GameDaily Nods Too Many Times, Head Falls Off
So we've been reading the 'Best Of E3' lists from the consumer sites with some interest - for example, 1UP.com's list tips its hat to a lot of the stuff we dug too, including Spore and Assassin's Creed. But we were kinda weirded out by GameDaily's press release for its E3 'Nods', which picked a multitude of games in a weird publisher-specific layout.
Most other people do 'Best X Game', but GameDaily's style this year is just to nominate multiple games for each publisher: for example, Sega has four nominations for Chrome Hounds (Xbox 360), Sonic Wild Fire (Wii), Super Monkey Ball Banana Blitz (Wii), and Virtua Tennis 3 (Xbox 360/PS3), and even semi-shovelware firm Game Factory made it onto the list for, uhh, Noddy and the Magic Book (PS2).
Our disconcertedness is further underlined by the comment immediately before the 'Nod' winners: "GameDaily Nod awards ensure confidence in purchasing decisions as both retailers and consumers look forward to the busy holiday season. Publishers seeking marketing artwork and editorial quotes may contact Cory D. Lewis..." Seems like these awards were much more publisher-facing than reader-facing, for some odd reason?
Comments
You're reading too much into it. GameDaily placed these games with their respective publishers just to group them, not because they're "in" with these companies. The PR could have been constructed better. I'll give you that, but the edit staff simply decided to list all of the games they liked. E3 awards not equal to Game of the Year awards. ;)
Posted by: The Senor | May 19, 2006 2:44 PM
I'm obviously not alleging payola, I just think it was a really odd way of structuring the awards, which makes more sense to publishers than readers. Each to his own!
Posted by: simonc | May 19, 2006 2:48 PM
Totally. You make a good point. It's certainly a different way of doing things than IGN did. Personally, I think the feature went on for way too long. There needs to be more thought put into which games truly (and I mean TRULY) stand out. This way, the list isn't several pages. Good chatting with you! :)
Posted by: The Senor | May 19, 2006 11:14 PM