Game Awards happened again. No Bill Clinton this time. But there was a drunk Harrison Ford. Games this year were all over the place, not to mention the industry itself, and I was more focused on stuff that either came out last year or earlier or weird indie stuff overall. Also it’s a given that there’s been several game award events and no game has taken all of them unlike Baldur’s Gate 3 last year that the top pick could be nearly anyone. However it turns out Astro Bot on PS5 is the top game of the year, as far as this ceremony at least. I’ve heard good things about it, and previous games involving Sony’s current mascot that they don’t seem to want to entirely admit yet is their mascot have also been neat.
I think the inclusion of the Muppets was mainly an attempt to deflect criticism by doing it themselves, but that’s not how it works. The show was much more about reveals and concerts like it always has been now and the rewards were mostly a side gig once again, outside of a few major picks, including recognizing Bald Mario the Job Hunter as an industry icon in the fight against the industry’s attempt to downsize into nothing. Also Balatro won awards, the one that was announced on stage was accepted by others in the developer’s stead, since I’d heard they’d wanted to stay out of the spotlight, and the speech they gave to the stand-ins involved wanting to give mention to all the other indies that fell off to the wayside, i.e. the kind of stuff I was playing outside of Game Pass.
As far as what games showed up, the promise of Okami 2 featuring the original leads behind it is interesting, but we’ll have to see how that happens. Witcher 4 has apparently been pre-rendered on an “unannounced Nvidia GPU” a.k.a. the 5090. There’s an edgy Pac-Man reboot as well as yet another attempt to turn Turok into some kinda futuristic soldier in a probably live service third person shoot type thing instead of a badass who hunts dinosaurs. Josef “FUCK THE OSCARS” Fares brought along footage of yet another weird co-op only adventure. Also there’s a bunch of PC ports of PS5 games, which will probably require Sony accounts again until they figure out their own launcher to screw things up more. Borderlands 4 actually has some footage now. And other stuff, including a bunch of updates for ongoing live service stuff. That’s about it off the top of my head. We’ll just have to see if the industry, let alone society itself, hold up long enough to see these games happen.