My Favorite Game

Sometimes, a game comes along that you can't really explain. The other day, I talked about Borderlands and there are a dozen reasons to play that. There are a dozen other places that you can read about that, too. For me, I have to talk about this game, Awesomenauts. Overall, this is not a game I would recommend for everyone. If it sounds good, then great, try it out. If you don't, that's cool, too.

First of all, even critics of the game can't fault the character design. It seems influenced by 80's cartoons and by influenced I mean you could probably find some of the inspiration for these guys ripped from the graphic designer's eighth grade notebook. There's robots, cowboys, a brain in a jar and various talking, weapon-toting anthropomorphic animals. The environments are awesome, they almost seem like they could have been pulled from a Megaman level which is not a bad thing.

Oddly enough, for all the retro characters and old-school 2d feel to the movement, there's a lot of newer ideas in the gameplay. There's profile-wide progression, similar to newer FPS games like Call of Duty (which is up to like, number 16 but they avoided that by changing the subtitles, so I think it's called Black Ops now). There's prestige ranks, which, as far as I know, is also pulled from CoD. The gameplay is very similar to multiplayer online battle arenas(MOBAs), where players push back and forth across the map in an attempt to destroy the other teams base. Little robots follow along while giant turrets defend your base but slowly wear down. A group of three players have to work together to lead their little robots, smash through the turrets and win the game.

That leads me to the biggest problem with this game and most games that rely on an online community to form the main play experience: people are jerks. In real life, if you play a pick-up game of anything with someone, whether they suck or not, you have fun unless you're insanely competitive. Online, behind a mask of anonymity, most people prefer to just be giant d-bags. If you show any signs of not knowing exactly what you're doing, prepare to have a random player on your team hurl profanities at you with no other provocation. Luckily, the community of Awesomenauts is mostly not like that, though because it is growing, it's starting to get there. I play on Xbox 360 and also on PC but I haven't picked up the 360 version for a while because the last time I did, it was two Scottish guys yelling at each other and using weird slang. In fact, I'm not entirely sure they were arguing. It was actually kind of awesome. Then, one of them left and somebody else came in and there was just dead air with an occasional grunt or cough.

There's another unfortunate fact, and that's that updating things on the console is expensive, so once Awesomenauts came to PC, it was hard for console players to not feel shafted because there was one update that added two new 'nauts and tried to balance the characters a little bit. Since then, another character has been released and each character's powers have been tweaked and fiddled several times so that old strategies and builds are no longer viable. The newest patch for the PC added different skins which are purchasable (at the slightly unrealistic price of $2.49 for each individual skin or $15.00 for the full pack, $6 more than the actual game costs), but that kind of bodes well for console owners because it appears that Ronimo is trying to get the money up to patch the console again but by the time they do, how many new PC updates will be out?

Anyway, as you can see, this is not a perfect game. Despite it's flaws, I love it and have put in an obscene amount of time on both the console and PC version because I just really like this game. There's a Russian monkey in a rocket pack. The matchmaking kinda sucks. There's a rapping frog. The voice acting for the surfing lizard girl is horrendous but everyone else says some really hilarious lines, almost deserving of a whole other blog devoted to it. I guess I'll just leave this here and call it a night.