Vol.
2, Issue 7
December 21, 1999
The
1999 loonygames Awards!
Voted
on by the loonygames staff. Text by Jason "loonyboi"
Bergman.
hh...the
end of the year. That time when everyone with a website, magazine,
or an audience of at least three decides what should be crowned
The Best. As much as I like to think we're different from all
those other publications...let's face it. This stuff is fun. Last
year, we crowned Half-Life the Game of the Year (well,
us and everyone else, apparently). This year's winner? Well, you'll
just have to read on and find out.
Just a
quick note about the qualifying games: in order for a game to
be eligible, it had to be released between January 1st 1999, and
December 17th. So that means that any games that manage to come
out in the last week of December just didn't make the cut. This
turned out to be less of a problem than I had originally thought,
since two games that may have been nominated (Daikatana and Messiah)
have been pushed back until next year.
Anyway,
on to the awards!
PC Awards
Deathmatch
Game of the Year: Quake III Arena
Like there
was any question? Let's face it. id Software has always been,
and will likely always be king of deathmatch. No matter how many
great first person games come out (and this year in particular
there were several) I doubt anything will ever manage to overtake
id as far as pure deathmatch is concerned. Hail to the king, baby.
Action
Game of the Year: Unreal Tournament
While
not as good a deathmatch game as Quake III Arena (although
you could make a case for it, and in fact the votes on both this
and the DM category were particularly close) Unreal Tournament
separates itself by having a terrific Capture the Flag mode, some
amazing bot AI, some ingenious Assault levels, and a single player
game that manages to be remarkably cohesive. Unreal Tournament
may follow the same Mortal Kombat model of gameplay
for its singleplayer game, but it surpasses Quake III Arena
by far in its structure, and by golly it even manages to have
a plot that makes some form of sense (however little).
