Today we will discuss which games should win our award for "Best Adventure", "Strongest Anti-Communist Stance", and who should receive our "Gone Home" award for the most Overpriced Piece of Shit!
Please consider what you would like to argue should be the winning item for each of the passing categories.
Additionally, consider who you would like to nominate as your electors. You may choose 3 electors to cast votes for you on your behalf. Persuade them as necessary. You may choose yourself once. The top 12 most nominated electors will assemble as our electoral tribunal, and will vote on the final categories. Feel free to message me directly with your nomination, or comment your nominations publicly. The electors are allowed to vote their own conscience.
Previous Discussions:
Gone Home Award : There's literally no other game more deserving. Cyberpunk 2077.
Nah, the gone home award should be to Last of Us 2. I mean sure Cyberpunk 2077 deserves it as well but LOU2 gets it for me for misleading customers.
Were there even zombies in that or was it just a series of buttfucking minigames?
LOU2 at least worked. 2077 didn't just hide it was bad, it hid that it was fundamentally broken with more bugs than Day 1 GTA Online.
Which is particularly damning in a narrative-driven game that desperately wants to be a movie.
The amount of hate is ridiculous. Mob mentality, and just like people sagged pants like retards to be different (belong) young retards are now mobbing on to hate in a way to belong, especially with gaming.
I'm loving the game, as THE VAST MAJORITY ARE. I have not had a crash or a glitch. Of course, I will now.
Yes, complaints are obviously legitimate, for those that have issues.
Yes, it should have been cooked longer. But do you remember the hate for the relatively slight delay? There's no pleasing internet fucktards.
Yes, the MONTAGE is ridiculous and there is cut stuff.
But I'm pretty damn impressed by what I have in front of me to play with. Try and appreciate what you have, and not what you wish you had, while taking responsibility for your own self-afflicted hyperbole.
If you're pissed because it doesn't align with the tabletop version enough, I know nothing about that and can't speak to it. I'm just looking at this as another new game to play, and see how well it does for me. And so far, it's been very good!
i7-6700. 1080ti. 32gb ram. Clean system with no bullshit running.
Do you have a different nomination?
For me, personally though I'll be in the vast minority, is Red Dead Redemption 2.
I am no fan of the Cyberpunk genre, but I love western games. I've played COJ: Gunslinger many times. I bought a 35" 21:9 monitor specifically in anticipation of RDR2.
But here I am, really digging Cyberpunk, but I quit RDR2 at Chapter 4 or 5.
What a fucking slog. Shitty writing. Characters I could never care enough about to give a damn. Cliches. Ham handed plot-line forcing ridiculous mission setups. NPC mission character's dialogue often verbal diarrhea the 'writers' just pull out of their ass.
I came to realize, Rockstar games are designed by kids for kids that like to do stupid shit. Of any age. An open world to do stupid shit in.
Hell, I love open world games. Far Cry 3-5, Blood Dragon, Primal, New Dawn, AC Black Flag through Valhalla. Mad Max. I even enjoyed Rage 2. Witcher 3, of course. Finished them all.
But here I was, a game I was anticipating more than any for the past three years, but I just couldn't keep going.
Hell, I'm not even a story guy. I find most game's stories cliched and predictable. I'm usually laughing at the story when I do pay attention. If you grew up on classic literature you likely understand this. If you grew up on Star Wars and Michael Bay... eh. To me, it's the difference between 'The Twilight Zone' and 'The X-Files'.
<trying to keep the bit below somewhat spoiler free>
But I know what the #1 issue was for me and likely resulted in my viewing a lot more of the game from a negative perspective. Because it made getting through it painful for me, because they just kept making it so obvious he was a evil person and I could predict the outcome of the game. Over and over.
I think where it really went south was when you had to 'liberate' him and then tag along for the Holocaust. I would have blown his fucking brains out. But oh no, you have to continue to endure it. And at that point, I also liked the gang less, and I really wasn't that impressed in the first place.
This is cheap manipulation that the utes of today might need to be so obvious so they fucking 'get it', but I don't. It was just heavy-handed, shitty writing. Give me a little subtlety here and there please! I'd like the challenge of catching it.
Tangent: I'm responding to the 'nomination' but it would be disingenuous of me to claim it is "the most overpriced piece of shit" for others though. Hell even for me, I just couldn't get into it, but there is a LOT of game there. And a lot that is very well done. The world and atmosphere.
Although, to counter that, the bugs on PC are ridiculous. That's pretty much what the PCRedDead Reddit is all about, in the end.
Seconding. Probably the peak of Action-Adventure gaming for a long time, only held back by a little too much open world collectible padding (that are fortunately barely needed for anything, even the Platinum).
My vote for Overpriced Piece of Shit goes to DBZ: Kakarot. I have played nearly every DBZ game released in the west, and its amazing how much effort was wasted on this game. Its filled to the brink with so much to appear like an RPG with open world elements, but all of it is forgettable and pointless. Its less fulfilling than Legacy of Goku 2/3 that were mobile games nearly two decades old. Still it was sold at full price, despite being worth half that.
The Card Game recently added looks interesting but its nearly 10 months later.
Also, while its not exactly a new game Frostpunk's expansion came out this year and it continues to be a very anti-communist game. Maybe not directly, but the game has a very USSR communist spirit to everything about it and its portrayed as pure horror with you as the leader having to balance keeping some level of humanity and hope with what is necessary for survival.
A game very good at testing how easy it is to slip into the corruption of communist power (you can even declare yourself God by the end) for even those with the best intentions. Let alone someone with less than altruistic intents like most of humanity.
Tropico 6 took a pretty strong jab at the commies. Granted, the game is cynical all around but there's a scenario specifically devoted to demonstrating how slippery the slope is. Normalizing wages, enacting labor laws, endorsing the communist factions, then demolishing all the housing and replacing with tenements, rationing food, meeting production quotas, then managing uprisings and fleeing riots while the heads of the communist faction wonder why everything turned to shit. I'm not sure I'd nominate it, but it was a fun jab.
Its not deliberately anti-communist, I don't think. But you get to see the horrors and struggles of communism as they play out in a disaster.
Including the necessary but brutal choices one makes that slowly dehumanize everyone until the allure of power finally corrupts you to simply squash them into simple cog in the machine.