Oscar Bernard Presents The REAL 2023 Game Awards
I spent a lot of time inside with a broken foot this year and played a lot of games, and this year happened to be a pretty special year for gaming. My opinions and love of Mountain Dew are about on par with Geoff Keighley, the only difference is that my parent's weren't IMAX executives so let me present The REAL 2023 Game Awards!
The "Look, I Really Tried" Award: The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
This award is for a game that I'm sure is very good and I tried very hard to get in to, but I just couldn't.
I feel like this was inevitable. Despite what people may think, I don't actually hate all Zelda games. In fact, there's a number of them I quite like. Breath of the Wild was not one of those games. This alone put Tears of the Kingdom on the back foot for me. Nevertheless I tried very hard. I heard everything people were saying about all the super cool stuff you could build and all the freedom and immersive storytelling and how this is Nintendo's masterpiece, but this just never clicked with me. I really hope that whatever's next for Zelda resembles something more along the lines of The Wind Waker (or Zelda II, but I'd imagine Nintendo wants to make money) instead of continuing in this direction.
Runners up: Hi-Fi Rush, Sonic Superstars
The New Old Game of the Year: System Shock
This award is for the best remake or remaster of the year.
Your mileage may vary on System Shock. It is faithful to a fault when it comes to remaking the original 1994 PC classic. Functionally no quality of life has been added except for a gorgeous new coat of paint. But I ask, is any of that a bad thing? Did they need to do anything else other than update the graphics and make it run on modern machines? Because at the end of the day, System Shock is a damn good video game.
Runners up: Super Mario RPG, Quake II, Mega Man Battle Network Legacy Collection
The Fool's Paradiseâ„¢ Award: AEW Fight Forever
This award is for the biggest bummer of the year.
You have no idea how much I needed AEW Fight Forever to be good. I love the WWE 2K series of games, warts and all, but the idea of there being a legitimate alternative was something that wrestling games, much like wrestling as a whole, could benefit from. Fight Forever had all the potential to be a slam dunk. It was first announced in the wake of the WWE 2K20 disaster, it had the creative director of No Mercy behind it, and everyone involved in making it painted a picture of everything wrestling game fans had been asking for for years. Then everything went wrong. WWE 2K turned the ship around to become a pretty decent game, Fight Forever got delayed so frequently it earned the nickname "Wait Forever," every screenshot coming out made the game look worse and worse.
Fight Forever is so lacking in any of the presentation features that make WWE's offerings stand out. Entrances and Create a Wrestler are so barebones they may as well have not been included. Gameplay is baffling. Road to Elite, the game's single player, has no personality. Unlocking characters like Paul Wight and Owen Hart have such ridiculous requirements that I can't imagine anyone but the most dedicated of players have even bothered with them. To this day huge members of the AEW roster like Swerve Strickland and Samoa Joe (not to mention Evil Uno, who was constantly present in the promotion of the game) are missing from the game.
Fight Forever could have been the catalyst for wrestling video games to improve all around, instead it confirms that WWE 2K will never have to do anything beyond what they're doing now.
Runners up: WarioWare: Move It!, the limp plodding along of Rock Band 4
The Coolest Thing Award: MyHouse.WAD
This award is for the coolest video game thing released this year.
I think it is for the best if I say functionally nothing about MyHouse.WAD. It is a free WAD for GZDoom, an open source version of Doom II. You should play it. It is more surprising and beautiful than I could have possibly imagined when I first heard of its existence.
Runner up: YARG
The 11th Place Award: EA Sports FC 24
This award is for a product which is, frankly, not great that I nonetheless have invested over 100 hours in. It probably merits a place on my Top 10 list due to sheer volume, but I can not justify it in any way.
In 2021 all my football club, Tottenham Hotspur, needed to do to advance to the quarter finals of the Europa League was not lose by more than 2 goals to Dynamo Zagreib, a team who's manager had earlier that week stepped down after being sentenced to prison. We lost 3-0. Not too long after our then-manager, serial winner José Mourinho, would be sacked. He would be replaced with Nuno EspÃrito Santo, who in his first interview with the club promised that "we're gonna make you proud." The football was identical and yet somehow had gotten even worse. He would be sacked after 17 games.
For some reason, all of this was on my mind after playing EA Sports FC 24, EA's first football video game without the FIFA branding.
Runners up: WWE 2K23, Fortnite Festival
The 2024 "2023 Game of the Year Award" Award: Persona 5 Tactica
This award is for a game that looks really cool that I'll probably wind up playing next year and liking a lot.
I love Persona 5, tactical RPGs are very much my thing, and the ~10 minutes or so I played of Tactica was super cool. This probably would have wound up on my Game of the Year list but I just completely dropped it almost right away because there's 8 billion other video games that came out this year. I do really hope to find the time for this soon and revisit the Phantom Thieves, especially since this is already more my speed than Persona 5 Strikers was.
Runners up: WrestleQuest, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Fire Emblem Engage
The Oscar Bernard Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Excellence: Alan Wake II
This award is for the best game of 2023.
I did not expect this to win. Up until about a week ago Baldur's Gate 3 was my game of the year. I had a whole write up planned about my relationship to Dungeons & Dragons and how despite it being tied in to the reason I went from 7 local friends to 1 in the space of a year I still hold a soft spot for it and how BG3 had reminded me why I loved D&D in the first place. Alan Wake II had it's own write up in the "2024's 2023 Game of the Year" category. Then I picked up Alan Wake II in the Epic Games Winter Sale.
I lack the words to truly describe how Alan Wake II made me feel other than this is exactly what I wanted from a game. I have not had a game give me exactly what I want since Persona 5 Royal released right at the start of the pandemic. The cross-section of David Lynch, Stephen King, and The X-Files just seemed to scratch every itch that I didn't even know I had and I found myself unable to stop thinking about it, let alone put it down. This spiraled out in to checking out the rest of Remedy's oeuvre, a studio that I had somehow not really checked out beyond the original Alan Wake. This only made me apricate Alan Wake II even more.
Few games are what I would call perfect. Alan Wake II is one of them.
Runners Up:
