U.S. cable channel Spike TV gave Red Dead Redemption Game Of The Year at its Video Game Awards, as teaser trailers announced titles including SSX: Deadly Descents, Mass Effect 3, Prototype 2 and Forza 4.
The televised, celebrity-heavy awards show gave out almost 30 awards, as listed out on Wikipedia, with Rockstar San Diego's Red Dead Redemption picking up the top prize, and BioWare winning Studio Of The Year for its work on titles including Mass Effect 2.
Other notable awards went to Playdead's Limbo for Best Indie Game, as well as Double Fine's Costume Quest for Best Downloadable Game and Valve's Portal 2 for Most Anticipated Game.
But there were several other video trailer debuts on the televised-live awards, subsequently made available GameTrailers.com's VGAs page, including a return for Electronic Arts' SSX snowboarding franchise in the military-tinged SSX: Deadly Descents, plus confirmation for Activision and Radical's action game sequel Prototype 2, due in 2012.
Other franchise follow-ups confirmed during the awards were Turn 10's Forza Motorsport 4, an Xbox 360 exclusive for 2011 which will also be Kinect-compatible, as well as a teaser trailer for BioWare's Mass Effect 3, which completes the acclaimed RPG trilogy and is due for holiday 2011.
Can there even be a more by the numbers list of games than this. Folks can't even give GoW3 away and somehow it's the best game of the year for the PS3? If this industry ever wants real recognition, having this dollars for awards show be used to represent the industry needs to be changed.
I can not agree more. This award show is a joke to developers and is being used by big companies to hype product. You do not see any premiering movies trailers at the Oscars.
The defining "Fuck you VGAs!" moment for me was a few years ago when Samuel Jackson instead of opening an envelop, he read the winners off of women who were airbrushed. Ahhhhh! I want to punch something right now thinking about it...
"You do not see any premiering movies trailers at the Oscars."
That is exactly what I was thinking. It's a bit sad that our industry is so focussed on the latest and next thing that we can't even make an event about celebrating the best games of the year without dedicating it in a large part to games that, in one extreme case, aren't even going to be released in the next two years.
It's also a little interesting that the highest [metacritic] rated game of the year wasn't a nominee for game of the year, though I'm pleased that a few single-player focussed games did.
Take a quick look over at some of the other entertainment award shows and while this one is quite shallow, it was ALOT better then past years. (seriuosly how many music award shows are there each year.. its silly)
Its to bad that the Video game industry doesn't have something similar to the "Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences" to vote on and then hold a once each year video game award show.
Actually with a little alteration the current setup/process used by the academy (membership, voting etc), could be good for the industry... (this was something i was thinking about while watching the show)
There is some group that called academy of interactive arts or some such thing and gives awards, but they usually end up with the same usual suspects for awards and nominees. That is based on broad market popularity.
And I'm not so much counting the number of the awards -- and yes the endless number of 'peoples choice' ceremonies are just as dippy. But that the depth and breadth of the nominees is so very limited. There is not a single medium or small dev/publisher title on any list and the closest thing you get to things not AAA are Heavy Rain and Alan Wake. There were things released this year that weren't named Halo or CoD and the industry at least should ensure such titles gather some notice.
The defining "Fuck you VGAs!" moment for me was a few years ago when Samuel Jackson instead of opening an envelop, he read the winners off of women who were airbrushed. Ahhhhh! I want to punch something right now thinking about it...
That is exactly what I was thinking. It's a bit sad that our industry is so focussed on the latest and next thing that we can't even make an event about celebrating the best games of the year without dedicating it in a large part to games that, in one extreme case, aren't even going to be released in the next two years.
It's also a little interesting that the highest [metacritic] rated game of the year wasn't a nominee for game of the year, though I'm pleased that a few single-player focussed games did.
Its to bad that the Video game industry doesn't have something similar to the "Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences" to vote on and then hold a once each year video game award show.
Actually with a little alteration the current setup/process used by the academy (membership, voting etc), could be good for the industry... (this was something i was thinking about while watching the show)
And I'm not so much counting the number of the awards -- and yes the endless number of 'peoples choice' ceremonies are just as dippy. But that the depth and breadth of the nominees is so very limited. There is not a single medium or small dev/publisher title on any list and the closest thing you get to things not AAA are Heavy Rain and Alan Wake. There were things released this year that weren't named Halo or CoD and the industry at least should ensure such titles gather some notice.
But yeah other than that it's mostly AAA.