The 2024 Game Awards: Bots, Balatro, Muppets & More
Plus, Magic: The Gathering's Pioneer Masters and Foundations, reviewed
One day I’ll cruise to LA for The Game Awards — but this year, like the last, I took frantic notes while scrutinizing the spectacle from my perch in Arlington, Virginia. After filing my digital story, I slouched to bed and scored meager sleep before a busy workday.
Unlike last year, I joined Morning Edition to preview the Awards nominees ahead of time, and also somehow pulled tape, scripted, edited, tracked and mixed a Here & Now feature in about three hours today.
I’m awfully proud of that radio story, rough-and-ready as it is. But I’ll distill my article here for those of you who don’t have the spare four minutes to listen:
Astro Bot claimed four wins, including Game of the Year, at the 2024 Game Awards.
The PlayStation 5 exclusive has players run, hover-jump, and rocket-blast to collect stranded robots across a cartoony galaxy. While the game celebrates three decades of Sony's console history, Studio Director Nicolas Doucet credited Nintendo in a misty-eyed acceptance speech (though he avoided mentioning the competitor by name):
"I was a kid in 1989, I got a gray box and there was a game packed in — it was called Super Mario Brothers and it was really, really great," said Doucet. "I want to pay tribute to the company who really showed us innovation and quality consistently, and inspired us to make the game that we made."
Nintendo, meanwhile, went home empty-handed after a night defined by sweeps, surprise reveals, fourth-wall breaks and celebrity appearances from the likes of Harrison Ford and Snoop Dogg.
Balatro, the poker roguelike from solo-developer LocalThunk, won "Best Debut Indie," "Best Independent Game" and "Best Mobile Game." Despite this dominance, the representative who accepted awards on LocalThunk's behalf tried to shout out the indie scene more broadly, calling out pixel western Arco by name.
Big-budget games otherwise stole the spotlight. The ceremony began with an official reveal trailer for The Witcher 4 and the surprise announcement of Elden Ring: Nightreign, a co-op spinoff to the 2022 hit. The studio head behind 2021 Game of the Year winner It Takes Two also unveiled the two-player adventure Split Fiction, out next March.
Breaking Bad's Aaron Paul and renowned voice actor Laura Bailey showed off the next game they performed in: a tongue-in-cheek superhero story named Dispatch. And just when the show seemed fresh out of revelations, The Last of Us developer Naughty Dog dropped a cinematic trailer for an entirely new franchise, Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet.
Host Geoff Keighley also acknowledged mass layoffs in the industry — something critics lambasted him for ignoring in 2023's ceremony. He even announced a new "Game changer” Award, which went to Amir Satvat, an employee of gaming tycoon Tencent who also runs a pro-bono support site for developers looking for work.
But it wouldn't be The Game Awards without the Muppets. Garrulous grumps Statler and Waldorf co-opted frequent criticisms of the awards in a series of running gags. After one rapid-fire battery of announcements, they jabbed that "it was like the game commercials with award interruptions!". But as the broadcast stretched toward its fourth hour, they also expressed the exhaustion many in the audience seemed to be feeling, "my Final Fantasy is for this show to be over."
Check out the rest of the article to read more about the full winners.
Pioneer Masters also released this week. I got the opportunity to play the MTG Arena set early and wrote up this review:
Hours deep into the streamer event Wizards invited me to, I couldn’t help but feel like Pioneer Masters was invented precisely for me.
While Magic: The Gathering often repackages past hits, none have captured a more personally formative period. I returned to the game between 2013’s Dragon’s Maze and Theros, entering an era when Master of Waves could surf to victory on Nightveil Specters and Frostburn Weirds, and when my budget heroic deck aced a Game Day tournament — punching way above its weight-class.
The designers of Pioneer Masters clearly remember those days fondly, but they’ve got more recent ideas too. They fortified draft staples like Wingsteed Rider with Rimrock Knight and Ardenvale Tactician synergies. They combined Converge cards with enablers like Courier’s Briefcase. They even included Opal Lake Gatekeepers and Guild Summit for greedy multicolor decks and those foolhardy enough to build around Maze’s End.
This revisionism also ratcheted up the power level, of course. Dreadbore, once rare, is now a common (though still premium) removal spell. Numerous rares are now uncommon — one of them, Anax and Cymede, supercharged a draft deck of mine that claimed the maximum seven wins. I suspect that similar Red-White aggro decks (and the White-Green Hexproof/Auras archetype) will dominate the draft format, but I’ve snatched surprise victories with cheeky Chromanticore and Ashen Rider plays too.
Overall, Pioneer Masters succeeds at bringing MTG Arena closer to the paper format it draws its name from, finishing a job left incomplete by digital re-releases like Shadows Over Innistrad Remastered. Its draft format may not be unique enough to endure, but it still let me revel in an era that launched my current Magic obsession.
Read the full article to also imbibe my opinions on Foundations, Magic’s latest back-to-basics set intended for competitive and casual players alike.
Other Here & Now Mastromarino Productions
Syrian human rights leader says thousands taken prisoner by Assad regime are likely dead
China retaliates for U.S. cracking down on high-tech chip exports
Singer-songwriter Shawn Colvin looks back on her Grammy-winning career — had a blast recording and producing this with host Scott Tong. Colvin was kind enough to strum songs he requested, and even retuned her guitar as needed.
Finally, this is neither a Mastromarino nor Here & Now production, but I have to hat-tip All Things Considered’s Vinny Acovino on this piece: Are video game companies doing enough for players with disabilities? Expert weighs in