The Game Awards 2014 Impressions

No fancy intro.  No intricate back story about the failures of the Video Game Awards.  I am getting straight to the point because I cannot think any other way to say it.  Although the Game Awards were a great improvement over the VGAs, I still found them disappointing and boring.  I understand a lot of good people put a ton of time and effort into making this show a celebration of games, but the show as a whole did more to make me question the point of it outside of the game reveals.  I spent three hours of my life starring at a computer screen to see about an hour of watchable content and I personally find that unacceptable.

Before diving right into all the flaws with the Game Awards, I will admit there were some good to great moments in this show.  There were a good amount of reveals with Metal Gear Online, Adr1ft, Human Element and the new Legend of Zelda being the standouts in my opinion.  Speaking of the new Zelda, that gameplay footage, albeit being short in length, made me feel all giddy inside.  Just the sheer size of Hyrule made my jaw drop.  While I found them unneeded, most of the musical performances were done well especially the collaboration between Imagine Dragons and Koji Kondo.  Geoff Keighley's friend Greg from Scotland stole the show with his performance of classic game tunes from Mario, Sonic, Street Fighter and Tetris using lasers to produce the music.  After a performance that spectacular, Greg definitely deserves a job in the video game industry.  It is up to the developer and publishers now, give the guy a chance.

One of my main complaints with the VGAs was their complete lack of respect and effort put into the awards aspect of the awards show.  The Game Awards fixed some of that by putting together credible award categories, having most of the awards selected by of panel of industry veterans and highlighting more awards on the show than ever before.  While I do have some complaints about the handling of awards outside of the main stage (more on this in a bit), the Game Awards did a job leaps and bounds better than any of the VGAs.  Also the awards look much better than the stupid monkey statues they use to give out.

For everything good about the Game Awards, there were two or three things wrong with the show.  For a three hour show, it had no sense of pacing.  Some segments like Conan O'Brien's videos on the nominees for Game of the Year and Lindsay Stirling's performance of Dragon Age: Inquistion's theme song felt rushed, while others such as Keighley's asides with others in the crowd went on for far too long.  Speaking of Keighley's asides, these moments made two key problems with the show evident: the lack of rehearsals and poor representation of awards not shown on the main stage

It is understandable that a level of improvisation makes the show feel organic, but every conversation, speech and introduction came off as awkward and highly unprofessional.  The fact that you forget a member of the Hearthstone team was in the audience to accept their award for Mobile/Handheld Game of the Year, overheard a musical performance tuning their instruments on the main speakers or had a Sony representative call out the existence of a teleprompter is just unacceptable.  These unfortunate instances make the video game industry as a whole look like a laughing stock to casual viewers and people from other mediums.  These mistakes would have been ironed out with a few rehearsals before the show.

Building off of the lack of rehearsals, the awards given out off of the main stage were handled poorly.  Nobody is going to take these awards seriously if Keighley and company are just going to hand them out with little to no context.  Time may be a constraint, but have a pre-show or cut unnecessary segments in order to make these awards feel credible rather than awkwardly pulling people out of the audience to hand them their awards.  These parts just reinforced how unprofessional the show was.

Apart from the Game Awards itself, my brother and I found it next to impossible to view the show on our Xbox 360 and PS3.  We tried everything from looking on the dashboards to searching on the Youtube and IGN apps to no avail.  When we went to search for instructions on how to watch on our game consoles, all we found were press releases boasting the show was available on all platforms without any instructions on where exactly to watch it.  It is one thing to boast about the show's availability, but to not provide a means of helping people gain access to it added more frustration to this entire ordeal.

While the Game Awards is a disappointing and boring show, it is a small step in the right direction.  Sadly, this step has created a plethora of new problems that Keighley and company will have to overcome before the show can gain widespread credibility.  After this year's show, I believe efforts should be made on creating an awards show that competes with the DICE Awards and the BAFTA Game Awards rather than the Grammys and Oscars.  Despite the Game Awards having a few moments that are worth watching, I cannot recommend spending three hours viewing the Game Awards in its entirety.

On the Download: December 18-24

As Christmas draws ever-so closer, the sales on your favourite downloadable game service keep ramping up.  With sales on Steam, the App Store, Xbox Live and PlayStation Network Store, there is definitely a deal for every gamer out there.  You just have to look.  Even with all these sales, developers still have a few new games for us before we enter the New Year.  So let us dive right into the games released this week.

Developer WayForward, creator of Shantae and the Mighty Milky Way and Mighty Flip Champ games, made their name on the Nintendo DS creating quality games reminiscent of some classic games from the NES and SNES eras.  With the 3DS released this year, WayForward moved development from Nintendo's older handheld to its new portable beauty.  As the spiritual successor to Mighty Milky Way and Mighty Flip Champ, Mighty Switch Force shares the same charm, humour and excellent 2D aesthetic as those two games with a little more emphasis on the action than puzzles.  In Mighty Switch Force, you play as Officer Patricia Wagon.  Your goal is to recapture a group of escaped inmates known as the Hooligan Sisters in order to restore peace to Planet Land.  You will have to use Wagon's various pieces of equipment to interact with the environment and enemies in order to solve puzzles and complete your mission.  Originally expected for a release early next year, WayForward dropped Mighty Switch Force earlier than expected.  For 6 dollars, Mighty Switch Force would be a great Christmas present for any 3DS owner starving for exclusive downloadable games.

If you had to pick the greatest puzzle game of all-time, what would you pick?  What one puzzle game sticks into the mind of whoever plays it?  From the music to the gameplay, what puzzle game is engrained into the minds of gamers young or old, male or female?  If you guessed Tetris, you are correct.  From the brillant mind of Alexey Pajitnov, Tetris has become one of the most iconic games of all-time as it is on everything from the computer to your iPhone.  In the hearts of many gamers, there stands one definitive version of Tetris and that is Tetris for the original Game Boy.  So for many of you including myself who logged into the Nintendo eShop today, it was a pleasant surprise to see Nintendo release the title for the 3DS Virtual Console.  If you do not know anything about Tetris, please open another tab in your browser and google it and fall in love with a masterpiece because I am not going to explain this game to you.  Tetris is only 4 dollars on the Nintendo eShop, so it is a perfect game to download.  One exception being that if you already own Tetris.  Even if the Game Boy version is the definitive form of Tetris, it is essentially the same game you love on whatever device you own it for.

LostWinds, a game from Frontier Developments, was originally released for WiiWare back in 2008 has now made its way to iOS.  In LostWinds, you play as a young boy by the name of Toku.  You must wield the unique powers of Enril, a wind elemental, to maneuver the lustrous environments, stun and even dispatch enemies and solve puzzles on your way to release the world of Mistralis from the evil Balasar's curse.  LostWinds got a lot of critical praise back in 2008, but did not make much of a splash as gamers never really took to WiiWare as they did to XBLA and PSN games.  Now on the iDevices and at the appealing price of only 4 dollars, LostWinds should reach a much broader audience of core and casual gamers who own these devices.  If you have a few extra dollars after all these great sales, pick up an innovative game that deserves a lot more love than it got back in 2008.