PC Invasion’s Alternative PC Game Awards 2015

Best Porno Game That Remembered The “Game” Part Of “Porno Game”: HuniePop

Tim: With very rare exceptions (Seduce Me, I’m glaring at you) we don’t tend to review erotic games here, which is slightly sad because censoring screenshots for that review is some of the most fun I’d had in awhile. In fairness, though, I’d been playing Seduce Me, so at that point stapling my eyelids to the desk might also have been the most fun I’d had in awhile.

Props, then, go out to developer HuniePot for making HuniePop, an erotic game which is actually a game. I have no idea whether the (incredibly explicit) cartoon nudity will work for you; I have no idea if you’ll find the caricature-ish ladies and their dialogue funny or offensive. I’m not going to make any judgments. That’s all on you, and the description alone should tell you whether you’re going to hate it and take a huge amount of offence at it, or not. But I am going to say that it’s a surprisingly good game which doesn’t take itself even remotely seriously, and it made me laugh more than once. Take that as you will.

Rather than being a slideshow of explicit images, HuniePop offers a slick twist on Bejewelled-style block-matching, spiced up with power-ups (“gifts”) and some light RPG progression. For me, the airy art and self-aware dialogue added an awful lot to it, but I suspect I’d have enjoyed it without any of that. Come for the gameplay, and then c… er, you can fill the rest of that joke in yourself. Kinda looking forward to HunieCam Studio, now, in the hopes of seeing a similarly quirky take on business management/empire building.

Best Dark Souls 2 Game of 2015: Dark Souls 2: Scholar of the First Sin

Paul: You only put this here so you could mention Dark Souls in an awards list. Shame!

Tim: And your point is…?

Peter: Definitely the best Dark Souls 2 release of the year, though. It’s rather less amazing if you already owned the PC version and all of the DLC, but if you were playing the PC version of Scholar of the First Sin after, say, playing vanilla Dark Souls 2 on 360/PS3, that’d be quite a step up. I’m not entirely convinced by all the new enemy placements (Heide Knights were initially outside Heide for a good reason – they were refugees from their shattered kingdom), but it’s a great way to get the three fantastic DLC areas in one bundle.

Award for Getting an Award Four Years in a Row: The Dark Souls series

Paul: Technically it shouldn’t get an award and Peter and Tim will come up with any old category to give a Dark Souls game an award. For that reason alone they will not be allowed to play Dark Souls 3 next year.

Tim: Well done, Dark Souls, on being so good that we find a way to shoehorn you into our Alternative Awards every single year. (And hey, it got the “Award for Getting an Award Three Years in a Row” last year. There’s precedent!)

Peter: I know your game, Paul. You saw Dark Souls 3 at GamesCom and now you’re hooked. You want that review for yourself!

Best [Award Removed Because Spoilers]: Undertale, about seventeen times

Tim: There are loads of awards I want to give to Undertale, and I don’t actually think Peter would argue with me… but most of them would spoil some aspect of the game that should probably go unspoiled. Specifics of boss fights, or clever things that it does, or bits of hidden content, or… well, yes. So I’m not going to. Instead, I’m just going to give it this award, as well as a few non-spoilery ones. You could consider this the “Award for Being Great and Doing Loads of Clever Stuff That You Should Experience For Yourself”, I suppose, but that’s a crap name for an award.

Game With The Most Characters I Wish Were Real People So We Could Hang Out and Be Buds: Undertale

Tim: I don’t think it’s possible to finish Undertale “properly” and not wish you could just hang out with Sans, Papyrus, and the various other friends you’ve made along the way. It’s maybe telling that when I mentioned this award to a fellow Undertale fan, I got the response “but they are real people”. They might not actually exist in our world, but, well… I can see what she’s getting at.

Best Non-Licensed Soundtrack: Undertale

Peter: Exhibit A: I still keep humming Undyne’s battle music at random intervals, a good week after hearing it.

Tim: Exhibit B: there are about a thousand mashups of Undertale‘s music on Soundcloud, a fair few of which are good, hilarious, or both. (Many of them are also massive spoilers, so don’t delve too far into that lot unless you’ve finished it).

Toby Fox is clearly a skilled musician, and it’s really nice to have a game with music that actually knows what a melody is, instead of random orchestral swells. Undertale‘s soundtrack takes me back to the days of MIDI chips, when game musicians would have to create memorable tracks with incredibly limited tools. Art through adversity, and all that. When games got it right, those tracks would stick in my head for days; there’s a reason why there are loads of projects and YouTube videos out there which either re-do old game tracks as an orchestral remaster or with people playing them on various instruments.

I can’t help but feel that we’ve lost something in the move to MASSIVE ORCHESTRAL SWELLS. If anything, I think Undertale has provided yet more evidence of this.

Best Licensed Soundtrack: Loads of games

Tim: I felt that if we were going to crown a game for having great original music, we should probably also crown a game that has great unoriginal music. Unfortunately, we couldn’t figure out whether we most liked Hotline Miami 2‘s techno/dance/electronica, Metal Gear Solid V‘s ode to the 80s, or Rebel Galaxy‘s Firefly/Cowboy Bebop-inspired dark country/blues/outlaw rock. Or maybe even something else we’ve forgotten. Grand Theft Auto V, maybe? Although with so many genres, that doesn’t really have a cohesive musical “setting.”

So, uh… joint winners? Without Peter here to contradict me, I’ll offer up Carpenter Brut’s Roller Mobster, the Midge Ure cover of The Man Who Sold The World, and the Justice mix of Blues Saraceno’s Evil Ways as the best fits for (and almost perfect auditory summaries of) each respective game.

Least Creepy Spying-On-Schoolgirls Simulator: Black Closet

Paul: I refuse to comment on this one. It’s a bit too Jimmy Savile.

Peter: It’s not Jimmy Savile-esque, Paul, that’s the point of the award!

Tim: Yeeeeah, but there’s still no way to quickly describe Black Closet and make it sound anything other than horrifically creepy. I mean, even the name sounds a bit… er. Anyway.

Basically, it’s a game in which you’re the head of the student council at an all-girls school, and it’s up to you to solve randomly generated mysteries and uncover conspiracies that could harm the school’s reputation (ranging from possibly-stolen belongings to potential gambling/drug rings to secret societies), while not being so brazen and draconian in your methods that the student body turns against you. What this generally means is sending out your assistants to spy on the students, rifle through their belongings, and generally figure out what’s going on… without getting caught, and without people getting pissed off at your assistants roughing them up and ransacking their bedrooms.

So yes, it’s a game in which your primary task is literally to spy on schoolgirls. But, y’know, not in a creepy way.

Biggest Improvement in Basic Keyboard Functionality: Square Enix

Tim: Thank you, Square Enix porting team, for learning rather quickly that pressing the Escape key should not be taken as a desire to instantly escape from the game without even an “are you sure” prompt, and is instead usually used to access the pause menu. You made that mistake once, and have gradually improved since then, with subsequent games generally asking if you’re really sure you want to quit. And then Lightning Returns came along and actually used the Escape key properly. It took awhile, but we got there in the end, everyone!

Biggest Improvement in Actual Porting Prowess: Square Enix

Tim: On that note, I was probably more surprised than anyone when Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII turned out to be a perfectly acceptable port of a recent Final Fantasy game. I was even more surprised when they patched it to address some of the issues raised by the community.

I have no idea if a different porting team handled this to most of the others (the previous Final Fantasy XIII series ports are pretty dreadful, Type-0 HD had a number of issues, and the iOS ports suffer pretty massively from being iOS ports) but kudos to whoever did this. It’s a massive step forward, and has made me optimistic for any future Final Fantasy games that pop up on PC.

Of course, then they released Final Fantasy VI, and… well…

Honorary “Well, At Least They Tried” Award: Infinite Crisis/Rise of Incarnates (Joint Winners)

Paul: Both of these being pulled is a little puzzling, especially Infinite Crisis which has been in beta testing for ages. As for Rise of Incarnates – well, that seemed like a very quick canning.

Tim: I don’t know whether I’d call it a surprise, as I don’t think either of them really found the playerbase they were looking for, but it’s still a bit sad. Infinite Crisis was a little derivative but I genuinely liked its voice-acting and its alternate world takes on DC characters, like a steampunk Catwoman and a post-apocalyptic Green Lantern, and I’m a pretty big sucker for any MOBA that lets me play as Supergirl and lob cars at people. Especially if it’s an alternate world magical take on Supergirl. I quite enjoyed it despite its flaws, but I guess a lot of people preferred to stick with Dota 2 and League of Legends and the like.

As for Rise of Incarnates… well, it was a brave experiment. That sort of fighting game has struggled to find much of a footing in the west, and it wasn’t the easiest thing to get to grips with. Nonetheless, I’m always sad when games end FOREVER; I like to consider myself a bit of a gaming historian, and the fact that people won’t be able to go back and play this stuff in a decade is something that I find really quite upsetting. I understand why they got shut down, but kudos for trying.