The new year has lasted for over a month now, and 2009 is falling further and further back into our memories. But before we keep going into the new year, it is time to see what the best scenarios and designers of last year were. I present you The Game of the Year Awards for 2009, the closest you get to an AoKH equivalent of the Oscars, except these are voted for by the people!
Compared to last time, this time around we received a lot more ballots. Last year there were nine people voting, now there's been a LOT more. Despite some inconvenience with bloc-voting, the increase in voters has still been high and the results are very varied. Now, let us begin!
Placement: Scenario/Campaign/Member name (authour)
Gameplay is something quite vague to set a score for when you are trying to review a scenario. Gameplay includes the fundamentals like a game simply being fun to play, to specific annoying details like that little spearman being on the screen for two seconds when he wasn't supposed to. Silly spearmen. This year's winner has been praised for its creative gameplay, amonst other things, and took the trophy by a large margin, gaining seven out of sixteen votes. The winner is
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An awesome-looking map can bring up the overall quality of an otherwise mediocre scenario to new levels, while a crappy map can kill the fun of a wonderful story or innovative gameplay. This year's winner has won by a landslide. Using not only the standard editor's features to great effect, the authour of this scenario also included loads of wonderful modded graphics, and modded gameplay! The winner is none other than
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Honorable mention: Blood of the Bear (Mashek).
While a story isn't traditionally needed to make a scenario fun to play, most of the scenarios regarded as the best of all time put large emphasis on the story. So does many of this year's productions, and this round was quite a tight one. Finally emerging victorious was
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Honorable mentions: Piece by Piece, the Third (SD Commnunity), The Quiet Dawn - Chapter I (Matt LiVecchi)
While not all great scenario emphasise the score, the music and soundeffects, doing so and doing it good can improve the atmosphere and gameplay a lot, and make the scenario much better, and much more captivating. The winner this year used a wide array of sounds and music pieces and managed to captivate the minds of six out of sixteen voters. The winner this year,
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While uniting the tribes of Mongolia and conquering the world might be fun, the real challenge and the greatest fun often comes when playing against other human players, thinking players. Be it hard-coded blood maps or a traditional random map about the control of the Mediterranean, multiplayer maps can take virtually any shape. The winner this year is the highly popular zombie apocalype survival scenario,
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Honorable mention: Castle Opposition (Kyra).
With a very successful minigame behind us, spawning as many as sixteen entries, the judges put together the results and gave us a winner. This time around it was time for the players to pick their favourite. Just as the contest was very even in the top, so was this category here, but in the end the contest runner-up won the award. Give a round of applause to paperclip007's
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Honorable mention: Where Am I (Dtrungle)
Jumping from the scenarios to their designers now, 2009 saw the arrival of many new designers, of which three stood out from the crowd. And of these three, one received 9/20 votes. The winner is the winner of the AoKH Cinematic Scenario Contest, Lady Mule,
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With age follow wisdom and experiense, and when speaking of AoK you also get improvement. Well, mostly anyway. Designing, releasing, getting feedback and improving your design, ad infinitum; this is how all the master designers once started out. This year, the votes have been spread out over many different designers who have all improved their designing a lot over the year. The winner, with a 50% margin, is Turty, with 6/21 votes!
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The award given to the one or those that the public believes were the best design of the year, who produced the best maps, produced the most entertaining projects or brought designing innovation to a new level. Whether or not having their projects mentioned in the nominees, these are the people that were the greatest designer of last year according to the public. At the very top we find
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Several ballots have been disqualified for trying to fix the ballot. Hawk_KK's thread over at HawkAOC's forums to gather people to vote for fellow Hawk members's projects over here is regarded as a breach of the rules, and whether or not KK's thread was a benevolent attempt to give the scenario the fame he believes it deserves, it will still be regarded as a breach of the rules.
As you can see from the results of GotY09, and from reviews and comments on the games, Hawk's designs are already appreciated by many, and trying to give them extra fame through bloc-voting like this is unneccesary, as well as a breach of the rules. For next year there will be more specific rules against this, as well as single-post voting accounts and the like.
The voters that were disqualified:
Hawk_KK
HawkPick
Hawk_Grassland
Hawk_tx
Jimmy King
That's all for now folks. Now, give your congrats to the winners and join the celebrations!
*clinks Pepsi-glass*
The
OF | [/ \] |¯| [/ \] | ME
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The Relics of Athalën (5.0) | AoK Opus - 100,000+ downloads | StormWind Studios | "I consider the conversion of Basse to be one of the great triumphs of my modding crusade" - Matt LiVecchi