Less than 10 minutes into the Spike Video Game Awards show and GamePro's feed overloaded with hate-Tweets. Why's it so vogue to bash this particular awards show?
The easy answer is: "The show sucks." GamePro Twitter followers had different reasons for the suck -- the jokes fell flat, the musical numbers were out of place, Denise Richards isn't as hot as she used to be, etc. But the real reason everyone hates this show is that it's a show. It's a two-hour block of television designed to entertain audiences and display commercials. Even if Spike hired Pulitzer-winning writers to pen the script and brought Johnny Carson back from the dead to host, most of you would probably still hate it. Because all the things that make the VGAs a show put another wall between you and what you really care about: the games.
Remember how excited you were for Uncharted 3? How your heart beat a little faster when Batman: Arkham City's teaser trailer hit the internet a few days ago? Seeing new games gives us a thrill that we can't get anywhere else because we know that soon(ish), we'll get to play them. We'll be a part of that experience instead of just watching a 30 second clip for it on a TV screen. Even if Neil Patrick Harris is a cool guy, no TV awards show host can inspire the kind of excitement this single line can: "The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim -- 11/11/11."
That's not to say we should throw in the towel and never have another televised video game awards show. If video games are on equal footing with movies and music, we deserve equal media attention, right? But to make a video game awards show work, you've got to get the games in front of the audience with as little patter as possible. It'd also help if they held the new game announcements 'til the end of the show, much like the Academy Awards shower you with never-before-seen trailers for upcoming films right before the Oscar credit roll. And finding celebrities that actually play games to come announce them is probably also a step in the right direction.
What we want is to see the VGAs land on another network. It's not that Spike TV sucks, it's just that it's a limited audience and by now, most of the world knows the average gamer isn't a socially inept 19-year-old male. We owe it to games and we owe it to ourselves to see the VGAs on MTV or VH1 -- where more people can enjoy them and where a bigger budget might pay for better writers.
By the way, the are the newly-announced games we didn't already know about from pre-VGA buzz:
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (2011)
Mass Effect 3 (2011)
Prototype 2 (2012)
Insane (2013)
SSX: Deadly Descent
And what or who won that we know of, because we didn't see some of the categories televised:
Game of the Year -- Red Dead Redemption
Studio of the Year -- BioWare
Best Shooter -- Call of Duty: Black Ops
Best Action Adventure Game -- Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood
Best RPG -- Mass Effect 2
Best Driving Game -- Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit
Best Music Game -- Rock Band 3
Best Soundtrack -- DJ Hero 2
Best Independent Game -- Limbo
Most Anticipated Game -- Portal 2
Best Adapted Video Game -- Scott Pilgrim vs. The World: The Game
Best Performance by a Human Male -- Neil Patrick Harris as Peter Parker in Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions
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Source: Daily News from GamePro.com
Sunday, December 12, 2010