And The Nominees For The 10th Annual Game Developer’s Choice Awards Are… Forget the Spike TV VGA’s. These are the ones that matter.
Better than the Oscars
– January 19, 2010
And The Nominees For The 10th Annual Game Developer’s Choice Awards Are… Forget the Spike TV VGA’s. These are the ones that matter.
About the Author
Richard Clark (Co-Founder/Editor-in-Chief) has spent his entire life writing, reading, listening, and playing. He has a Bachelors in Theology from the Baptist College of Florida and has a Master of Arts in Theology and the Arts from the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He lives in Louisville, KY where he is the classroom technology manager at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. In addition to writing at Christ and Pop Culture, he is also a staff writer for Kill Screen Magazine's website and has written for various other outlets such as Paste, Gamasutra, and Collide.
Email: deadyetliving [at] gmail [dot] com. Twitter: @deadyetliving. Xbox Live: deadyetliving 
My picks:
Best Game Design – Assassin’s Creed 2
Best Visual Art – Flower
Best Technology – Uncharted 2
Best Writing – Dragon Age
Best Audio – Flower
Innovation – Flower
Best Debut – Spider: The Secret Of Bryce Manor (Tiger Style)
Best Downloadable Game – Flower
Best New Social/Online Game – Ugh. Bejeweled Blitz? I guess?
Best Handheld Game – Spider: The Secret Of Bryce Manor (Tiger Style)
Game of the Year – Assassin’s Creed 2
Anyone else?
Wow, those were some of the stupidest nominees I’ve ever seen. It’s like they nominated the same five games for every category.
haha, I disagree and agree respectively.
At the very least, it is an atrocity that Machinarium didn’t even get nominated for visual art. That game easily blows away everything I’ve seen this year in terms of game art.
And if Dragon Age is the pinnacle of video game writing, woe unto the medium. I’m not saying it was bad, because it wasn’t and the dialogue was deliciously sparky, but the storytelling was rather lackluster. Nowhere near as exciting as, say, Bioshock (which wasn’t quite stellar writing either).
Kind of a shame that people who don’t up for an iPhone can’t play Spider. In that category, I’ve only played Torchlight. It’s been pretty fun, but it’s so far been Diablo or Titan Quest clone with WoW-ish graphics (which is a cool idea for sure) and less class choices (not as cool). I’m not sure it offers much new beyond the ability to have your pet return to town to sell your goods, but it’s certainly fun enough to invest a number of hours into.
Oh, I would be negligent if I were not to point out something else that falls under the category of Serious when one considers what Torchlight offers. There is no Save option.
Let that sink in: no Save option.
This is not to say that the game does not save your state of play, allowing you to return to the game at the point where you left it before your mother called for dinner. Or you had to, at last, go to sleep. For it certainly does save your game, protecting all your successes. And mistakes.
While Torchlight does save your game, it does not offer you the option to save. Instead, the game is unforgiving in offering a MMORPG-style persistent world. When you close the game, it is saved. If you accidentally sold the ultimate unique item that you were trying to equip? Too bad. It you accidentally trashed your high-end gems and recovered a lame piece of equipment? Your bad. Did you spec your character poorly? You’ve only yourself to blame. Everything is save and there is no going back.
And if that is not unforgiving enough, the game features a Hardcore option that ends the game if you happen to die. You could be fighting the final enemy, have your eye twitch, and (realistically) have your character obliterated for all time for something entirely beyond your control. And that right there is cool. One might even say: old school.
Okay, so here’s another rad thing about Torchlight: it works with the Steam Cloud. That means that if I download and install the game on your computer, all my characters and saved information and progress are there and available to me. Torchlight‘s becoming more and more interesting to me (despite the fact that its still kind of lacking in story content) simply because it’s taking the best of MMO advancements and applying them to single player action-RPGs. Many hours in and still fun.