This past weekend was a big one for gaming news, with both The Game Awards and Sony’s PlayStation Experience event taking place in Las Vegas. The two events served to wet the palate of gamers who would otherwise be short on game updates now that we’ve entered the lull between the big holiday shopping weekend and E3 in early June.
While they were cringeworthy for most of the evening, to call The Game Awards an awkward and overly long mess would be to discredit how much better they are compared with the Spike Video Game Awards (VGAs) that had taken place annually until last year. (If you so choose, you can look up Joel McHale spending most of last year’s rebranded VGX finding new ways to insult his co-host.) Undoubtedly, the show’s highs far outclassed its lows.
Konami’s Hideo Kojima showed off “Metal Gear Online,” the online multiplayer component to the upcoming game “Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain.” A trailer was shown for the first game in the highly-touted, point-and-click franchise “King’s Quest” in over 15 years. Even though the teasers were short, we also got a look at the “Gone Home” developer’s new game, “Tacoma,” and the announcement that the creator of “Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons” has created a new studio in association with Electronic Arts. Other highly anticipated games that nabbed some time at the awards show: From Software’s “Bloodborne,” “The Order: 1886,” “The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt” and the continuously awe-inspiring “No Man’s Sky” from the four-man team at Hello Games.
It was Nintendo, however, that won the night. It did not manage to nab the big award, Game of the Year (its contender, Platinum Games’s “Bayonetta 2” lost out to BioWare’s “Dragon Age: Inquisition”), but it managed to command the entirety of social media for the following 24 hours with a four-minute gameplay demo of the new “The Legend of Zelda” game due out next year. The demo – which showed both a vast open world and new, much welcomed mechanics such as a horse that will avoid obstacles in its path and keep running on its own – came alongside the announcement that it and a new game in the “Starfox” franchise would definitely be due out in 2015.
To put a cherry on top, the show ended with Nintendo’s head composer Koji Kondo teaming up with Imagine Dragons to perform a mix of music from both the “Zelda” series and their own album. Talk about a mash-up.
You can see more of the big reveals and happenings at the Game Awards by checking out their YouTube channel.
Nintendo’s presence at the event essentially acted to produce counter-hype to Sony’s PlayStation Experience and the keynote presentation happening the next day. Sony wasted no time in offering its own heavyweight to throw punches against “Zelda” when it showed off a full 14 minutes of gameplay from next year’s “Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End.” The highly anticipated game was visually striking, and while mechanically looked exactly like an “Uncharted” game, also showed off a new grappling hook mechanic that pushes us even closer to the inevitable Indiana Jones crossover.
A series of interesting games were also announced at the event: “Kill Strain,” a MOBA-inspired, 5v2v5, online multiplayer game; “Katamari Damacy” creator’s new game, “Wattam;” a remastered version of “Day of the Tentacle;” indie-game “Super Time Force Ultra,” featuring Sony’s President of Worldwide Studios, Shuhei Yoshida, as a playable character; and David Jaffe’s new shooter, “Drawn to Death,” which features an art style that appears to take place in the notebook of a severely troubled high school student.
The biggest responses of the keynote (besides the “Uncharted” gameplay) probably came from the announcements that “Persona 5” is coming to PS4 in North America, “Yakuza 5”– a game no one thought was ever going to be released outside Japan – is indeed going to PS3 and both “Ultra Street Fighter IV” and “Street Fighter V” are coming to PS4 (the latter also being a huge console exclusive).
The whole event allowed attendees at the PlayStation Experience to get hands-on time with many of the games shown at the keynote over the course of Saturday and Sunday, and the response has generally labeled the show as a success.
If you want to check out what else was shown off at the show, you can head over to PlayStation’s YouTube channel.
