The poll is now live; participants are encouraged to discuss their selections. I posted notice in the threads of all nominated games to hopefully increase voting participation. Fingers crossed.
That's a great idea. I ran across a TA GoTW poll from 2 years ago and there were 94 votes! It blew me away, since it seems there are not even 30 votes lately. I didn't recognize a lot of the voting members either. I'm too new school. Does that make me a Jr Sr? Ha!
Never played the Mikey games, but after trying Boots I decided to pick up Shorts and Hooks. These are fun! Playin Shorts now and just have level 5 and 6 left to three star.
Bought Mikey Boots and played the heck out of it for a couple days and then at some point of topping off high scores I sort of sat back and said to myself, "I'm not having fun, why am I playing this again?". So I stopped. Maybe I wasn't as much in the mood for the game or maybe it was the flappiness of it that made it feel less special than the other entries that I loved so much... either way it got me motivated to check out other games and my vote is one that surprises me most of all (as I would have thought Mikey would have easily topped everything)... ANGRY BIRDS STELLA No doubt people will throw the finger at anything angry birds because the company did well and made boatloads of money, and typically I'm not one to get into freemium games very often, but this game was solid fun from beginning to end. The freemium aspect didn't ruin the game at all for me as they give out quite a lot of content at a time and I don't mind taking a break between sets of levels. All the mechanical puzzles in Chapter 2 were quite refreshing, including a few levels where you could fire in any direction. I'm sure my vote won't matter much in the grand scheme of things. It's unlikely the game will get any serious recognition here. But dang it was good fun and I look forward to the other half of the game getting released as I've 3 starred everything offered up so far. Heck it makes me want to go back and play one of the other games in the series (of which I own them all).
My vote went to Battle Riders, it's a great battle racing game and a lot of fun, not to mention it's an amazing game considering it was made by one man.
I guess everyone will hate what I'm going to say and no doubt no one will agree but here goes.. I think free games should be banned from entering the game of the week *or* have their own Gotw section. No.. I'm not just saying that because all the free games are crap (although most are) I'm saying it because they have an unfair advantage. Why? Because the free game(s) are obviously going to be downloaded and played far FAR more than a paid game, thus skewing the vote results? ....Oookay, I'll now go hide under my tin hat.
I vote for separate sections, one for Free GOTW, and another for Premium GOTW. Putting them together actually leads me to ignore most of the free offerings, and focus more on the premium releases of the week. Separate sections (votes) make sense to me. Though if that doesn't happen (it won't), I wouldn't want to ban them altogether from the GOTW list. There are usually a couple interesting/well done free games released every week, lumped together with the usual weekly freemium money pits. And the GOTW section does help identify the quality from the crap. But based on past GOTW votes, I wouldn't say free games have an unfair advantage. The TA crowd will give free games a chance, and will recognize a good free-to-play game, but always prefer a good premium game, and will usually vote that way too.
With at times minimal votes (one game of the week won the other week with just 5 votes) i think its not worth it at all splitting it up. Be good to get more people voting as it hardly takes long. I dont get the love for Mikey Boots i must admit ! Then again people seemed to like that tiny copters thing so perhaps its just me ! My vote went to Valiant Hearts, an epic game, shame i could only vote once as i'm a huge fan of Battle Riders which is an excellent indie game
Good point, it is useless to split the vote when the amount of voters is so small. I'd like to see TA post the GOTW poll once a week, followed by a post with the results. Some attention on the main page would definitely help improve the small turnout.
Mene makes a good point but psj3809 is right, if there were a lot more people taking part in the process then I would think we would need seperate threads.
It looks like this is going to be the sixth week in a row where a paid game has won the vote (I know Dodo Master went free while the poll was live, but it had enough votes to win before that) so I don't think there's really an issue at the moment. I really enjoyed Mikey Boots this week, but my vote went to Duke Dashington for being something a bit different. Looking forward to the update too. Should add a load of replay value.
My opinion is that freemium, paid, indie, etc are all just arbitrary labels secondary to the deciding factor of which game is the most fun. The good news is that participation is up this week. The August 14 round had only 14 total votes with the top "winner" claiming first place with only 4 votes: http://forums.toucharcade.com/showthread.php?t=239680. This week, one candidate alone has more votes than that entire poll. I'll keep posting in the threads of games successfully nominated because that seemed to help.
Agree that posting on the threads helps, I came straight from the link you posted to vote, my memory is utterly shit and I often forget to vote, lately I forget to nominate too, as the thread doesn't always show under new posts in the app. I think some way if having the poll on front page is a good idea too, not sure how it work. I think separate threads for paid, free games etc would be a headache. Quite often new premium games are free for the first few days or week so, I can imagine the bickering over what category that should be placed in. I personally don't pay any attention to if a game is paid or free when voting or nominating, sometimes I can't even remember which are which, I vote based purely on the game I've enjoyed the most that week, sometimes this isn't the "better" game but if it's given me enjoyment that week, it gets my vote. I understand I'm weird though lol.
45 votes is definitely a strong uptick. It's extra work, but I'm happy GoTW will continue to be announced in the nominated threads. Thanks undeadcow!
