Game Developer's Choice Nominees Announced 37
The International Game Developers Association has announced the nominees for the 2005 Developer's Choice Awards. The list includes some pleasantly surprising decisions, such as the inclusion of the quirky Katamari Damacy in the running for Best Game of the Year.
Re:I can't take this list seriously... (Score:4, Informative)
MGS3 was just like MGS2. It didn't do anything new, it just rehashed the same gameplay yet again. (Oh, it took away that radar. Yeah, that's exciting new gameplay. No, wait, that just makes it more like the various Tom Clancy games, minus the strategy.) Face it, if you played MGS2, you played MGS3. There was nothing new. Hell, you're playing the same damn character!
Oh, wait, that's right, the annoying camouflage and health system. Somehow, making the game play more annoying doesn't seem like an improvement to me. Instead of using one item to completely cure a gunshot wound, now I need to use six! That's six times as fun, right? Oh, wait, no - it's just tedious. The food thing was BS too, since there was food EVERYWHERE and yet again you could instantly chow down on a complete meal to regain your health in the middle of a firefight with ten guards. Yeah, that's good gameplay. I'll just keep taking hits, because once I've finished with the guards, I can just go on a small hunting spree to restock the small zoo of animal carcasses I'm carrying around with me.
The character design is just as lame as always, the story was just as pointless as always, the boss battles were just as lame as always. All around it was a C-grade game. That's probably why it didn't make the nominations - it was a lousy game, that was simply a rehash of previous lousy games.
KotOR2 (Score:4, Informative)
The story seems to lack cohesion with the original's (which was a satisfying Star Wars style archetypal good vs. evil thing - simplistic perhaps, but fun), and they apparently failed to run the game's dialog through a spellchecker, let alone a grammar checker. This ruins the sense of immersion, for me at any rate. There are several seemingly gaping plot holes, that I'll detail in a reply, for anyone who's interested (some mild spoilers, so I'll leave it for now). Also, the music is quite banal compared to the original's haunting melodies (Jeremy Soule did the first one's music, I believe - not sure if it's him again, or someone else, but I liked his music in Dungeon siege too). You'd think that building on KotOR1's game engine would result in fewer bugs, but that's sadly not true either - I've already encountered a few (generally minor, but very annoying).