Ladies and gentlemen, you know what it is. Summer E3 is here (a.k.a. Winter E3 for the Bore-thern Hemisphere), and His Excellence, Pope Geoff Keighley, first of His name, King of the Doritos and the First Giraffes, will be gracing us with another of his awards shows. The awards themselves are bunk, obviously, since it's already been announced that Devil May Cry 5 isn't even nominated for GOTY, but we aren't there to watch them anyway. It's all about those HOT. VIDEO. GAME. TRAILERS. BAYBEE. Don't tell me you don't want to see another round of CG trailers for games that won't be out until 2022, because I won't believe you.
But the Keighleys are still a couple of days away, and I thought we could spend the time talking about, y'know, video games or whatever. Throw a top ten at me. Or a top five. Top one, even; I know how it is. Throw some curveballs at me. Make up an award category, I don't mind. And, hey, tell me about movies and books and TV shows and, like, general life stuff, too. I'm not going to ban you for going off-topic in the video game forum. I'll only ban you if you don't pick DMC5 as your GOTY.
I'm going to kick things off with a couple of the smaller prizes:
Backlog GOTY (i.e. an older game that I only played this year): Bloodborne. What a great game! I went from being too scared to even play a From Software to playing Bloodborne for a solid month this year, and eventually getting the Platinum Trophy, and I loved it. You don't need me to tell you about this game, since it's basically all the internet has talked about for the last four years. Turns out everything everyone said was true and it's really good. The combat system with its wonderful Trick Weapons, the level design that leads you deeper and deeper into a gothic nightmare as the game goes on, a cadre of bosses that go from a scary wolf man to an actual, for-realsies Elder God by the end of it all. How many games have you played where you have to hide from a giant alien brain covered in eyeballs imprisoned in the depths of a castle and sending out pulses of other-worldly light that turns you mad if you look at it?
Biggest Stinker: Anthem. Remember Anthem? Remember Bioware? Remember when you found out that they referred to this project as 'Dylan' internally, because they anticipated that it would be THE BOB DYLAN OF VIDEO GAMES?It feels like something from a different epoch. Bioware worked on this thing for like eight years, chewed up and spat out dozens of employees, and I honestly forgot Anthem even came out this year. And I played it to completion!