We're handing out honors to games so good we haven't even played them yet
How’d we do last year?
We began the preemptive award tradition in2008, so for fun let’s see just how accurate our preemptive honors were last year.
Best GTA IV competition: Prototype Yeah, it wasn’t released.
Will cause the most death due to 36 hour gaming binges at Korean cafes: Starcraft II Yeah, it wasn’t released either.
Most popular with middle aged women: Wii Fit We nailed this one! That was hard too, we were stuck between “middle aged women” and “pubescent boys who want to impress that girl in their geometry class by losing 30 lbs. but can’t get away from videogames long enough to do some real goddamn exercise… for Christ’s sake, JIMMY! Get off the damn couch and stop playin’ wit that TV GIZMO!”
Best game that involves sneaking: Metal Gear Solid 4 This one was close too, but we hit the nail right on the head. We were going to go with Sneak King 2: Rise of the Burger King, but alas, that was a dream we had and not an actual promotional Burger King game.
Best game with the word “war” in its name: Star Wars: The Force Unleashed We can admit when we’re wrong. We’re not going to right now, but we can if we want to.
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Worst title: Left 4 Dead This one is unfortunate. At the time, we really didn’t like the whole “it’s the number ‘4’ because there are four survivors… but it’s also the word “for.” Get it? GET IT?” thing, but now that we played the damn game and love it to undeath, we wouldn’t care if it were called “Killer, Diller, Chiller, Thriller here Tonight.”
We gave the runner up award in this category to Legendary: The Box. Guess what? They changed the name to simply “Legendary.” That’s power.
Best action survival horror thriller: Silent Hill 5 We failed again, and our two runner ups (RE 5 and Alan Wake) haven’t even been released yet. If we had to go back and rewrite it, we probably would have said Dead Space.
Will incite the most anger if effed up: Street Fighter IV This is both true and false. It’s true that screwing up Street Fighter would have caused an angry fanboy rant-fest. So good thing they didn’t screw it up. Of course, they also didn’t release it in 2008.
Game of the Year: Spore HAH! Spore is a great game, but it didn’t exactly glue our noses to our monitors, though it did stick SecuROM on our systems. Our actual game of the year award for 2008 went to Fallout 3, which absolutely deserved it, and wasn’t even mentioned in last year’s awards. Huh, maybe basing an entire set of awards on marketing and press releases isn’t the right way to do it. Oh well, if the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences can do it every year, so can we.
