The Game Audio Network Guild has announced its final nominees for the 9th annual awards, to be held this upcoming March 3 in San Francisco, CA. Reach is up for a total of four awards: Best Soundtrack, Best Interactive Score, Best Vocal - Choral (for "Hymn") and Best Use of Multi-Channel Surround.
mrsmiley sends word that the Happy Halodays grand winner has been announced.
There was actualy a flag in this match, huh... I didn't notice.
Well 119-Raymond has struk agian being vertualy invincable for all his matches.
Hawty McBloggy has put up the nominations for the 2008 Best of Halo awards, divided into ten categories, over at HawtyMcBloggy.com and Rampancy's been nominated, in the best resource website category. Up against the 800lb. gorilla that is HBO one can't expect to do more than score a point here or there, but the real honor is being nominated. The site category also includes (relative) newcomers with fantastic material like Ascendant Justice, and the Forge Hub. Do we have to pick just one?
The Game Audio Network Guild is holding its sixth annual awards ceremony for the best audio in games during the Game Developers Conference on February 21, 2008.
Halo 3 is nominated in several categories, including Audio of the Year, Music of the Year, Best Original Soundtrack Album, Best Cinematic Audio, Best Dialogue, Best Original Vocal-Choral (for "Luck") and Best Use of Multi-Channel Surround In A Game.
Check the GANG website for details.
Second Foundation, home of the Halo community podcast The Riot, is holding its 2007 community awards. Voting will be open until midnight GMT on January 13.
In the interest of full disclosure, yours truly was nominated under "Biggest Community Contributor (Individual)" but I'm up against Louis Wu so if I don't win, no hard feelings. Then again, if you want to vote for me, don't let me stand in your way.
First GameSpy, now TeamXbox shun Halo 3 when it comes to top honors in its year-end awards roundup. Crackdown-- the game that at first people thought might only be bought by people who wanted into the Halo 3 Public Beta, but then turned out to be good in its own right-- was dubbed best action game.
Mass Effect took the overall Game of the Year award.
Halo 3 had to settle for best Multiplayer Action Game, which I suppose is fine, but just continues the multiplayer-centric myopia around console gaming in general and the Halo series in specific.
GameSpy wants you to know they love Halo 3. They really do. It's just that 2007 was just too good a year for the console, and well... a game that executes really well on a known formula while tinkering with details and adding some new features just isn't quite enough to make the top half of a top ten list this year.
Halo 3 is a carefully tuned refinement of one of the most successful game formulas of all time, and innovative gameplay mechanics don't really figure into that equation. So, while Halo 3 accomplished amazing things in terms of its impact on the burgeoning Xbox Live community by introducing the Forge (object-oriented level editor) and an impressive set of video-editing tools, the frenetic multiplayer remained mostly the same, with just a few tweaks (HD graphics, deployable equipment, new guns) to bring the experience into the new generation.
Ironically, the Halo game even Halo lovers love to hate-- Halo 2-- got comparatively more accolades than either the original or the final chapter, despite the fact that many fans like both of them better.
Oh well. So Halo 3 takes the #6 spot, behind Mass Effect ("brilliantly stylish"), Rock Band ("magical balance between musical experience and videogame"), Orange Box ("best gaming deal of 2007"), BioShock ("a beautifully designed and wonderfully thought-out world") and Call of Duty 4 ("It isn't set during WWII!").
1Up.com obviously didn't get enough Bungie in their "three weeks of Halo 3" coverage, because now the company is getting a mention again-- this time for Marathon.
Unfortunately, it's not a flattering mention. Marathon 2 is featured in their Best Worst Ads 3 feature, on page six, which shows their ad from 1996 that compares video games to a skinner box.
We may have neglected it to mention it before, but Wideload Games was nominated for the New Studio award at the Game Developer Choice Awards. The competition certainly seems stiff; ArenaNet is up for Guild Wars, DoubleFine Productions up for Psychonauts, and TellTale Games up for Bone: Out From Boneville. The last nominee in the category is New Crayon Games up for Bonnie's Bookstore. The last I believe are both children's titles; Bone I've heard of, Bonnie I haven't. Oh well; perhaps they'll meet up somewhere in a dark alley. And perhaps I've just blown this site's child-safe rating. If it had one. Which it didn't.
Late last week 1Up.com interviewed Wideload's Alex "The Man" Seropian about Wideload, Bungie, Halo, and how he got into gaming and game development.
Stubbs failed to get a nomination for writing, which is not only a shame, but just proves that while the real money might be in dick and fart jokes, award nominations are not.
The awards ceremony is being held Wednesday, March 22 at 6:30 PM in the San Jose Civic Auditorium in San Jose, California.
Another pre-release award segment, this one for Best Male Performance, is up at the Rockets On Prisoner 2005 website, hosted by That Weasel TV. Thanks to Spartan 777 who pointed it out in the HBO forum.
At Rampancy we've been quite remiss in reporting on the Rockets on Prisoner 2005 awards for fan-made films. The RoP site still says that the awards ceremony has been delayed, but instead, they've been releasing videos with the nominees and winners in individual categories over the past few weeks.
So far, videos for the following awards have been posted on the RoP site:
There's also an Awards Ceremony Preview, and some screenshots of the awards ceremony stage.
The top 117 entries in the 117 Words contest have been announced by Jillybean and Stuntmutt. Your editor was tickled pink to have managed a third-place tie with Tum-Tut Mantis' entry The Arbiter's Sentence. And it's mine! All mine! It's my birthday pressssent! Stan won second place for Perhaps They Should Have Used Pimsleur. And the fix is in first place went to Bungie's own Frankie for his entry, the appropriately titled Can of Worms.
The announcement of the winners also has some special shout-outs to deserving entries, including one by Eric Trautmann that wasn't judged. Perhaps being the editor of the Halo novelizations made him too professional for the rest of us, and therefore, unfair competition.