By Jim Rossignol on October 27th, 2007 at 3:04 pm.
The winner of the PC category for game of the year at the Golden Joystick Awards went to, you guessed it, The Lords Of The Rings Online: Shadows Of Angmar! Oh, you hadn’t guessed? Well you’d be forgiven – it’s one of those reader’s votes things, and it seems The Lord Of The Rings Online remains extra specially popular with a huge swathe of the PC gaming populace. LOTRO beat World Of Warcraft: Burning Crusade, Football Manager 2007, Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars, and S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Shadow Of Chernobyl. It was 2007: The Year Of The Colon.
And here’s an orc, celebrating:
Needless to say, RPS will be holding its own highly sought-after PC gaming awards towards the end of the year, and I’m not anticipating Lord Of The Rings Online doing quite so well in that… I wonder if we should have a Best Peggle category?
In the meantime: are you a LOTRO stalwart? Can you play a virtual lute? Speak up, and tell us why Shadows Of Angmar deserves its joystick.
SORT-after?
Damn you non-rhotic Englishmen and your INABILITY TO SPEAK YOUR OWN LANGUAGE.
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If only it were just the speaking I had trouble with.
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Best Peggle category FTW!
This kinda reminds of how Uplink got into the PC Gamer’s top 10 list. Perhaps the developers told their players to go and vote for LOTR…
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Ahhh, Mr Colon. Where would the games industry be without you? To be honest, I’m suprised Miss Hyphen hasn’t tried to have him offed, hogging all the limelight and all.
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Sorry Jim, but none of the aforementioned titles (minus FM, which has just been a one-new-feature-a-year title since CM) deserve it any more. And plus, apparently the Golden Joysticks are a FUTURE publication – and who the hell takes any notice of them? GOTY was MTW II (was that this year?)
If it were up to me we’d still be speaking Saxon, and you’d still be living in a cave worshipping a Deer skull, you cretinous Scot!
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I thougt everyone knew that Knytt Stories is the best PC-game of 2007?
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Damn right.
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MTW2 was last year.
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Okay, Kingdoms was GOTY!
(It totally wasn’t :[)
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“GOTY was MTW II (was that this year?)”
Well, no. But you can count the expansion pack, Kingdoms.
And to be honest, MTW2 is so good it should be eligble this year also.
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James: To be fair, it was an open vote-in for anyone reading C&VG. So you can blame the general public for this one.
KG
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Ok, let me think.
LOTRO won GOTY, check, LOTRO is an online game right? I’ve never played it but judging from the name and from the reviews I’ve read, it should be.
Now, how can the GOTY, being an online game, not be Online GOTY?
Discuss.
Also, WoW TBC got Online GOTY.
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I enjoyed Lotro for the short time I played it, but none of my mates would move over from WoW, so I quit both!
STALKER should have won from that list, imho. Im playing it at the moment with the “Nuclear Snow” mod, which is utterly brilliant. Such a great subject matter as well (nice article in PCG by JIM on that as well), its got me watching all sorts of random australian documentaries on the internet about it.
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Grine: that’s an interesting observation. Presumably those who voted in the PC GOTY category forgot to vote in the online category too?
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That or the PC category was suitably diluted by votes for, say, Football Manager that LOTRO was able to squeeze its way into first.
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LOTRO’s certainly a well-made game, but….I dunno. I can’t help think it’d be more fun without the license. Tolkien’s work is not ideal MMO fare, to me. Low magic, and there’s already heroes other than you center stage. They did about as well working around the latter as it’s likely to be possible to do, but nonetheless it’s an issue. As for it being GOTY in a year containing games like Stalker and Bioshock and Portal? Hell no.
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I don’t think either ‘Shock or Portal were in the running this year. STALKER was though.
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LOTRO died before it was even released when they changed the name from Middle Earth on line to that abomination and then changed tack completely and relied on the popularity of the books and storyline to strike a chord with gamers (most of which would probably be geeky enough to have watched the films and even read the books).
Yes the game was good (well for me in the beta that ‘goodness’ lasted all of 3-4 weeks then I was bored stupid) for some, but they could have done so much more really, with the wealth of information that was provided and also allot of gray area’s that were offhandedly mentioned in the books that could have been built upon and made the game unique instead they go for the cheap easy option.
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