The 2011 Spike Video Game Awards were so bad that to post a rant on them would be a pretty long read. So I have decided to split my rant into three separate parts, the trailers, the awards and the nonsense. I did touch on some of my thoughts yesterday in my weekly Bit by Bit post, but these next three days I would like to go into detail of what I thought of this atrocity in the video game industry.
The Trailers
Let us start with the reason any sane gamer tunes into the VGAs and that is for the "World Premieres" as Spike likes to call them. For the first time since Spike started having these big reveals take place at the VGAs, the trailers were just as disappointing as the show. Even though last years' VGAs were a complete train wreck of a show, Mass Effect 3, Uncharted 3 and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, some of the most anticipated games of the past year, were all announced. None of the reveals this year held even a candle to any of the three games I just mentioned. For a game that Geoff Keighley has been pimping out on Twitter as the PlayStation exclusive that will blow you away, The Last of Us trailer looked interesting, but did nothing to blow me away as Keighley claimed. I love Naughty Dog, but I need to see more than a concept trailer that looks exactly like I Am Legend complete with infected enemies and a New York City ravaged by plant-life. Next up was Alan Wake's American Nightmare, which looked and sounded pretty cool until Mr. Wake started talking. The moment Alan said, "I've seen the enemy and it's me, an evil caricature. He is called Mr. Scratch", I could not take the story of Alan Wake, the key selling point of the game, serious anymore. We continued on with an extremely short cinematic teaser for Rainbow 6: Patriots, which was cool, but had no place on the VGAs considering Game Informer already covered the game in their December issue and the trailer should have debuted along with their coverage of the game. We got another look at Mass Effect 3 as Sheppard along with a gigantic space worm battled a Reaper. Some cool footage again, but it felt like an extension of what BioWare showed off at E3 rather than a "World Primiere as it was touted to be. BioWare also revealed in a 30 second teaser showing barely anything about the game, Command & Conquer Generals 2. In short, I was not impressed. Going on with the rest, we saw Spider-Man face-off against Reaper in The Amazing Spider-Man game, Ironhide absolutely destroy Starscream, Blizzard show Diablo III and still no announce a release date, a remixed version of the E3 BioShock Infinite trailer, Epic reveal their high-resolution MineCraft rip-off and Metal Gear Rising steal this terrible and disappointing show.
As a whole, the trailers this year at 2011 Video Game Awards left a whole lot to be desired. They showed little super tiny glimpses at games that should be coming out within the next year or two. When a show like the VGAs relies to heavily on these reveals to keep their audience watching, they need to knock it out of the park with everyone. My main problem was that these trailers did not feel like the "World Premieres" as Geoff Keighley and Spike promoted to the heavens that they would be. They showed nothing new for the games like Rainbow 6 and Transformers that were already revealed in the pages of Game Informer and the other trailers were too short or in Alan Wake's case too stupid for there own good that they were not even close to satisfying. The VGAs failed miserably at the only thing that they ever did right and drastically hurt an already struggling show.
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