AGS Awards 2025

Better late than never, I thought I should do a write-up of the AGS Awards 2025. There was one very clear winner from the awards overall - Grundislav Games, with 4 wins including the coveted Best Game. Francisco has certainly come a long way since making the first Ben Jordan game! (Which was way back in 2004! Yes of course I just went and checked, my memory's not that good...) I also had the pleasure of briefly meeting him at Adventure-X 2014... okay, now I'm feeling old.

Another big winner is Knoodn, with 2 wins for the very retro BARBARIAN vs ROBOT. I helped a little with testing and voice acting for this game, and Timo is also someone I have actually met in real life, so this was another win that I was very happy to see. Since my first real experience of helping create an adventure game - which led to my further adventures with designing and creating games, along with voice acting - were in his game UNGA needs MUMBA - I'll always owe a lot to this guy. 😃 It was great fun voicing one of the characters for B vs R, and the retro look couldn't really get more retro. Well, unless, just perhaps, it was the next game I'm going to mention...

My favourite win was, however, that of Anomaly Resolution by Let'sGetCooking. Is it weird that I desperately wanted this game to win the Best Non-Adventure Game category, even though the only other game nominated for that category was my own game (AGSnake: The Last Bite)? Well, even if it was weird, it was definitely the case - Anomaly Resolution is a great mash-up of retro gameplay styles presented in glorious CGA (just look at those colours - all 4 of them!!). I had a blast playing it, and was very pleased that it won - thoroughly deserved.

The other winners were Beyond Booleans, Postmodern Adventures, Jabbage, Dave Gilbert, WHAM, tampie85 and AGA. Very hearty congratulations to all!!

The full list of winning games is below:

Best Game of the Year

Rosewater

Best Freeware Game

BARBARIAN vs. ROBOT

Best Short Game

Snarl

Best Non-Adventure Game

Anomaly Resolution

Best Demo

The Dark Rites of Arkham - DEMO

Best Audio

Rosewater

Best Visuals

Rosewater

Best Writing

The Beekeeper's Picnic

Best Programming

Rosewater

Best Character

Old Skies (Fia Quinn)

Best Gameplay

BARBARIAN vs. ROBOT

Lifetime Achievement

WHAM - for his many years of let's play videos, his hilarious and engaging forum games, and always being willing to play devil's advocate on nearly any topic. After nearly 20 years here, he continues to be one of the more unique voices in the AGS community.

(Edit - can't believe I forgot to mention this - Tomi is the very first member of the AGS community that I ever met in real life, way back at Adventure-X 2012)

Best Innovation

tampie85 and AGA - for their tireless efforts designing, creating, launching, and maintaining the new AGS website and database

Now, just to get myself into the mode of finishing Captain Disaster and the Two Worlds of Riskara so that hopefully, it may win something in next year's edition of the AGS Awards...

New release! At odds of 3,720:1...

I've just released a new game - still Captain Disaster-themed (albeit the most tenuous of connections!) - a short-session, browser-based game (still made with AGS, obviously) where you have to blast your way through an on-rushing asteroid field.

Check it out on Itch. Since I actually designed it from the ground up to be played in a browser, I'm not planning on releasing a downloadable version.

Yes, yes, I should probably see if I can work out how to have it available to play directly on this site... but in the meantime...