VGC | John – Page 27 – Video Game Canon

God of War Wins “Game of the Year” at 2018-2019 GDC Awards

Red Dead Redemption 2 may have received the most nominations, but Sony Santa Monica’s God of War walked away with “Game of the Year” at the 2018-2019 Game Developers Choice Awards. But while these two juggernauts battled it out across a half-dozen categories, a parade of independent developers were the big winners of the night.

Mountains’s Florence captured two awards, “Best Mobile Game” and “Best Debut.” The black-and-white world of Lucas Pope’s Return of the Obra Dinn won “Best Narrative” while the wild colors of Nomada Studio’s Gris won “Best Visual Art.” Meanwhile, Subset’s Into the Breach won for “Best Design,” Matt Makes Games’s Celeste claimed “Best Audio,” and Beat Games’s Beat Saber took home “Best VR/AR Game.”

Red Dead Redemption 2 did manage to capture one prize at the 2018-2019 GDC Awards. Rockstar Games can claim to have the “Best Technology.”

The complete list of winners, nominees, and Honorable Mentions from this year’s Game Developers Choice Awards can be found after the break.

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Introducing the Finalists for the World Video Game Hall of Fame’s Class of 2019

The World Video Game Hall of Fame, which is overseen by The Strong Museum of Play, has announced the finalists for this year’s crop of inductees. We’ll have to wait until May to find out which games make the final cut, but we now know that a dozen classic titles will be in the running for the Class of 2019.

This year’s finalists include several games that are taking one more shot at immortality, including Midway’s Mortal Kombat, Cyan Worlds’s Myst, Microsoft’s Windows Solitaire, and Valve’s Half-Life. All four have a strong claim to “Hall of Fame” status, as Myst helped popularize CD-ROMs, Half-Life pushed narrative games to new heights, Mortal Kombat’s controversial violence is still discussed today, and Windows Solitaire may just be the most-played game ever.

But they’ll have to compete against a slate of other titles that includes King’s Candy Crush, Atari’s Centipede, William Crowther’s Colossal Cave Adventure, Konami’s Dance Dance Revolution, Sega’s NBA 2K, Sid Meier’s Civilization, and Nintendo’s Super Mario Kart and Super Smash Bros. Melee.

Gaming fans from around the globe will be able to influence which games will be eligible for induction this year through the Player’s Choice Ballot, which will be open from March 21st through the 28th. The remaining ballots will come from the Hall of Fame’s International Selection Advisory Committee, which is comprised of journalists and scholars who are “familiar with the history of video games.”

The World Video Game Hall of Fame’s Class of 2019 will announced on May 2, but you can learn more about this year’s finalists after the break.

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God of War Captures “Game of the Year” at 2018-2019 SXSW Gaming Awards

Sony Santa Monica’s God of War continued its award-winning ways this weekend with a trio of wins at the 2018-2019 SXSW Gaming Awards. The action-adventure title was awarded “Game of the Year” by SXSW’s Gaming Advisory Board, as well as “Excellence In Design” and “Excellence in Visual Achievement.”

The rest of the 2018-2019 SXSW Gaming Awards were spread out among a large number of games, and like Kratos, several managed to secure multiple victories. Rockstar’s Red Dead Redemption 2 was the only other game to win in three categories, and it took home some hardware as the “Trending Game of the Year,” along with “Excellence in Technical Achievement” and “Excellence in SFX.”

Insomniac’s Spider-Man won two awards (“Excellence in Convergence” and “Excellence in Animation”), as did Epic’s Fortnite (“Most Promising New Esports Game” and “Excellence in Multiplayer”) and Beat Games’s Beat Saber (“VR Game of the Year” and “Most Promising New Intellectual Property”).

Congratulations to all the winners, and you can find a complete list of every winning game (and all the nominees) from the 2018-2019 SXSW Gaming Awards after the break.

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Tetris Remains the Best Game of All Time in Video Game Canon’s Version 3.0 Update

This article refers to an older Version of the Video Game Canon. View the Top 1000 to see the most recent changes to the list.

Once again, Alexey Pajitnov’s puzzle masterpiece, Tetris, stands atop the Video Game Canon.

If you’re unfamiliar with the Video Game Canon, it’s a statistical meta-analysis of 53 Best Video Games of All Time lists that were published between 1995 and 2018. To qualify for inclusion, each list had to include at least 50 games, as well as some form of editorial oversight in the process (lists made up solely of reader polls or fan voting were excluded), and no restrictions on release dates or platforms.

After feeding each Best Games list into the Video Game Canon machine, the games were ranked against each other using the C-Score, a formula that adds together a game’s Average Ranking across all lists with the complementary percentage of its Appearance Frequency. Combining these two factors allows us to create a list of games that have universal appeal across a long period of time without punishing any game for being too old or too new.

Five new lists were added to the Video Game Canon in the Version 3.0 update, bringing the total number of games to be selected by at least one list up to 1,167. The most expansive new list came from Game Informer, which published “The Top 300 Games of All Time” in April of last year. Hyper (“The 200 Games You Must Play“), IGN (“Top 100 Video Games of All Time“), and Slant Magazine (“The 100 Greatest Video Games of All Time“) also published new lists in 2018.

I was also able to reach back into the history books a little bit after stumbling upon a list from 2009 by Benchmark.pl, one of Poland’s largest technology blogs. Aside from a handful of titles (most notably, 2015’s The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt), most of the games created in Eastern Europe or played by Eastern European players aren’t on the radar of your average gamer, so digging through “The Top 100 Best Games of the Twentieth Century” gave me an interesting window into a population of gamers that I probably don’t think about as often as I should.

Even with these new additions to the dataset, Version 3.0 didn’t signal any huge changes to the Video Game Canon over last year’s Version 2.0 update, but the movement amongst the games in the top ten does bring to mind a round of musical chairs. And after the music stopped, nearly all the titles scrambled to find a new place to sit.

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Eurogamer Editors Will Debate “The Best Games of the Last 20 Years” at PAX East 2019

Eurogamer‘s Johnny Chiodini and Aoife Wilson (and a bunch of special guests) will debate “The Best Games of the Last 20 Years” during a special panel at this year’s PAX East convention:

Eurogamer turns 20 this year, and to celebrate we’re coming to PAX East to figure out what the best games of the last 20 years are. Eurogamer hosts Johnny Chiodini and Aoife Wilson will be joined by a panel of special guests, each of whom will make a case for their favourite game released since 1999 – and we’ll need YOUR help deciding which of these is the best of the best!

As always, PAX East 2019 will take place at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center, and the “Eurogamer 20th Anniversary Celebrations: The Best Games of the Last 20 Years” panel will be held in the Dragonfly Theatre on Thursday, March 28.

UPDATE (4/1/19): The book has closed on another PAX East, so now we finally know which games were chosen by the panel.

Making the cut as part of “The Best Games of the Last 20 Years” were 1999’s Shenmue, 2000’s Deus Ex, 2000’s The Sims, 2001’s Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, 2011’s Dark Souls, and 2017’s The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

A replay of the discussion can be viewed on Twitch.

20th Century Fox Created a Feature-Length Movie Using Cutscenes and New Animations from Alien: Isolation

Eschewing the whiz bang pyrotechnics that the Colonial Marines usually bring to game adaptations of the Alien franchise, 2014’s Alien: Isolation took its cues from the quieter (but no less terrifying) original film.

The game was a big hit with critics and fans, though it struggled on the sales charts and a planned sequel never got off the ground. But Sega and The Creative Assembly recently teamed up with 20th Century Fox to give the game, which took place between Alien and Aliens, a second lease on life… as a movie.

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Bite-Sized Game History: The Origin of Shmup, the First Article About Spacewar, and the Last Gasp of Game Videos

Before GameTrailers made its debut in 2002, it was fairly difficult for publishers to make trailers for upcoming games available over the Internet. Large file sizes and slow download speeds made the entire thing rather impractical (not that we didn’t try).

We’ll be talking about how publishers made game trailers available in the days before widespread broadband adoption in this edition of Bite-Sized Game History, as well as uncovering a pair of firsts.

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Sony Santa Monica’s God of War Wins “Game of the Year” at 2018-2019 DICE Awards

The Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences announced the winners of the 2018-2019 DICE Awards last night… and Sony Santa Monica’s God of War almost had a clean sweep.

The action-adventure game was competing in an astounding 11 categories, but even more astounding is that it claimed victory in nine of them, including “Game of the Year” and “Adventure Game of the Year.” God of War also picked up “Outstanding Achievements” in “Game Design,” “Game Direction,” “Original Music Composition” “Sound Design,” “Story,” and “Art Direction,” and Kratos himself won “Outstanding Achievement in Character.”

A few other games managed to snag some trophies (mostly in categories God of War wasn’t competing in), and that list included games such as Matt Makes Games’s Celeste (“Action Game of the Year” and “Outstanding Achievement for an Independent Game”), Mountains’s Florence (“Portable Game of the Year”), and Super Smash Bros. Ultimate (“Fighting Game of the Year”). Not surprisingly, Fortnite won “Online Game of the Year.”

You can find the full list of winners and nominees from the 2018-2019 DICE Awards after the break.

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Popular Mechanics Selects “The Best Video Game the Year You Were Born” from 1971 to 2018

Going all the way back to 1971 and the the very dawn of commercial video games, the editors of Popular Mechanics have chosen “The Best Video Game the Year You Were Born.”

Popular Mechanics’s choices range from the obvious (Pong over everything in 1972) to the debatable (Sonic the Hedgehog over Street Fighter II and Zelda: A Link to the Past in 1991) to the controversial (Donkey Kong Country over both Earthbound and Final Fantasy VI in 1994). The editors went with The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild for 2017, pushing Link’s latest adventure to eight total selections since its release two years ago.

“The Best Video Game the Year You Were Born” is also the first “Best Games” list I’ve found to include the entirety of 2018 in its purview and the editors chose to honor Into the Breach as the best game from last year, while also selecting Deltarune, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, God of War, Celeste, Red Dead Redemption 2, and Monster Hunter: World as “Honorable Mentions.” Popular Mechanics plans to update “The Best Video Game the Year You Were Born” with new titles every year.

The Video Game Canon’s Version 3.0 Update has already been locked down and will be published soon, but Popular Mechanics’s “The Best Video Game the Year You Were Born” will be added in a further update.

Bite-Sized Game History: Mastering Space Invaders, Serial Killers in The Sims, and SimCity’s Miyamoto Connection

Most games won’t keep track of your High Score anymore, but the desire to climb the local leaderboard was once a huge draw to arcade players the world over.

This edition of Bite-Sized Game History looks back at one of those competitors and their complete mastery of Space Invaders, as well as the sinister shenanigans that were almost included in The Sims, and Shigeru Miyamoto’s influence on the original SimCity.

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