I spent my night like so many gamers did while trying to maintain a connection to the Game Awards stream on both Steam.tv and Twitch.tv so I could earn potential rewards in both locations. I think everyone was out chasing the possibility of winning a Steam Deck, and it seems as though maybe Valve had some technical difficulties with this giveaway because about 20 minutes into the show they finally seemed to start announcing the winners. I did not win a Steam Deck which is probably a good thing because I already have one… but I promise it would have gone to a good home if I did end up with a second one. Here is hoping someone out there that I know actually managed to snag one.
We all know we tune into “The Game Awards” for the cavalcade of trailers because the rewards themselves are largely inconsequential. They will feature some esports people you have never heard of and a bunch of games that you didn’t play… with a single AAA game winning almost every single award. This year I thought it was going to be all about Elden Ring but it seems that God of War Ragnarok was the main character of the evening. What was significantly different this year however is how I commented about what I was seeing. Normally speaking on a game show like this I would have Twitter open and keep a running sequence of commentary going along with all of my other friends doing the same thing. Since I am no longer on Twitter however a few of us opted for something different.
I spent a delightful evening hanging out with Arkenor, Scopique, and Tipa as we attempted to all stay in synch while hanging out on voice chat while watching the show. It did not work as planned. The original goal was to have everyone tune in to discord which would in theory rebroadcast the same stream at the same time to all of us so we would be able to comment on the same things. What ended up happening instead is that the rebroadcast was wigging out for a few people, which lead some of us to be watching YouTube, others on Twitch, and myself trying to keep tabs on the Steam version of the broadcast. This caused some hilariously out-of-sequence comment moments, but in spite of all of that, it was a heck of a lot of fun. This is definitely the most enjoyable way to watch a big corporate games presentation.
There were way too many things covered to talk about in a blog post, so here are some of my rapid-fire comments about the things that really stood out to me on a personal level.
Dead Cells Return to Castlevania
You had me at Castlevania. I enjoy Dead Cells but have not played it anywhere near as much as I should. Once this DLC drops I will do my best to remedy this failure. I have so many fond memories of the Belmonts, and Alucard, and count Symphony of the Night as my one true favorite game of all time. There was no way I was not going t o play this.
Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden
This looks really interesting. It gives me deep Witcher vibes as maybe a more spiritualist/druidic take on that franchise. The trailer definitely piqued my interest enough to wishlist this. My hope is it feels like the big open-world witcher nonsense that I love so much. It definitely seems like the sort of game I would go in for.
Hellboy: Web of Wyrd
Scopique and I were talking about this during the show, but we did not realize that we had apparently not gotten a Hellboy game before now. This is apparently not true and that there were two games previously… one in 2000 and one in 2004 but I remember the existence of neither. What impressed me about this game particularly is how closely it seemed to replicate the unique art stylings of Mike Mignola. I love Hellboy and more particularly I love the Hellboy comics. I will be watching this game closely.
Star Wars Jedi Survivor
I don’t have this problem when I am playing the game but in person… I cannot see Cameron Monaghan as anything other than his character from Shameless which is a hilarious show if you have never watched it. I loved Jedi Fallen Order so this is absolutely going to be a “day one drop everything else” type game for me. I will be picking it up on the PC and I will be ignoring again the warnings against playing with a keyboard and mouse because that control scheme greatly improved my enjoyment of the first title. I will also be playing this on a low difficulty because at that point it no longer feels like a “soulslike”.
Judas
Bioshock in Outer Space? Yes please, sign me the fuck up. Like if you had told me nothing else about this game but that elevator pitch you would have had me on board with it. I loved the Bioshock games and played the first two multiple times. There was something about Infinite that made me less interested in the replay. Regardless I am extremely interested in this game.
Dune Awakening
Okay, I love the Dune franchise and have been wanting to have a Dune-based MMORPG since I first started playing these games in the 2000s. There were a few rumored projects that went nowhere and now we have Funcom carrying this banner forward. Funcom is both the company behind Secret World that I loved and Conan that I had no interest in. I am hoping this does not end up being a forced PVP murder box and has a way in which I can play it in a purely PVE-focused nature. I am not super optimistic however because I am almost certain that faction lines will be drawn crossed the Great Houses of the Landsraad.
Hades II
I have to be honest, this reveals somewhat shocked me. When I saw Supergiant scroll across the screen I remember commenting to my friends that I wondered what genre they would be tackling this time. Basically, up until this point, each time Supergiant released a game it would dive into a new style of gameplay. Bastion was mostly a Zelda-like beat-em-up, Transistor was a strategic dungeon crawler, Pyre was a story-driven “sportsball” game, and Hades was maybe the purest version of the rogue-lite I had seen in a while. I guess Hades was just too popular not to warrant a direct sequel. I am on board for more Hades world from a different perspective, but also I am kinda hoping that the studio has gotten big enough to have folks also be working on another quirky venture into a new genre.
Death Stranding 2
This was my highlight of the evening without a doubt. I loved Death Stranding and I played it at a very specific moment in life, during the lockdowns of the pandemic… and as a result, the storyline felt deeply poignant. I want to know more about this world and it seems like we are going to get that. I became way the heck too attached to BB, which I know is a bit weird. I am just hoping we get a simultaneous release on PC and Console because I have no interest in trying to play this with a controller. It was excellent with a mouse and keyboard and I want more of that.
Reformed Orthodox Rabbi Bill Clinton
The highlight of the night however was at the very end of the show, when a kid seemingly snuck up on stage along with the confused developers of FROM Software. This gave The Game Awards their “Soy Bomb” moment, so I guess they have officially arrived on the world’s stage. Essentially after the devs gave their comments, the kid sneaks up to the microphone and in a faux broken English accent he dedicates the award to his “reformed orthodox rabbi Bill Clinton”. According to Geoff Keighley, he was arrested… which I guess is a bit sad because it added a moment of true levity to an otherwise stuffy occasion. There is another twitter thread indicating he did something similar on Info Wars with a Free Taiwan message, but I have not been able to find a clip of whatever that was. The same thread also indicates that he had planned this ahead of time.
Did you watch The Game Awards? What were your highlights? Drop me a line below.
The post The Game Awards 2022 appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, and Tamrielo
In this show, we start off as we have the last several weeks with a discussion about the Corporate Collapse Speedrun that is Muskrat and Twitter. We don’t want to talk about it… but each week brand new levels of stupid nonsense keep happening. Bel talks about his mission to document “camps” and gear drops in New World and how he is having to unlearn some of his “Roleplaying Server” biases. Tam talks a bit about Battletech, Mechwarrior, and the mods that are currently available for both. Kodra talks a bit about being “Sudoku Famous” and having a puzzle featured on Cracking the Cryptic. Ash talks about revisiting Tactics Ogre Reborn now that it is actually on a platform he currently can play on. Tam talks about the Star Citizen Intergalactic Aerospace Expo coming up this week and some of the progress made for open worlds and race tracks. Finally, Bel makes a plea that if you are not watching Andor… you should get on that because it might be the best Star Wars to date.
Like I said in yesterdays post, last night I saw the new Star Wars film and the capstone to the trilogy of trilogies… The Rise of Skywalker. I also managed to leave my credit card at dinner and am going to have to go pick that up tonight, but that is another story. Watching Rise of Skywalker in some ways reminded me of watching Return of the Jedi but for the wrong reasons. When I was a kid I was so deathly sick the weekend we were supposed to go see Return, but I refused to let my parents cancel because I was desperate to see it. Last night I was similarly fighting some sort of a crud and I think it dulled my senses, because there were so many moments that should have made me cheer or weep but all I could do was sit there glued to the screen attempting to continue breathing.
This is going to be a post about impressions and will be my attempt to do a spoiler free review. All of the imagery that you see in this post was pulled from the “Final Trailer” which wasn’t actually the Final trailer as I have seen 3 more new ones since then. I will however mention parts of Force Awakens and Last Jedi as I consider those to largely be “fair game” at this point. First off lets get my ranking of Star Wars films out of the way because in some ways that is going to tell you quickly how much of this “review” you are going to personally agree with. I posted it on twitter last night but here is my revised order of preference. I don’t hate any Star Wars films, I just have some that I like better than others. I’ve made my peace with the prequels.
The Empire Strikes Back
Rogue One
The Rise of Skywalker
The Force Awakens
A New Hope
Solo
Return of the Jedi
The Last Jedi
Revenge of the Sith
Attack of the Clones
The Phantom Menace
The most controversial part of that list is going to be Last Jedi since it is a deeply polarizing movie. There are some of my friends that hate it with the passion of a Sith, and there are others that feel like it heralded in a brand new era of excellence for Star Wars. I’m somewhere between. There are moments in that movie that I really liked but I found it to be an overall disappointing experience. Force Awakens set up all of these mystery boxes that I desperately wanted to see opened in the follow up. Rian Johnson on the other hand seemed damned determined to toss them all over his shoulder into the ocean the way Luke tried to toss Anakin’s Lightsaber. It was a movie that purposefully tried to undo all of the knots that Force Awakens tied, and for that I will always be disappointed.
My cat loves to knock over the bathroom trash can, and get to any crinkly wrappers that might have been thrown away. I dutifully set the trash can upright and try and stuff everything back inside rather than just emptying the damned thing and moving on with my life. Rise of Skywalker is a movie that tries to set the trash can upright and get things back to a state of where the franchise was heading at the end of Force Awakens. As a result it feels like it undoes a lot of the things that are just tossed aside in Last Jedi, all the while attempting to walk the thin line between doing this and doing it in such a flagrant way as to piss off all of the Last Jedi stalwarts.
The Last Jedi was a smaller film about personal interactions and character development. Rise of Skywalker is a movie about giant epic set pieces that the story flows between with them purposefully knowing that this is the grand send off of the entire “Saga”. I like big damned action sequences and I like giant scenes that are going to be paused forever as the lore hounds mine tidbits of information from the corners of the screen. I really enjoyed the film, but it more or less follows the script that I had originally thought was going to happen after Force Awakens. None of the reveals or the way that the content flows was really a surprise to me because I had imagined things unfolding in this manner for some time.
There are also more bits of the previously expanded universe that creep into the film in ways that aren’t really addressed setting up even more mystery boxes. I have some tasty theories but I won’t dare talk about them for some time, because spoilers. If you’ve always loved Star Wars you are probably going to be happy enough with this outing. As I said before it is a grand send off of the entire Saga and it makes me super interested to see what might come along later. This movie finishes the story of the Skywalker lineage, but I am not entirely certain that the story that is expressed in this film is really over. I feel about the Star Wars universe now much like I did at the end of Return of the Jedi. The sky is the limit and there are so many more tales out there to tell.
I’m thoroughly happy with this film and I am looking forward to seeing it again. I wish we lived in a world where you could watch first run films in your home, but we do not yet live in that world. So at some point during the holiday season I am going to make my wife venture forth and go see it with me. Last night I saw it with a bunch of friends, because while my wife is awesome and seems to have a begrudging respect for the original Trilogy, she is in no way near the fan that I am. Harry Potter was her universe that she fell in love with, but she was sleeping last night in a Santa Yoda shirt so at least some of me has rubbed off on her. I am satisfied with where the movies have gone, and I have a feeling that knowing what is coming in this movie will probably make my opinion of Last Jedi improve significantly.
Featuring: Ammo, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen
Tonight we talk about the new Hollow Knight randomizer and also some discussion of games that have randomizers in general. From there Kodra talks about the return of the DoubleClicks at Geek Girl Con and how chill and awesome of a convention that is each year. We dive into a discussion about a game we swore was vaporware but actually is freaking awesome… Jedi Fallen Order. We dive a little bit into some talk of the importance of space in games, but it mostly just ends up looping back around to some more Jedi Fallen Order discussion.
