Ricardo’s Other Gaming Awards for 2018

Yesterday I announced the winner of my 2018 Game Of The Year Award, which was Child of Light. Today I’m going to hand out some other gaming awards in various categories that I totally made up on the fly. Please keep in mind the potential winners of these awards were limited to games that I played for the first time in 2018. Obviously the awards related to events in the gaming world in 2018 are going to be things that meant the most to me and might not mean much to other people.

Best soundtrack: Bastion
There were lots of great songs in the games I played in 2018 but Bastion’s OST as a whole was the best. At some point I need to get around to buying it.

Best sound effects: Battlefield 1
The Battlefield series has had outstanding sound effects since at least the first Bad Company game and Battlefield 1 continues this tradition of excellence.

Best Visuals: Child of Light
Beautiful foreground and background art with impressive levels of depth are found everywhere in Child of Light, making for a gorgeous game that is possibly the first to recapture the feel I got from playing the excellent 2008 entry in the Prince of Persia series. Like Rayman Legends and Valiant Hearts, Child of Light is a showcase for what the UbiArt Framework is capable of creating.

Best gameplay: Titanfall 2
Whether pinballing across an area on foot or piloting a giant robot, Titanfall 2’s fast and fluid gameplay was leaps and bounds ahead of the competition.

Best trailer/gameplay demo: Ghost of Tsushima E3 Gameplay Trailer
I didn’t keep up with game trailers and gameplay demos in 2018 as much as I’ve done in the past, but the Ghost of Tsushima E3 Gameplay Trailer was the most memorable gameplay trailer of E3 2018 for me and it’s the only trailer from 2018 that I’ve found myself repeatedly coming back to.

Biggest gaming news: Sony announcing that it’s skipping E3 2019
Having faithfully attended E3 for many years, Sony’s announcement that it would be skipping E3 in 2019 caught a lot of people by surprise. At the moment the common speculation is that this decision likely has to do both with the timing of the inevitable announcement of the PlayStation 5 and/or the fact that Sony won’t have much in the way of PlayStation 4 exclusives to talk about for the second half of 2019, but we’ll just have to wait and see what Sony is up to.

Best Story: Child of Light
Aurora’s story of reluctant heroics was my favorite from 2018. Though surprisingly melancholy at times, there’s an undeniable charm to this fairy tale and the game puts its own little spin on storytelling by making all dialogue and narration rhyme.

Game most needing a sequel: Mass Effect: Andromeda
Andromeda was my biggest gaming disappointment of 2018, but I really don’t want to see the Mass Effect series go out on this negative note.

Best Dog: Walt (from Valiant Hearts)
It is an undeniable fact that games as made exponentially better with the inclusion of faithful and lovable canine companions and in 2018 I found no dog more faithful and more lovable than Walt from Valiant Hearts.

Best game demo I played: Tetris Effect
Suffice to say I didn’t think anyone could make Tetris this cool and enthralling. I can only imagine what it’s like to play this game in VR.

Best Gaming-Related Music Video: K/DA – Pop Stars (League of Legends)
I don’t play League of Legends and I know very little about K-Pop but this is a really catchy song and an expertly crafted music video. Normally I wouldn’t give out an award for a music video but after I first viewed it I knew I needed to give Pop Stars some sort of recognition.

Game that I probably most benefitted from playing late: Mass Effect: Andromeda
When Andromeda first launched it was not in a good place. A quick search on Youtube will bring you to myriad number of videos highlighting the game’s bugs and it’s clear that Andromeda should have gotten a few more months in development before it was released. Playing the game a year after it was released meant I didn’t have to experience the worst of Andromeda’s launch bugs.