Happy Monday, folks, and welcome to the Weekly Video Games Thread!
We’re coming up on end of the year awards season! That will include the Avocado for both the Pits and the Peely’s (solid news on that TBD but coming soon), but also the 2025 Game Awards. And… well, to be honest, I’ve never liked them. I quite enjoyed coming to the 2017 New York Video Game Awards and seeing the back of Todd Howard’s head from like fifteen feet away, and plenty of gaming institutions have great end-of-year lists and honors, but for me, the TGA has never been fun. Outside of the musical numbers, honestly only some of the musical numbers, it’s dire. I’ve come to every stream Lily Bones hosted of it, and I’ve sometimes puttered about in the ongoing Avocado live chat, but for me it’s just that place for big announcements I almost never care about and honors for Triple-A games I also almost never care about.
Now, there are a lot of reasons for this. Again, the roster of games getting honors can be pretty small, and I was surprised to discover that it’s actually shrunken over the past eight or so years to become increasingly “prestige game”-heavy. Giving somehow more space to blockbusters dovetails with how blatantly commercial it is; even by the transactional and commercialist element endemic to big award shows, it really is a space mostly for the announcement of big games (and maybe I’d be more inclined if there was more than like one announcement a year that I cared about, but I don’t think I would). Host Geoff Keighley’s insistence of a sort of surface-level, capitalism-first progressivism has often diminished smaller and more marginalized game makers while whitewashing the industry’s moral turpitude and complicity in outright atrocities. The show as a whole is ridiculously inconsistent in what it pays attention to, leading to a “mobile game” category that almost goes out of its way to ignore innovation in that sphere. There are awards for fucking influencers. It goes on for far too long, despite the fact that many of its most interesting awards are rushed off like me doing that “Who Knows One” poem at Seder night. The jokes are bad, the interesting ideas are flattened, and for god’s sake, do we need the “best indie debut” award to shine a light on a game that’s already gonna win almost every other award on Thursday?*
* Still excited about Clair Obscur, which I'm assuming will get its inevitable Switch 2 announcement around that time. But like, come on. The award blatantly exists to help out new developers with great games but no real foothold in the industry. It shouldn't be turned into part of a sweep.
But let’s push at least some of that aside. One thing that I would love to see, honestly? More awards. Yes, I know I just complained about the length of this thing, and how a lot of the awards I care about are brushed off, but just bear with me for a moment. One of the big things I love about doing the Peely’s is that it’s tailored to every year. We have our staples like “Worst TV Show,” “Silliest Title for an Eric Roberts Movie,” yadda yadda, but because most of the topics are nominated at the show itself, it means we can adapt to not only what members are interested in but also what happened this year. Trends, massive flops, cultural events, and the like can take the stage. While I don’t think this could logistically or practically work for The Game Awards, I also wouldn’t mind seeing some new blood when it comes to the categories. And it doesn’t even have to be something that’s just one-off or made only for this year. There are, in all honesty, many categories that deserve to be there, particularly for underserved and underrepresented genres. If your project isn’t an action game with RPG elements, cutting edge graphics, and voice actors, you’re kinda fucked getting into more than one or two at most.
In the spirit of contribution, today’s prompt is for you to give me a new category that The Game Awards should include. And I’m gonna kick us off with one I feel is really important: “Best Reissue.” This would cover remakes and remasters, a genre that is a huge pillar of the mainstream now and likely to stay that way. This year was slightly smaller on that front than the last two, but we still had Metal Gear Solid Delta, Dragon Quest I & II HD-2D, Final Fantasy Tactics, House of the Dead 2, Tomb Raider IV – VI, Trails in the Sky, and although it looks kinda bad as a remaster, Oblivion. And there are at least six remakes slated for 2026 already, with plenty of remasters assuredly coming as well. If The Game Awards are supposed to represent gaming at its best, then it should be able to honor the studios that best navigate the challenges of making a re-release.
Anyway, that’s just me. Any ideas from you? What did you play this weekend? And remember to check out Lily’s latest “Game News Roundup!” I never miss it!