(Type Thing)â„¢ Awards 2002: Nominations

Some said it wouldn't happen, more said it shouldn't happen, but we're here again to prove them wrong - welcome to the nominations thread for the second annual¹ (Type Thing)™ Game of the Year Awards!

Don't know what it's all about? Check out last year's awards

Remember, post your nomination for game of the year in a genre, with some kind of justification for its inclusion in that genre. Half-arsed justifications are, as always, appreciated, but fully arsed ones is what we're really after. We're only accepting nominations for games published between Jan 1st - Dec 31st 2002 (although you can pick which country ). Once the nominations are in, I'll make this thread a poll.

Highlights expected from this year's awards include Ioo not taking a dump in my thread and the HoLers being a generally a bit less confused about it all than we were last year.

There are a few more categories this year, to encourage nit-picking:

• Turn-based Strategy (type thing)
• RPG (type thing)
• Sports (type thing)
• Action Adventure (type thing)
• Simulation (type thing)
• Expansion Pack (type thing)
• Adventure (type thing)
• First Person Shooter (type thing)
• Squad-based Tactical (type thing)

(some of my own noms will follow soon).










¹Woohoo, it just became annual.

 

My nomination for best Simulation (Type Thingâ„¢) this year goes to the hugely popular Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind.

Never before has the gamer been treated to such a visually stunning, richly textured, and immersive Delivery Man Taking a Leisurely Stroll Through the Wilderness Simulator. In an unprecedented blending of genres, Bethesda took the Parcel Delivery RPG and the the First Person Shooter and fused them into an awesome... Thingâ„¢.

This game has everything. Enormous maps to slowly walk through as you bring a letter from one end of the giant continent to the other, staring at the beautiful bump-mapped ponds as you stroll by. Photo realistic horizons and sunsets for you to admire as your system grinds to a halt, choking on the draw distance.

The journaling/quest tracking system is admirably done in Morrowind. Quests and conversations are logged sequentially and quickly swell your logbook to unmanageable proportions, thereby causing long delays in delivery as you stand by a richly textured tree flipping through your 500 page log one page at a time, hoping that E'Lana'erag'othar'nenessess adress was taken down somewhere because you have no idea where to find her. While more modern Parcel Delivery Simulators emulate this confusion with a more realistic scratched barcode and outdated GPS maps, Morrowind takes an old-school tack and manages to simulate the frustration, albeit at the sake of realism. A small concession to make, in my opinion, for such a beautiful water.

All in all, I give Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind a 9.5/10, reserving the extra 0.5 for the upcoming expansion type thing, as well as my most heartfelt nomination for Best Delivery Man Taking a Leisurely Stroll Through the Wilderness Simulator (Type Thingâ„¢) 2003.

 

Sports (type thing) nomination.

Jedi Knight 2. Unsuspecting customer who expected to use his lightsaber and Jedi powers to cut through enemies was surprised to learn that this game is in fact "Rat looking for a way through almost never ending labirynth with lots of places to jump at". Of course as no one (well almost no one) would like to play as a rat in uninteresting maze you get to become a fit Jedi with great powers that frankly prove to be most useful not in combat but in looking for your way out. You will excersice high jumps, quick runs of course your 6th and even 7th sense to find a passage the size of a mouse hole - and equally dark. Your adversaries will want to protect the "cheese" and even cheat in thise noble olympics (they shoot while you perform your jumps) but after a few days of running around various mazes you will finally get to it. The only drawbacks are that a pole would be more useful for some tricky jumps than your lightsaber and you should be awarded a medal at the end (or get to eat that damn cheese at least). All that can be implemented in Jedi 3.

 

Nice one, Milo. And you, Dragoon. This is already better than last year


My first nomination is Neverwinter Nights in the category of best FPS (type thing)

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Neverwinter Nights is an FPS set in the D&D gameworld of Faerun. It has all the things we've come to expect from a good FPS and more.

There are a wide range of character models to choose from, covering all the Faerun races and classes. As with other FPS titles, there is also support for player-made models - even to the point of enabling players to use one of the wide range of D&D creature meshes!

Player submitted material does not end with models. In an unprecedented act of charity, Bioware spent more money putting together a toolset to accompany the game, which allows players to easily create maps and mods, than they did on the single player game itself. It's a testament to Bioware's altruism that these tools are so good that almost all the 1600 modules created with them have surpassed the quality of the map supplied in the box.

Gameplay is fairly typical for an FPS, primarily consisting running around looking for targets then firing at them until they're dead. NWN has an unusual melee combat mode, which adds a bit of variety, but doesn't really alter the gameplay. One of the particularly neat aspects of NWN is that combat has been made very easy. Rarely will the player have to fiddle with complex buttons, or be called upon to think while playing. Instead, a few quick clicks and - presto! - the computer does the rest.

Unlike other first person shooters, the makers of NWN have shown a bit of originality and opted for a third person perspective. On the face of it, this may seem like a strange decision, but when you consider the hours of enjoyment added by letting the player twiddle with camera controls constantly during play, the reasons become clear. In fact, Bioware were apparently sure enough of how much people would like this feature that they made it very hard for players to aviod using it.

Of course, no review of an FPS would be complete without discussing the array of weapons, and this is where NWN really shince. There are a vast array of weapons, in terms of both spells and items, each with it's own slightly different graphical effect and damage range. It's a slight drawback weaponry has almost no impact on combat tactics or gameplay, but they all look different and some of the spells have neato effects that hardly start to pall at all after the third or fourth time you've seen it. Besides, with the computer handling most of the combat, tactical simplicity translates directly into a more efficiently running game.

On the whole, I don't think anyone will be able to disagree that NWN represents the next wave of combat games and truly a grand addition to the FPS (type thing) market. Thanks, Bioware!

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I hereby nominate Warcraft 3 in the category of Squad-based Tactical Type Thingâ„¢. How does it fit into this? Well, allow me to explain:

In Warcraft 3, the player must choose between 4 races, all of which apparently have strengths and weakness - Undead can mass produce crappy units or good units, the Night Elves can mass produce ranged units, or ranged units that have so little range they're effectively melee, the Orcs have tough melee units, and ranged units that do more damage than any other ranged units and most melee units, and have more hitpoints. The Humans strength is they have no weaknesses, and their weakness is no strengths.

Now that we've covered the basics of each race, nation or army type, if you will, we move on to the squad part. This game would classify as a real time strategy, but the low unit limit prevents the player from controlling anything larger than a platoon-sized "army" - the claim from Blizzard that this is an RTS is false; it is obviously a squad-based tactical game.

In an ingenious move, Blizzard decided to combine the tactics of an RTS (being that it's claimed to be one) with the army size or a Squad-based game. Hence, the game is made easier, with the limit of tactical decisions being "To rush or not to rush", and "Pull out or fight to the death and hope for the best". This refinement in decision making (some might say lack of ability to make effective decisions, but who listens to naysayers, or takes them seriously?) means that anyone who can flick a power switch and click a mouse can play Warcraft 3. This simple, yet effective, design decision means that Warcraft 3 has incredibly broad appeal. 1 million copies sold in a week proves my point. With all the people playing, you're bound to find someone of your intelligence level among all the dredges of the gene pool also playing! Of course, those naysayers would also claim that if the game were not so simple you'd only have intelligent people to play against, but where's the fun in that? You'd actually have to think in playing this game, and vary from the common tactic of "Rush" and "fight to the death and hope for the best" combination.

Instead, Blizzard have seen the future, taken a look at today, and realised that anyone who is playing a game now and previously wasn't was too dumb to join in the revolution, therefore games must be made easier. And what game is easier than Warcraft 3? This masterpiece of simple gameplay made for the mass-market is a fine example of Squad-based tactical strategy game Type Thingâ„¢.

 

I nominate Morrowind for the Best Strategy (type thing) category.

Planning the effective use of cheat codes is vital to a successful career in Morrowind. Get the levitation spell and don't have enough mana? Walking around taking way too FUCKING long? Want to leap from one side of the island to the other in a single bound? Getting sick of those goddamn cliff racer things?
Cheat codes are the only answer, of course. But one must be careful - use the water walking cheat at an inopportune time, and lose the ability to drown ceremonially and advance in the church. Speed around too much and you lose the exciting opportunity to escort impossibly slow-moving people to locations marked by road signs.
Yes, the strategic use of cheating definetely sets this game above other games heavy on the cheating, such as GTA 3.

 

Ioo one last year's award, with best Annoying Bastard (Type Thing).

 

My next one is going to be Morrowind's second entry into this year's awards. Looks like Morrowind is set to become a classic (type thing). I nominate it for best MMORPG (type thing)

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As anyone who has played them knows, the players are the main weakness of MMORPGs. They get you killed. They disrupt play with incessant chat requests. They disrupt atmosphere with real life chat topics. The say "newb" a lot.

Morrwind is the first of a new breed of MMORPG, using a revolutionary new format to neatly side-step these problems.

As we expect from a game in this genre, Morrowind has plenty of wide open spaces, dotted with monsters and treasure. A major scenario of play is perambulating around in search of these, fighting the monsters and taking in the scenery, but mainly just holding down the walk key.

Combat has the usual MMORPG swing-until-done style, with a good magic system for artillery and support.

Towns will be familiar to any veteran MMORPG player, too. Gameplay here entails walking into every building and interrogating the NPCs waiting inside for you, to find out if they have an errand or want to push an existing errand further along.

This may seem like fairly typical MMORPG fare, but Morrowind has one feature that puts it head and shoulders aboove the rest - it is single player. You won't be needing an internet connection to play it. You won't need to try to rustle up a team everytime you get online. Towns aren't crowded with people runnning, sitting in random places, or asking each other for armour. In Morrowind, not only do you have all the gameplay of a MMORPG, but you have the whole world to yourself. Surely that makes it a winner?

 

Nice Berner sig, DU :grin: .

Hey, S_F, do you have to let your RTS grudge into everything?

New TT: RTSTT's. For that, Age of Mythology, easily.

Anyway, for the Games Released Three Years Previously Type Thing, I nominate Close Combat III. Need I say more (I will)? Variables like the standard health and ammo, along with suppresion, morale, fear, intelligence and leadership; authentic WWII weapons, with good graphics and sound; great atmosphere; and Russian voices...


Mie Propane*!


(That's pro-paahn-ehh, not propane).

 

Well, shucks, I'm just going to have to nominate Dungeon Siege in the Simulation Type Thingâ„¢ category.

Why? It's simple - you simulate playing a RPG! Yes, this game does so much for you, it's possible to beat the game without playing it yourself! This revolutionary step in simulating the gaming experience will surely encourage other companies to do the same and flood the market with crappy action RPG's you can play simultaneously and beat, without ever doing anything apart from typing in your name, if you even have to do that!

Obviously, Chris Taylor is onto something here - if a game can play itself, then it is no longer interactive! Hence, by the Australian censorship standards, it would cease to become a game, and therefore be eligible for an R rating, permitting content normally not allowed in games to be allowed in this simulated game! Ingenious, I say!