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Just like a comic-book plotline where two crimefighters battle it out to find out who’s best, the members of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts will decide whether Cole Phelps and Batman had the better video game.
BAFTA! That’s the British Academy of Film and Television Arts to the rest of you not on an acronym basis with the academy. And they’re giving the creator of Donkey Kong and Super Mario Bros fellowship props.
The GAME British Academy Video Games Awards are starting to be handed out in the UK. So far the official BAFTA Twitter has named a few winners.
The British Academy of Film and Television Arts will bestow their highest honour at this years GAME British Academy Video Games Awards to the gather of Atari and pioneer of Pong, Nolan Bushnell.
Man, those BAFTA awards were nutty. Games in the wrong category, games nominated that weren’t even out yet…what a mess. Were the Golden Joysticks any better? We’d love to say “yes”, but are going to instead bust out a resounding “no”. Why? Because of the award’s scheduling, the winners list reads exactly like a list of…the best games of 2006. Full list of winners after the jump, but know Gears of War and Guitar Hero II feature prominently.
The 2007 British Academy Video Games Awards wrapped up yesterday, and while we’ve already brought you the list of winners and losers, we didn’t bring you what is possibly the most important thing to come out of the gaming BAFTAs every year: pictures of people getting awards in England. Luckily for us they had some sort of staff photographer on hand who seems genuinely good at what he or she does, so the day is saved! At the top you’ll see the legendary Will Wright getting his award from television producer Hilary Bevan Jones. More pictures of people I don’t recognise follow!
Gallery after the jump.
Glad to see someone else has the same opinion as me on the British Academy of Film and Television Arts Game Awards.
Back on Atomic, I did an editorial on the BAFTAs in 2005, when Half-Life 2 made a close-to-clean sweep of the proceedings. It even managed to pick up an award for Best Online, despite at the time not having an online component.
What surprised me even more was that in ’05, Peter Molyneux was on the board for the Game Awards. WTF indeed.
When that sort of crap happens, you know there’s someone behind the scenes who’s a few cans short of a six pack. From that point onwards, the BAFTA Game Awards, at least for me, became a complete joke.
Sadly, things have not improved in two years.
Carlos Bergfeld over at Shacknews has his own editorial up on this year’s awards and how he considers them to be a bumbled operation:
Looking at this year’s list of nominations as well as the official rules for eligibility on BAFTA’s site shows how the game awards have quickly become a sham. Eight of the titles nominated for awards this year had not yet been released in Europe, with seven of them unreleased in any territory, making it highly improbable that each of the category juries made up of seven to nine developers and publishers had played or even seen a significant portion of these games.
Personally – the BAFTA Game Awards should be scrapped until there are people with some, oh… I don’t know, familiarity with the industry running the show. Just stop, please, before I die from laughter.
Editorial: BAFTA’s Games Awards Have Failed Us [Shacknews]
The gaming BAFTAs just wound up in London. Full list of winners are after the jump, so for now, we’re just going to generalise. List the big winners, the big losers. Wii Sports, it was a big winner, cleaning up in six categories. Okami, it won too, nabbing two awards. Which is also how many God of War II took home. BioShock only won a single award, so lucky it was for Best Game. And the losers? Well, the PS3 didn’t win squat. Neither did the handhelds. Not even the DS.
