#1: What the eroge Japanese “polls” call quality eroge, and what I personally view as quality eroge don’t mix. Seriously. I have seen titles that outright suck in my opinion, score pretty high on ErogameScape… Then there are titles that I think absolutely kick ass, which score low on ErogameScape. However this applies to a lot of things: not just eroge. Many of us are aware of anime series that bombed in Japan, become major hits in the West (the Big O for example). We don’t always think alike.

#2: The more I studied how the eroge market works, the more I realized how “fanboy politics” are involved everywhere… which certainly does not get carried overseas. It’s a pretty heated topic that is not appropriate for this place… but just checkout Dies Irae for example. Then you have “loyalists” groups who support certain circles no matter what… which leads into TREMENDOUS bias here and there. The Ijitte Princess series keeps selling tons of titles, despite it being utterly unimaginative garbage (except for maybe Final Road. Now that can’t be right.

#3: Sometimes these experts have their heads stuck too far up the butt. Take action movies as a pointer: how many times have “professional movie critics” given a badass “guns and tits” movie 2 stars or less, when the “common man” rates it as a 5 star extravaganza? I don’t know what planet those idiots are on… but they aren’t watching the movie like me. Same goes for eroge. What they are looking for, might not be what I’m looking for… or what I think my “fellow blue collar eroge Westerner” is looking for.

I can tell ya right now: I certainly don’t agree with how some of those awards were given out. To begin with, I don’t think Harukani Aogi deserved such a LotR type showing. It’s a good game, but not that damn good. Then again if it had twincest… ;)

>>Terry Bogard
One would think so, but it seems MOSAIC.WAV won the day with their denpa anthem of a theme song.

>>blacklotus
The exclusion of Lilith wasn’t so big a deal, seeing as until this year there wasn’t an award category their games could’ve competed in (they produce exclusively “low price” games), but now that there is such a category they would be a serious contender if they were allowed to compete. Nitro+, of course, is one of the heavy hitters in the industry these days, and the lack of representation from them is a pretty major omission.

It’s just like the Oscars Awards excluding films from Sony and Dreamworks for judging. 8/

Personally I’d treat these awards with roughly the same deference I’d treat the Oscars – namely, as an interesting bit of trivia and an indication that if you played any of these you wouldn’t be bored out of your skull, but a look at other metrics (EGS scores, Tech Gian polls) indicates that they don’t tell anything close to the whole story.