Techtite Feature Article!

Techtite's 2nd Annual Golden Ottos are awarded in these categories:

Movies

DVDs

Multimedia

Television

Video Games

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Sidebar :

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What? No Video Game Awards?... ...sadly, Techtite's Video Game department is practically brand new, with the exception of a paltry number of reviews in past years. Although a revival of the page is now underway, it was not deemed appropriate to offer awards in a genre with so many consoles (PS2, XBOX, Gamecube), many of which were only recently purchased. See awards for these systems in the 2002 awards...

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Feel free to contribute. As always, review submissions are accepted!

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The Golden Ottos for Video Games Go To...

Worst Game of the Year! Celebrity Deathmatch. How bad is a game that is the worst video game of all game systems combined? Don't ask. Even a fan of the MTV series would find a hard time liking anything this "game" has to offer. The graphics are so bad you long for the clay animation of the actual series. The voice acting is so bad that just about every other "celebrity" sounds exactly the same. The fighting moves are so bad that you may even blow dust off your Nintendo NES to have a much better fighting game experience. As for the "bonus characters," they are simple, please-don't-sue-us "celebrity" characters, like the wolf man, the mummy, and Frankenstein's monster. What. EVER.

Best Fighting Game: Soul Calibur 2 (X-Box, Game Cube, Playstation-2) Let the Playstation folk talk on and on about "Virtua Fighter." This game was 2003's best fighting game period. They know it, and we know it. Its lead character roster is cool, its bonus character line-up (particularly the giant eyeball named Charade) is cool, and  the "one unique character for every game system"...? That's coolest of all. Game Cube gamers got Link, PS-2 got Tekken's Heihachi and X-Box got Spawn. There really wasn't anything bad to say about this game in the slightest.

Best RPG: Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (X-Box). A great RPG that is sadly too large to fit on anything other than the X-Box or a computer. The good news: this is probably because of the hard drive space required for save games, not because of any exclusivity deal with X-Box/PC's. So buy those PS-2 hard drive add-ons when they come out; games like this make such a drive all the more important (are you listening, Game Cube?).

Best Adventure Game: Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker (GCN). Yes, Game Cube games are all on little mini discs. This makes it all the more impressive that Wind Waker did what it did. Much the same way we were wowed long ago at the size of the original Zelda game fitting on one little NES game cartridge, once again we are wowed that all the splendor of Wind Waker could fit so well on a little disc. Even better for fans of the series was how pre-orders came free (!) with a port of the Nintendo 64 game, Ocarina of Time; playable on the Game Cube. Cool!

Best Hardware: Eye Toy (Playstation 2) Definitely the most ingenious hardware accessory idea of the year; let's just hope the game designers use it to its fullest potential. The free games with purchase are cute though, and best of all, they actually work! Not even PC's have such a toy.

Best Sports Game: DOA: Extreme Beach Volleyball. Yeah, I know. It's a volleyball game. It has girls in bathing suits as the opponents. It has these girls win games so they can buy even skimpier bathing suits. Call me weird if you must, but I don't have a problem with any of that. If I wanted to enjoy a game of football or basketball, I'd go outside to do it. How often does someone in Northern U.S. get to see beach volleyball? I'm just saying.

Best FPS: Deus Ex: Invisible War. (X-Box) When it comes to multiple endings (four, to be precise), multiple solutions to any problem (brute force, stealth, and puzzle solving, to name just three) and a whole array of places to explore and enemies to confront; this is the FPS that broke the mold. The original game was better, but this was good enough.

Best action-adventure: Beyond Good & Evil (X-Box, Game Cube, Playstation-2) From the sneaking around undetected to the taking photos like some interstellar undercover reporter; this game had it all. What made it so great, though, was at no point did it resort to jumping puzzles a la Tomb Raider (the only exceptions were either optional mini-quests, or very easily jumped "puzzles"). Nor did it become a mere "find all the magic mushrooms" quest or a "find red key to open red door" quest. It was an action game with unique action; an adventure game, with an inspired story. Hence the reason it's 2003's Action-Adventure Of the Year.

The Game With No Category: Viewtiful Joe (Game Cube). Though hard to categorize, this game was fun...even if it's hard to say exactly why. It captured the fun of an "interactive comic book" more than anyone this year; that's worth saying. However, it wasn't the best of any genre; it was basically in a genre all its own. Maybe that's why everyone who played it likes it so much. It makes it hard to categorize for a "best of" award, though not so much we won't give it one anyway.

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