2011 Video Game Awards Thoughts Part 3: The Nonsense

Welcome to the third and final part of my thoughts on the 2011 Spike Video Game Awards.  Usually I put up a music track for each Wednesday to help you get over the hump, but not this week considering how big this rant on the VGAs has become.  For those looking for a piece of music, come back tomorrow and I will have the Hump Day Music post then, which means I have pushed back On the Download to Friday.  Enough of my little tangent.  For the last two days, I have looked at the trailers and the awards at the VGAs.  Today for my final rant, I will be talking about all the crap that took place on this show that I like to call the nonsense.  So let's begin.

The Nonsense
Considering less than 10 minutes was spent on the awards, Spike spent the rest of this two hour show on trailers and all the other stupid crap.  Honestly a good 30 to 45 minutes could have been cut from this show.  Spike spent too much time on stupid skits that had no purpose on this show.  Yes, other award shows have skits to keep the audience in the crowd and at home entertained, but that is what they usually are entertaining.  All the skits from Felicia Day's charity contests to the tea-bagging segment to the Black Baron crap did not need to be on this show.  They sucked up all the time from what should have been the focal point from the start and I will emphasize this Spike, the AWARDS.  They even spent good five to ten minute chucks looking at each Game of the Year and showing off remixed E3 trailers for those games.  Something that should have been relegated to the pre-show as the purpose of the pre-show is to hype the actual show.  Funny how generic rock back number 171, also known as the Black Keys, was the musical performance for the night while Deadmau5 was relegated to nothing more then provide music just before and after commercials (what a crappy gig).  Considering that the VGAs are a video game award show shouldn't the obvious choice have been to actually have video game music be it performed by Deadmau5 or somebody else possibly Video Games Live as the main musical performance than random rock music that has nothing to do with video games.  Guess that one went over the heads of Geoff Keighley and the Spike execs like most things video game related do.

Overall, the 2011 Spike Video Game Awards were less of an award show and more of a two hour commercial.  Zachary Levi made due with what he was given and was much better than Neil Patrick Harris (it hurts even saying it).  All the celebrities up presenting trailers or awards felt they were promoting a show on Spike such as Hulk Hogan clearly wearing an Impact Wrestling shirt or some other product like a movie or video game.  If Spike wants to get some credibility, first thing you need to get rid are the celebrities and have actual game designers or other game personalities such as Hideo Kojima, Shigeru Miyamoto, Will Wright, Warren Spector or Tommy Tallarico present the awards and introduce the trailers.  Make this show for the gamers by the gamers instead of two hour crapfest thought up in the minds of people who certainly do not know anything about video games and the gaming community.  Spike show some damn respect to this industry people pour their lives and money into instead of making a mockery of it.  The 2011 VGAs were better than last year, but that is like comparing horse manure to human feces.  It's still shit.

2011 Video Game Awards Thoughts Part 2: The Awards

Welcome back to my thoughts on the 2011 Spike Video Game Awards.  Yesterday, I took a look at the trailers from the awards given at the show.  So instead of wasting your time with a drawn out intro, let us get on with the second part of the rant so big it takes three parts.

The Awards
Awards?!  What awards?!  For an award show, the VGAs spent less than ten minutes on actual awards.  What a slap in the face to us gamers and to all the developers, voice actors and others involved in these huge multi-men and women projects.  Take it from me, making games are not easy.  For Spike, Geoff Keighley and the other who wrote and produced this show to not make these awards the focal point of the show really shows how little these people care about the video game industry.  Spike does this supposed award show to make them look hip and cool, but it makes them look as cheap and pathetic as they actually are.  There are much better video game award shows out there.  Spike should watch the Canadian Video Game Awards to see how to do a proper award show.  Oh and I have not even gotten to few awards that they gave out on the show.  Those awards were Action Adventure Game of the Year, Gaming Hall of Fame Award, Shooter of the Year, Gamer God Award, Character of the Year and Game of the Year.  The others were either given out on the non-televised pre-show or in a little 2 minute segment that ran down all the award winners.  Yes, most of the awards were given off-camera.  Yet another slap in the face to the video game industry and the gaming community.  Thanks Spike.  The award winners were reasonable sort of.  Arkham City won Action Adventure Game of the Year, Zelda was inducted into Spike's Video Game Hall of Fame, Modern Warfare 3 won Shooter of the Year (an act that simply encourages lazy game development in the industry), Blizzard won the Gamer God Award (wait, what did they release this year? Nothing!), Joker won Character of the Year and to nobodies surprise Skyrim won Game of the Year (rolls eyes).

I can bitch and complain about who should have won these awards all I want in the end these are the opinions of others and not in my control.  But it makes me wonder who was on the panel that decided Modern Warfare 3, which is literally a copy and paste of Modern Warfare 2 with a new coat of paint (don't believe me, look at the code), should win Shooter of the Year.  Out of all of my complaints, the one that is most prevalent is the lack of time Spike gave to the awards themselves.  It does not help the credibility of your award show, let me say it again AWARD SHOW, when you focus your time on stupid random crap, which I will get to tomorrow, rather than honouring those who put their blood, sweat and tears into the games we play each and every day.  What the VGAs proved to me that their blue monkey statues mean nothing in the video game industry and to gamers alike.

2011 Video Game Awards Thoughts Part 1: The Trailers

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.

Preview of the 2011 Spike Video Game Awards

There are awards shows for absolutely everything nowadays from films to wrestling.  The fact that these shows are usually two hours of boring television with only a handful of decent to good moments does not make them that appealing.  Let us look to Spike TV.  The only television network that tries so very hard to appeal the adult male demographic, but fails at every chance they take.  Why would anybody want to watch a television network that has about 1001 generic car shows, a wrestling show that has seen better days and more rip-offs than you can count?

In a desperate attempt to capture the male demographic back in 2003, Spike TV brought us the Video Game Awards.  An award show that year after year has done much more to damage the reputation of the video game industry than help it.  Honestly my brother and I could not get through the first hour of last years' VGAs because it was so downright horrible and Neil Patrick Harris was the host.  Spike TV hopes to change things around this year with a huge amount of exclusive premieres and trailers and with host Zachary Levi.  As a huge fan of the show Chuck, where Levi plays the main character, I really want to see if Zach Levi can pull off what the great Neil Patrick Harris could not, an enjoyable show.  There are a lot of premieres set for the VGAs this year.  A new game from Bioware, a new game from Epic and the Sony project that will supposedly blow us away will be revealed and new trailers for Transformers: Fall of Cybertron, Mass Effect 3, Metal Gear Rising, the Amazing Spider-Man, Rainbow 6: Patriots and more will be shown.  There will also be a special musical performance from deadmau5.  Now let us talk about the awards.  Apart from the actual awards probably looking nothing even related to video games, Geoff Keighley and others on the VGA panel did a good job picking the nominees this year.  There have been quite a few times where I questioned why the hell they nominated a certain thing such as the voice acting from the Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen game for an award.  As much as I would love the awards not to all fall into the big blockbusters (they deserve some, but not all), the realist side of me says that there will be a whole lot of love for Skyrim.  Personally, I would love Skyward Sword take home Game of the Year, but that will not happen sadly.  To prove my point, just watch the episode of the Bound Round which was suppose to highlight Skyward Sword as a Game of the Year nominee.  In short, it did not.

It will be interesting to see if Spike TV can finally pull off an award that does not make you want to immediately change the channel.  We will just have to tune in tomorrow night at 8 on Spike to see for ourselves.  Also before I leave you tonight, due to all the announcements at the VGAs I will be posting this week's Bit by Bit on Sunday instead of Saturday.  So have a good night and I hope you enjoy.