Tonight marked the ninth installment of Geoff Keighley’s The Game Awards, truly the Super Bowl of gaming—i.e., an over-produced, highly corporatized spectacle that people mostly watch only for the commercials. (And which is also, annoyingly, the best games award show that the industry has so far managed to produce.)
Because while The Game Awards do manage to hand out some actual game awards here and there around the margins, they’re mostly a place for new games to show themselves off, with a whole cavalcade of flashy, expensive trailers on basically constant display. But not all trailers are created equal, and so we’ve set ourselves to the task of collecting the best of the best from this year’s crop of promos. We’re sticking to the “World Premieres” from the actual show proper tonight—otherwise, we’d just be losing our minds endlessly at Vampire Survivors finally going to mobile—and not commenting on the actual awards—because then, we’d just be losing our minds at Keighley dragging Actual Al Pacino out on stage to say “Hey, I don’t play these things, but they sure look neat!” This is all about the trailers, baby (or BB), and specifically those that are the best at kindling that tiny flame in our hearts called “hype.”
And oh, we’re also going to include one entry for “Most Embarrassing,” because, uh, did you see that shit?