Oblivion Takes Game Of The Year At Spike Awards

[Shawn Andrich]

Oblivion Takes Game Of The Year At Spike Awards

As the Spike Video Game Awards show continues to strive for relevance, Oblivion takes the top spot over Gears Of War.

Hosted by Samuel L. Jackson, the Spike TV awards are often discredited by gamers for poor nominations and picking undeserving winners. With what may be the strongest list of nominees yet, there were a few surprises in this year's awards. Epic (Gears of War) won the awards for Best Shooter, Best Graphics, Best Multiplayer Game, and Best Studio but fell short of the Game of the Year award, stunning the MTV crowd according to Gamespot [http://www.gamespot.com/news/6162929.html].

The only way games released after November 7th could get an award was in the Critics Choice Award category. This year The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess took the top spot, beating out Wii Sports, Resistance: Fall of Man, Medieval II: Total War and Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Vegas.

Other winners included Burnout Revenge for Best Driving Game, Company of Heroes took Best Military Game and PC Game Of The Year and the Wii won Breakthrough Technology. The coveted Cyber Vixen of The Year award went to Alyx Vance of Half-Life 2: Episode 1 fame, winning over Princess Peach, Jen from Prey and Lara Croft.

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[heavyfeul]

I can understand why they would question an RPG winning game of the year. While many people may love RPGs and their pen and paper predecessors, I have never had more than a passing interest in them myself. I enjoyed Final Fantasy on the PS2 for a while and I like some action RPGs like Jade Empire, but I find most RPGs to be extremely boring. If i want a good story, I will watch a movie. Give me a gun and let me lay waste to my online enemies. To me, that is pure gruesome fun.

I am not saying Oblivion is not worthy of game of the year. I simply understand the "MTV crowd's" sentiment. Based on its merits as an RPG, I think it is a worthy choice. By the way, I do not watch MTV. Just in case you were wondering. I used to though when they actually played music. Anyone else miss 120 Minutes. Who could forget Aeon Flux on Liquid Televison. Now that was some good non-music programing.

 

[Bongo Bill]

Oblivion is good, but I dunno if it's that good.

 

[Echolocating]

Oblivion is good, but I dunno if it's that good.

Yeah, I'm not so sure it was that good either. I played it for about 12 hours and shut the thing off... and haven't had the interest to start it up again. It had some really questionable game mechanics. The world that scales in difficulty with your character was a love/hate thing (sounds good in theory), quite a few of the NPCs were freakish and borderline hideous, and the whole "I'd better not do X anymore, incase I accidentally level"... well, like I said, quite a few fundamental design choices were questionable.

Metacritic is pretty good about weighing the public's vs. the critic's reactions to things...
http://www.metacritic.com/games/platforms/pc/elderscrolls4oblivion

 

[generalissimofurioso [deprecated]]

While I'd rather have Okami win Game of The Year, I just found it hilarious that Oblivion won, especially after all of the buzz Gears of War was getting.

It just goes to show that hype is not always a good indicator of success

 

[David Miscavidge]

Honestly I think this is a rare instance of an award of this type being right on the money.

Gears of War, in my opinion, is the purest instance of flavor-of-the-month I've seen in a while. Halo 3 will one day arrive and no one will remember GOW existed. (Haven't played GOW multiplayer yet, so I could be wrong, but that's how I feel about it now.)

Oblivion, on the other hand is something that I've put an obscene amount of hours into, and still want to go back for the expansion pack. It's made me a zealot. I could see going back for another round, with another character in 6 months or a year.

As for the Alyx Vance thing, Valve makes some really alive, uncanny-valley NPCs?Those facial kinesics, man... Who programs that stuff in FacePoser? I badly creeped myself out after playing HL2:EP1 by catching myself in a state of humiliating nerd-fantasy. "I've got a new girlfriend, and we saw a nuclear explosion together!"