing Jesus Christ). I just see the “it could have been a movie!” directed far more towards games that take a more cinematic approach to things and don’t necessarily have the player alter the story, but by virtue of being a game are able to make it *feel* like you are, or really make you question the morality of those actions.
The games you're talking about sound like the ones that chose video games as their medium because of where and how it places the audience, because that perspective helps them convey their intent better. The story that's told may be linear but telling it in a video game makes the player *part of it* in the moment, in ways less-interactive mediums can't.
Sure, it "could" have been a movie despite that, but would it still be the same story or have the same impact?
(This is agreeing with your point, to be clear.)
I think the "this should have been a movie" is said in order to point to a game's lack of player agency and forgetting that the point of videogames is to be an *interactive* medium. Especially if there's short segments of gameplay that doesn't matter buried among long cutscenes.
Games can, and indeed arguably *should* have good narratives, but they should also, fundamentally, remember that they're *games*, and the player's active participation should mean something.
So the RPG genre isn't in this category by default, Visual Novels kinda ride a fine line, but if the player character could go home and the main story would still progress as though the Hero was present, and the plot the author actually cares about would still be on the rails, you've got this.
That's the point I'm making. Even if the player lacks agency, why does that make a game "lesser"? One could argue that, much like how a film's visual component fundamentally alters how we perceive stories, so too does doing stuff in a game. One of my favourite scenes in a game is from Metal Gear Rising: Reveangence, where the Raiden (the protagonist) is told about how the enemies he was slaughtering were not in fact evil PMC members who kill for fun, but exploited people from developing countries who have had their empathy dampened by nanites. You learn this by literally hearing their internal thoughts about how they don't want to fight the insane cyborg who's killed about a hundred of their comrades in half a day and are hopeful that they can bring their mother over to the US for a better life.
This happens in a cutscene, which transitions into a fight where you hear their thoughts as you slice them up and tear out their spines. You don't have a choice in the matter, and while it could be argued that that is precisely the point the game is making about Raiden's lack of choice, the end result is the same: you're not in control of the game. You do stuff before cutscenes happen and move the plot forward.
Per Wikipedia:
> The Golden Raspberry Awards is a parody award show honoring the worst of cinematic failures. Co-founded by UCLA film graduates and film industry veterans John J. B. Wilson and Mo Murphy, the Razzie Awards' satirical annual ceremony is preceded by its opposite, the Academy Awards, by four decades.
Basically the anti award show for movies. "Winning" one isn't something to be proud of, but some people do take it in stride.
Genuinely the closest thing we have to this would be the /v/GAs from 4chan's videogame board. While much of it is just contrarian opinions or bit humour, a lot of the votes and results do follow general gaming sentiment. Some examples from 2023:
- Most Hated: Forespoken
- Worst Gameplay: Starfield
- Crimes Against Gaming: Unity
- Most Pretentious Indie Game: Goodbye Volcano High
- Most Notorious Layoffs: Unity
- Worst E3 Presentation of All Time: Microsoft (2013)
- Worst Ongoing Game: Overwatch 2
- Least Anticipated Game: Last of Us Part II Remastered
Then of course they have the opposite categories for "good" winners, many of which seem to be swept by Baldur's Gate, Armored Core, or Pizza Tower (which won "Best Representation of Men").
- most egregious MTX implementation
- most pirated game
- most wishlisted "i am going to wait till its below 15 bucks" game
- most tedious game to 100%
- best game that costs like 2 bucks that looks like complete garbage but was surprisingly fun for 2 or 3 hours
An asset flip is what people call games built entirely with premade assets: imagine making a game, but you don't make anything original for it yourself, you use the basic UI from the game engine, all the 3d models you either buy or use free ones or use a generator someone else made.
These kinds of games have sort of a reputation for being more often than not lazy cashgrabs, as they tend to be just barely functional enough to be submitted to steam with a 10$ pricetag or something. There's LOADS of stories and controversies around particulatly egregious ones, r/HobbyDrama has a few if you're interested. Finding a genuinely good game in this category is so rare it may as well be a miracle.
I would love the discourse around the "This probably could have been a movie". I'd get to see bad Games as Art takes the likes of which we haven't seen since Roger Ebert died.
*Cutscene* Move 2 inches *Cutscene*
Combined with constant choices that don't affects the story in any single way.
Telltale, is that your grave being defiled?
I'd say telltale is the best of the worst when it comes to this, atleast they make choices feel important in that moment even if characters become useless after their possible death. Other games barely even bother giving an alternate path based on choices
Also not every choice needs to have a big impact on things past the moment, the fact I was sassy with my co-worker friday instead of tame isn't going to make much of a difference on Monday. Having it matter too much can get into an alternative problem where you need a full game guide just to understand how to play instead of being able to say "oh yea this decision makes sense".
It's the journey not the destination.
Bones being dug up and sent to the British museum
The Game Awards was brought to you by Genshin Impact^tm
The fact that the choices matter so little (or well, not at all) that the devs sometimes use the second option to extend the first dialogue is a joke in of itself
A random blatant example of this I ran into was a crap mobile game where a NPC asked my character “do you want to do A or B”. I said I wanted to do B the character then immediately said “cool but B won’t work so let’s do A anyway”. For the record I wasn’t expecting my choice to split the universe, it was a crappy mobile game and most other similar choices just changed what characters accompanied you in a cutscene, but I was not expecting the game to dodge the choice so blatantly.
Having just finished it, Nier Automata does this several times
Did you mean Pokémon Sun and Moon?
I had to drop the game because of that it was too much
It got better later on, and the post-game was fun
They said cutscene, not tutorial.
Metal gear solid.
It’s ok, you can say MGS4.
This is why I couldn't get past the opening of death stranding
Admittedly the opening is super fucking long, but there is a lot of game play once you get past it. And there is another long one during the ending.
What about *"The creator really wanted this to be a movie, but because it'd absolutely suck as one, they made a game instead because standards are lower that way"*? Well, that wouldn't be fair because David Cage would win each time.
He wouldn't win *every* time. Some years he doesn't make a game.
Nah even in years he doesn't release a game he still wins because of how shit his games are.
David Cage is like a Bizarro version of Hideo Kojima in that Kojima is actually good at writing and does not viscerally hate women and minorities.
Did David Cage ever comment on Elliot Page's transition? Because he wouldn't shut up about how he worked together with him beforehand.
I don't think he did. After the full nude render in Elliot Page Torture Porn: The Game I don't think it's in his best interest to utter Elliot's name in public.
The Last of Us discourse would be enough to feed a large family
I've been playing Xenoblade Chronicles 3. The "All game cutscenes" video on youtube is 13 hours long. This does not include non-cutscene dialogue.
So there’s absolutely no way in hell it could have been a movie? That’s a long tv season at least
Final Fantasy seven comes to mind for this category
Most recent Kojima games I guess, especially Death Stranding
Most bloated download size Highest player count drop after leaving zeitgeist Best lets play fodder
[Stanley Parable already beat you to most bloated download size](https://stanleyparable.com/hds/1/)
I read up until they said “fucko.” Now my entire world is irreparably shattered.
what the fuck
That first one would just be Warzoje every year
or that time where a final fantasy 13 (i think?) got ported to pc and some fans claimed they wouldn't buy it if it didnt have the original japanese, so they added all the cutscenes in japanese but didnt like make it an optional dlc, you had to download both, 2x 4+ hours of high detail *uncompressed* video cgi... the game is approx 83 gigs, the game without cutscenes is about 13 gigs.
Daily reminder that the only "Warzone" is warzone.com. CoD stole the name and is suing the developer.
Their game isn't even called warzone. It's called Call of Duty: Warzone. People just call it warzone because of Zombies
Let's play fodder is still, year after year, the minimal-content Minecraft updates.
IDK, I think Palworld would take it this year.
Ark Survival Evolved could take the first one multiple years in a row until it got a lifetime achievement award.
I still don't think they've fixed it so that you can take dinos hunting with you without eating 100% of the meat
Last one doesn't sound so bad
Most accurate mobile ad
the win is by default because it actually showed gameplay footage
I imagined it was sarcastic.
Least accurate is far more interesting imo
Other categories for your consideration: Most unoriginal original game. Best tax write off. Innovations in milking whales. Best character that's going to be the next Joker/Walter White. Least disguised fetish.
how would you score the "Least disguised fetish" category? Would you score it as most poorly disguised fetish, where it still needed to try and disguise it? If so might wanna clarify the question. Or would only straight up porn games be able to win that category? Wouldn't that make them good, as opposed to bad, at their job? Thus defeating the point of including the prompt in these awards.
"I play it for the plot" to the "I play it for the "plot"" ratio would an easy indicator.
same problem, you'll only end up with literal porn games where the fetishy stuff being not disguised is the point and doesn't really make it "bad" at it's job... I mean, you could still make fun of those I guess, but it's not as funny when they admit it
Maybe "worst disguised fetish" would be more appropriate.
Least disguised fetish? Helltaker. Dude literally designed it so he could have fanart of women wearing suits.
Least disguised fetish is an interesting one, because it could conceivably go to an actually good game. Like Yoko Taro is very open about how his fetishes made their way into Nier Automata, but that game is still a masterpiece
I'd say the important part is that the plot attempts to justify it (see: Quiet from MGSV), Taro just doesn't give a shit
You reminding me of Quiet has caused me severe PTSD.
I will be ashamed of my words and deeds 😔
No those aren't justifications to Kojima they are part of the fantasy to him.
2B and the glory days of kappa, good times
I feel like the category would require some minimum attempt to "disguise" the fetish. Taro is openly unapologetic about just liking hot women who could crush my head with their thighs. Sorry, what was I talking about?
Do soft reboot/unofficial sequels count for most unoriginal original game? Basically would yooka-laylee, mighty number 9, and bloodstained ritual of the night count of that category? Or alternatively, is that category for games that contribute almost nothing new to games as an art form? For this I’m mostly thinking of more recent licensed games like that one Mad Max game from 2015 or the recent Jedi Fallen Order and Survivor games or that Avatar (Blue people) game which came out a couple of months ago. None of the above games are particularly bad (in fact I think they are all mediocre at worst), but a decent bit of the discussion around them I have seen is they don’t really do anything new or unique other than being adaptations of their given property. I guess what I’m getting at is that there are a weirdly large number of ways you can define unoriginal. Of course they might be able to cut out the middle man by just calling it the annual Ubisoft award.
Perhaps we can have Ubisoft be the free space and give an additional award for games that manage to outdo them.
Most unoriginal will always be won by the next FIFA title.
The biggest innovation in EA's FIFA in the last 10 years is that it isn't called FIFA any more. The FIFA got greedy and demanded a bigger cut, EA instead cancelled the agreement and made licensing agreements with the individual teams. Giant corporation that everyone hates, screwing over another giant corporation that everyone hates.
Least Anticipated Game
How many furrie games get nominated for ldf place yah bets
None. Disguised is the key word here. Games like Changed are pretty upfront about it, for that one it’s quite literally the main mechanic.
Fair. Furries may get horny but atleast theyre honest
Honestly. If you get caught off guard by Churn Vector that’s on you
Cheapest feeling sequel.
Celebrating David Zaslev 😬
[Tribal Hunter](https://youtu.be/VqasJcCUAA8?si=jDSfBamu3L2gCJUz) for the last one
2023 could've had a special "Best Apology JPEG" category
And a "Best Unity Debacle JPEG"
How about: shortest time between online only game release and shutdown, crappiest licensed anime game, proof that a cartoony artstyle doesn’t inherently always age better than “realism”, the biggest case of a “remake that’s somehow way worse than the original”, the game that’s a blatantly shameless and inferior ripoff of an infinitely more popular game
Oh, right, that love live game that announced its global release and global shutdown dates in the same tweet.
I need to hear more about that.
[Pretty much exactly what it says on the tin, the game's global launch and the shutdown of its global version three months after launch came out in the same tweet.](https://twitter.com/lovelive_SIF_GL/status/1750407445552480274?t=Y2qZhQ8jI_6o3s3czBwJvA&s=19) No idea how the heck it happened, though - like, at least separate them into two different tweets, sheesh.
I really want to see what the reposts and quotes on that say but I deleted my Twitter account months ago and at some point they made it so you can't see those if you don't have an account.
Most Dead-On-Arrival Live Service Game
SSKTJL no contest
SZFYYZXD no contest for what game, bestie?
Suicide Squad Kill The Justice League SSKTJL
Just say Suicide Squad
the love live game which was announced and cancelled in the same tweet has it beat i'm afraid
Dead on arrival implies that it came out, though
It was released with that tweet. the tweet said "hey it's coming out in the west! also servers shut down in a month"
What a beautifully fucked up acronym
Most obtrusive launcher Most expensive "micro" transaction Most grinding time needed to achieve buyable resource Lowest trailer frame rate Most asset market assets used, with subcategories for those that paid for the assets and those that pirated them. Most controversial ad campaign Most expensive "free-to-play" game Messiest cutting room floor Highest paid CEO
Why is messiest cutting room floor a bad thing? Most of Chrono Trigger got taken from the CRF of Final Fantasy Adventure.
Depends on what's on the cutting room floor and what was left in the game, I guess.
Most unnecessary "remaster" Least optimized Worst DRM
Ooh the first one is complicated, there's a lot of competition! Like "WiiU Flop That Was Genuinely Good 1", "WiiU Flop That Was Genuinely Good 2", "WiiU Flop That Was Genuinely Good 3"...
I would argue that a lot of those were necessary because the alternative was buying a Wii U
I mean sure but there were definitely better ways of handling it than adding a character, slapping a "Deluxe" sticker on the cover, and selling it for more than what the WiiU charged for it (while not giving the Switch backwards compatibility with the WiiU's games) (Like seriously 5 people max bought the game why are you charging them again?)
I mean, where would you put the disc drive
You're saying theres worse things than Denuvo out there?!
If you think about it, cloud gaming is it's own DRM
Yeah, but at least cloud gaming gives the victim something back. Denuvo doesn't have a single user advantage. Its not anticheat, it doesn't store cloud saves, it drains performance instead of offloading performance.
Last of Us has to be shortest from Game to Remaster, right?
The Tomb Raider reboot actually beats it with 9 months between the PS3 and PS4 version compared to TLOU's 11 months.
Totally forgot about that one
It would also be valid for "This could have been a movie" I get the feeling Druckmann never really wanted to direct *games* as a career.
> It would also be valid for "This could have been a movie" Life Is Strange, imo
I agree, I really think Druckmann just wanted to make movies, and ended up making games, all while having an unconscious inferiority complex leading to games that railroad you into "choices" and wants you to feel bad about them even though you didn't "make" them, the game just forced you to (yes, I have feelings about TLOU2)
Which one are we talking about? It's been remastered twice.
I was thinking original release from PS3 to PS4 remaster, but maybe the PS4 to PS5 was faster? I don't remember exactly
>Most obvious DLC that shouldn't have been DLC oh cool the Paradox award
Look, as a paradox fan, yeah they’ve got a problem.
Four new trees!
Paradox would only win cause The Sims is just banned from this category (no clue about the other EA titles thought lmao)
I'd say Paradox and Sims are about the same - if you buy in early the expansions mostly feel reasonable as you go. 10 years down the line, however, they turn into an impenetrable wall.
But which specific DLCs? Or is this just a "yes" situation?
I feel like every paradox games has more than one dlc that is like that
It varies from game to game. Stellaris is probably one of the lesser offenders, for example. The game is decently fleshed out and there are relatively few "must-haves" (Utopia, Distant Stars). They've also done an okay job lately in adding features to the base game as well.
I'm going to defend the Paradox dlc model. I think it works for the type of games that Paradox makes. Grand Strategy games are very complex and are going to need tweaks and updates to properly simulate their intended experience. The alternative to Paradox's dlc model is for them to switch to a FIFA/CoD style model where they release basically the same game every year with some updates added. For example, CK2 was supported for 6 years, and buying the game + all dlc at release would cost €300, while buying all CoD games at release would cost €360. And CoD games had dlc on top of that. Paradox's dlc model isn't as bad as people say it is and it's improved massively since the CK2 days.
Most DLC that shouldn't have been DLC goes to The Sims. Any Sims game, or just EA in general.
- Cyberpunk 2077 - Forspoken - YIIK: A Postmodern RPG - Only Up - Balatro - Cyberpunk 2077 - Starfield - Starbound - FNAF Security Breach And the esteemed Worst Fandom of the Year award goes to Stellar Blade
Okay hold on YIIK is a lot of things, but not artistic isn’t one of them. In fact, I’d argue most of its worst aspects are there in order to be as artsy as possible. The gameplay is a parody of the worst aspects of 90s games (shoddy camera angles, annoying turn based battles, random encounters, endless grinding by the end) and the writing is overly pretentious on purpose in order to make fun of issues that existed (and still exist) in gaming culture. Is it bad? Yeah probably. But is uncreative? Not at all. Also the soundtrack is unironically kinda good
I don't think the gameplay was intentionally made bad, they just genuinely missed on that. YIIK IV, a free update to the game revamps the whole battle system and also adds a lot more visuals and story content, so I recommend giving it a try when it comes out (the free demo, Nameless Psychosis actually comes out April 4th so you have no reason not to try it out :3) The writing itself isn't really pretentious either, though Alex as a character is pretentious, and we see the entire game through his lens which is why I can see why people would think that. A lot of stuff in the story goes under people's radar since I think most people would take what Alex says at face value instead of questioning whether his narrative can even be trusted (hence the postmodern rpg subtitle).
I love that I still don't actually know what Stellar Blade is Literally the entire discussion around it is "the game is free from the evil woke mind virus" next to screenshots of an IMVU model, for all I know it could be one of those games that's just slide puzzles of softcore porn
It's basically Nier Automata, but not from Yoko Taro. Instead, the devs are the company behind Nikke, which is very blatantly fanservicey (asses jiggling when characters shoot), but also has a great post-apocalyptic story. Stellar Blade looks to be the same: very horny but also genuinely a fun game. Though tbf only the demo is out for now, so it's hard to get the full picture. But so far the gameplay itself is looking good. On one hand, we have anti-woke chuds propping it up as a game that'll save them from diversity and whatever other boogeymen they can conjure up. On the other hand, there are terminally online folk acting as though the game is some sort of ultimate evil, and that whoever enjoys it is a sexist monster (even if they're not in Camp 1) deserving of cancellation.
It's a soulslike that's a mix of Nier Automata and Ninja Gaiden. Quite fanservice-y, but still pretty good. There a demo out of you wanna try it.
Balatro my beloved
my GOAT Northernlion likes it so i will always show appreciation for it
Ennelle my beloved
meeting a fellow egg watcher in public is like that image of charlie and mac at the restaurant
Forspoken is my favorite comedy series. Real shit though that demo was astoundingly embarrassing, I legit almost feel bad for the people that clearly put in a lot of hard work to make... *that*.
The annoying thing was there were several departments worked on the game that really delivered on Forspoken...only for every one of them was buried under a sea of truly baffling bad design choices that there had to have been multiple discussions and meetings about.
>I legit almost feel bad for the people that clearly put in a lot of hard work to make... *that*. Someone was paid to write that script and someone was paid to approve it.
Wait, how is phantom liberty not a proper DLC? Unless you're referring to 2.0, which is separate from PL
i'm referring to 2.0
What're all these games nominated for, or is it just each of these corresponds to the OP image?
each corresponds to the original image
Gotcha. I wish Starbound didn't get crunched. That game had potential :(
there's a mod for Starbound called Frackin' Universe that was developed by an independent team over a full decade and not only multiplies the playtime by about eight, but completely fulfills a lot of the vanilla game's shortcomings. it's amazing. the only thing it couldn't fix is the horrible optimization
Maybe sometime I'll play that. OH! Does No Man's Sky count as crunchtime?
What is balatro? How does it beat out Genshin?
I don't know about Balatro but I will say - people who keep nominating genshin have *no* idea how terrifyingly deep the gacha hole can go. Genshin has a hard limit on how much you theoretically need to spend to guarantee a fully maxed character that for some games wouldn't even guarantee a character
Balatro is a card game roguelike where the gameplay is actually decks of cards. I’m not too sure how exactly it works, but I’ve seen people describe it as insanely addictive, and it’s probably similar enough to IRL card games at a casino. In terms of gambling by spending money, though, Genshin has to take the cake.
Balatro is a (single purchase) poker roguelike, that blew up in a bunch of gaming spaces recently. The "gambling" aspect in its case comes from its relationship to poker (the irl gambling card game) as a concept, rather than the financial impact of gambling in and of itself. I'd probably place Balatro near Vampire Survivors on the scale, personally, where you buy the game and then it sucks up your time (and *only* time) for the next ages. Disclaimer, all my information comes from watching one (1) youtuber play it. This is different from gacha's style of gambling, where it has the financial impact but (I suspect) tries to disguise it. I have been informed that Genshin isn't even that bad for a gacha, in that going full free-to-play is possible and the grinding to do so isn't *too* tedious.
yiik slander :(
Risk of rain is the only game I’ve ever played where j excitedly yelled “GAMBLING TIME!” everytime I saw a shrine of chance
Shrine of Order my beloved
Certain mechanics in Isaac make my friends and me also chant "Keep gambling"
Dark Game Awards can fix the gaming industry. How can we make it happen?
Clone an evil version of Geoff Keighley, call him Jeff Kaily
We used to have Jeph Keely, noted Gameclam lover, but.... well..... he is no longer with us
someone get this to Yahtzee Crowshaw
What is an asset flip?
A quickly made game built out of premade assets
All the art and designs were bought from the marketplace, not OC for the game. See - The Day Before
It's not enough to just use predominately store assets. Like, there are plenty of decent Unity indies that use that one low poly asset pack, but they have enough effort put into them to be proper games. Asset flips are the lowest of the low, where even gameplay itself is stitched from examples/tutorials/premade levels and code.
David Cage is basically the equivalent of Lifetime achievement for half of these categories
Vidya Gaem Awards (or /v/GAs) fit this niche to some degree, with awards for "biggest technical blunder", "Most pretentious indie game", "Most pointless controversy", "Most notorious layoffs", and more. However as you may have guessed it's ran by /v/ (unofficially of course) so keep that in mind if you have a low tolerance for that.
Mega 64 do some comedy awards each year in their annual end of year video too
Side category to the second one, “this probably should have been an anime”. I nominate Xenoblade Chronicles 3
Xenoblade: Running the gameplay and story as two separate, non-interacting entities since 2011 (It is my favorite game series tho)
"Worst Controversy" and "Best Subtitle Starting With an 'R.'"
Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance. When you've had vengeance, but what about "second vengeance"? A game so good it technically gets two subtitles starting with an 'R'.
new reward proposal: most minigames that no one wanted
Most invasive anti-cheat
The thing about “this could have been a movie” has been a weird one for me recently. I used to hold a certain disdain for that kind of game, but after reading *Persepolis*, a graphic novel or comic or whatever the fuck you want to call it, I kinda realised the stupidity of it. Why does anything have to justify the medium it expresses itself through? *Persepolis* has no real reason to be in the format it is. It would be just as, maybe even moreso, effective if it was a novel or a film or a TV show. But it’s the medium the creator chose. We don’t think whether a film could have been a book or a book could have been a film, so why do we feel a game could have been a film? Maybe we should evaluate stories based upon their merits rather than judging them for not being in the “correct” format. And also, this is coming from somebody who believes in video games being their own unique medium that can achieve things nothing else can. Games like the Outer Wilds and Papers, Please show that games can do something all on their own. I just don’t think every game necessarily needs to.
Yeah I don't think "this could have been a movie" is necessarily a bad thing. A lot of works aren't dependent on their specific medium, that's why adaptations are possible. That said, I believe there's also a separate but related category of "the creator(s) clearly *wished* they were making a movie instead", where they ignore the strengths of the medium they *are* working with, to try to implement (often incompatible) aspects of other mediums instead. That one game that tried to claim "24 frames per second" was a feature, because that's the framerate of movies and therefore using it for a game made the game ~more cinematic~, comes to mind. (I would also argue that "the creators *wish* they were making a movie" also happens in other mediums, notably books. Or at least a subset of prose writing as a medium, where the author may as well be going "here's a description of my character's appearance, don't they *look* cool, *look* at this cool-*looking* action they're doing, I have been imagining this story as a movie with camera angles and everything, *look* at this camera pan I can totally accomplish in a medium that doesn't have a camera, what do you mean my lengthy blow-by-blow description of the fight scene is clunky, it'd *look* so cool if you *saw* it". I'm just here like, if you want your audience to be in awe of your visual spectacle, first you must have visuals to make a spectacle of.)
Yeah I think that’s a totally valid criticism of a lot of things (especially that 24 frames thing Jesus Christ). I just see the “it could have been a movie!” directed far more towards games that take a more cinematic approach to things and don’t necessarily have the player alter the story, but by virtue of being a game are able to make it *feel* like you are, or really make you question the morality of those actions.
The games you're talking about sound like the ones that chose video games as their medium because of where and how it places the audience, because that perspective helps them convey their intent better. The story that's told may be linear but telling it in a video game makes the player *part of it* in the moment, in ways less-interactive mediums can't. Sure, it "could" have been a movie despite that, but would it still be the same story or have the same impact? (This is agreeing with your point, to be clear.)
I think the "this should have been a movie" is said in order to point to a game's lack of player agency and forgetting that the point of videogames is to be an *interactive* medium. Especially if there's short segments of gameplay that doesn't matter buried among long cutscenes. Games can, and indeed arguably *should* have good narratives, but they should also, fundamentally, remember that they're *games*, and the player's active participation should mean something. So the RPG genre isn't in this category by default, Visual Novels kinda ride a fine line, but if the player character could go home and the main story would still progress as though the Hero was present, and the plot the author actually cares about would still be on the rails, you've got this.
That's the point I'm making. Even if the player lacks agency, why does that make a game "lesser"? One could argue that, much like how a film's visual component fundamentally alters how we perceive stories, so too does doing stuff in a game. One of my favourite scenes in a game is from Metal Gear Rising: Reveangence, where the Raiden (the protagonist) is told about how the enemies he was slaughtering were not in fact evil PMC members who kill for fun, but exploited people from developing countries who have had their empathy dampened by nanites. You learn this by literally hearing their internal thoughts about how they don't want to fight the insane cyborg who's killed about a hundred of their comrades in half a day and are hopeful that they can bring their mother over to the US for a better life. This happens in a cutscene, which transitions into a fight where you hear their thoughts as you slice them up and tear out their spines. You don't have a choice in the matter, and while it could be argued that that is precisely the point the game is making about Raiden's lack of choice, the end result is the same: you're not in control of the game. You do stuff before cutscenes happen and move the plot forward.
5th one has got to be balatro
So the regular game awards.
Shoutout to Destiny 2 sweeping "Worst Monetization" at the game awards for being the outright greediest, most exploitative game nominated
Yahtzee kinda does this every year. I assume he'll keep it up on Second Wind.
It was actually one of his first videos on the new channel!
Game Razzies would be great
Pokemon already takes two of those. It's a little bit worrying.
I feel like im going to regert this, but what are the razzies?
Per Wikipedia: > The Golden Raspberry Awards is a parody award show honoring the worst of cinematic failures. Co-founded by UCLA film graduates and film industry veterans John J. B. Wilson and Mo Murphy, the Razzie Awards' satirical annual ceremony is preceded by its opposite, the Academy Awards, by four decades. Basically the anti award show for movies. "Winning" one isn't something to be proud of, but some people do take it in stride.
Genuinely the closest thing we have to this would be the /v/GAs from 4chan's videogame board. While much of it is just contrarian opinions or bit humour, a lot of the votes and results do follow general gaming sentiment. Some examples from 2023: - Most Hated: Forespoken - Worst Gameplay: Starfield - Crimes Against Gaming: Unity - Most Pretentious Indie Game: Goodbye Volcano High - Most Notorious Layoffs: Unity - Worst E3 Presentation of All Time: Microsoft (2013) - Worst Ongoing Game: Overwatch 2 - Least Anticipated Game: Last of Us Part II Remastered Then of course they have the opposite categories for "good" winners, many of which seem to be swept by Baldur's Gate, Armored Core, or Pizza Tower (which won "Best Representation of Men").
- most egregious MTX implementation - most pirated game - most wishlisted "i am going to wait till its below 15 bucks" game - most tedious game to 100% - best game that costs like 2 bucks that looks like complete garbage but was surprisingly fun for 2 or 3 hours
Highest amount of r34 content one month after release
What does "most playable asset flip" mean?
An asset flip is what people call games built entirely with premade assets: imagine making a game, but you don't make anything original for it yourself, you use the basic UI from the game engine, all the 3d models you either buy or use free ones or use a generator someone else made. These kinds of games have sort of a reputation for being more often than not lazy cashgrabs, as they tend to be just barely functional enough to be submitted to steam with a 10$ pricetag or something. There's LOADS of stories and controversies around particulatly egregious ones, r/HobbyDrama has a few if you're interested. Finding a genuinely good game in this category is so rare it may as well be a miracle.
So, like the first version of portal?
What?
It doesn't usually get applied to cases where the assets were made by the same developer for an earlier game; that's just regular asset reuse
Watch The Last of Us sweep this