At the time of writing, the 2017 nominees for The Game Awards — referred to by some as “gaming’s Oscars” — have just been announced.
While it’s nice to see some high-profile Japanese games — most notably Persona 5, Breath of the Wild, Final Fantasy XV and Super Mario Odyssey — get some recognition, once again the overall lineup for the awards is a fairly predictable affair that primarily boils down to “which games were most popular and/or made most money this year”.
And while there’s some merit to celebrating those games that have performed well from a commercial perspective over the course of the year, it presents a rather narrow view of the industry that leaves a number of titles underrepresented and underappreciated.
My 2017 Extra Life efforts are over and done with, and at the conclusion of my 24-hour stint I’d raised a grand total of $170: not quite as much as I managed last time around, but still pretty respectable!
If you’d still like to make a donation to Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals in celebration of my marathon, you can still do so here.
And if you missed it, well, you’re in “luck”, because I’ve gone and archived most of the stream for you to enjoy at your leisure! (DISCLAIMER: This is all unedited footage, I have had a cold and tonsillitis and am not very good/confident at streaming. But there are some fun games to see, at least!)
The last few years have been a strange time for the gaming community at large — if such a thing even exists as a single entity any more — with one of the most surprising incidents being the apparent fall of NeoGAF.
I won’t be shedding any tears over the site’s possible demise, since its shift into heavily left-leaning progressive politics, the idolisation of women and minorities as infallible beings to be worshiped and unquestioningly protected (as opposed to regular human beings, the same as anyone else) and the immediate, uncompromising exclusion and demonisation of anyone who didn’t fall in line with these values had made the site a laughing-stock for anyone who just wanted to, you know, talk about games. Plus, most relevantly to us here at MoeGamer, many readers will know that the site had been unfriendly to discussion of many modern Japanese games for some time now, with threads on some titles such as Criminal Girlscompletely banned, and the entirety of the site’s substantial Senran Kaguracommunity unceremoniously ejected one day without any prior warning or explanation.
But the fact remains that what was once a proud institution in gaming culture — one of the longest surviving gaming forums, and formerly a hangout for journalists, developers and gamers alike — now lies in ruins. And that’s significant to anyone who was ever part of it.
Hi everyone, just a quickie for a now — a full article is coming later today, but I wanted to bring this up while it was fresh in my mind!
MoeGamer has kind of stood by itself for a while as I wanted it to be a self-contained site that people could refer to in order to find out information on Japanese games and visual novels. Indeed, that’s not going to change at all — the All Games page is growing on pretty much a daily basis and you’ll hopefully have noticed I have been very good about creating new Hub Pages for games as and when I bring them up!
However, just recently I’ve been making a bit more of an effort to engage with the broader WordPress community and have encountered some thoroughly lovely people, one of whom is Irina from the wonderfully titled I Drink and Watch Anime, a blog about, among other things, anime and drinking games you can play while enjoying it. Well, obviously.
Grisaia’s totally an anime that you could drink and watch. But you should really play the visual novels instead. You may need a full case of booze, though.
I bring up Irina and her blog specifically because she’s making efforts to help newer anime bloggers who are just getting started to meet the broader community and perhaps make some new friends, and that’s something I’d very much like to support — particularly as there’s a lot of crossover between enthusiasm for anime and a fondness for Japanese video games and visual novels. Also speaking purely selfishly, it may also be a great opportunity for me to meet some new people who share some interests, too — and I hope it doesn’t sound too arrogant of me to say that they may find something of interest here on MoeGamer too.
If you’re a new anime or manga blogger and want to take your first steps into a very friendly and welcoming community — or just want to find some cool new blogs to read! — I encourage you to stop by Irina’s post here and get your own personal Blogwarming Party started!
Thank you for your time, dear reader. Normal business will resume later today — and expect more Community posts like this alongside the site’s main articles in the near future!
The best of overlooked and underappreciated computer and video games, from yesterday and today.
