If you have not already listened to the podcast of this category, this is the final results, so this will spoil the course of the discussion on that podcast! Be warned!
We’re not particularly positive on “gamers” or “the gaming community” around here. Oh, we’re cool with folks who play games. WE play games. But wouldn’t you know it, people for whom playing games is their IDENTITY are so often toxic, vicious little bastards. The gaming community is of course more than just gamers, it’s game developers, too. And the devs I personally are like, almost all chill and cool! But they rarely get to be the voice of their games. The voice is the studio’s PR and marketing, or more bluntly, the design choices they’re forced to make by management. Taken as a whole, the gaming community just sucks a whole lot!
So let’s not take it as a whole. Looking at smaller sub-communities, or small teams of fans working together, or individual enthusiasts, we see some amazing stuff. That’s why we’re doing Community Effort this year- 2023 was a hell of a year for toxic fandom, so let’s appreciate the folks who worked to make their communities even better.
The Winner
Palette Swap
Marvel vs Capcom stands alone amongst fighting games. There have been attempts to imitate it, and they’re not without merit- Skullgirls and Dragon Ball FighterZ to name a few- but no one else can quite match Marvel’s pace and spectacle. But, of course, these days we’d have to ask Disney to get one of those made. After the mess of Marvel vs Capcom Infinite, I think Capcom agrees that that’s not worth it.
Unfortunately, the way MvC3 was coded makes substantial mods a… challenge, is the gentle way to put it. A nightmare is the other way one might. It took ages to figure out how to sideload new character data into the game via character color palettes (hence the name), a janky solution akin to those code injections of Super Mario World you see at Games Done Quick. Fighters could only use existing animations as well, so they were all improvised remixes of animations already present. It wasn’t pretty, it was DEFINITELY buggy, and it broke some other parts of the game, but… it was functional. And the work began to build out the roster.
Then someone figured out how to add slots to the base roster, so that it’s not some messy sideload. Then someone figured out how to load in custom animations. And before long we had a game that was not unrecognizable, somehow- the spirit of that original game resides in modded Marvel still, and all those characters are present in Palette Swap. It’s like if we got two more full retail editions of Marvel 3, and now we’re on Omega Marvel vs Capcom 3 or something. And, as the trailer for the upcoming Community Edition mod collection (that rounds up all of the major mods and adds even more on top) puts it, “the hits keep on coming.”
2023 was incredible for Marvel 3. I bet 2024 will be even better.
The Runners-Up
Fan Wikis Telling Fandom to Shove It
Fandom has, since its inception, been a for-profit company. The idea was always to make money off of these fan-created, fan-run wikis that the company provides servers for and then skims the revenue off of. But boy, the history of that company is the history of “damn, we found an even more evil person to buy us” over and over. Hindsight is 20/20, but Fandom wikis becoming miserable ad-drowned hellholes was inevitable. The only question was, would they be so entrenched that we’d all have no choice but to deal with it?
The crazy thing is, I would have said “yes.” If you asked me not that long ago, I’d have said that by and large, resistance was futile. That they’d hit an inescapable critical mass, and we were stuck. But the communities proved me wrong. They have been fighting back, and reclaiming these depositaries of knowledge. The work isn’t done, heaven knows. But pulling it back from the brink- perhaps past the brink- is truly remarkable, and worth celebrating.
City of Heroes Homecoming
How many MMOs have died? Not just random ones, obscure ones… beloved ones. Star Wars Galaxies. Dark Age of Camelot. The Matrix Online. Entire worlds once teeming with players, now relegated to dust. And there are fan efforts to bring them back, but nearly all of them are one scary letter from a lawyer away from disappearing. It’s a really shitty state of affairs, and a tragedy for game preservation.
When I added City of Heroes Homecoming to the list, it was simply to say, “Hey I played a bunch of fan MMO revivals in 2023, they were all cool, and this was the best one!” Also that the game freakin’ holds up and is still very fun. It was only once we started recording that I learned that Homecoming had just been made official. It wasn’t just a fan server- NCSoft had granted them an official license to run. The threat was gone. Not only that, now the fandom had a clear indication of a safe place to congregate, and the Homecoming operators had official permission to develop original content for the game!
City of Heroes Homecoming is kind of miraculous. It’s the kind of miracle we could use more of. Hint hint, publishers of The Matrix Online. Wait, who- WARNER BROTHERS. SHIT.
I hope you’ve enjoyed the first category of this year’s Gimmick Awards! Come back Monday for Best Surprise, and then two more awards over the course of that week- not to mention the weeks to come.
Our art is a commission from @inkopolis on Twitter. 2023 version coming soon!