Every year we see the release of many, many new games. Most are between okay and absolutely terrible, but some are excellent, and as with all the the entertainment industries gaming as it’s own way of showing the good, the bad and the downright ugly. So I welcome you to The First Annual Achievement Unlocked Gaming Awards, presented by me, George Marriott. Over the next three days, I will be presenting my gaming awards. However, I have not made any actual awards and therefore if you want to say you got one of these, you can make one or maybe just put it on your website. We start with the categories of: Worst Story, Worst Cutscenes, Most Anticipated Game, Biggest Disappointment, Worst Adaptation, Best Movie Tie-In.
Worst Story – Final Fantasy XIII
Yes, it’s a Final Fantasy story, and that should say something about the story, but the actual story is as impenetrable as a concrete sandwich. In fact, it wasn’t the gameplay but the story that made me stop playing the game. I got bored of the game, but I can get through games that are boring in gameplay but have a good story, but this had the bad gameplay and a terrible terrible story. Plus, this isn’t the last you’ll see of FFXIII.
Worst Cutscenes – Call Of Duty: Black Ops
Okay, okay. I don’t like the CoD series, in fact CoD 3 was the only good one in my opinion. But the cutscenes are normally good fun and contain enough action and ‘story’ to keep you interested. But Black Ops, had bad animation, bad voice acting and terrible moments of action. Each one actually stopped my passing interest in the game, the moments that would normally be fun action scenes just got bogged down with odd moments of espionage thriller novels that the dev team and writers must have been reading.
Most Anticipated Game – Mass Effect 3
This is one of the group decision awards, where I asked five people what game they were most looking forward to, four of them said Mass Effect 3. therefore it wins this awards. Well done Bioware.
Biggest Disappointment – Super Mario Anniversary
Okay, maybe I shouldn’t have been disappointed by this, but the anniversary of Mario’s birthday should have warranted a little bit more of a game than just a minor graphical upgrade and slightly more pomp and circumstance than simply re-releasing a game with less features than the original game.
Worst Adaptation – Epic Mickey
I played this game, actually expecting something interesting or intriguing. What I got was a large quantity of terrible gameplay, badly strung together story and bad controls. It was supposed to be slightly open ended, but it so linear they might as well have done it as a 2D side scroller where all of the enemies just run at you and you press a button to make them go away.
Best Movie Adaptation – Tron: Evolution
As far as I can remember, there have only been two good movie adaptations. Spiderman 2, and now Tron: Evolution, it’s a well made and well executed game. Set before the events of Tron: Legacy, which helps to keep it away from the full movie story. So well done Propaganda Games, you have done rather well for yourself.
And so concludes the first installment of the the inaugural Achievement Unlocked Awards, look for the next installment tomorrow.