QJ.NET’s Dubious Video Game Awards

There are video game awards, and then there are video game awards. This particular video game awards feature is probably of the latter, but with a lot of good-natured irreverence thrown into the mix. While it would have been easier for us to just make an article about our favorite games (and we did), we felt that the gaming year of 2007 had a lot to offer, and thus we’re giving credit (and blame) where it’s due.

Check out the winners in the full article.

Originally posted on January 21, 2008 at 1:14 PM.

 

It seems that the other game-reviewing websites have put us, QJ.NET, in a very awkward position. Most if not all of our colleagues in the industry have busted out their top video game picks for 2007, proclaiming this or that game as being the best in this or that category.

There’s also the big about Game of The Year, where everyone pretty much gets into a massive Internet argument on just what is the best title ever to come down from the heavens and inject awesome directly into our eyeballs during the past 365 days. Besides our Year in Review articles and our own pet choices for this year, we haven’t quite written anything of the sort (mainly because we often want to pretend we’re a unique and special snowflake).

But the whole shebang wouldn’t really be complete without us putting this or that title on a pedestal and hail it as manna from the heavens, so to round up 2007, here’s our twisted take on the Game of the Year Awards. Do note that this article is rife with spoilers, so if you want to discover today’s biggest games for yourselves, you’d do well to stay away.

Most Unintentionally Sadistic Boss Fight of the Year:
Mario versus Dino Piranha in the Good Egg Galaxy (Super Mario Galaxy)

In his latest adventure for the Nintendo Wii, Super Mario Galaxy, Mario shows us right off the bat how sick and twisted he’s become after all those years of eating strange mushrooms. This is through the game’s very first boss fight, where his space-rocketing sends him crashing right into an unsuspecting egg of gargantuan proportions.

The egg cracks and its occupant harmlessly stumbles about in confusion. Normally, we’d leave the poor bugger alone and go search for Power Stars somewhere else, but Mario thinks otherwise – using his deadly spin maneuver to beat the creature senseless with its own tail one, two, three times in succession.

It’s this flagrant disrespect of personal space as well as disregard for sportsmanship – the act is equivalent to ripping someone’s arm off and beating them to submission with it – that it takes the cake of Most Unintentionally Sadistic Boss Fight of the Year. It’s a truly sickening fight to watch, from the very first hit to the pitiful death animation. We hope you’re happy, Mario.

Pick-up line of the Year
“I’m looking for some alien toilet to park my bricks.” (Duke Nukem Forever)

Just. Awesome.

Best Dragon flight Simulator
(Lair)

Factor 5 stunned the video game world with Lair. It was pretty, it was awesome, and it had dragons. Dragons, a hardcore package of claws, teeth, scales, and fire. Dragons, the unstable genetic crossbreed between dinosaurs and a military-issue flamethrower.

Sure, the Panzer Dragoon series did it first and it was a laudable effort, but Lair scores a bajillion points more than Sega’s dragon-riding adventure because it wasn’t on rails. And you get to do all these sorts of crazy dragon-killing special moves and you had this wicked control scheme that fully utilized the motion-sensing capabilities of the SIXAXIS and…

Oh, who are we kidding? Everyone and their mother’s dog was waiting for Lair to justify the Sony PS3’s then-astronomical price tag of US$ 599. It was made by none other than the guys who put us in the seats of the most badass rides ever, and they turned out to be pretty awesome games. How in the world could they mess up something as simple as a dragon flight simulator?

For the record, the game does look brilliant and it does play nicely, but how did the crippling bugs, the horrendous controls, the stiff animation and the horrible controls get past quality control?

Ghosts. That’s the only explanation.

Most Formidable Handlebar Mustache
Captain Price (Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare – Xbox 360, PC, PS3)

In this day and age of pretty boys and girly men, we turn to the very last bastions of manliness in the video game world for salvation – that is, rugged facial hair in the form of handlebar mustaches.

Even the most JRPG-obsessed, Yuna-from-FFX-cosplaying fangirl would be hard pressed to deny the fact that facial hair of this degree and magnitude isn’t at the very least attractive. And not a lot of men can handle the world-heavy burden of such a magnificent growth of plumage on their upper lips – it takes a stern man, a brave man, a man of extreme caliber to carry a handlebar mustache and not look like a complete pillock at it.

With that said, we’re proud to give the award of Most Formidable Handlebar Mustache to none other than Captain Price of the Call of Duty series. He’s been through every conceivable war there ever was, and in Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, he proves that even after being reincarnated three times he can still hack it with the best. And keep his badass mustache. Mario will just have to settle for second place.

Just look at that. Holy crap. Holy crap.

Most Pointless Use of Wet-Clothes Graphics
Nathan Drake (Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune)

 

While us guys here at QJ.NET like to believe that we’ve risen beyond being turned into jabbering cavemen when we catch sight of the female form being exquisitely displayed, we do heartily commend and appreciate today’s video game developers in cooking up new ways to reduce us into jabbering cavemen when we catch sight of the female form being exquisitely displayed.

One of these ways is wet-clothes graphics – how the in-game representation of water turns the female protagonist’s clothes into a body-hugging affair of transparency and fanservice.

This award is about the abhorrent and unjustifiable misuse of such advanced technology. We understand the concept of visual fidelity, normal-mapping, next-gen graphics, and so on, but do we really need to see Nate’s shirt and pants sticking wetly to his chest and crotch after he’s gone for a dip? No.

Thanks, Naughty Dog, for giving us a good third person shooter-slash-tomb raider with the extra X chromosome. God forbid you could have helped Tomonobu Itagaki make the wet water-physics of Dead or Alive Volleyball: Extreme Tasteless Fanservice better.

Most Unintentional Innuendo of That Sort
“We may need you to play Twing-Twang.” (Heavenly Sword)

There are things about Heavenly Sword that leave us scratching our heads. Besides the fact that the game is practically over by the time you press Start to play, the game takes liberties not just with physics, but with common sense (you should not be able to steer your projectiles after you’ve shot them, but it is admittedly an awesome feature).

But what really bakes our noodles is the nickname Kai and Nuriko seem to call the activity of shooting arrows through people’s crotches – namely, the fine art of “twing-twang”.

In the proper context, it actually sounds cute, maybe even clever. But the fact that we hear it first in the demo and not see it in action until the full game itself is played that we start imagining things.

Dirty things.

Most Effective Advertisement Campaign
Jade Raymond (Ubisoft)

When Ubisoft Montreal first revealed Assassin’s Creed (Xbox 360, PS3, PC)  we were all pretty much poleaxed into a perpetual state of awe. Here was a game that was all about killing people in style, and with an unlimited number of ways on how to go about it.

It also had this neat parkour system where your player character, an assassin named Altair, can pretty much climb, scale, or explore any part of the three heavily-populated cities in his jurisdiction – and all it takes is a simple tilt of the analog stick here and there to do so. All in all, Assassin’s Creed took the cake right out from the gates, if not for a few bugs and AI issues.

But some of us probably know what – or who – the main draw of Assassin’s Creed is. Yes, we know it wasn’t actually part of Ubisoft Montreal’s advertising strategy to parade one of the video game industry’s hottest celebrities just to advertise a game, but with a Ubisoft Montreal staff photo having her displayed prominently in the foreground doesn’t really help things that much. In fact, it kind of makes one think that something’s up.

You can’t even see some of the staff members in the background.

Most Cruel Display of Animal Torture
Riding a crippled horse (Assassin’s Creed)

Ride that sucker. It can rest its crippled, twisted shell of a body when it’s dead.

Most Helpful AI
UNSC Military Personnel (Halo 3)

 

It’s been said dozens of times, but it bears repeating: Halo 3 has some of the most devious enemy AI on this side of the seventh gaming generation. Turtling behind cover? Horrifyingly accurate plasma grenades are thrown to flush you out while snipers hide in wait for a bead on your helmet-wearing skull. Sniping to pick off units from afar? Unggoy units bum-rushing you with a plasma grenade in each hand. Going gung-ho, Rambo style, melee-ing everything you can see without any regard for safety? Say hello to a Gravity Hammer whacking, thanks to an Elite Grunt.

You’d be hard-pressed to even survive amongst the toughest and meanest digital badasses of the Covenant.

Unfortunately, it seems that while the enemy AI development team in Bungie Studios may have worked their asses off in creating ruthless killing machines, the friendly AI development team may have been knocking back too many Game Fuel drinks rather than getting their coding ship-shape. Suffice to say the friendly AI only serves as a convenient weapons cache, on the off-chance that you would want to trade your Needler Gun in for a bog-standard UNSC Assault Rifle (god forbid).

And don’t even get us started on how well they drive behind the wheel of any Halo 3 vehicle.

Most Pointless Boss Fight (or most obvious point in the game where the developers ran out of ideas)
Master Chief w/ Spartan Laser versus Guilty Spark (Halo 3)

Halo 3‘s single player campaign on any other mode is pure FPS awesome. Halo 3‘s single player campaign in Legendary – well, you’ve got yourself a banquet of hardcore Covenant-busting gameplay that’s sure to challenge any armchair marksman worth his frag count.

Sure, it’s plagued with issues such as the small deal about your AI companions being as useful as a suit of armor made of exploding gasoline barrels in a firefight, but it’s suitably epic as the endnote to a critically-acclaimed franchise. Too bad the final boss fight isn’t quite as good as the events leading up to it.

Yes, for those of us who were fooled by that particular ad with the museum models of a massive, full-scale war with the Covenant and the Gravemind combined – just how loudly did you hear your heart break when it all boiled down to blasting a flying little robot with the Halo 3 equivalent of a portable orbital bombardment system. The harrowing warthog ride after that got our hearts pumping, but other than that, it was a sour note that left us scratching our heads.

It’s been quite a slog, but we’re finally at the end of our post. The awards have been passed out, the winners duly lauded for their dubious honors – but one thing still remains, even if we’ve just made fun of all these high-quality titles: they’re still worth your hard-earned cash, and they each made 2007 the greatest (if not the weirdest) gaming year ever.

Originally posted on January 21, 2008 at 1:14 PM.