Sort of a “news round-up” of the awards show last Saturday, with some interesting addendums about the GOTY winner.

WHO WON

Some of the biggies, or interesting to note, of the night -

Game of the Year

Best PC Game

Best Graphics

Best Indie Game

Best DLC

Most Anticipated

More on winners – http://www.spike.com/articles/s1c4s1/video-game-awards-legend-of-zelda-skyrim-take-top-honors-at-the-2011-vgas

BIG MOMENTS

Felicia Day Chops Fruit!

All you can find is about her jumping on a wall or eating cupcakes…

but at one point people were throwing fruit at her (pineapples and melons, even) and she was cutting them from the air with a sword.  That was pretty bizarre.

http://www.ugo.com/games/spike-vga-2011-highlights-felicia-day

Cool Trailers For Games We Knew Were Coming

Both Bioshock Infinite and Mass Effect 3 (both of whom had plenty of footage shown before) had some cool trailers…

but we also got see some new premiere trailers for games we’d heard of, like Spider-Man and Alan Wake…

World Premeire

But we also saw a big announcement from Sony and Naughty Dog – a brand new property, and one that I’m excited about.

Go check out all the results and many more videos of things that happened that night at – http://www.spike.com/events/video-game-awards-2011\

Skyrim an unmitigated success

Despite it being only single-player.  Despite it being a fantasy role-playing game.  Despite it having an unvoiced main character and no, repeat, no in-game cut scenes of movie-style cinematics…

Skyrim is a BIG seller.  And winner.  And it’s also awesome, but that’s opinion.

Keep in mind that is not 10 million units sold, but rather the number shipped to retailers. It’s impressive nonetheless, but we also know the actual sales are noteworthy in their own right — it was the second-best selling in the United States during November according to the NPD Group, and was only about 500,000 units away from surpassing lifetime sales of its predecessor, Oblivion, by the end of the month.

One thing the NPD numbers don’t take into account are digital sales, including those through Steam. Today’s announcement includes a quote from Valve business development director Jason Holtman who notes, “Skyrim is the fastest selling title in Steam’s history.” Given that Steam has been around for years now and has hosted more than its fair share of big PC game releases, that’s quite the achievement.

The 10 million units shipped accounts for about $650 million in retail sales. PC sales in North America have been so strong the game “outsold all other PC games by a factor of over three to one in the month of its release,” according to today’s press release.

Sales aren’t everything, though.  How do people like it?

Skyrim has received strong marks from critics — we gave it an A- in our review — and has the distinction of being the first western-made game to score a perfect 40 out of 40 in Famitsu. Despite that, as mentioned above, there are more than a few gamers who have been dealing with serious bugs, the most common of which is severe lag in the PlayStation 3 version of the game.

http://www.1up.com/news/skyrim-ships-ten-million-fastest-selling-game-steam

Let’s jaunt over to Metacritic (and save all the anti-Metacritic ranting to go in a box of IGNORE next to the anti-Wikipedia ranting)

http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/the-elder-scrolls-v-skyrim

http://www.metacritic.com/game/xbox-360/the-elder-scrolls-v-skyrim

http://www.metacritic.com/game/playstation-3/the-elder-scrolls-v-skyrim

Other than there being some big bug issues with the PS3 version, apparently, it’s pretty much universal acclaim.

Here’s another way to look at it.  I frequent the BioWare Social Network site.  Skyrim has the largest current off-topic thread going.  Larger than the Brony thread.  About all I can find that outsizes the Skyrim thread in the forums are the Romance threads (threads dedicated to characters like Tali or Miranda, for example.)  That isn’t trying to say that Skyrim is more discussed than BioWare games there – that’s ridiculous – but that is a VERY active thread about a game not by that company – and anything that rivals My Little Pony fandom is big, believe me. that was all tongue-in-cheek, seriously folks – though the Skyrim thread is big there.

Skyrim is far from my favorite game, or even favorite game this year.  But it IS an amazing game.  And it does go to show that reviews, fans, and sales will go to an RPG that isn’t voiced, cinematic or dependent on FP POV.