The (Sony Exclusive) Game Awards 2024
Well that was hot garbage.
At least I played one of these award winning Sony Exclusives this year.
Astro Bot — 4 wins (including Game of the Year), 7 nominations
Metaphor: ReFantazio — 3 wins, 6 nominations
Balatro — 3 wins, 5 nominations
Black Myth: Wukong — 2 wins, 5 nominations
Helldivers 2 — 2 wins, 4 nominations
Senua’s Sage: Hellblade 2 — 2 wins (including lead actor Melina Juergens’ win for Best Performance), 4 nominations
Helldivers 2 did win my heart last night. During the awards what little traffic the Game Awards was getting suddenly crashed. It turned out that the Illuminate had finally decided to attack Super Earth… In the middle of the Game Awards.
I think my favorite award was Most Anticipated Game. This is an award given to (effectively) the best game that hasn’t been released yet. It was GTA VI in case you wondering. I personally think that Half Life 3 got robbed… AGAIN!
Another favorite of mine is Best Content Creator. I don’t care who wins, I think it’s hilarious that it even exists. Although looking at how well known any of the nominees were this year, it feels like I got robbed.
Best E-Sports The award went to a game that was released four years ago. One of the nominees was Dota 2, which started life 22 years ago.
Best E-Sports Athlete: Went to Korean Guy, who beat out Korean Guy, Korean Guy, and Korean Guy, plus Russian Guy. I’ve never heard of any of them and I don’t have a prayer of spelling their names correctly.
Best E-Sports Team: Went to a League of Legends team I’ve never heard of, they beat out three other LoL teams, a Counterstrike team and a Dota team. Such diversity year after year.
Mostly the Game Award are there for some zero effort publicity for upcoming games. Consequently along with Todd Howard and other hated worthies of the gaming world are some confused actors who clearly want to kick their agents in the teeth for sticking them in this shitty gig.
Which is why Aaron Paul and Harrison Ford shuffled on to the Award stage to do whatever.
Its only real purpose is to showcase the next series of AAA games that are going to bomb. Next year there will be plenty of old and new. CD Projekt Red will be delivering their “Hold my beer” reply to Netflix witcher-free version of The Witcher. Geralt was absolutely nowhere to be seen in the trailer. This Ciri story looks like something out of LucasFilm Story Group garbage can. Big hint, it turns out Men are the real monsters. This isn’t even remotely surprising given how high on the DEI bandwagon Projekt Red has climbed in the past couple of years.
The Dispatch. That’s the thing that stars Aaron Paul and Jacksepticeye. It’s not really a game, it’s an interactive choose your own adventure book… Except you can’t really choose your own adventure because Dispatch is on rails.
But the absolute cream of the crop this year was from Neil Cuckman’s Naughty Dog – Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet. This one appears to be a wholly original creation by Neil, a man who is absolutely convinced that he and he alone has broken the code on creating financially sustainable Woke entertainment. He has been incredibly successful at ignoring what really happened with The Last of Us 2, (which was release a deceptive trailer featuring Joel and then then the game crashes in sales in the second week. Cuckman was frantic to impose wokeness on Naughty Dog and it looks like he was more than successful at this. The trailer itself is nothing but a tone piece but what tone it strikes! It’s enough to shatter crystal and hopefully Naughty Dog. There’s no in game capture footage it’s all a cutscene. You get see angry, shaven headed prison yard lesbian, and one-eyed dyke with a chip on her shoulder.
Since Cuckman isn’t sponging off an established IP this time I predict with confidence a disaster Concord levels is inbound.
