Some Made-Up Summer Game Fest Awards

I hereby award trophies for Best Concept, Best Developer Name, my very own Biggest Fiasco and more

Star Wars Outlaws. Screenshot: Massive Entertainment, Ubisoft

Back when there was an E3, there were also E3 judges.

Members of the media would go to E3—and even to a semi-secret pre-E3 judges-only tour—to play and judge the best demos of the event.

The praise was premature, of course, and the whole thing was a bit silly.

Sometimes, though, silly is good. I’m now a week removed from my swing through Los Angeles’ not-E3/Summer Game Fest, and I am ready to pass judgment on a few things. Time to hand out some awards…

Best Concept - While Waiting

While Waiting. Screenshot: Optillusion

While in L.A., I saw games about Hobbits and shinobis, wizards and robots. I cooked, I killed and I drove a mech. I only found one game that only asks you to wait.

While Waiting (PC, TBD release) is an upcoming game filled with 100 levels of waiting.

Your character stands at a bus stop. Clear the level when the bus arrives. He stands inside a restaurant waiting for the rain to stop. Main goal: wait out the rain. There’s a level set inside a role-playing game in which you wait for a meter to fill up. 

There’s a little more to it: The actual game is figuring out what you can do in each level while waiting. Inside the restaurant, for example, you can paw at the window and play a little game on the glass.

Best Glitch - Star Wars Outlaws

Ubisoft brought a three-part demo of its epic Star Wars Outlaws (PC, PlayStation, Xbox, etc August 2024) to its Ubisoft Forward showcase. The polished 20-minute chunks demonstrated third-person gunplay by our playable scoundrel, Kay Vess, a smooth transition to space combat, a flight down to a planet and a whole lot of Uncharted-style climbing/jumping/nearly-dying. 

It was all quite pleasant and designed to cut off, leaving you wanting more. Unless you, like me, are someone who starts playing a demo by going into the settings menu to invert Y for superior camera movement. That seemed to remove each demo area’s kill switch. These demos didn’t end for me. 

Twice, I played further than I was supposed to—like a scoundrel!—until nearby Ubisoft reps would step in. I’m not sure exactly how far into forbidden territory I got, but I can say that racing through tunnels on Vess’ Star Wars motorcycle was a hoot. 

More proof that inverting Y is the better choice.

Best Giraffes - Zoochosis

Zoochosis. Screenshot: Clapperheads

The Zoochosis (PC, 2024) demo at Summer Game Fest required about 90 minutes of attention, and I did not have that. But in the half hour that I played of this eerie first-person adventure, I learned to operate gadgets in a strange zoo, fed a giraffe, did a thermal reading of its body and grabbed a sample of its droppings. 

I think Zoochosis is a horror game. I noticed a sign near the demo showing a monstrous-looking mutated giraffe. There’s a GIF on the game’s official site that sure looks like a giraffe has grown spider legs… But the giraffes I saw in the game looked normal. They also looked very impressive just as regular old giraffes, thank you very much.

Best Title -  The Remake of the End of the Greatest RPG of All Time

I wrote about The Remake of the End of the Greatest RPG of All Time (PC, 2024) on Friday. It’s very meta and very cool!

I’ll give second place to a game I heard about while in L.A. but that wasn’t demoed at the show: Little Problems (PC, winter). “Little Problems” is a nice, punchy title for a game that’ll be about small inconveniences, like figuring out who broke a mug. (It’s from Playstack, the publisher of acclaimed murder-mystery game The Case of the Golden Idol, and they’re intentionally drawing a comparison as they try to corner the market on fill-in-the-blank whodunnits.)

Nicest Effects - Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess

I mistakenly thought you play Capcom’s upcoming game Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess (PC, PlayStation, Xbox, July 2024) as a goddess.

Nope.

You play as the person named Soh, who clears a path for the goddess through befouled Japanese-styled villages. Soh waves their sword, which somehow has long pink tassels at the end, freeing villagers from cocoons and undoing the pollution spilled along the ground. With each purifying move, firecrackers erupt and flower petals flutter to the ground. A hideous landscape turns beautiful, and the goddess slowly dances her way through it.

Path of The Goddess is a strategy game. Soh recruits the villagers and assigns them tasks to guard the goddess’ path. As night falls in each level, demons rush in and try to swarm the goddess. Controlling Soh, the player can fight those demons, cutting rips of color through the air, but manual combat won’t suffice. Good villager placement is key. That’s all fine, and it was fun to play during the 15 minutes I could spend on it.

For me, the game’s strongest hook is its beauty, best observed in motion, and its many dazzling effects.

Biggest Fiasco - The cat pee

My laundry. Photo: Game File

On the Friday of my trip, before grabbing a taxi to Inglewood to attend the live Summer Game Fest kick-off show in a theater full of hundreds of gamers, game industry folks and members of the media, I went for a run at my hotel’s gym.

Funny enough, the treadmill I ran on smelled like the pee from my cat back home—the cat that sometimes, when he’s annoyed or nervous, pees on the couch or on the bed or on my shoes.

When I returned to my hotel room, I realized it wasn’t the treadmill that smelled like cat urine. 

After I vigorously smelled the clothes in my suitcase, I decided he’d only gotten the running clothes. Distressed, but not too distressed, I took that taxi to Inglewood, entered the theater, found some fellow media members and whispered to them about my travails. A few minutes into the 2pm show, one of them, Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier, told me had some bad news for me. Apparently he doesn’t just have a nose for news. I was mortified. At least he and The Guardian’s Keza MacDonald were nice about it

I left the show early, and thanks to some emergency Googling by my wife, found a laundromat that’d do wash-and-fold that evening, as long as I’d return by 10pm. I put on the only clothes that hadn’t been in the suitcase, hopped in another taxi and dropped the rest of my travel wardrobe off, including my running shoes.

At 9:50pm I was wrapping up my time checking out a batch of interesting indie games, including The Remake of the End of the Greatest RPG of All Time. I had to go!

I got to the laundromat just in time. My clothes now all smelled great.

Best Developer Name - Soul Frame

As I played the upcoming action game Phantom Blade Zero (PC, PS5, TBD release), a representative from the game’s Beijing-based development studio, S-Game, was telling me all about it: It’s got the save system of a Dark Souls but the combo-heavy combat of Devil May Cry. It’s set in a dark fantasy version of Ming dynasty China. It’s a spiritual successor to Rain Blood, a game I had not heard of that was created by PBZ’s director, Soul Frame, when he was in college.

Soul Frame? Was that the developer’s real name?

“His name is actually public, but he prefers to go by Soul Frame,” the S-Game rep told me. “That’s his gamer name.”

Also: The lead character in the game is called Soul. And the S in “S-Game” stands for Soul Frame.

Why’d he pick the name Soul Frame? “We haven’t actually asked him yet.”

Most Recognizable Graphics From Afar - ChainStaff

And finally… at an indie showcase on a rooftop in L.A., I spotted ChainStaff (PC, 2025) a 2D action game with slimy creatures, fever-dream landscapes and a gorgeously garish color palate. 

I wondered: Was that a new Mommy’s Best Games game?

It was! The work of MBG’s Nathan Fouts is unmistakable.

Here’s what Fouts’ 2008 game Weapon of Choice looked like:

And 2018’s Pig Eat Ball:

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Item 2: In brief…

☹️ The Embracer Group has shut down development studio Pieces Interactive, which most recently made a new Alone in the Dark, VGC reports.

🤔 Xbox’s chief marketing officer, Jerret West (he just bylined the official Xbox post hyping Xbox’s well-received showcase), is leaving Microsoft to become Roblox’s chief marketing officer, The Verge reports.

😲 Nintendo will livestream a 40-minute Nintendo Direct showcase on Tuesday at 10am ET. The Direct will focus on upcoming games, mostly for the rest of 2024, and there will be no mention of the Switch’s successor console, the company said.

• This event, the contents of which haven’t leaked, is likely to be the highest-interest showcase of the current not-E3 stretch.

• Nintendo currently has no games announced for the typically busy latter months of the year, though the long-awaited Metroid Prime 4 remains listed as a tantalizing “TBA.”

💰 EA CEO Andrew Wilson’s compensation for the year ending March 31, 2024 totaled $25,643,093 in cash and stock, including $482,560 in “personal security benefits,” per an annual proxy filing by Electronic Arts.

• That compensation is the highest for Wilson since a $39.2 million haul in 2021, which had followed an unusual but non-binding “no” vote from shareholders regarding Wilson’s pay the year before (EA had said the 2021 figure was due to a one-time bonus to “continue to retain and motivate Mr. Wilson,” and Wilson’s compensation dropped below $20 million in 2022).

• EA cut nearly 700 jobs in February.

• Among Wilson’s leadership achievements for the pay period was “optimizing our portfolio, investments and resources in support of our strategic priorities and growth initiatives in the restructuring plan announced in February 2024,” according to the EA proxy.

👀 Goodnight Universe a game about playing as infant and that is controlled partially by the player’s eyes, won the Tribeca festival’s top game award, Digital Trends reports.

🏆 The International Olympic Committee is close to launching the first Olympic Esports Games, pending a vote by its members in late July, the AP reports.