The Speed and Sound of Balatro

This should not surprise you; I have been playing Balatro, the poker deck-buidling rogue-like, and it’s very, very good. It’s a marriage of two things that I would have never considered, but makes complete sense now that it exists. Balatro does a lot of things right. It’s a unique angle for the genre (exciting to me personally now that the dice-builder has picked up in popularity), it has a simple but compelling presentation. There are a ton to say, but I’ve been thinking about two specific aspects that I really love about Balatro: The speed in which you can start a new run, and the sounds that accompany them.

The Love of Loss

One of the most important aspects of a good deck-building rogue-like, to me, is how it feels when you lose a run. Balatro handles this really well. For one, the poker theme cushions the blow associated with losing a run. It’s similar to Peglin in that way. Sometimes, when you play pachinko, you get bad luck.

Thems just the breaks.

Sometimes, in poker, you just get dealt a bad hand. You don’t see the cards you need.

Thems just the breaks.

Not like Slay the Spire, where losing a run makes me question every single decision I’ve ever made in my entire life.

Balatro also features the fastest New Run process I’ve encountered so far. No dramatic death animation, no drawn-out score screen. You don’t even have to go back to the Main Menu. Of course, when you fail to meet the round’s chip goal, the game lets you know you’ve lost. It quickly offers you the chance to reset your run. You click “New Run,” it lets you change your deck if you’d like, and you’re right back in. 

Quick and Easy

It takes seconds! It feels like I could start and lose 100 Balatro runs in the amount of time it takes to end a game of Slay the Spire and start a new one. It’s possible I’ve done exactly that many new runs, too. In a lot of X-buildling rogue-likes, if I can’t get something good set up in one run, it takes long enough that I’m done with the game. With Balatro, it’s easy to keep resetting until I get a run with substance. That way, even if I end up blowing it, it felt like I had one satisfying run.

The Satisfaction of Sound

Aesthetically, Balatro does a lot with a little. The visuals all work together with intention. The window has a CRT-style filter. Gameplay is backdropped by a gently shifting spiral, like a 90s Windows Media Player visualizer. Your window is adorned with the unsettling clown faces of your various Jokers. When I boot up Balatro, it feels like I’ve just sat down at a haunted video poker machine in a seedy gas station. It rules.

Imagine the scene: I’m 4 cigars deep, and I’ve been sitting at the machine for 5 hours.

I can’t stop thinking about the sound effects, though. I don’t know that I can really describe what makes them so perfect, but every sound effect just works. Part of it is because they are set against simple yet effective background music, a loop that changes from calm when you’re in the shop, to intense as you enter each Blind/Boss Blind. The sounds that play while a hand is being scored are so satisfying. Balatro found the best possible sound for each aspect of the process. The chip, multiplier, and shuffling sound are a three piece ensemble, creating little masterpieces simply by alternating the order in which the sounds occur. Plus, the sound of the physical Blind chip disintegrating, representing your victory over that round, is icing on the audio cake.

It just Feels Good, honestly. The destination (winning a run) is good, but they say it’s about the journey. Balatro’s soundscape makes the journey extremely satisfying, which makes the destination even sweeter.

Sent From My Phone: Pokemon As a Fidget Spinner

So the last three major Pokémon releases (Sword/Shield, Legends: Arceus, Scarlet/Violet) have moved to this kind of open-world hybrid design. Instead of the game boy era’s Routes that lead directly from 1 location to the next in story order, towns are scattered around in one big open area, with wild Pokémon spawning on the overworld. This concept has evolved over the last few games of course. In Sword/Shield, we technically had both classic Routes AND a giant circular area where the Pokémon spawned. In Legends: Arceus and Scarlet/Violet, Pokémon are out, everywhere.

This is, in my opinion, a huge aesthetic improvement. There’s always been something cute about the concept of Danger in the Tall Grass, and the randomness inherent in the old way enabled certain extracurricular styles of play, like the nuzlocke run. Seeing herds of Pokémon running around in the wild evokes the spirit of Pokémon, and the spirit of wilderness so much better. It’s one of my favorite modern Pokémon changes.

This has also, however, led to a certain kind of Mobile Game-ification of the Pokémon series. Sword/Shield added Max Raid dens to the overworld, new locations on the map you had to stop at to participate in. The actual raids were fun, but touching a den gives you League Points, and you need LP to buy certain items. So a session of Pokémon could quickly devolve into cycling around the map and touching every den. On top of that, if you cleared all the Max Raids on your map, it refreshed the map with new Max Raids. That’s more LP baby!!

This idea has persisted into Scarlet/Violet, which is fine, I guess. The Indigo Disk DLC has truly carried the series into mobile game territory by effectively adding Dailies. I call them dailies, but really they’re worse; Blueberry Quests (or BBQs, as the game cutely calls them), are small missions that constantly replace themselves. Little things, like “Take a Photo of a Pokémon,” or “Travel 500 Steps.” Stuff that’s designed to encourage you to interact with the Terarium, the location you spend most of the DLC at. Once the numbers start going up, though, my brain just phases out. Four hours and 1200 BP (that’s Blueberry Points, of course) later, I’ve got no clue what happened. Only a Switch hard drive filled with random photos of Pokémon to remind me, like looking through my phone after a particularly busy night out.

It's like if Professor Oak said "You Were Close!" after looking at every drunk photo. Pictures from Pokemon Scarlet.

Since I’ve started writing this, I’ve both Gotten Way Worse About It, and also kind of burnt myself out from doing it. It’s been a very zen way to spent time kind of sad in my apartment listening to a podcast, or in a call with friends. I gravitate to gaming experiences like that these days, to be honest. I also think it’s kind of a shame that this is the direction Pokemon has been heading lately!

Jake Jacobson's Top 5 Games I Played in 2023

That’s right. After years of over promising and under delivering, I am here to tell you about the games I loved playing this year. If you only follow me on twitter, you will be surprised to learn that I have in fact played games that were not digital card games. I hope you will let me tell you about them.

A couple of things, though. This list was numbered when I wrote it, but it’s loose. I wouldn’t say they’re in Order. Also, this is a list of games I played in 2023, not necessarily games that came out this year. I guess that’s the thing about having a decades-long backlog, huh.

Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

I’ve said a lot about Tears of the Kingdom already, so I’ll try to say something I haven’t already said, which is: Tears of the Kingdom is just a step above Breath of the Wild in every way. Every new ability is an evolution of its Breath of the Wild counterpart, except maybe the ability to pass upwards through solid objects, which doesn’t really have a comparison ability. It is also the best ability in any video game, turns out.

Out of fairness I will say I did not fully explore the god hand ability as a way to build vehicles. However, I did fully experience sitting in a discord call building Hyrule’s Dumbest Contraptions. Plus, every time I got to solve a puzzle by combining 6 trees into one extremely long bridge, I felt a sick sort of pleasure and feeling of accomplishment.

The fashion is good, too.

This list isn’t in order, except for this one, which is my favorite game of 2023. It has broken into my top 3 Zelda games, and may very well be number 1.

Peglin

An important thing you need to know about Peglin, a “deck-building peggle-like,” is that every time bad luck would end one of my or my friends’ runs prematurely, we would briefly complain before angrily declaring it our Game of the Year. We mean it, too.

Peglin, by way of being a pachinko machine, fully leans into how luck-based a run-based game already is. When a good build that should have gone the distance breaks bad, it’s extra heartbreaking. It’s the other end of that luck, though, that makes Peglin so easy to run over and over again. When you lose in Slay the Spire, the progenitor of X-building rogue-likes, it feels so much like YOU messed up. Everything about losing a run screams Skill Issue. In contrast, the way luck can swing a Peglin run is actually kind of relieving. My build wasn’t bad, my luck was. The game isn’t necessarily forgiving, but it helps ME forgive my bad build and move on to the next run. “Oh well,” I sigh, “the Game of the Year is just like that sometimes.”

Halos 1 & 2

This is gonna sound silly, but I have always wanted to play through the Halo trilogy on co-op. I’ve just never done it. I didn’t really play the series until Halo 2, and at that point I was playing the campaign on my own so I could rush to playing it online. I remember playing a little bit of Halo 3 with my brother but not well enough to consider it a fulfilling experience.

The Master Chief Collection is on Game Pass, so friend of the site Isaias and I decided we would finally Finish The Fight, and it’s important to note that Halo’s campaigns really do hold up. The original Halo is a bit clunky in 2023, but I was also expecting that. I looked forward to Halo 2sdays every week. It’s just an incredible game to play with someone else. In fact, I’m finding now that we were so in-the-moment that I did not take any screenshots of us playing Halo or Halo 2. The following tweet is the only media I shared apparently.

My only major issue is that we played straight through the first two games, which is a lot of Halo in a row. I’m hoping that I get to add Halo 3 to next year’s list, but I’m not rushing anything.

Lies of P

I could not get into any game in the Dark Souls series (including Jedi: Fallen Order which I just couldn’t enjoy) until Elden Ring, which I ended up giving a try after watching friends and streamers play so many hours that it felt like I had already played the game multiple times. But I loved Elden Ring. Seeing other people make discoveries and fight bosses did not make my own playthrough any less challenging or exciting. Instead, every time I watched someone finish a boss I thought, “Damn I want to try that.” Except Malenia. I simply did not need to put myself through that, so I didn’t. : )

I ended up downloading Lies of P for the exact same reason. I was already hearing buzz around how surprising it was that a Souls game where you play as Pinocchio (allegedly) felt so good to play. On top of that, I got the same “I wanna try that,” feelings watching people play Lies of P as I did with Elden Ring. So I did.

Lies of P? Also good fashion.

I was worried that the game’s increased focus on parrying attacks would end up turning me off from the game, but it’s actually been one of my favorite aspects of playing so far. When I successfully parry an attack in Lies of P, especially an attack that cannot otherwise be blocked, the game rewards me by making me feel really fuckin’ cool.

Also, you would think that a game adapting the fairy tale “Pinocchio” would be pretty cheesy, and… you know, it kind of is. But the puppets you fight early in the game have such cool designs, and the Stalkers (and their fashionable animal masks) kind of rule. I do want to read all of the lore items about them.

I’m still getting through this one, so it’s a later addition to the list, but I’m having a great time with it.

Splatoon 3

Splatoon’s aesthetics have always been tailored specifically to me. Bombastic colors, incredible soundtrack that blends genres into a sort of Splatoon’s Monster, a third person shooter that de-emphasizes KD over the more unique concept of “How Wet Can You Make The Battlefield?” I loved the original Splatoon’s single-player campaign, but just could not get into its multiplayer. It just wasn’t Call of Duty, which was the kind of shooting game I was used to at the time.

With the benefit of some 3-4 years since I was really into a traditional FPS, and looking for more games I could play with Isaias (if this blog goes on long enough you will Notice this pattern), I decided to give Splatoon 3 a try. Plus, I knew they had added Salmon Run, a PvE mode introduced in Splatoon 2 that I never got to play but looked very fun. Surprisingly, I really stuck to it this time around. I do think having time away from playing most shooters helped me better adjust to how much different playing Splatoon is, but I’m also pretty sure that, after 3 games’ worth of Splatoon, they finally added enough weapon/grenade/super combinations for me to find some I liked using.

Average Podcasters, via Splatoon 3’s campaign.

I also had a blast with Splatoon 3’s campaign. The most underrated thing about the Splatoon series is that their single-player content is top-tier. A series of puzzles that are perfectly crafted to use every aspect of the game. The little open-ish world in this one was fun to fully explore too. I’m not usually someone who tries to 100% something, but I found myself going back and beating every last level of the campaign well after I rolled credits.

Jake Jacobson's Top 5 Games I (Did Not) Play in 2023

After about a decade of threatening it, I am taking advantage of a renewed interested to write (spawned from a 4 hour take-down of plagiarists) to finally write up some Game of the Year content! This will include my Top 5 Games I played in 2023, but it’s important to me to also write about some games that I didn’t play.

I’m at a point right now where I sometimes struggle to play through single player games on my own. I supplement this by watching other people stream video games. Many people are doing this all of the time, but watching a playthrough of a game can be just as fulfilling to me as actually playing it. Sometimes, it convinces me to play it, too. I figured it’d be fun to write about some games I loved this year that I was lucky enough to watch other people play.

Enjoy an audio read-through of the blog-post!

Baldur’s Gate 3

Screenshot from Baldur’s Gate 3 via Eric Rudkin.

So Baldur’s Gate 3 is the poster child of why I value this category conceptually. There are a ton of games I would not have started if I had not watched someone play it first (one of them ends up on my Top 5 List!), but more often I get to enjoy a game that I’m pretty sure I just would never play on my own. Baldur’s Gate 3 is expansive and immersive; There is so much to do, so many paths that no one playthrough is exactly like another. It’s the exact style of game that I would have spent 4 months straight playing in my 20s, but I know that I would struggle to put enough time into it now.

Which is fine, because it has instead allowed me to follow the many adventures of my friends, who all played very different characters with very different journeys. Gave me the same vibes I had talking about the aftermath of Mass Effect 2 with folks: I didn’t even know half the cast because in the first person I watched’s playthrough, they all died.

It’s also one of those games I just enjoy hearing people talk about. I’ve had more conversations about Baldur’s Gate 3 than all of the Top 5 games I did play this year. A great experience all around.

Slay the Princess

Back in 2017, Gita Jackson wrote a unique review of Resident Evil 7 for Kotaku, where they reviewed the game by watching someone else play it. Their review was recognizing a trend that has become more commonplace since. People watch entertainers play games now, and that is how they play those games.

I heavily related to their review when it dropped--I mean, that’s the entire premise of this blog post--because I am a huge baby who cannot play horror games. I still want to experience great horror games though!

Slay the Princess was in this category. It is a game that, in hindsight, I think I could have played on my own, but when a friend and I found it during one of our weekly digs through the New & Trending section of Steam, it looked horror enough that I did not trust that I could handle it. So imagine how happy I was when one of the streamers I watch, Hololive’s Ceres Fauna, played it.

Extremely Regular Princess, from Slay the Princess via Ceres Fauna on YouTube.

I’m not sure what I was expecting going into Slay the Princess, but I can confidently say it cleared whatever bar I set. The art style is striking, black and white line art with greyscale shading that still finds a way to make a character’s blood jump out from the rest of a scene. It is a very creepy game, in ways that are existential and psychological. And the game’s narrative, while a bit hard to follow initially, had me following along the entire way waiting to see what it did next.

If anything, Slay the Princess highlights the flaw of my love of spectating. With a game like From Software’s Elden Ring, seeing streamers and friends fight bosses and find secrets didn’t ruin the experience for me when I ended up playing the game myself. With Slay the Princess, the mystery of the narrative is the playthrough. Once I’ve seen it laid out, there’s not really a reason for me to go back and enjoy a solo playthrough.

Grand Poo World 3

The title screen from BarbarousKing’s 2023 rom hack Grand Poo World 3.

If you’ve never watched someone play a kaizo Super Mario World rom hack, you should check one out. To be frank, it whips ass to see people with such a mastery over a game’s physics engine clear a level that looks like the devil redesigned Donut Plains.

Our devil in question here is BarbarousKing, whose rom hack Grand Poo World 3 is the long awaited sequel to my first brush with the concept of kazio, Grand Poo World 2. Grand Poo World 3 had big shoes to fill; Most of the Super Mario World streamers I watch have Grand Poo World 2 in their Top 3 favorite rom hacks, if not their favorite. From this spectator’s perspective, it more than lived up to the hype.

Grand Poo World 3 is the third genre of game I like to watch other people play: Extremely Difficult Game That Requires A Mastery of a Specific Kind of Game. There’s a ~90% chance I never finish Grand Poo World 3. Hell, it took me about 4 years to beat Marathon, the very first level of Grand Poo World 2. The stream where I finally cleared it was a little over 8 hours, my longest single stream (in comparison, one of my favorite SMW streamers Thabeast721 cleared it blind in roughly 45 minutes). That just means I get to enjoy the experience of learning the levels and clearing the game’s many puzzles through the lens of someone who’s got the chops.

If you don’t have a favorite Super Mario World streamer but you’re still curious, Barb himself has been uploading compilation videos out of community clips, which you should check out.

The Yakuza Series (Yakuza 5, 6)

Kazuma Kiryu experiencing the plot of Yakuza 6.

Watching Isaias play through the Yakuza series is my soap opera. It’s my General Hospital, my Survivor, my Bachelor. I’m slowly playing through Yakuza 0 and will eventually beat it (for sure), but I don’t need to play the entire series. I would like to experience it, though.

I think my “hot take” might be that this is, in fact, the ideal way to engage with the Yakuza series. You shouldn’t play it, you should turn on channel 5 just in time to see what Haruka is up to today. Or to watch Akiyama chain smoke.

Lethal Company

Lethal Company is a fun one because, even if I actively played Lethal Company (which I might! As long as I can find a group who doesn’t mind me just being Ship Operator) I think I would still put it on this list and not my Top 5 Games Played. I just can’t think of the last time a game did comedy so well and so effortlessly as Lethal Company does.

A moment of divine comedy from a Lethal Company collab, via Hakos Baelz on YouTube.

Ostensibly, Lethal Company is a scavenging game. You’re on the clock, and your boss needs you and your team to hit a certain profit margin every few in-game days or you will be Fired (into space). The game is actually a Funny Ways To Kill Your Friends Simulator. Lethal Company is a game where you and 3 of your best friends have to constantly Handle Situations, and it will always be fun to watch those situations fall apart.

Sent From My Phone: Card Game Burnout

Sent From My Phone is a series of blogs that are, as the name suggests, typed on my phone, in the spaces surrounding and in-between time at my day job. Enjoy!

I am a Trading Card Game guy. Always have been. I have memories of playing the Pokémon TCG as a kid in a Bloomington Barnes and Nobles.

Side bar, but the league’s cool thing was that, once you got your first badge, the league leaders would give you a lanyard with a Cool Pokémon-based nickname. I was really looking forward to mine, because other kids had some really cool ones. Mine ended up being Jakuna, complete with Base Set Kakuna. I was so disappointed.

This is an artist’s rendition. Unfortunately, no documentation of the original item currently exists.

Anyway, I eventually came back to the Pokémon TCG on the other side, running my own league for kids (they did not receive disappointing nicknames). In the space between I started playing Hearthstone, which was a brand new kind of Thing for me to do. It was easy to collect cards, easier to find people to play. No need to wait til league night each week! No need to awkwardly text all my semi-Pokémon friends and try to organize a time to play games.

The last ~5 years I’ve found it harder to focus on single-player games. Part of it is based on the fact I’m so used to playing games communally that it’s just tough for me to focus up. I also just…. Sometimes I want to focus on a podcast, or a stream, or a YouTube video. And I need a game that doesn’t require me to hold a controller. That’s the kind of hole that a Digital Card Game is perfectly sized for.

Marvel Snap, a mobile card game that dropped last year from most of the grandfathers of Hearthstone, has been an incredible game for that purpose. I can get 2 or 3 games in while riding the bus to and from work, I can have it on one monitor while I pay more attention to something else. It has a great capital-F Feel and it’s visually optimized for mobile; Plus, if my hands are cold I, running Marvel Snap for more than a few games can really heat this bad boy up.

Also, it kind of sucks to play right now! And the short length of games has changed my relationship to Hearthstone, whose 30-40 minute single games feel like an eternity in comparison. Plus, Pokemon’s new digital TGC interface is so, so much worse than the one it retired.

I find that it’s less likely I’m enjoying a game of one of these apps than that I’m simply Filling Time. But I gotta play, because I’m a trading card game guy. What am I if I don’t have a trading card game?

Six Years of Breath of the Wild; or, Why Tears of the Kingdom is My 2023 Game of the Year

I can’t write about my feelings on the two modern Zelda games without splitting it into two parts; how I actually feel about Tears of the Kingdom, and how it took me 5 years to beat Breath of the Wild. The latter almost certainly colors my opinion on the former, but also just kind of explains me as a person. I’ve always been a communal gamer. Obviously that means I enjoy multiplayer games (to the point where I played League of Legends for much longer than I actually enjoyed doing so because my friends played it together), but it also means playing single player games when other people are around.

It started young. In high school, two friends and I would bring our Xboxes and TVs to one place and each play our own Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind saves in the same living room. When Mass Effect 3 came out, my two college roommates and I had a similar set-up. These days it’s why I stream on Twitch, or to friends in our Discord server. It’s also a common way I’ve spent time with people I’ve dated.

I loved Breath of the Wild. It’s as good as every critic you and I respect say it was. I was lucky enough to play the game side-by-side with my partner at the time. We both loved it. We’d watch each other play, celebrating when one of us found something the other hadn’t seen yet. When we split, we also split Breath of the Wild. I left her with the Wii U we had been playing together on; in exchange, she bought me a copy of the game for the Switch.

I struggle divorcing things from the experiences I’ve had with them. Faced with the task of replaying all of Breath of the Wild alone, without the relationship we had built it into, I fell off, just short of finishing the game.

I jumped back in leading up to the release of Tears of the Kingdom. I finished Breath of the Wild right under the gun, beating Ganon the weekend before the release of the sequel. It was such a relief, finally being able to put to bed a game I had attached an incredible amount of baggage to. To my delight, I was about to start a game that felt as strongly about communal experiences as I did.

One of the great things Breath of the Wild did was make an open world that felt lived-in. Every aspect of the map felt intentional, with well-placed puzzles or secrets, and other characters who felt like they were truly living and traveling in the space. To me, this is the thing Tears of the Kingdom improves on the most: saving Tears of the Kingdom’s Hyrule is a communal experience.

After your extended tutorial area, Link finds himself in Lookout Landing, your headquarters for the game. Lookout Landing houses a growing population of folks from all over Hyrule, all working together to rebuild. The rest of the game follows the tone, with each major village struggling from its own unique issues. In Breath of the Wild, I often felt like Link was a catalyst, cleaning up the mess caused by the Divine Beasts that simply could not be resolved until he arrived. In Tears of the Kingdom, it feels like Link is arriving in the middle of events, a helping hand rather than a deus ex machina. In this way, Hyrule feels like it exists. Obviously Link is still the Hero, but he is working with people who are On Top Of It.

The fact that Link is never doing his work alone reinforces this feeling; you’re alway solving a dungeon along-side someone who has been figuring things out before Link ever arrived. While the player can technically stumble into the game’s final fight on their own, Link cannot. Characters from Lookout Landing and each of the four major villages are providing the important information that Link needs to figure out exactly what, how, and when things are happening. As you help the four Villages, they send an advisor to Lookout Landing. They each bring their Xboxes and TVs to Hyrule’s living room, to share what they’ve learned and celebrate when each other finds a secret.

Breath of the Wild is lived in; Tears of the Kingdom has Community.

I love this game.

WRITER’S NOTE: Isaias wanted me to add the word “thematic” to this piece somewhere but I couldn’t find a place to squeeze it in. So I’m cheating.

The Game Awards 2023 Guessies (Updated with Winners)

Inspired by my good friend Jacob Oller’s yearly Oscars Predictions, I’ve quickly put together a list of the nominees for this year’s The Game Awards, along with who I think SHOULD win, and who I think WILL win. No thoughtful blurbs, since I did this on a whim last night, but I want to get into the habit of actually putting stuff on my website, so here goes.

Jake Note: I’ve updated the blurbs to identify the winners, and add little notes where I feel like I have something to say. I’m mostly disappointed with how ashamed of video games The Video Game Award are, the natural culmination of

Jake Jacobson’s Official “The Game Awards” Guessies 2023

Game of the Year

Should Win: Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
Will Win: Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
Did Win: Baldur’s Game 3
Jake Note: Honestly, I figured this would probably happen, and it’s well deserved! Everyone I know played this game, so much so that I just feel like I’ve played the game via osmosis like… 4 times over. I just think Tears of the Kingdom is my Game of the Year, so I was Manifesting.

Best Game Direction

Should Win: Baldur’s Gate 3
Will Win: Baldur’s Gate 3
Did Win: Alan Wake 2

Best Narrative

Should Win: Baldur’s Gate 3
Will Win: Baldur’s Gate 3
Did Win: Alan Wake 2
Jake Note: Kind of surprised at how much Alan Wake 2 wins at this show, just because my assumption was that, because it didn’t blow up the world like Remedy seemed to. Bad read!

Best Art Direction

Should Win: Hi-Fi Rush
Will Win: Hi-Fi Rush
Did Win: Alan Wake 2
Jake Note: This feels like Hi-Fi Rush got robbed, to me, but Art Direction can really be Anything, and also the following award is a much bigger snub for it.

Best Score and Music

Should Win: Hi-Fi Rush
Will Win: Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
Did Win: Final Fantasy 16
Jake Note: No One seems to remember the music from this game so, like, you know. Gotta give Sony awards probably.

Best Audio Design

Should Win: Hi-Fi Rush
Will Win: Marvel’s Spider-Man 2
Did Win: Hi-Fi Rush
Jake Note: Audio Design is another one where I thought maybe Spider-Man 2 may win because it sounds really good when you thwip; If Hi-Fi Rush was going to win one of the categories it was nominated for though, it should have been one of the audio ones!

Best Performance

Should Win: Neil Newbon (Asterion)
Will Win: Cameron Monaghan (Karl Kestus)
Did Win: Neil Newbon (Asterion)
Jake Note: Obviously well deserved, it would have been a crime to not award this to 2023’s Most Thirsted Character. I kind of thought Geoff would be giving more love to Jedi Survivor but this was another bad read on my part, the sequel just didn’t have the staying power its predecessor had.

Innovation in Accessibility

Should Win: To be perfectly transparent, I’m not super familiar with any of this year’s nominees’ big accessibility features. I think Street Fighter 6’s Modern Controls are a very cool direction to take fighting games, but I don’t honestly know if that counts as an Accessibility Feature.
Will Win: Forza Motorsport
Did Win: Forza Motorsport

Games for Impact (Indie Game Category #1)

Should Win: Venba
Will Win: Venba
Did Win: Tchia
Jake Note: Venba was the only one of these games I heard anyone talk about, so I’m surprised but didn’t know enough about the category to be shocked.

Best Ongoing

Should Win: Final Fantasy 14
Will Win: Cyberpunk 2077
Did Win: Cyberpunk 2077
Jake Note: Ignoring that Cyberpunk 2077 has been an integral part of The Game Awards of the past, I figured this game was going to get the love in this category because it favors broken games that get fixed over the course of 2-4 years.

Best Community Support

Should Win: No Man’s Sky
Will Win: Baldur’s Gate 3
Did Win: Baldur’s Gate 3

Best Independent Game

Should Win: Dredge
Will Win: Dave the Diver
Did Win: Sea of Stars
Jake Note: Would have been great to have some of these Indie developers be allowed to talk about their games on stage! If only we hosted an event that celebrated games by giving them awards.

Best Debut Indie Game

Should Win: Pizza Tower
Will Win: Pizza Tower
Did Win: Cocoon
Jake Note: Obviously I agree with the white people on twitter(?) who think Pizza Tower got robbed. I think that, out of all the options for this game, Cocoon was the weakest choice, but even it looks good with a unique game mechanic. Anyway one of my favorite games is infamously the subject of an AVGN video, so you can still enjoy games that don’t win Best Awards!

Best Mobile Game

Should Win: Hello Kitty Island Adventure
Will Win: Honki: Stonk Donk
Did Win: Honki: Stonk Donk

Best VR/AR

Should Win: Resident Evil Village VR Mode
Will Win: Gran Turismo 7
Did Win: Resident Evil Village VR Mode
Jake Note: Huge Women Win Again.

Best Action Game

Should Win: Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon
Will Win: Super Mario Brothers 2
Did Win: Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon

Best Action/Adventure

Should Win: The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
Will Win: Star Wars Jedi: Survivor
Did Win: The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
Jake Note: Well Deserved!

Best RPG

Should Win: Lies of P
Will Win: Baldur’s Gate 3
Did Win: Baldur’s Gate 3
Jake Note: Again, Baldur’s Gate 3 deserves all it’s flowers here, but I wanted to shout out Lies of P, which is for all accounts a surprise 2023 hit. Sad it doesn’t get any recognition here, but also The Game Awards are all fake anyway, so.

Best Fighting Game

Should Win: Street Fighter 6
Will Win: Street Fighter 6
Did Win: Street Fighter 6

Best Family Game

Should Win: Disney Illusion Island
Will Win: Super Mario Bros. Wonder
Did Win: Super Mario Bros. Wonder

Best Sim/Strategy (aka the “Why Are These Combined” Award)

Should Win: Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot Camp
Will Win: Fire Emblem Engage
Did Win: Pikmin 4
Jake Note: Oatchi that’s my doggie that’s my baby that’s my funny little buddy wish he’d hug me he’s a puppy he’s an angel he’s a silly little creature and I love the way he carries all my stuff and all my men and he will always be my friend.

Best Sports/Racing

Should Win: Forza Motorsport
Will Win: Forza Motorsport
Did Win: Forza Motorsport
Jake Note: My former colleague Brandon Satterwhite points out that this is Forza’s 5th win in as many appearances. There are enough racing and sports games that this can probably be separate, but this is Forza’s category until they do.

Best Multiplayer

Should Win: Street Fighter 6
Will Win: Baldur’s Gate 3
Did Win: Baldur’s Gate 3
Jake Note: Baldur’s Gate 3’s multiplayer does look legitimately fun, but this category seems like it could be put to better use highlighting actual multiplayer experiences, with something like Party Animals.

The “Last of Us” Award (Sponsored by “The Last of Us”)

Should Win: Castlevania: Nocturne
Will Win: Come on dude man
Did Win: 😏

Most Anticipated Game

Should Win: Hades II
Will Win: Final Fantasy VII Rebirth
Did Win: Final Fantasy VII Rebirth
Jake Note: Hades II is gonna whip ass!! I can’t believe they’re making a Hades II!!!!

Content Creator of the Year

Should Win: twitch.tv/dtjmelons
Will Win: Ironmouse
Did Win: Ironmouse
Jake Note: Ironmouse gotta be the most well-known english vtuber at this point, and she’s worked hard to earn that status. Eric got robbed tho.

Best eSports Game

Should Win: Zelda: Ocarina of Time Randomizer
Will Win: Valorant
Did Win: Valorant

Best eSports Athlete

Should Win: Eric “DtJMelons” Rudkin (Zelda: Ocarina of Time Randomizer)
Will Win: Lee “Faker” Sang-Hyeok (League of Legends)
Did Win: Lee “Faker” Sang-Hyeok (League of Legends)
Jake Note: I want to be serious for a minute here and point out that Faker’s T1 team won this year’s League of Legends World Championship. This comes exactly a decade after his first Worlds championship win, the year he debuted for T1 in 2013. Truly insane longevity in a genre of competition that seems to favor youth. Legendary run.

There are technically a handful of additional categories around eSports but, to be honest, I just don’t know much about any of them. I think Evil Geniuses will probably win Best eSports Team but only because it’s the Only Team Whose Name I Recognize.