 I'm biased, right? I mean, I think all of us can admit to being biased. I think it's impossible to have an opinion and not have bias involved. Your bias, my bias, everyone's bias, is going to be based on our personal preferences that is based upon our prior experiences and what we like and dislike. And for me, obviously, I have a bias towards Nintendo. It's no secret. Yes, I play Xbox. You can see the corner of the Xbox Series S over here. But obviously, I play Switch. That's my preferred platform. It's what I game on them. Probably the most Xbox is probably second than PC. Don't have a PlayStation in-house right now. That's going to change. Hopefully, in the next year, we'll get a PlayStation 5 in-house. And then, you know, I'll be playing some games on there that I want to play. Like, I'm really looking forward to forespoken coming up. But I look at these awards and I understand that I have a bias. But I think my bias has a little bit of justification in terms of what games are even nominated. I don't know who's going to win most of the categories. I think Elden Ring or God of War Ragnarok is probably the game of the year. But what I don't understand, like, let's just start with Game of the Year. Let's start with Game of the Year, okay? Let's just go there. Because a Nintendo game is up for Game of the Year, so where's the bias, Nate? Well, let me show you something. Because this isn't just Nintendo. I have a theory and I feel like the Game of the Year award encapsulates my theory. And my theory is essentially maybe it's not so much anti-Nintendo bias as it is PlayStation bias. Here's our Game of the Year finalist, right? So we got a Plague Tale Requiem, Elden Ring, God of War Ragnarok, Horizon Food and West, Stray, and Xenobite Chronicles. So here's our Nintendo game. Xenobite Chronicles 3 is the highest reviewed Nintendo game of the year. So it is fitting that Xenobite Chronicles 3 got in. You might go, well, Bayonetta, Bayonetta 3 actually fell back a couple points. So Xenobite Chronicles 3 is to date the highest reviewed Nintendo Switch exclusive game of the year. And as such, it is deserving to be on this list. It's actually higher rated than Horizon Forbidden West. Not sure if you guys knew that. It's actually a higher rated game. But what's interesting are two other games that are included on this list that don't seem to have a reason to be on this list other than their on PlayStation. One of them is Stray. Stray has an 83 on Metacritic. Okay. Has an 83 on Metacritic. 99 critic reviews and has an 83 on Metacritic. It's considered an indie game. And a lot of people will tell you that this is being included because they want to include one indie game a year. They want to include one indie game a year. The problem is this is not the best indie game that came out this year. That belongs to Tunic. Problem is Tunic was originally an Xbox game. It got ported to other platforms later, but it started out on Xbox. Stray is PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5. Tunic's a higher rated game. By the exact same media, by the way, these are just media votes. The entirety of the nominees are based on the media. I can show you the list. It's right here. Here you go. Let's start at the top. See all these media outlets? These are the people that decide the nominees. All these media outlets. These are the same media outlets that do the reviews. Tunic's a higher rated game, but it started on Xbox. But Stray is the one up for game of the year. So if you have to include an indie game, let's say they have a rule. One indie game needs to be included. This isn't even the best indie game this year. In fact, we can argue Neon White. Neon White's one of the highest reviewed games of the year. Considered a must play on Metacritic. Neon White is an independent game. It is also significantly higher rated than Stray. Its most popular version is on Switch. I'm talking popular version in terms of number of reviews. So a game that isn't even objectively the best indie game of the year is up for game of the year over an original Xbox game that got ported to other platforms. And then Neon White, a multi-platform game, both of which are independent games, both of which are higher rated than Stray. But we're not done. We're not done. Because we also have a Plague Tale Requiem. Fine game. Fun game. It's a multi-platform game. But again, the most popular reviewed version is on PlayStation 5, with 66 critic reviews. This is by far and away the most reviews on any version of a Plague Tale Requiem. And it has an 82. So put this in perspective. One, two, three PlayStation essentially only games are most popular on PlayStation. A Plague Tale Requiem, most of the reviews were on PlayStation 5. So most of these outlets voting reviewed the PlayStation 5 version. So we have four out of these six nominees are essentially there because of PlayStation reviews. But here's the problem. Remember, 83. 82. Hmm. Hmm. Well, let's look at another game that came out this year that's multi-platform, really popular, highly reviewed. How about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle Shredders Revenge? The most highly rated version is on Switch. But either way, the review ratings average from 85 to 87 for Shredders Revenge higher than two of the games up for Game of the Year. But we're not done. Bandanna 3. I'm sorry, is 109 critic reviews not enough? If you want to say there's not enough reviews on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, there's enough reviews of Bandanna 3. There's more reviews of this than there's of Stray. It's not up for Game of the Year. In fact, Bandanna 3 only gets nominated once. Stray, a game that's in 83, has six awards it's nominated for. Three more than two-nick, the better game. We're not done. Marnable Strabbit Sparks of Hope 86. Higher rated than two of the Game of the Year nominees. 113 critic reviews. It's nominated for two awards. Strategy, because it is a strategy game, and then Best Family Game. And that's it. It's higher rated than Stray by three points. But Stray has three times the award nominations. Because he plays a cat on PlayStation. We're not done. Triangle Strategy. Also higher rated. Also Switch Exclusive. We're not done. Kirby and the Forgotten Land. One nomination this year. One for the highest rated, best-selling Kirby game in existence with 132 critic reviews. It is objectively better than two of the Game of the Year nominees. Objectively better. With the most reviews. The biggest chance to rip down that review rating by having so many damn reviews. And yet, it's nominated for a single award. Best Family Game. AKA Best Nintendo Game. It's the Nintendo Game category. Oh, it can't possibly be nominated for Best Musical Score. No, that can't happen. It can't possibly be nominated for Best Art Direction. No, no, no, no. You're not a realistic art style like the PlayStation. All the realistic games got Best Art Direction nominations. How dare we nominate Kirby? Can't do that. I can see why Xenoblade Chronicles 3 can't be in there. It goes for a somewhat realistic art style. It doesn't look as good as the other games, but Kirby? Kirby in the Forgotten Land is the maestro of art direction, looking absolutely utterly current generation on really old technology because of the art direction. But no recognition. No recognition for the music. No recognition for the gameplay. Here we have the most nominated games. Gamble Ragnarok, Elden Ring, no problem. They're the two highest-reviewed games of the year. They're going to have the most nominations. Fine. We all know it's a two-person race for Game of the Year anyways. Don't have a problem with it. Do have a problem with Horizon Forbidden West, an 88 overall game compared to a 96 overall game in Elden Ring has the same number of nominations as Elden Ring. Elden Ring, a 96 overall game. 96. And a game that's an 88 that is like worse reviewed compared to Xenoblade Chronicles 3 has the same number of nominations. Gets even better. Stray has six. It's an 83. It has six nominations. One less than a 96 overall game. A game that's 13 points rated higher. And it's got six nominations. A Planktail Requiem. An 82. An 82 overall game has five nominations. An 82. 86 overall. Mario plus Drive of the Sparks of Hope. No, no, no. You get two. Kirby. 130 plus reviews. Best-selling Kirby game of all time. Highest rated Kirby game of all time. Tunic. A better game than Stray has half the nominations. Sifu. A good old Sifu is an 81. Its best reviewed version is again the PlayStation 5 version. And an 81. Sifu. And an 81 overall has two more nominations than Kirby. One more nomination than Sparks of Hope. And the same number of nominations as an 89 overall game in Xenoblade Chronicles 3. I don't want to hear the excuses. I don't want to hear the reasoning. It is without a doubt. Not just looking at gaming a year. Just looking at even the overall nomination list. Nintendo is snubbed. If you make a highly rated, highly reviewed Nintendo game, you are going to be beat out by an 81 overall PlayStation game. It's just the way it is. It doesn't matter that the same critics making these nomination lists also reviewed your game as the better game. If you're not a PlayStation game, you're not going to get on the list over them unless you are one of the highest reviewed games of the year. Or your Zelda or Mario. Zelda or Mario seem to always be the exception. Then again, we have Mario plus Rabbids, but I guess because the Rabbids are in, that game doesn't count as an exception to anything. Splatoon 3 has a single nomination. It's higher reviewed than two of the game of the years. I don't even think Splatoon 3 should be up for a bunch of awards. The game awards, to me, from my viewpoint looking in, is heavily slanted to PlayStation. Heavily slanted to PlayStation. And that's because of who's voting. It's because of who's voting. Oh no, there's no PlayStation only blogs on this voting list, right? So it wants to come across as unbiased. It's not including any Nintendo only outlets, Xbox only outlets, or PlayStation only outlets. It wants to appear unbiased. Of course, it includes Entertainment Weekly, who knows next to nothing about video games. So what are they going to vote for? The hot trendy games in the moment, God of War, Ragnarok, Elden Ring, Stray. Just going down LA Times, what are they doing in here? What do they know about video games? You could say that about almost a lot of these, you could say that about. But you kind of get my point. These are all the people deciding what's up for the awards. All these outlets are what decide what is up for all these awards. All of these outlets have reviews counted on Metacritic towards all these games. And they decided that other games are significantly better than the games that they are putting up. Because from at least the appearance of what's nominated, a vast majority of these outlets are pro Sony. That's just based on what was nominated. A vast majority of the outlets pro Sony. And I'm not really sure to think about that. I'm not. I got my biases. I'm not saying like Kirby should be up for game of the year. I don't know. It doesn't have a chance to win anyways, right? We all know it's a two-horse race. We all know that it's between two games. But why does a third game, a Sony exclusive, have just as many nominations as a game that's a 96 overall? That's a multi-platform game. Meanwhile, a game that's actually higher reviewed than that Sony exclusive, the Switch exclusive Xenome Chronicles 3 has three nominations. It's a higher reviewed game by these same outlets. Ergo, they feel it's a better game than Horizon Forbidden West. But it's nominated not even half as much as Horizon Forbidden West, which is nominated as much as a 96 overall game. Kind of a Raiden Rock, by the way, is a 94. If you just go off of that, it should probably be Elden Ring that wins game of the year. But there's going to be a recency bias involved. Gotta War Raiden Rock, because of recency bias, and it's a PlayStation game go figure, has three extra nominations. And because it's nominated for the most awards, you can't dismiss it. It could end up running away with it, because it has the most nominations. But it'll depend, because Elden Ring and Gotta War Raiden Rock are nominated in many of these same categories. And if Elden Ring wins a majority of the categories that both games are in, then Elden Ring would obviously be the shoe in for game of the year. But we've known this since Elden Ring came out, right? It got a 96. When you have a game that gets a 96 on Metacritic, and it's a major AAA game, it's probably shoe in for game of the year. It's going to be very hard to top it. If Breath of the Wild 2, I'm sorry, Tears of the Kingdom comes out as a 96-97 overall game next year, it's going to set the bar. It's going to be the game that everyone else is going to be trying to beat. And as I said, unless you're Zelda or Mario, Zelda or Mario seem to be the exceptions, because Mario Odyssey was nominated for a number of awards, so was Breath of the Wild. So Zelda and Mario seem to be the exception to the anti-Nintendo, because God forbid we give Kirby some credit. No, it's just a family game. We're only going to mention Kirby as a family game, never mind it's one of the highest-reviewed games of the year. Oh, we'll go ahead and throw Sparks of Hope in the strategy category, never mind that it's higher rated than two of your Game of the Year nominations. Oh, Tunic, great game! We got it's nominated for three awards. It's higher rated than your indie game that's in your Game of the Year award. Stray that somehow got six. A cat simulator. Oh, by the way, nothing against Stray. It's a good game. Really short, but it's a good game. And people love cats, so I get it. That's why it has 99 reviews. But also, not the best indie game. Neon White is, can't give Neon White credit. By the way, Neon White totally unique art style. Oh, it can't be up for best art direction, because it's not realistic. If you're not running a realistic art or style, you can't have the best art direction. At least that's what the awards are saying this year, as every game up for best art direction goes with the hyper realistic art style. So I just, it's a little frustrating and I know that a lot of people don't take the Game of the Year awards that seriously. So I get that this isn't going to be something that matters to a lot of people because most people just look at the Game of the Year awards. It's either just this really fun industry celebration and it doesn't really mean anything. Other people think the Game Awards are a joke. I'm someone who really enjoys the Game Awards and I just kind of wish that the award nominations, the winners or whatever, but the nominees would be consistent with the way those same media outlets have been reviewing the games all year. Because the media outlets are deciding what's on these lists. And the media outlets are deciding what these games are rated. And when they're rating all these other games significantly higher, but awarding one platform's games more than the others, even though that platform's game is rated significantly lower, it just shows a bias. It shows a media bias towards PlayStation.