Awards & Tags
NON-AWARD TAGS
Games with a Multitool icon next to their names feature some extent of editing, such as casted over audio in broken parts of Alice: Madness Returns or the more extensive timelapsing of grind in Divinity: Original Sin. This is so you can quickly know in advance if a run for a game well-known to be lengthy or otherwise grindy has been edited. The extents of the edits are detailed in the notes.
AWARDS
Games may be granted Awards depending on their level of Westernisms observed during casts and subsequent analysis. The current Awards are as follows.
Rancid titles are objectively bad games exhibiting a complete disregard for quality control and harboring no respect for their work or the industry. In an era flooded with mediocre media, to be considered a unique enough pile of rubbish to be Rancid is a true feat indeed, but not so difficult to accomplish in the West. Rancid is more of a tag and not necessarily an award, so it is also paired with the title. Some titles can receive Awards for doing hang-worthy things, but may not necessarily be Rancid as a whole, though they often go hand in hand.
The Crank award is handed to games featuring Quick Time Events, a byproduct of Americans dumbing down games to focus market to an audience with kindergarten-level mental development. Developers who implement such trash are ostracized whenever possible.
This badge is awarded to only the absolute worst of titles in terms of sheer destructiveness to the recording environment. This title exhibits horrible performance, instability, graphics corruption, or unsavory activity beyond just its design. A game may be objectively more bad as a production than a game handed this title, but a game is only handed this title in cases where only blatant maliciousness can be the reasoning behind the things it does - for example, LotR: War in the North managed to repeatedly crash and heavily corrupt visuals on three entirely different computer systems in a single run, to the point of forcing one of the players to give up.
This badge is awarded to games that stand out as maliciously designed to destroy franchises, mock gaming culture, or are otherwise destructive beyond the scope of their presentation.
Games awarded the Eggplant have demonstrated censorship or pandering. This is a special breed of cancer that has plagued the Western industry since its earliest days, setting it apart from previous awards as being particularly sinister and damaging to a product.
Attempting to capture the pure essence of the Metzen requires a developer to sacrifice all dignity and self-respect, relegating dialogue, naming conventions, world building and plot of written content to a dart board containing nothing but buzzwords and catchphrases pulled from a marketer's handbook and saturday morning cartoons. While doing so won't net you a remotely intelligible or coherent story, it will net you this snazzy award!
This award is handed to titles who very clearly are participating in the Loudness War or otherwise employ destructive post-processing techniques as seen with the vocals in Blizzard's Mist of Pandaria trailer and many modern films. Also applicable to titles who take degenerate film industry tone mapping ridiculousness to heart.
Metzen would like to personally congratulate you on copypasting Blizzard's uninspired washed out purple-green color wheel vomit they've effortlessly demolished the game industry's graphics advancement with.
As a licensed Autist, it is my pleasure to serve you the Autism Award - a special award granted only to titles whom have devoted their development time to producing utterly convoluted and contrived plot devices, convenient excuses and Black Jizz rather than making any visible effort to actually create a plot, setting or characters from which to convey them, resulting in a final product that can only be described as clinically autistic - much like my country itself. This award is also granted for titles who defer to pop culture references instead of any hint of actual writing.
You've bamboozled the world by very blatantly copypasting Metzen's alcohol-drenched handbook, especially exciting avant-garde buzzwords like "Corruption" and "Void", and throw them around for the fuck of it because, "Well, he did it and was successful, so I can be, too!" This doesn't demand an edgy context, it's simply a total baselessness and lack of creativity that nabs you this fantastic centerpiece for your girlfriend's boyfriend's mantle.
The Cinematic Experience award is handed to games who don't want to be games and are instead a flagellant mouthpiece through which liberal hacks spew their incessant junior high drama pieces.
GRIND MAKE BILLY HUNGRY AND BILLY EAT WHEN BILLY HUNGRY AND WHEN BILLY EAT BILLY GET HUNGRY
What's better than a video game? A walking simulator! Now the journalists can play, too!
Only the absolute worst of the worst can accrue the Willy award. This is a true accomplishment. Congratulations.
For titles that are objectively good, I don't feel there is a need to assign any kind of award. Aspiring for greatness is not something that should demand reward. It is something all people who claim to be trying to create art should be doing. The unfortunate truth is that the vast majority of media I encounter is, at the best, circling an average I consider below substandard of what I expected out of media in 2003, and almost no game in the history of the industry has been created that approaches "art". Not all content is created equal. What I care about more is the pursuit of creating an end product that achieves the potential of its platform, design, and the era of its technology, and how it learned from its ancestors to make the most out of every element involved. The kind of effort its developers placed into it, and how their passion for their work shines through the finished product. This is why Elitism matters, and why one should embrace his desire for polished, passionate products developed by creators who cared about their work.
The simple fact is, when objectively reviewing a title, it matters little if I like the title or not. While it is true that frustration often comes with bad titles, titles I may not enjoy very much may simply not be for me and aggregate a favorable review regardless, and titles I did enjoy often feature a lot of oversights or problems I also address in like-manner. Blatant dishonesty and lack of effort are the most heavy hitting offenders in game development, and virtually all modern developers will never attempt to escape the prison of either evil, while many older developers successfully skirted by the industry's tougher restrictions on nothing but a healthy dose of dick.