Second Wind [Intro Music] Welcome to the Fully Ramblimatic Game Awards. Basically exactly the same as the
regular game awards except for two crucial details. One, we prioritise awarding things and
not sucking off corporate industry so hard that its legs recede into its stomach cavity. And two, our award
categories actually fucking mean something. I mean, come on. Best action adventure might as well
have an award for best game with a title screen. Categorising based on
genre's a flawed practice anyway. What you should do is categorise based
on what feelings the games bring out in you. Best game that made us excited. Best game that made us scared. Best game that made us haunted by our
own capacity for violence in a zero-consequence environment. Well, in that spirit, here's my top five
games from 2023 that made me happy, my top five games that made me mad, and my top five games
that were as stimulating as taking my grandparents to a general anaesthetic tasting party. [angelic choir] Kicking off with my fifth favourite game
of 2023, Dredge, an understated horror post-dad game about scouring every inch of a
dreary ocean to draw up the few commodities within that are either valuable or at the
very least make for interesting conversation. And maybe it spoke to me so much because
it's such a wonderful analogy for my own job. Although I don't usually have to
carefully navigate choppy waters to avoid being speared by merciless tentacles. Only when talking about Hogwarts legacy. What better illustration for the perils
of overexposing even the greatest IP than Star Wars, when you can take a property full
of space battles, laser sword fights and implied sisterfucking and reach the point that
its new entries provoke reactions like "Oh god, not this again." You know you might have overdone as a tad. Jedi Survivor is my fifth blandest game
of 2023, so what are you going to try now, Star Wars? If it were me, I'd lean
harder on the sisterfucking. It was heartening this year to see
general audiences turning against live service gear grind design and more towards the artfully
designed single player experiences like Baldur's Gate 3, which isn't getting any prizes
from me because it won TGA Game of the Year and I don't want it getting too smug. In a way I'm grateful to Redfall for
being one of the early signs of this positive shift in the wind. Thanks, Redfall. Now get out of here, you fucking suck. I'm still one of those deviants who
likes horror games in months other than October, and it would be remiss of me not to
award the one game that actually scared the piss out of my jaded arse. Please don't ask what piss was doing in my arse. Amnesia the Bunker achieves this with its
innovative approach to organic recursive gameplay. Threatening my protagonist with death or
injury is one thing, but threatening to erase my last hour of progress? Truly traumatising for
anyone who works with regular deadlines. Obviously any game with a protagonist
named Clive has no business in anything but the bland list, but that's underselling
Final Fantasy XVI's real achievement in mediocrity. Finally committing to real-time hack and
slash combat did little to distract from its utterly pedestrian plot, livened up only by its
ambition to rip off Game of Thrones at every turn, while forgetting the one ingredient
that made Game of Thrones worth watching. Sex scenes with visible nipples. I will reiterate that I have no
interest in the actual gameplay mechanics of fighting games and so cannot judge Mortal Kombat
1 on that level, but even if every blitzed-out Evo competitor raised a vibrating thumb in
its support, that would not justify its existence to me. Not with its tedious character roster
and story campaign not even on the hilarious side of terrible anymore. Its only real purpose seems to be to earn
money flogging poor impersonations of TV supervillains who were popular memes about two years ago. I'm still a little iffy about awarding a
game still in early access whose entire buttocks could fall off at any moment
with a bad update, but you know what? With its innovative procedural design
and detective mechanics, Shadows of Doubt was the first of the only three games
this year that actually made me excited. Good excited, I mean, not Monkey Man at
the start of 2001 A Space Odyssey, learning how to hit things with a stick and
immediately channeling Phil Collins excited. Boy, the conversation around Hogwarts
Legacy really helped me appreciate new perspectives and expand my worldview. Now I know how the
mute function works on Twitter. And after all that, what a waste of
energy that it was all in service of such a dull fucking game. I've got missed potential to give us a
flying broomstick and then a world as boring as that to explore it with. That's like getting your car serviced
so you can use it to drive around Emeryville. You may have already guessed that these
awards are for all the games I've reviewed, regardless of what label they were reviewed under. And you may recall at one point under
the previous label I panned a game that I wasn't allowed to identify because the pricks
moved the embargo just before the video came out. But embargo's long over now so I can
finally admit that it was Hellboy Web of Weird. Thanks for playing this brief round of
"what all media will be like the moment American Democracy drops the pretense
and elects a corporation as president." A late entry to my top five list, Talos
Principle 2 took everything that made the first game engaging and pumped it up like a song
the Hedgehog character on an obscure fetish site. Some might say it's a rather heavy-handed Philosophy 101 experience,
slathered like Chunky Marmalade over gameplay that's just a
string of puzzles, but guess what? I like puzzles. That little piano ditty you get when you
finish a crossword on the New York Times app? That's what I hear in my head when I come. As late as a late entry can possibly
get, Avatar handily takes the crown of inevitable Ubisoft sandbox bland game winner from
previous front runner Assassin's Creed Mirage for similar reasons to Jedi Survivor's Presents, in
that it's set out to make a game about playing a big blue cat exploring a vast alien
botanical garden while blitzed out on ketamine and the result somehow still found a
way to bore off all six of my nipples. It shouldn't be controversial to say
that a game's protagonist could make a significant impact on its appeal, it's the person
we're stuck with the whole way, after all. Had Forspoken's main character, for
example, not been a smug insufferable whiny asshole, who with every dialogue demonstrated how
much they deserved to be impaled mouth-to-butt-hole on an unfinished wooden fencepost, then
the game might have aspired to being merely boring and ugly. But when it comes to the good games of
2023, apparently they all should have stopped trying in February, because that's when Hifi
Rush came out and it just wasn't topped, for me. It's bright and colourful and innovative and
funny and stimulating and finished in a reasonable amount of time. And, in brief, feels like you're
playing a really good third party game on the PS2. Do more of this, games industry. Remind me more about how it was
before you made everything go to shit. Skyrim in space. Any pitch that can inside three words
make a game conference, audience seating area, ankle deep and excited piss,
should have been a slam dunk, but no. Bethesda's sci-fi yawnfest
must inevitably take the top spot. I guess they were counting on the
modders to liven it up, but those lads have given up on it already, I hear. I guess there's only so much appeal in
riding around on your favourite My Little Pony when all you have is a thousand
planets of bugger all to do it in. I vacillated for a while on
what order to put my top two worst games. Forspoken functions, yeah, but Golem is at
least aware of the loathsome-ness of its protagonist and is more to the point mercifully brief,
but at the end of the day there's no overlooking what a gigantic fucking mess Golem is. It's like comparing a broken down
card to a pile of disembodied panda guts. I can't in good conscience pretend I'd
prefer to keep the panda guts around just because it's cheaper than buying
tinsel for the Christmas tree.
