THE TAWARDS

Good evening, and welcome to the Tim Awards, or the "T-Awards", or simply the Tawards. Here you will find the picks for best and worst of 2001, as picked by a council of me.

Please remember that my choices were limited by things I experienced this year, thus somethings which debuted in 2000 or earlier were eligible for selection.

MOVIE OF THE YEAR

AKIRA

Nothing I saw this year could compete with the newly restored masterpiece, Akira. With animation, it seems that there are either developed cells with poor fluidness, or terrible character designs with higher elasticity. With AKIRA, you get both- the thing is practically as fluid as real life and stays just as pretty when you hit the PAUSE button. On top of that, the plot was unbelievably good, (one of the best of all time for an animation) with a fully realized world so developed that you’ll have to watch it two or eight times to catch everything. The movie starts off fast and gets faster, until by the end you feel like you can’t afford to breathe lest you miss a single frame.

Even if you saw this movie before and didn't appreciate it, I suggest you check out the DVD, as it been excellently re-dubbed (in other words, in now makes sense). Even if you're some nerd that can't stand dubs anyway, the disc includes the orginal Japanand audio as well. You have no excuse not to get this movie.

GAME OF THE YEAR (I can’t choose)

GRADIUS GAIDEN

Oh, this game is so, so freakin' sweet.

This was, by far, the slickest thing I played this year. The old Gradiuses were cool, but they never hit the spot head on (with the exception of Gradius III). No matter what, there where always a few things wrong, or bland. This game seems to just do everything right. Every level is fairly original (as opposed to other games in which the levels are mostly remakes of stages from previous games), and for the first time you have the ability to choose between four distinctly different ships, each with their own set of strengths and weaknesses. The play control is tight, and the graphics are stunningly gorgeous- the're on the same level as those found in Symphony of the Night. The game can even be played simultaneously with two players! Set the difficulty to very hard and you'll be playing this one for years- and you won't regret a second of it.

SECOND BEST
SEAMAN- DREAMCAST

Seaman may be the weirdest video game ever. In it, you raise a fish as a pet, like in the many other cheesy stupid pet simulators that choked the market two years ago. But in Seaman, you’re not just raising any old fish. The thing has a human head on it. And so it talks to you. Do you like yourself? Do others like you? Are you a pretty person? And actually respond to it using the microphone at the top of the controller. This alone is cool enough, but what seperates this from "Hey You, Pikachu!" is that sometimes things get really, really weird. A word of warning- don’t stare at the insect larvae too close in the head, and when Seaman remarks that he feels like making a baby, please avert your eyes to the screen for about five minutes until the strange sounds go away. No, I’m serious.

Seaman may not be for all people, as it monitors the DC’s internal clock to make the game world coincide with real time (therefore a game of Seaman can literally take weeks of you checking in twice a day to feed and talk to it). But anyone who thinks they can handle the responsibility, and thinks they would enjoy talking to a fish with a human head on it, should check this sick puppy out.

THIRD BEST
CONKER’S BAD FUR DAY

Many people concluded that because Rare had been so gimmicky as to put naughty words and images into the game, that the game must suck. These people need to die. Because the fact is, this game got dumped on when it is probably one of the best N64 games ever (certainly Rare’s best platform game ever, which is saying a lot), and the only reason it sold poorly was due to members of the press trying to show they were above a gimmick and Nintendo's admirable marketting campaign, which hurt the title.. Conker’s genius revolves around the fact that it does not force players to spend long, chorefull hours hunting hundreds of irrelevant items just so they can open a door and spend another hundred hours doing it again. This is the fastest paced 3-d platformer ever, because it gives players the third dimension as a gift, not a hassle. Everything is so linear and to the point- you don’t have to spend several hours getting on top of the ceiling just so you can collect ten more puzzle pieces or fifteen bananas or the last golden star or whatever.

And every level is amazingly unique, ranging from Mario esque romps to gyro board races to Resident Evil parodies to Gladiator fights in large arenas. Another thing, which the magazines love to talk about in most cases but completely failed to mention here, is that no two enemies are defeated the same way. Conker’s initial attack is so terrible it fails to defeat anything that might actually be a threat to you, so you take out most enemies in hilarious ways which are unique to the situation. The one player mode is relatively short (although still clocking in at over ten hours), but well worth the price of admission. On top of that, there are four multiplayer modes, and more voice than thought possible in a N64 game.

BIGGEST VIDEO GAME DISSAPOINTMENT

"SHENMUE"!

Sega tries to prove to the world that they too can blow millions upon millions of dollars on a game based on an inherently flawed concept in SHENMUE. You play as RYO, a young guy out for revenge whose father is horrifically killed before his eyes. Now, for most video game characters, taking revenge would involve loading up the shot gun and going out to kill the evil character responsible, who would morph into a giant screen filling alien after you killed him in the second to last boss fight. In SHENMUE, taking revenge amounts to wondering around your local neighborhood at a snail’s pace and conversing with boring, stupid characters in conversations that are a testament to bad dubbing. Bad dubbing from the early 1950’s. Bad dubbing that is so racially offensive at times (blacka peoplea talka lika thisa) that you will feel guilty for laughing. Half of the fifty billions dollars Sega spent bankrupting themselves for this game went into creating boring, optional, nonevents, such as caring for a kitten, playing arcade games, or buying sodas.

These things are all done fairly well, and to some extent add to the realism, but anger kicks in three hours into the game when you realized you’ve seen 90% of everything the game has to offer. Now you must spend the next 18 hours using the games ridiculously slow interface to search for the last ten percent of the game by asking every single person you meet what they know about the "mystery" you're trying to crack. After all, we all know that when trying to take out the Chinese mafia, the best thing to do is walk over to every single person you know and start blabbing your mouth off about your exact intentions and COA. If Sega was really going for realism, they would have the Black Car from the intro drive by and brutally masacre your character on day three.

One of the funniest parts of this game is that Sega (presumably) spent a lot of money to translate all of the audio for each of the several hundred characters who live in the town. These characters, through an act of production brilliance, will all almost always say something different based on the situation Ryo’s in. Funny thing is, for each situation, each one says practically the THE EXACT SAME THING! Need to find a black car? Watch in horror all 50 plus townspeople, all of them in different, individually recorded audio, tell you, "Hello RyO!! I have SEEN no black CAR today!!!" and then tacks on some petty personal preference, such as "But black is my favorite color!" Who was at the helm of this indevor? Listening to the NPC's becomes a massive hassle several hours into the game, because they all constantly repeat each other as though they are all hooked into some central hive intelligence and 50% of the voices grate your ears.

It’s like playing a game that sits back and reads you the phone book. This game feels like its just taking a bath in money all of the time, and I guess the best part of it is the gluttonous spectacle of the game itself. The worst part of this game would probably be actually having to play it.

To be continued...
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Copyright 2001 Tim Simpson