Media Awards, Part One

After a week of contemplation, here are the winners of the (coveted, I’m sure) Peter Hodges annual awards.

Book of the Year

There were so many good novels out last year, including several that I didn’t have a chance to mention even in the nominations. I picked stand-out novels from among my favorite, established authors for consideration. This meant that  I left out Acacia by David Anthony Durham, Maelstrom by Taylor Anderson, Eye of the Storm by John Ringo, and Lamentation by Ken Scholes, all of which were great reads and deserve recognition for their contributions to the genre for the year.

Head and shoulders above them all, though, is Joe Abercrombie’s Best Served Cold. He takes a standard revenge story, sets it in the harsh world of his Last Argument of Kings trilogy, and adds such memorable characters and tight plotting to it that it rises to the level of masterpiece. Abercrombie has a gift for making each character in his narrative sound distinctly different–haughty nobles, sorcerers with the weight of ages, obsessive-compulsive serial killers, and charismatic barbarians sound and feel alive. Each of them is writing their own story with their own voice within the greater narrative, to the point that I lose myself so completely in the book that I will surface hours later. The voices are different enough that they could have been written by the characters themselves. Add to this the fact that the characters are not typical fantasy constructs–none of them are wholly good or wholly evil (not even the OCD serial killer). Best Served Cold provides a visceral, satisfying, and entertaining read that has resonated enough with me that every time I finish a book, I contemplate re-reading it before starting another new one.

Video Game of the Year

I played so few video games this year, that it almost seems a little unfair to nominate and pick a game for this award. I spent quite a bit of time with the Wii, but none of the games there are more than idle version. Gaming as a medium for solid storytelling is reserved mostly for the PC (with a begrudging hat tip to some console titles and developers that have forsaken the PC). My taste in games has changed over the years, as well. I used to live for the perfect frag, the epic flag capture, or the best tank/zerg/grunt rush. Now, I’m looking for immersive story lines, good laughs with a few close friends, and a sense of shared accomplishment.

Team Fortress 2 filled all of those roles (save for a storyline) off and on for a good portion of the year, but the game has been out for nearly two years. Even though, hour for hour, this is where the bulk of my game time was spent, TF2 was ineligible for consideration. That left Dragon Age: Origins and Borderlands as the serious contenders.

Borderlands was the most fun I’ve had in a shooter since Battlefield 2. The coop play is implemented better and more smoothly than anything I’ve ever played before, but I can’t give the game the award for several reasons:

1. Forcing gamers to use Gamespy for a match-making system is a travesty. That might have been acceptable in 2001. It’s not in 2009. Either use Steam (Valve makes an excellent product) or code your own.
2. Uneven pacing toward the end of the game was generated by the high expectations of the early game. I expect my excitement to crescendo through a game, instead of getting derailed.
3. The last boss battle was anti-climatic to the point of frustration. Were it not for all the things Borderlands did correctly, I would have mailed Randy Pitchford of Gearbox software a picture of me giving him the finger.

This makes it sound like I’m giving Dragon Age: Origins the award by default, by that isn’t entirely fair. It is hands down the best RPG I’ve ever played, lacking only a good coop system to elevate it to true greatness. Games like Dragon Age are meant to be enjoyed by parties of people, and the fact that Bioware worked so diligently to give you intelligent, meaningful interactions with the NPC characters in the game shows that they understand that. I would have loved, though, had they expanded the mechanic of the game just enough to let two human players each play with an NPC companion. This would have made a nearly perfect experience sublime.

As it stands, Dragon Age will be long remembered as one of the near-misses of my PC Gaming career, and my winner for video game of the year.