In what has now become a December tradition, Spike TV is airing their annual Video Game Awards show, and once again I am along for the ride. What started as a gamer’s curious transcript of how the medium is portrayed, especially on a “Guy’s Only” channel, has now turned into me describing the CGI-ness of trailers, people receiving pointless awards (if only to add any sort of notoriety to the back of game boxes), or to gnash my teeth and tolerate the stupid skits. Well, there is an improvement this year. No host. And no stupid host skits. So let’s see how the 2009 Spike TV Video Game Awards fared with these out of the equation.
The show starts with a giant present in the middle of the stage, with Mark Hamill’s Joker doing the voiceover welcoming us to the VGAs. Joker asks if we’re ready for the big surprise and the present comes apart to reveal two big goons in gas masks. The stage starts blowing smoke and the goons run around the audience, acting like they’re going to gas the crowd to death. About the funniest unintentional part happens here when the camera lingers too long on a stone-faced guy in the audience, looking around concerned like he’s waiting for the goons to come and steal his wallet.
Turns out this is just the set-up to show the World Premiere of the new Batman: Arkham Asylum trailer. Wow, that was quick. Of course, it’s the Batman franchise, and there are still plenty of villains and scenarios you can play out for at least a couple of sequels, so I can’t say I blame them for capitalizing while the first game is fresh in everyone’s mind and on all the Best of 2009 lists. Unfortunately, there isn’t much to talk about in the trailer. Apparently, Joker and Harley Quinn have gotten out of Arkham and are now operating out of a make-shift, dangerous fun house. Harley is shown wearing the same outfit from the first game, but now Joker looks more like the Heath Ledger version from The Dark Knight, with black circles around his eyes and acting in poor health.
The show is formally introduced and, as mentioned earlier, there is no host named. It is said that the show is airing in 180 countries and there are only six presenters named. Two musical acts are named, but obviously, if you’ve paid any attention to the hype of this show, it is all about the surprise World Premiere trailers. Some surprises are so big, they are just teased as “the next Star Wars game” or “the next Rock Band game.”
Speaking of surprises this year’s announcers are not named, except that they will be an older sounding British woman, and a slightly younger sounding British woman. The location of the event is not named, but it just looks like a pavilion tent with a monitor in the back and a big round stage to obscure most of the audience from the main stage view. There is also an awkward looking catwalk at the end of the stage for reasons unknown.
The first person out is Zachary Quinto, the guy who plays The Bad Guy on Heroes. But more importantly these days is that he was Spock in the new Star Trek movie. Because of that, Zachary announces he will be the voice of Atari’s new Star Trek online game. I heard two things to make me think this isn’t going to turn out well – Atari and online. Zachary is also here to present the award for Best Voice in a Video Game.
Winner: Jack Black as Eddie Riggs in Brutal Legend
Jack comes up with a crown and a cape reading “Game of the Year” and rubs his award in the other games’ faces by making poo jokes. After five minutes, a stagehand tells him that the award is actually for Best Voice and Jack says it doesn’t matter because he’ll be back in an hour to receive Game of the Year. The stagehand tells him that Brutal Legend wasn’t even nominated and Jack smashes the award against the podium, breaking it in the process and gets taken away by security. Overall, this was about the funniest intentional bit on the show all night, but from this start you can’t help but call bullshit on the entire proceedings. Especially since Jack beat out Mark Hamill’s Joker, who they started the show with, and Nolan North, the new voice of gaming. But hey, who am I to accuse Spike of having Jack win so that he’ll act crazy to keep people tuned in at the beginning of the show.
Next is the World Premiere of the trailer for True Crime. Yes, THAT True Crime. The GTA knockoff that failed twice on the last-generation systems. Looks like they’re trying to reboot the franchise (with new people making it), but it still looks like it’s a few steps behind. Basically, it looks like if GTA4 was about a kung-fu cop in Tokyo, but using a last-generation engine and last-gen graphics.
Commercials. The only commercial of note is one that plays at every commercial break – Burger King wants you to send someone you don’t really care about a coupon for a free double cheeseburger. I’ll let that one speak for itself.
The show returns will a video of a light-cycle race from Tron. After the video, a partition moves away, revealing a replica light-cycle and Olivia Wilde from House. The reason she’s on stage is because she’s in the new Tron movie and also in the video game of said movie. She must have really gotten into her role in the movie, because she’s reading the teleprompter just like a robot. This leads us to the World Premiere of Tron Evolution: The Video Game. It’s marked as a Disney Interactive movie game, and boy does it show. The parts of the game that are actual shown are a generic, low detailed third-person fighting part and CGI of a light-cycle match. Somehow I doubt that, if Square couldn’t create a good light-cycle part in Kingdom Hearts 2, Disney Games won’t be able to pull it off either.
Like the Ghost of Video Games Past, Tony Hawk gets on stage to present the award for Best Action/Adventure Game. According to Tony, Action/Adventure is like kissing a girl at a bar…and her boyfriend is in the bathroom…and you run down the street in your boxers while he’s trying to kill you. Or something. No mention is made of Tony Hawk: Ride.
Winner: Assassin’s Creed 2
Once again, the Bullshit Meter spikes considering it was up against Arkham Asylum and Uncharted 2. Two guys from UbiSoft accept, thanking French people, speaking French, and then unintentionally backhanding all the other games nominated by congratulating them for not winning.
The British announcer says that we’ve loved the Spike show Deadliest Warrior, so here is the First Look at the new season and the World Premiere of the video game. In case you’ve never seen Deadliest Warrior (I’d never even heard of the show), it’s a MythBusters-type show that breaks down who really would win in a fight between two warriors, like a ninja and a knight, based on the weapons used. I’m guessing the game will just be fighting and no science, since it’s announced as a downloadable game. Which would be funny because science seems to be the reason for this show to exist.
Commercials. Actually this “commercial break” is just a quick time-out for the annual pimp of Verizon Wireless cellphone games. Yes, they have moved up to iPhone-style games, since almost every commercial break, including this one, has ads for Verizon’s iPhone-killer, the Droid. But the only games shown are a Rock Band game and a side-scrolling Assassin’s Creed 2 game. Nothing that uses the accelerometers, like in the iPhone. Don’t worry, Verizon. You’ll be up to speed with games someday.
Kimbo Slice comes out to show the World Premiere of the game everyone saw coming – UFC Undisputed 2010. Spike TV especially saw this one coming, considering they were showing 6 hours of UFC shows before the VGAs aired. Kimbo presents it because he says the only thing missing in the last game was him. It’s at this point where you start to realize what’s happening. This game will just be the 2009 game, but with a roster update. Just like the WWE Smackdown games THQ also makes. And the trailer doesn’t do much to change that feeling, showing new guys, but doing the same basic stuff and with questionable collision detection. I wonder how long THQ can get away with this because, unlike the WWE games, you can’t just add match types to the thing. They’re all just going to be roster updates by definition.
Zack Braff gets on stage to present the Studio of the Year Award. Zack either has a cold, or he’s gotten a job as a football coach, because instead of his usual nerdy voice, he’s shouting at the audience. I know I leave the nominations out to save time, but the ones in this category are interesting in their nomination package. Rocksteady Studios (Arkham Asylum) and Naughty Dog (Uncharted 2) are shown doing mocap work and busting their ass, where Infinity Ward (Modern Warfare 2) and Valve (Left 4 Dead 2) are just a bunch of guys sitting at computers.
Winner: Rocksteady Studios for Batman: Arkham Asylum
I’d say Naughty Dog should get this, but Rocksteady really deserved it for going above and beyond the call of duty with a Batman game. Two British guys from Rocksteady come up and seem genuinely grateful for winning. They thank all the studios that believed in them even though they were nobodies and thanked all the people involved.
Samuel L. Jackson is here to present the newest Star Wars game. What could it be? To be totally honest, the Star Wars games are such a mixed bag, this could be anything. Sam talks about choosing your destiny in Star Wars. He may look like he would be a Sith badass, but he will always be a Jedi master. The trailer is revealed to be…wait for it…The Force Unleashed 2. Um, ok. Kinda a little disappointing, but whatever. Anyway, the trailer shows the Apprentice walking down a hallway, force-crushing the walkway behind him while the voices of Yoda and Darth Vader are insulting him in his mind. The hallway leads him to an arena where a dead rancor comes flying at him and the thing that killed the rancor, a monster three times the rancor’s size, is soon shocked and stabbed in the head with the two lightsabers of the Apprentice. This trailer really hits the “meh” territory, considering the first game didn’t set the world on fire and the surprise got everybody’s hopes too high.
Commercials. 1000 Ways to Die must be scraping the bottom of the 1000 ways barrel if they’re advertising someone falling off a motorcycle.
Coming back, the announcer calls out Jake Gyllenhaal, who is here to promote the new Prince of Persia movie. Jake says that when he heard that Jordan Mechner and Jerry Bruckheimer were making a Prince of Persia movie, he was in. Of course, that’s because they cast him. Jake shows the First Look at the Prince movie, which is actually like a fifth look, because plus or minus a couple of shots, it ‘s basically the same as all the rest of the Prince of Persia trailers on YouTube.
Instead of going straight into the new Prince of Persia game trailer, a big floppy mascot runs out on stage followed by some cheerleaders and three guys who look like characters from a direct-to-DVD American Pie movie. They announce themselves as being the cast of the new Spike show Blue Mountain State. Judging by the scenes playing behind them, it looks like a show about a college football team, made by those direct-to-DVD American Pie guys. Yeah, good luck with them. You know, sometimes I think the UFC gives Spike bad ideas like this just so they’ll fail and have to put more UFC shows on. Anyway, they are here to present the Best Team Sports Award aka the Madden Award.
Winner: NHL 10
Huh, what? Well, it doesn’t matter if Madden didn’t win or not, because two EA guys accept just the same. They give the standard acceptance speech of thanking the staff, their families, the fans, and the nominees for not winning. One of them also says that the NHL is back-to-back with NHL 09 winning last year’s award. The funniest thing about this is that the Madden Award wasn’t even mentioned on last year’s VGAs, so maybe the NHL guys are just fucking with Spike and made that up.
Now it’s finally time for the World Premiere of Prince of Persia: the Forgotten Sands. Now I love Prince of Persia and Sands of Time is one of my favorite games of all time, but this trailer does little to impress. It looks like last-gen CGI and the kicker is the Prince himself. He looks exactly like Jake Gyllenhaal’s Prince, except…he has the face of Default Create-A-Character #5. This, on top of the fact it will come out the same time as the movie, tells me this was supposed to be a movie game, but Jake pulled out, and UbiSoft figured they couldn’t just call it Sands of Time: The Game Based on the Movie Based on the Game.
Commercials. Are you ready? Monday, January 4th Hulk Hogan debuts on TNA Wrestling. Yes, that Hulk Hogan. That 56-year-old Hulk Hogan. In a sport where most guys don’t live to see 40. Have fun playing rasslin’ with grandpa, TNA.
Coming back the Energizer bunny goes across the screen, even though kids today don’t even recognize that character. The announcer presents Best Performance by a Human Male.
Winner: Hugh Jackman as Wolverine in X-Men Origins: Wolverine
A video of Hugh holding two awards is shown. He explains the second award is for Best Cast. Even though one of the nominees in this category was the original cast from the movie Ghostbusters. Anyway, Hugh seemed actually thankful for the awards and that the game developers actually pulled of a better than average game based on the property.
Olivia Wilde is brought back out to present the Best Independent Game Fueled By Dew. After getting derailed by catcalls, Olivia says that this award is dedicated to the indy games that take risks and shape the future of gaming.
Winner: Flower
Yep, after all that, the nominated game least like a video game won for being a groundbreaking game. Two men and a woman accept the award. The Asian man thanks Sony for backing them even though their game was just about “flowers and love,” and the woman asks the thousands of programmers that were laid off this year to join them. What, like the company, or join the indy game scene, or…you know what, I’m guessing it was just a recruitment thing.
The British announcer brings out “The Doggfather” himself, Snoop Dogg. Snoop has nothing to do with video games, but he’s here to perform just the same. And the title of his new rap song must be “Generic”, because this is about the blandest rap song I’ve ever heard. It doesn’t help that the guys and girls dancing on the stage are performing like they’re jacked up on cold medicine. And as usual the crowd is completely dead, except for a couple of people.
Commercials. One game shown during this break wasn’t even mentioned, but its ad looked very good. The ad was for a game called Split Second. Basically it’s a racing game that looks like Burnout 3, but with crash scenarios to escape.
Coming back from commercials, the set now has a bunker and a Jeep on it. This is for the World Premiere of Spec Ops: The Line. According to the British announcer, in this game you will lead a crack team of soldiers through Dubai while it’s being assaulted by massive sandstorms. The trailer starts with shock scenes of an upside-down US flag and dead tortured soldiers, and then the real game scenes start. Basically it’s Gears of War Iraq with terraforming in it, meaning you’ll be in cover fighting and the sand will suddenly shift out from under you.
Sportscaster Steven A. Smith comes out to present the Best Individual Sports Game Award. But first, he wants to air his grievances with sports and the players today compared to video games. He asks how he can win in Madden with the sucky Detroit Lions, but a pro coach can’t.
Stage director over the loudspeaker: “Uh, Steven? Finish up, will you?”
Steven: “Oh please, I ain’t got time for that.”
Steven then proceeds to talk about how the Nets are having a losing streak due to their starters having girls’ names.
Stage director: “Uh, forget this. Go to the package.”
Steven says not to interrupt him, but is cut off by the nominees anyway.
After the nominees are aired, we see that Steven is still in his own little world talking up a storm. After a few played-out Tiger Woods jokes the stage director ends it.
Stage director: “Uh, Steven, would you please just announce the winner?”
Winner: UFC 2009 Undisputed
UFC fighter Forrest Griffin and a THQ developer accept. Forrest stands bowlegged for some reason and yells at everyone to leave and order the next UFC pay-per-view. Forrest also mentions that the first UFC game sucked balls, and he’s happy that THQ, the company that has been making stale Smackdown games for about the last 6 years, has picked up the license. Oh, and in case you’re keeping track, I will no longer be calling this the Tony Hawk Award for obvious reasons – like the fact that Tony Hawk: Ride wasn’t nominated and is already being clearanced out at stores. I think I’ll rename this the UFC Award given which channel this show airs on. You know, the channel that will probably fix this award to go to Undisputed each year until Spike drops UFC.
Up next is the World Premiere for Crackdown 2. Now, I must admit, I have little faith going into this game. Especially since the first Crackdown went from being a loser game you had to buy for entrance into the Halo 3 Beta to one of most everybody’s favorite 360 game with its over-the-top physics and atmosphere. Now a sequel has come out of nowhere with a new developer and little by the way of details. Well, the trailer isn’t very reassuring, looking nuttier than the Saints Row series with goofy weapons, goofy music, and a tagline of “Would you like to blow *#%! up with me?”
Commercials. Nothing to mention.
Back from commercials, the announcer re-introduces “The Doggfather”, who thankfully isn’t here to tranquilize the crowd again. He’s here to present the Best RPG Award. Snoop says RPGs are great because, in real life, you can’t walk into a hardware store with a wizard hat and ask for their best axe. What do you want to bet that Snoop got high and actually tried that once?
Winner: Dragon Age: Origins
A designer of the game accepts two awards (the second for Best PC Game), while, for some reason, Me So Horny plays in the background.
A video message from an aged-looking Green Day is played and they say they have a World Premiere to announce. They’re making a video game. And it’s called Green Day: Rock Band. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! So let me get this straight, Harmonix go from one of the most generation-spanning musical acts in the Beatles to one that peaked in the mid-90’s. I truly believe, if they make bundle packs of instruments for this game, it will be the straw that breaks the camel’s back for most retailers making shelf space for these games.
Next the announcer presents “And the Winners Are”, or the Non-Award Awards. In case you forgot, this is the segment where they just name award winners that either refused to show up or weren’t cool enough to be presented an award.
Best Performance by a Human Female: Megan Fox as Mikaela Banes in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
Best Downloadable Game: Shadow Complex
Best Wii Game: New Super Mario Bros. Wii
Best DLC: Grand Theft Auto IV: The Ballad of Gay Tony
Most Anticipated Game: God of War III
A few notes: I don’t care if she was reading off the cure for cancer in the Transformers game, Megan Fox should never win any award ever. The Wii gets dismissed, but that’s standard. But how embarrassing is it that God of War III wins for Most Anticipated, but has nothing new to show to keep the fans going?
Commercials. This break shows ads for Entourage on Spike, Prilosec OTC, an auto dealer website, and Oral-B toothbrushes. It’s funny how the ad guys know the average age of gamers, but the VGAs themselves don’t seem to get it yet.
Back from break, Joel McHale, who has nothing to do with games, tells us that FPSes are coming close to simulating real war and that FPS players spill energy drinks on their balls. Joel then reveals the World Premiere of the new Medal of Honor game called…just Medal of Honor. I don’t even need to go into detail on this one – this game is just EA’s attempt to cash in on the Modern Warfare crowd. And what better time than now when it’s starting to cool off.
An old, out-of-shape Mike Tyson comes to the stage along with four over-tanned people from the MTV show Jersey Shore. You know, that show that got famous by a guy full-force punching a girl in the face. Mike’s teleprompter tells him to ask who they are, but Mike honestly asks them, like he can’t believe people like this exist. One guy introduces Mike to his killer abs while he creepily strokes his shirt open. Mike stammers out retardedly that his fists are named “Cracked Rib” and “Concussion”. Everyone on stage is there to present the Best Shooter Award, because if all five of these people were shot dead, they probably wouldn’t be missed.
Winner: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2
Two developers accept and receive an extra award for Best Multiplayer Game. The short-haired developer gives the usual thanks. The developer that looks like he works in a bowling alley just yells “Thanks!” and looks at the Jersey Shore kids to get the hell off stage.
More Non-Award Awards come up next.
Best Fighting Game: Street Fighter IV
Best Handheld Game: Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars
Best Driving Game: Forza Motorsport 3
Best Soundtrack: DJ Hero
Best Xbox 360 Game: Left 4 Dead 2
Best Original Score: Halo 3: ODST
Best Game Based on a Movie or TV Show: South Park Let’s Go Tower Defense Play
Some of these are odd winners, considering the massive licensed metal soundtrack of Brutal Legend, and the fact that you wouldn’t expect a Halo game to have an impressive score. But the real crime is that these more interesting categories weren’t formally presented.
Commercials. Nothing new, except more adult-based ads.
After the commercials, Stevie Wonder has found his way to the stage to present the Best Music Game Award. The audience gives him a standing ovation for still being alive. Awkwardly, someone is feeding Stevie stats about the VGAs and handicapped people through his earpiece, so Stevie sounds like he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Stevie points out that, as a handicapped individual, he’d like to see more handicapped-accessible music games. But then again, Stevie would just like to see anything. BA-DUM-BUM!
Winner: The Beatles: Rock Band
A developer from Harmonix comes up to accept and gives Stevie a look of “what’s a famous person like you doing here?” Also, this guy must be the smallest writer in the world because he reads off his entire acceptance speech from a paper the size of two fortune cookie fortunes taped on top of each other.
The British announcer introduces musical act The Bravery. Who are The Bravery? Well, I’ll never know because after seeing a guy play an electric guitar with a violin bow and hearing the lead singer sleepily mumbling into the microphone, I said “fuck it” and fast-forwarded. Sorry Bravery fans, this is a video game show, not the Music Video Awards. Anyway, I’m happy I fast-forwarded. Even sped up, this act takes fucking forever.
Commercials. Still doing the adult thing with ads for razors and eHarmony.
Next up to the stage is Tricia Helfer from the recent Halo 3: ODST game. Tricia asks which game is well-orchestrated and has such an “artfully-complete” story line? Halo, of course. Even Tricia cracks herself up over that one. After building up Halo as the greatest FPS experience ever EVER, they show the World Premiere of Halo Reach. There’s really not much to say about this trailer. It’s set long before the first Halo game with a group of Spartan armored soldiers who all look different than Master Chief – for example, one guy has a skull painted on his helmet and a woman has a robot arm. They are quickly briefed by their commander and then take off in helicopters. None of the game was shown, so it’s hard to judge what to expect, but it will be curious to see if Halo can win back interest in a Modern Warfare world.
Jake Gyllenhaal is back to put an end to this with the Game of the Year Award. Jake implies that “Game of the Year” means gamers have been playing nothing but this game all year, although of the five games nominated, the earliest (Arkham Asylum) came out less than four months ago.
Winner: Uncharted 2: Among Thieves
Four developers from Naughty Dog accept and seem really grateful to win. They also pick up two other awards for Best PS3 Game and Best Graphics. One of the developers identifies Nolan North, the voice of Nathan Drake (the camera still won’t show him) as well as one of the British announcers from tonight as Claudia Black, which is more than Spike could do. After their thanks, the trophy girl herds them off-stage so that Jake can re-introduce The Bravery to play out the show. This set is a little better than the last one, going from drunk mumbling to incomprehensible British mumbling. After they perform, there is no mass exodus from the arena, mostly because I think the audience is now comatose.
Well, that does it for the 2009 VGAs. All-in-all, not really much to write home about. Sure, the lack of a host and all the terrible skits kept the bullshit down to an absolute minimum, but what’s the fun in that? I came for a train wreck, people. All you got instead was a bunch of “surprise” trailers and a bunch of mostly questionable awards. Let’s start with the trailers. They were either obvious titles that didn’t show much to get excited about (ie. Arkham 2 and UFC 2010) or they were unexpected properties that nobody asked for. Are you really going to try and reboot True Crime and Medal of Honor to try to take down GTA and Call of Duty? That ship already sailed with Saints Row 2 and Killzone 2/ODST.
Now about the awards. If you’re going to bust their balls over disregarding awards, they had about as many awards presented as there were trailers. But this year proved that the awards just need to go. Overall, a lot of the winners were questionable, considering many of the game journalists on other podcasts said they got different categories to vote for than on the website – such as the Megan Fox award. Second, how does Assassin’s Creed 2 win for Best Action/Adventure Game and Uncharted 2 wins for G.O.T.Y.? Could it be because UbiSoft got Jake Gyllenhaal there to show off the new Prince of Persia game and he was about the biggest star of the night? Or was it because, in presented awards, no winner won twice. This was evident by a game winning one award and the devs walking back with a handful. This would be like if, when Titanic won for Best Picture at the Oscars, they wheel out a giant cart with all the rest if that movie’s Oscars on it. So obviously, recognition isn’t the big deal of this show either.
So the bullshit was mostly gone, the trailers were lackluster, and the awards were questionable. And sadly, I do see this as being as good as it gets, in its current condition. But I think I need to talk to the producers at Spike. Come closer, I want to tell you something. First, thank you for killing the bullshit and treating me like this at least isn’t on Nickelodeon. But these awards. You don’t want to give them and I understand that. And that’s ok. They don’t hold any value or prestige anyway. Look, just make it a trailer premiere show. You know you want to. Quit lying to yourself. Now go back to showing more UFC, you guys. We’ll talk again next year.
Tuesday, December 22, 2009
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
2008 Spike TV Video Game Awards Recap
It's December, and that can only mean one thing -- it's time for me to recap the 2008 Spike TV Video Game Awards. I realize that in a world that now has YouTube, DVR, and torrents, my yearly recaps become less and less necessary, but I just consider this my annual contribution to GAMERadio. Besides, as a lifelong gamer, I'm always curious to see how a “Guys Only” station like Spike TV portrays and appeals to gamers. Also, these shows are always gigantic pieces of shit and it's fun to watch as a train wreck. And “train wreck” is the right way to describe this year's VGAs. I usually don't like to sum up this show until the end, but I have to provide a word of warning -- this show was absolute garbage. The presenters didn't want to be there. The “world premieres” weren't much to talk about. But worst of all, Spike TV thinks the average gamer age is around 10 years old. There is stuff that will make you groan. There is stuff that will make you roll your eyes. But mostly, there is stuff that will make you embarrassed to be a gamer. Don't believe me? Let's get started...
The awards show starts with a warning that this show will be displaying M-Rated games, so viewer discretion is advised. Actually, viewer discretion should be advised for the following segment.
Jack Black is in a hotel room, coming out of the shower in a bathrobe, only to find an Xbox 360 lying on his bed. Jack then starts to make out with the 360. Then he sees a PS3. Now it's a three-way with Jack molesting the consoles and controllers and rubbing them all over his naked body. His wife (a Wii) and son (a DS Lite) appear in the doorway and Jack says he thought they were at church. The Wii now has a gun glued to the side of it and it fires at Jack. Jack's last words: “Why did they have to make them all so beautiful?” Because there's nothing as beautiful as a shrunken Dell tower molded into an hourglass shape, a giant Blu Ray drive disguised as a Foreman grill, an external DVD drive intentionally cocked on its side, and a portable system that looks like if Apple reinvented the Game & Watch.
The cameras shift to the award show stage and Jack shows up in an undershirt, whitey-tighties, and an Xbox 360 headset. Get ready for a musical number. Apparently Jack has died and has gone to Gamer Heaven (which is the theme of the show). Behind him are man-children also in their underwear on couches playing Xbox multiplayer. Video Game God comes out and it's the black guy from Zack and Miri Make a Porno with white hair. He says Jack will have to battle the devil and his 3 demons -- Reading, Exercise, and Relationship. This is where I almost threw in the towel. Can you imagine the Oscars doing a skit where the host has to defend the act of watching movies? Anyway, Jack disposes of Reading by giving a synopsis of the Grand Theft Auto IV plot (leaving out the part where it gets a little flat at the end). Jack disposes of Exercise by showing him a girl jiggling her ass to Wii Fit, like in that one viral video. Jack has trouble with Relationship, so he calls in the other guy from Tenacious D who puts up his “Intimacy Shield” to dispose of the demon. Wait, did they just imply that he shrugged off his relationship by getting intimate with the Tenacious D guy? Anyway, the devil comes out and is unbeatable, so Jack and Tenacious D Guy shoot fireworks out of their crotches to defeat him. Just like in every video game you've ever played. Video Game God is pleased and deems Jack the host of the 2008 Video Game Awards. The only audience reaction they show to all this is Tony Hawk cheering and sitting next to an embarrassed guy.
Jack then introduces “America's #1 Supermodel” Marisa Miller, who has nothing to do with video games. Cliffy B and people who look like Marisa's parents applaud. Marisa says that she is hot. Really hot. Seriously, really hot. Read those last three sentences like a robot and you sound like Marisa Miller. She is here because she's been programmed with some news about Gears of War 2. She sends it over to a video of Cole Train (from Gears 2) spouting enough ebonics to make Mr. T sound like Shakespeare. Back to Marisa, who tells us that she is psyched about Gears of War. And dead serious about it. Look up her gamertag. Once again, read those sentences like a robot for the full Marisa experience. She introduces the Combustible Map Pack for Gears 2. A video plays, narrated by Cole, about the 3 new maps: Flood, Gold Rush, and Fuel Station. Or, from the looks of them, a vacant lot with lava, an oil rig, and the gas station from the original Gears of War, respectively.
With the beginning skit and first advertisement out of the way, it's time for the intro to the 2008 Spike TV Video Game Awards. Coming to you live from an undisclosed location in Los Angeles. Tonight there will be ads for games, referred to as “exclusive footage”, including a Gears of War 2 surprise that they just showed. Since iPods and MP3 players are all the rage, tonight's performers are being called a “playlist” and are provided by Interscope Records, a record company that I hadn't heard from since Snoop Dogg's second album. Tonight's announcer refers to herself as “your gaming goddess”, and I start to wonder is Funkmaster Flex will ever return. The awards arena is shown and it is basically a large college auditorium with three large monitors, and a conveyor belt leading to the main circular stage. The audience is just a sea of white couches, but there is a three-row standing area next to the stage, full of planted college kids to give some reaction to the musical acts, since the audience has only reacted around three times throughout the last 6 years of musical presentations. Speaking of little reaction, the only crowd shot they get of the crowd after these announcements is four bored people sitting on a couch, looking disinterested.
Commercials. Burger King did a taste test on “whopper virgins”. No, not people who have never fucked a Whopper, but people in remote world locations who have never eaten fast food. They wanted these completely non-biased people to taste test the Whopper verses the Big Mac. Many uncomfortable foreigners are shown, and at least 3 of them said they liked the Whopper better. I would love to compare the medical condition of these people compared to the rest of the people in their village over time after being exposed to the garbage in an American fast food burger. And also a big “Fuck you” goes out to the people at Burger King for setting this up. Imagine this: you're walking around your neighborhood one day when a group of foreign people with a camera crew and a translator come up to you and demand your attention. They have two servings of monkey brains -- one sauted in a mystery brown liquid, and one fried to all hell and resembling a greasy turd. These people lead you to a room and insist you try both. Does that sound like fun? That's the Burger King international experience.
Coming back from break, the lights are out in the arena, except for the main stage which contains “UFC superfan” LL Cool J. Who cares about UFC? Spike TV, that's who! Ever since UFC and MMA got popular, Spike has been all about the UFC, so much so that there were about 5 hours of UFC specials leading up to this award show. LL raps about being a rap legend and that it's “time for war”. He introduces the UFC president and “ringmaster”, Dana White. He's here to announce that he stole my idea from last year and has created a UFC video game -- UFC 2009 Undisputed. A game so ambitious that it implies there will be a sequel every year. On top of the CGI intros of the fighters playing on the monitors, he presents a cage containing six of the UFC's baddest fighters looking badass and ready to kill each other. What comes next is the funniest thing on the entire show. Dana releases the fighters and LL runs over in front of them and begins to jump up and down and starts singing “Mama Said Knock You Out”. These badass fighters are now LL's backup dancers. The problem is they don't know what they're supposed to be doing. Some throw air punches. Some throw rap handsigns. And some are doing the two-step. The six fighters all look at each other, freeze up immediately, and start standing there trying not to look like dorks.
After LL is done acting like it's 1992, the UFC fighters disperse, leaving behind Rashad Evans who will announce the winner for Best Shooter. Rashad: “I don't know who gonna win, but I know it ain't gonna be Plaxico Burress.” Google says he shot himself, in case you didn't know who he was either.
Winner: Gears of War 2
The goddess announces that Gears 2 also won for Best Xbox 360 game. Cliff “Don't Call Me Cliffy B” Blezinsky and associates get the Vector Monkey, which is now inexplicably multi-colored like a bad bong from the 60's. A guy who isn't Cliffy B thanks the writer of Gears 2, which is like thanking the Easter Bunny for making Peeps.
It's been too long without an ad, so let's look at the world premiere of God of War 3. It about a 30 second CGI-fest of Kratos fighting the remaining mythological creatures that weren't in the other two God of War games, like centaurs and an army of skeletons. He even has some lion-head gauntlets on his hands at some point, which will probably act like guns. If this blows you away, you are reminded to reserve it at GameStop, which, as of writing this, is showing the game shipping in..oh...October 2009! How about this deal -- you give me $5 now and if you remember giving me it a year later, I'll give it back when you buy a game at full price.
Back from break, the goddess reintroduces Jack. Except it's just a gay frat boy standing on stage singing and acting retarded. A flushing sound plays and Jack jumps up on stage to relieve the guy. He says it's his double for when he has to poop, and then acts retarded like the other guy. Keep in mind we're over 30 minutes into the show and only one award has been presented.
Jack introduces EA president Peter Moore, who must have spent some serious cash on this award show, as you'll see throughout the night. Peter's here to show the exclusive premiere for Fight Night Round 4. According to his cue cards, this game will feature boxing legends at their prime, just like every other boxing game in recent memory. Peter says that no one can beat Muhammad Ali. The stage opens up and I swear I was expecting a staggering, stumbling Ali to come out. Instead it's a dejected looking, out-of-shape Mike Tyson, whose cue cards say he would like to try and beat his idol. The footage is the intro CGI of the game, showing a dream match of Ali verses Tyson, with both in their prime. I wonder how all the present-day boxing champions feel about being so unknown in their own sport that the game makers have to constantly put fighters from 30 years ago in the games to sell them.
The goddess introduces Neil Patrick Harris to present the Best Independent Game Fueled By Dew. I guess Mountain Dew doesn't want to be associated with addiction anymore, so it's good to see them backing independent talent. Which is ironic for an extremely mainstream soda that's getting killed in the marketplace by independent energy drinks. NPH says that, like the nominees, he has independent integrity, like starring in both mainstream Harold and Kumar movies. A fat guy pretending to be an Italian Beastie Boy in the first row keeps calling Neil “Doogie”. Doogie takes out a gun and shoots him to promote his new unknown game “Eat Lead”.
The nominees are quite an independent lot: Audiosurf, Braid, World of Goo, and Pixeljunk Eden. You know, the games that look like Guitar Hero, Super Mario Bros., Loco Roco, and N+-meets-Linerider. The nominees are read and Doogie pretends to open an imaginary envelope. He then admit to the camera guys he doesn't have the winner.
Doogie: “Should I just say one of them?”
Goddess: “........................RON CARMEL!”
Doogie looking around: “What?!”
Winner: World of Goo
Ron Carmel is revealed as one of the co-creators of World of Goo. He has a cardboard head on a stick to represent the other guy. Ron says that 2008 was a great year for independent games. He pauses to try and name one that wasn't one of the nominees, draws a blank and just says “this is awesome” and leaves.
Backstage, Geoff Keighley is with Stacy Keibler, and reveals to her that Pearl Jam's album Ten will be available to download for Rock Band 2 coming this March. March?! Rock Band releases DLC every week and it's going to take them three months to convert an album that's over 15 years old into Rock Band?
Commercials. This commercial break has 3 commercials that will be shown throughout the entire award show.
1)A serious battery commercial -- if it's Duracell, they show kids in hospitals; if it's Energizer, they show them used in space. Weird for such a juvenile show.
2)A Diet Mountain Dew commercial where only men, not women, get hit by lightning. Dew must really be hurting if they're just focusing on their diet drink and gearing it towards women.
3)A serious medicine commercial -- this break, it's Nyquil for people going camping. Weird.
Back from commercial, the goddess introduces the actress with a “ridiculously funny” last name, Eliza Dushku for the Big Name in the Game award. Yes, after I praised them for not having name-dropping awards (mostly because there were no big stars in games), they brought it back. But this is no ordinary award. Since there are no nominees named, I'm assuming this is like a lifetime achievement award. Which is weird because all he did was voice the role of the commanding officer in the latest Call of Duty that everyone was too busy playing Call of Duty 4 to check out.
Winner: Keifer Sutherland for Call of Duty: World at War
Keifer seemed pretty pleased to get the award and enjoyed the video game process overall. Although he says that he truly believes that one day video games and movies will combine. Obviously, Keifer's never played a Square game.
Chris Evans, who has nothing to do with video games, is here to introduce a band he plays all the time in Rock Band, the All-American Rejects. Although he thinks they should be called “Electric Rock Gods from Awesometown”. No, you don't. No one has ever thought that. No one over the age of 10 even puts those words together in a sentence. Now, all I know about the All-American Rejects is that “Move Along” song. This isn't that song. Instead, it's a whiny emo song that might be called “Hope It Gives You Hell”. At least that's what the lead singer in the pink tank top from the 80's doing the Mick Jagger strut keeps saying.
Commercials. Get ready for the new show “1000 Ways to Die”, coming in February to Spike. It would be great if there were some stupid deaths mixed in with the terrible ones, like falling out of a bunk bed.
The whoring isn't just in the world premieres. Coming back, the Energizer Bunny goes across the screen, as the goddess says “keeps going”. Speaking of animated toys, out comes Kim Kardashian, who I still have a theory about being an animated Barbie doll. Tonight's show doesn't negate that theory, as Kim is having problems reading, talking, and even walking down stairs. Kim is going to show the world premiere of the new game Dante's Inferno. Kim sounding ditzy: “It's based on a book. *giggle*” Kim says that no one knew this was being made into a game, which is why no one's ever heard of this game. The trailer plays, and of course it's an EA game. It basically shows a bunch of arcane symbols and talks about the nine circles of hell, which will probably be the levels. The video ends with one piece of CGI footage of a black knight thrusting a cross into a imp's skull. Since that wasn't impressive, the stage then erupts in fire. If I had to guess, this game will probably be a God of War knockoff with Hell references replacing the Greek mythology.
The goddess brings out Tony Hawk. Since he's been irrelevant to video games for the past couple of years, he's here to present the newly-made Gamer God award to Will Wright. Hopefully this becomes a new yearly lifetime achievement award, and not just a cheap way for EA to give some credibility to Spore, which has been pirated and humiliated into obscurity. But seriously, Will Wright is a pioneer in the field of god games and should be praised for all the work he has done. No, not by his peers and fellow game designers. This is the VGAs. Knowledge of game designers and creators have no place here. Instead he gets praise from three of his creations: a Sim-ant (developed in the Spore Creature Creator), a Sim guy, and a Spore monster that surprisingly doesn't look like genitals.
Winner: Will Wright
Will gets on stage and gives the obligatory “back in my day” speech and then talks about how he gets greater messages from today's video games then he does from books or movies. Considering that the winning games featured so far were Gears of War, Call of Duty, and World of Goo, that doesn't speak highly of today's books and movies.
Geoff Keighly, game journalist and host of Spike's GameTrailers.tv, is introduced. He is going to debut the trailer to the long awaited GTA IV DLC, named The Lost and Damned, coming in February. The trailer shows the Lost biker gang and identifies each member by name. Apparently, the game is not about Niko at all, but about the Lost gang and their rivals. Keep in mind that I am a huge GTA fan when I say this, but I don't give two shits about this DLC. The characters still look like plastic. The tone is still serious, so they didn't learn anything from Saint's Row 2. Not to mention that I was on board until they said it was about biker gangs, because the bike missions were the absolute worse missions in GTA IV. If you thought the cars handled like shit, the bike handled like a turd sliding on ice and you always had to cock the camera just to shoot the guy in front of you.
Commercials. This commercial break was the oddest line-up of commercials I think I've ever seen. Between the ads for things aimed at kids like that Call of Duty Wii ad with the psychopath it, and a Lebron James Nike ad that promotes cocaine use, there's also an ad for Prilosec heartburn medicine, starring a dancing 40-something woman, and Saturn cars. This confusion finishes up with an ad where a VGA stagehand is seduced by a near-naked Burger King, because of his “flamebroiled” smelling cologne. Very weird.
Back from commercials, Jack is dressed in a plaid suit (still wearing the 360 headset) and singing a vaudeville song. If it's all right with you we're just going to move on. The only thing worth mentioning in this skit is that Jerry Stiller (yes, he was on the show) gets bleeped for saying “hopped up on goofballs”, but Jack gets away with saying “shit” and “titty”.
Jerry brings out Kristin Kreuk and Chris Klein from the new Chun-Li Street Fighter movie that will either tank, go straight to DVD, or both. Even though both look embarrassed to be there, they both say they are super-excited to be there to present the Best RPG award because they both love video games. Kristin is so excited, her nipples are showing through her dress.
Winner: Fallout 3
Three Bethesda guys accept and seem genuinely thankful to get the award and that Bethesda got to make the Fallout sequel. One guy thanks his mom, and in a funny moment, one guy tells his kids to go to bed and stop playing Left 4 Dead.
Suddenly confetti rains down from the ceiling and the goddess introduces Busta Rhymes. Remember him? He must not think so because he immediately plugs his album coming in March to validate his existence. Busta asks the audience if they hate seeing game previews with bullshit CG in them. The cameraman nods. Well, here's a bullshit CG trailer for Uncharted 2 that allegedly uses the in-game engine. Also, Busta cannot say the words “in-game engine”. But he does say “NATHAN DRAKE IS BACK, BAY-BAAAAY!” The scene that is shown is Nathan falling out of a train car that hangs over a cliff. At no point does this look like gameplay footage, so I still call bullshit CG.
Marisa-bot is backstage. “It's amazing in Gamer's Heaven. All your favorite old school characters are here.” End of Line. Fittingly, she tells us the world premiere of the Terminator Salvation video game is up next.
Commercials.
Back from break, the goddess introduces Odette Yustman from Fallout 3 and Stacy Keibler, who has nothing to do with video games. They are going to present the new Terminator game trailer. Both look like they can't believe the shit they're reading and are about to crack up at any moment. Odette says she bought a T-1000 but it broke. And then pours a bucket of silver paint into an empty fishtank. Wow. Really? Anyway, the Terminator footage looks like what you'd imagine a licensed Gears of War knockoff would look like. The environment is still a devastated city, but the characters and enemies all look dull and the cover system looks sloppy.
It's a double-shot of ads as the goddess presents the non-awaited sequel, Mafia 2. It's a bullshit CG trailer with a Mafia guy confessing in church to doing a bunch of crazy shit in the 50's, like crashing cars and smoking cigarettes with women. Overall, this just looks like Vice City, cleaned up and set in the 50's.
Now is it time for an award to be presented? Nope, here's Tony Hawk to kick off a performance by 50 Cent. 50 will be performing his “Get Up” song that's all over the radio. You know, the song that's desperately trying to get his rap credibility back. 50 mumbles his way through the song, and the censors must have pulled up the lyrics to this thing, since stuff is getting censored right and left, but I can't make out a damn thing he's saying. It should also be noted that footage of his next game Blood in the Sand is playing behind him, but since, last I heard, Activision had dropped it and it was stuck in limbo, no mention is made of this game.
Going to break, the goddess says she will give us a “Front Line First Look”. What the hell is that? Is it like Front Line the recent game, or a new game, or that Front Line flea medicine? You'll have to wait until after Spike TV shows an ad for a Manswers marathon. Apparently, this Manswers show is like an “Ask Mr. Wizard” show for idiots and wifebeaters who ask questions like “can beer make your girlfriend's boobs bigger?” Oh, and that Front Line segment? It was just an army-sponsored Nvidia ad for their 3D glasses for video games.
And this concludes our third part. If you look, this award show just presented only one award in the past 30 minutes.
Coming back, the goddess presents a world premiere of the video game Watchmen: The End is Nigh. Now, I'll admit I'm not the biggest Watchmen fan so I don't get off on all the environments and characters, but this game looks like just another licensed third-person action game with different Watchmen characters doing brawler moves. Basically, without the environments and characters, this game could just be another Iron Man game or Lego Batman game.
The drought passes as two guys from Weezer who aren't the lead singer come out to present the Best Music Game award. Last year, this was called the Best Rhythm Game and I predicted that it wouldn't be around the next year after Rock Band and Guitar Hero 3 came out. Well, I forgot about sequels and that Activision is now a big whore about their IPs. Also, I'm guessing people have come to their senses about these games and that “rhythm” isn't really necessary for karaoke games and games about matching colors to different classic rock songs. Anyway, the Weezer guys come off as offended by the whole plastic guitar trend and then deadpan their lines like they're auditioning for the Daily Show.
Winner: Rock Band 2
Unfortunately, Mega-Boobs chick from Harmonix is not there this year, but instead some random guy accepts and then goes out of his way to kiss the asses of MTV and Weezer. You don't want to piss off Weezer. What if they take their four hit songs out of Rock Band?
Up next is one of the most prestigious awards of the night -- Studio of the Year. An award to identify and salute the individuals responsible for their company's success. So who does Spike get to present this award. It's the King of Queens guy riding a segway and in character to promote a new movie where he plays a bumbling mall cop. You have got to be shitting me. But Spike is not shitting. Soon, King of Queens Mall Cop is joined by his apparent nemesis in the movie -- a grungier version of the lead singer of Nickelback. Nickelback is a skater and says no mall cop can stop him. So he challenges King of Queens to a trick-off. Actually, the mall cop has no jurisdiction outside of the mall, so Nickleback could do whatever he wanted. Wait a minute, this is the fucking Studio of the Year award! What the fuck is this shit? Anyway, the skit ends when the mall cop calls in backup and the MadTV version of Terry Tate howls at Nickelback until he leaves.
Winner: Media Molecule for Little Big Planet
It is also mentioned that Little Big Planet won for Best PS3 Game. A British man and woman accept and are very genuinely thankful, like they won a real legit award. They say that they are honored to be nominated with the likes of Rockstar North, Bethesda, and Harmonix, and then proceed to thank everyone they ever crossed paths with, like Peter Molyneux and Valve. Unfortunately, this all seems a little unceremonious as you see the two mall cops still posing in character behind them.
A graphic then comes up reading “And the Winners Are”. It must be time for the Non-Award Awards. These are all the awards that they can't be bothered to present, or else they would be cutting into the amount of time given to the world premiere advertisements.
Best Driving Game: Burnout Paradise
Best Game Based on a Movie or TV Show: Lego Indiana Jones
Best Fighting Game: Soul Calibur IV
Best PC Game and Best Multiplayer Game: Left 4 Dead
Best Handheld Game: Professor Layton and the Curious Village
Best Wii Game: Boom Blox
Best Individual Sports Game (aka the Tony Hawk Award): Shaun White Snowboarding
Big Name in the Game Female: Jenny McCarthy as Tanya in C&C: Red Alert 3
Best Performance by a Human Male: Michael Hollick as Niko Bellic in GTA IV
Best Performance by a Human Female: Debi Mae West as Meryl Silverburgh in MGS4
Best Graphics and Best Original Score: Metal Gear Solid 4
Hideo Kojima and 3 other people are shown holding awards for MGS4. Wait, you had fucking Hideo Kojima there and you can't present him an award on stage, or ask him to comment on Will Wright's award. But let's look at these awards. As usual, Nintendo and the PC get the shaft, but what about the individual awards? They bring them back out of nowhere, and when unknown people win for giving voices to very memorable characters, they can't present awards to them in person. Not to mention that some of these awards have almost never been presented live, or are now unnecessary (does there need to be a Tony Hawk Award anymore?), so why even bother mentioning them?
Phew! That was a lot of awards, so let's get back to the shilling. And what better time for the mandatory Verizon Wireless spot. Melaina Scanton from VCast (who looks like if Tara Reid worked for QVC) is backstage to present cell phone games that wish they were Game Boy games. No, not like iPhone app games, but regular cell phone games. The camera man gets bored and puts some bikini models in the shot. Melaina says she's showing the hottest new mobile games, which from the looks of them are Peter Griffin fighting a giant chicken, a skeleton patting its groin and then exploding, and a sniper scope looking down a gray hallway.
Melaina is replaced by Geoff Keighly with Tony Hawk. Tony confesses he's been to all 6 VGAs and then pimps the Gears 2 DLC. Geoff points out that there was no Tony Hawk game nominated this year and Tony admits the game took a year off. But he says that the Tony Hawk franchise will be back next year with a “revolutionary” game and that “people aren't ready for what they have in store.” Is there still even a market for skateboarding games? I haven't heard anyone excited about any type of __boarding games, whether it's Tony Hawk, skate, Shaun White, or SSX, in a really long time.
Commercials.
Coming back, we are again reminded that tonight's playlist is provided by Interscope Records. We will not be forgotten! Anyway, Jack is on stage with a giant plastic flamethrower, looking like he just stole it from that one obstacle course on American Gladiators. Jack tells us to get ready to be launched into the air and land on our skulls. Then he brings out the super-duper-mega-ultra angel of video games, Tim Schafer. Tim comes out in a rickshaw pulled by those bikini models from earlier, while Jack stomps around stage trying to get a “Tim-Freaking-Schafer” chant started in the audience. The crowd looks on disinterested, because a sea of Guitar Hero players doesn't know who the creator of Grim Fandango and Psychonauts is. Tim is here to present Brutal Legend. Jack is spazzing out with the flamethrower, while Tim tries to calm him down.
Tim: “Are you just doing this because you're in the game?”
Jack bring out Rob Halford from Judas Priest, who is also in the game. Rob has a sword for Tim to martyr himself in the name of Brutal Legend, but Tim just wants to show the trailer.
Jack: “We were gonna kill you.”
Tim: “Roll the trailer!”
The trailer is mostly vehicle and animal driving, but looks very funny. Supposedly this is a third-person action game like God of War, but this trailer doesn't really focus on that. For me, as a huge Psychonauts fan, this is a day-one purchase, if anything to support DoubleFine Studios, even though I'm not a heavy metal fan. And I will actually congratulate EA for putting such a focus on a crapshoot like Brutal Legend, even if it was handled kind of childishly.
Megan Fox, who has absolutely nothing to do with video games, is here to present the Game of the Year. Megan looks like she has no idea why she's there.
Winner: Grand Theft Auto IV
It is mentioned that GTA IV also won the Best Action/Adventure Game award. A suburban-looking couple accepts the award and, for some reason, Megan pinky-shakes the guy's hand. The two look genuinely thankful, and say that the rest of the people at Rockstar are busy working on the next chapter of GTA IV. Great. How long is that DLC gonna take?
Jack is lowered from the ceiling on a swing and he is getting slap-happy. He stumbles over the year and calls the Video Game God by his real name, pointing out he has a sore throat. As Jack is reeled up to “Gamer Heaven Heaven” (don't ask), he presents Weezer to end the show. I apologize for the lack of total coverage, but this is 2008 and I came to watch video game content, so fuck the Weezer act. If you care about what Weezer sang, go find the video online. All I got from fast-forwarding through the thing is that it sounded like a typical Weezer song, the lead singer had a white suit on and a choir was singing along.
The crowd waits until after the performance to begin the mass exodus, so that's an improvement. And then I quickly turn the VCR off before the immediate encore shows me Jack Black fucking an Xbox again.
So what is there to say about the 2008 VGAs? Well, last year I used the term “eventommercial” to describe that award show because of all the obvious whoring, and that term applies more than ever this year. There were 12 trailers, as opposed to only 8 presented awards, and 2 of those had no nominees. As much as I like EA for what they've been doing lately with new franchises (ex. Dead Space and Mirror's Edge), they sure had their hands in this thing all over the place. And the skits were downright embarrassing. With last year's low-key ceremony based around fantastic games, I had figured all the “sexless nerd” crap was behind us. But something worse happened -- games like Gears and Guitar Hero went mainstream. Now instead of backhanded asides to nerds, they are trying to win over Beavis and Butthead. Not to mention that with mainstream acceptance comes mainstream attention. Many of the presenters had hardly anything to do with video games, including the presenter of the biggest award of the night. I suppose I shouldn't be too harsh on the VGAs. If you consider the MTV Movie Awards, their format is the same thing (or it was last time I watched it long ago) -- each presenter has a new movie coming out and the award winners are based on a popularity contest. I have no problem if that's the way they want to go with it -- as a fun time for gamers (and ad space for companies), but the MTV Movie Awards seem pointless compared to the Oscars. But, video games have no Oscars. To be honest, I think certain people consider this show the Oscars of video games because it gets the most viewers (as opposed to something like X-Play's Year-End Award Show). So I guess what I am asking for is a better showing of the best of a year's video games. Get knowledgeable people involved (I still have no idea who picks the damn VGA winners), put the designers, creators and voice actors all over the show, and keep the bullshit to a minimum. Or at least within reason. If Jack Black does a “I'm dancing like on vaudeville” joke, fuck you. If Jack Black does a joke that the nominees where posted on the NXE, but he couldn't find the fucking things, that's ok. I guess what it all boils down to is that, as much as I love recapping train wreck shit, as a gamer, I wish Spike would either cut the shit and make a real awards show (I'm sure real gamers wouldn't mind and the mainstream would learn something), or just cut out the “awards” and make a trailer premiere show. Oh well, see ya next year!
The awards show starts with a warning that this show will be displaying M-Rated games, so viewer discretion is advised. Actually, viewer discretion should be advised for the following segment.
Jack Black is in a hotel room, coming out of the shower in a bathrobe, only to find an Xbox 360 lying on his bed. Jack then starts to make out with the 360. Then he sees a PS3. Now it's a three-way with Jack molesting the consoles and controllers and rubbing them all over his naked body. His wife (a Wii) and son (a DS Lite) appear in the doorway and Jack says he thought they were at church. The Wii now has a gun glued to the side of it and it fires at Jack. Jack's last words: “Why did they have to make them all so beautiful?” Because there's nothing as beautiful as a shrunken Dell tower molded into an hourglass shape, a giant Blu Ray drive disguised as a Foreman grill, an external DVD drive intentionally cocked on its side, and a portable system that looks like if Apple reinvented the Game & Watch.
The cameras shift to the award show stage and Jack shows up in an undershirt, whitey-tighties, and an Xbox 360 headset. Get ready for a musical number. Apparently Jack has died and has gone to Gamer Heaven (which is the theme of the show). Behind him are man-children also in their underwear on couches playing Xbox multiplayer. Video Game God comes out and it's the black guy from Zack and Miri Make a Porno with white hair. He says Jack will have to battle the devil and his 3 demons -- Reading, Exercise, and Relationship. This is where I almost threw in the towel. Can you imagine the Oscars doing a skit where the host has to defend the act of watching movies? Anyway, Jack disposes of Reading by giving a synopsis of the Grand Theft Auto IV plot (leaving out the part where it gets a little flat at the end). Jack disposes of Exercise by showing him a girl jiggling her ass to Wii Fit, like in that one viral video. Jack has trouble with Relationship, so he calls in the other guy from Tenacious D who puts up his “Intimacy Shield” to dispose of the demon. Wait, did they just imply that he shrugged off his relationship by getting intimate with the Tenacious D guy? Anyway, the devil comes out and is unbeatable, so Jack and Tenacious D Guy shoot fireworks out of their crotches to defeat him. Just like in every video game you've ever played. Video Game God is pleased and deems Jack the host of the 2008 Video Game Awards. The only audience reaction they show to all this is Tony Hawk cheering and sitting next to an embarrassed guy.
Jack then introduces “America's #1 Supermodel” Marisa Miller, who has nothing to do with video games. Cliffy B and people who look like Marisa's parents applaud. Marisa says that she is hot. Really hot. Seriously, really hot. Read those last three sentences like a robot and you sound like Marisa Miller. She is here because she's been programmed with some news about Gears of War 2. She sends it over to a video of Cole Train (from Gears 2) spouting enough ebonics to make Mr. T sound like Shakespeare. Back to Marisa, who tells us that she is psyched about Gears of War. And dead serious about it. Look up her gamertag. Once again, read those sentences like a robot for the full Marisa experience. She introduces the Combustible Map Pack for Gears 2. A video plays, narrated by Cole, about the 3 new maps: Flood, Gold Rush, and Fuel Station. Or, from the looks of them, a vacant lot with lava, an oil rig, and the gas station from the original Gears of War, respectively.
With the beginning skit and first advertisement out of the way, it's time for the intro to the 2008 Spike TV Video Game Awards. Coming to you live from an undisclosed location in Los Angeles. Tonight there will be ads for games, referred to as “exclusive footage”, including a Gears of War 2 surprise that they just showed. Since iPods and MP3 players are all the rage, tonight's performers are being called a “playlist” and are provided by Interscope Records, a record company that I hadn't heard from since Snoop Dogg's second album. Tonight's announcer refers to herself as “your gaming goddess”, and I start to wonder is Funkmaster Flex will ever return. The awards arena is shown and it is basically a large college auditorium with three large monitors, and a conveyor belt leading to the main circular stage. The audience is just a sea of white couches, but there is a three-row standing area next to the stage, full of planted college kids to give some reaction to the musical acts, since the audience has only reacted around three times throughout the last 6 years of musical presentations. Speaking of little reaction, the only crowd shot they get of the crowd after these announcements is four bored people sitting on a couch, looking disinterested.
Commercials. Burger King did a taste test on “whopper virgins”. No, not people who have never fucked a Whopper, but people in remote world locations who have never eaten fast food. They wanted these completely non-biased people to taste test the Whopper verses the Big Mac. Many uncomfortable foreigners are shown, and at least 3 of them said they liked the Whopper better. I would love to compare the medical condition of these people compared to the rest of the people in their village over time after being exposed to the garbage in an American fast food burger. And also a big “Fuck you” goes out to the people at Burger King for setting this up. Imagine this: you're walking around your neighborhood one day when a group of foreign people with a camera crew and a translator come up to you and demand your attention. They have two servings of monkey brains -- one sauted in a mystery brown liquid, and one fried to all hell and resembling a greasy turd. These people lead you to a room and insist you try both. Does that sound like fun? That's the Burger King international experience.
Coming back from break, the lights are out in the arena, except for the main stage which contains “UFC superfan” LL Cool J. Who cares about UFC? Spike TV, that's who! Ever since UFC and MMA got popular, Spike has been all about the UFC, so much so that there were about 5 hours of UFC specials leading up to this award show. LL raps about being a rap legend and that it's “time for war”. He introduces the UFC president and “ringmaster”, Dana White. He's here to announce that he stole my idea from last year and has created a UFC video game -- UFC 2009 Undisputed. A game so ambitious that it implies there will be a sequel every year. On top of the CGI intros of the fighters playing on the monitors, he presents a cage containing six of the UFC's baddest fighters looking badass and ready to kill each other. What comes next is the funniest thing on the entire show. Dana releases the fighters and LL runs over in front of them and begins to jump up and down and starts singing “Mama Said Knock You Out”. These badass fighters are now LL's backup dancers. The problem is they don't know what they're supposed to be doing. Some throw air punches. Some throw rap handsigns. And some are doing the two-step. The six fighters all look at each other, freeze up immediately, and start standing there trying not to look like dorks.
After LL is done acting like it's 1992, the UFC fighters disperse, leaving behind Rashad Evans who will announce the winner for Best Shooter. Rashad: “I don't know who gonna win, but I know it ain't gonna be Plaxico Burress.” Google says he shot himself, in case you didn't know who he was either.
Winner: Gears of War 2
The goddess announces that Gears 2 also won for Best Xbox 360 game. Cliff “Don't Call Me Cliffy B” Blezinsky and associates get the Vector Monkey, which is now inexplicably multi-colored like a bad bong from the 60's. A guy who isn't Cliffy B thanks the writer of Gears 2, which is like thanking the Easter Bunny for making Peeps.
It's been too long without an ad, so let's look at the world premiere of God of War 3. It about a 30 second CGI-fest of Kratos fighting the remaining mythological creatures that weren't in the other two God of War games, like centaurs and an army of skeletons. He even has some lion-head gauntlets on his hands at some point, which will probably act like guns. If this blows you away, you are reminded to reserve it at GameStop, which, as of writing this, is showing the game shipping in..oh...October 2009! How about this deal -- you give me $5 now and if you remember giving me it a year later, I'll give it back when you buy a game at full price.
Back from break, the goddess reintroduces Jack. Except it's just a gay frat boy standing on stage singing and acting retarded. A flushing sound plays and Jack jumps up on stage to relieve the guy. He says it's his double for when he has to poop, and then acts retarded like the other guy. Keep in mind we're over 30 minutes into the show and only one award has been presented.
Jack introduces EA president Peter Moore, who must have spent some serious cash on this award show, as you'll see throughout the night. Peter's here to show the exclusive premiere for Fight Night Round 4. According to his cue cards, this game will feature boxing legends at their prime, just like every other boxing game in recent memory. Peter says that no one can beat Muhammad Ali. The stage opens up and I swear I was expecting a staggering, stumbling Ali to come out. Instead it's a dejected looking, out-of-shape Mike Tyson, whose cue cards say he would like to try and beat his idol. The footage is the intro CGI of the game, showing a dream match of Ali verses Tyson, with both in their prime. I wonder how all the present-day boxing champions feel about being so unknown in their own sport that the game makers have to constantly put fighters from 30 years ago in the games to sell them.
The goddess introduces Neil Patrick Harris to present the Best Independent Game Fueled By Dew. I guess Mountain Dew doesn't want to be associated with addiction anymore, so it's good to see them backing independent talent. Which is ironic for an extremely mainstream soda that's getting killed in the marketplace by independent energy drinks. NPH says that, like the nominees, he has independent integrity, like starring in both mainstream Harold and Kumar movies. A fat guy pretending to be an Italian Beastie Boy in the first row keeps calling Neil “Doogie”. Doogie takes out a gun and shoots him to promote his new unknown game “Eat Lead”.
The nominees are quite an independent lot: Audiosurf, Braid, World of Goo, and Pixeljunk Eden. You know, the games that look like Guitar Hero, Super Mario Bros., Loco Roco, and N+-meets-Linerider. The nominees are read and Doogie pretends to open an imaginary envelope. He then admit to the camera guys he doesn't have the winner.
Doogie: “Should I just say one of them?”
Goddess: “........................RON CARMEL!”
Doogie looking around: “What?!”
Winner: World of Goo
Ron Carmel is revealed as one of the co-creators of World of Goo. He has a cardboard head on a stick to represent the other guy. Ron says that 2008 was a great year for independent games. He pauses to try and name one that wasn't one of the nominees, draws a blank and just says “this is awesome” and leaves.
Backstage, Geoff Keighley is with Stacy Keibler, and reveals to her that Pearl Jam's album Ten will be available to download for Rock Band 2 coming this March. March?! Rock Band releases DLC every week and it's going to take them three months to convert an album that's over 15 years old into Rock Band?
Commercials. This commercial break has 3 commercials that will be shown throughout the entire award show.
1)A serious battery commercial -- if it's Duracell, they show kids in hospitals; if it's Energizer, they show them used in space. Weird for such a juvenile show.
2)A Diet Mountain Dew commercial where only men, not women, get hit by lightning. Dew must really be hurting if they're just focusing on their diet drink and gearing it towards women.
3)A serious medicine commercial -- this break, it's Nyquil for people going camping. Weird.
Back from commercial, the goddess introduces the actress with a “ridiculously funny” last name, Eliza Dushku for the Big Name in the Game award. Yes, after I praised them for not having name-dropping awards (mostly because there were no big stars in games), they brought it back. But this is no ordinary award. Since there are no nominees named, I'm assuming this is like a lifetime achievement award. Which is weird because all he did was voice the role of the commanding officer in the latest Call of Duty that everyone was too busy playing Call of Duty 4 to check out.
Winner: Keifer Sutherland for Call of Duty: World at War
Keifer seemed pretty pleased to get the award and enjoyed the video game process overall. Although he says that he truly believes that one day video games and movies will combine. Obviously, Keifer's never played a Square game.
Chris Evans, who has nothing to do with video games, is here to introduce a band he plays all the time in Rock Band, the All-American Rejects. Although he thinks they should be called “Electric Rock Gods from Awesometown”. No, you don't. No one has ever thought that. No one over the age of 10 even puts those words together in a sentence. Now, all I know about the All-American Rejects is that “Move Along” song. This isn't that song. Instead, it's a whiny emo song that might be called “Hope It Gives You Hell”. At least that's what the lead singer in the pink tank top from the 80's doing the Mick Jagger strut keeps saying.
Commercials. Get ready for the new show “1000 Ways to Die”, coming in February to Spike. It would be great if there were some stupid deaths mixed in with the terrible ones, like falling out of a bunk bed.
The whoring isn't just in the world premieres. Coming back, the Energizer Bunny goes across the screen, as the goddess says “keeps going”. Speaking of animated toys, out comes Kim Kardashian, who I still have a theory about being an animated Barbie doll. Tonight's show doesn't negate that theory, as Kim is having problems reading, talking, and even walking down stairs. Kim is going to show the world premiere of the new game Dante's Inferno. Kim sounding ditzy: “It's based on a book. *giggle*” Kim says that no one knew this was being made into a game, which is why no one's ever heard of this game. The trailer plays, and of course it's an EA game. It basically shows a bunch of arcane symbols and talks about the nine circles of hell, which will probably be the levels. The video ends with one piece of CGI footage of a black knight thrusting a cross into a imp's skull. Since that wasn't impressive, the stage then erupts in fire. If I had to guess, this game will probably be a God of War knockoff with Hell references replacing the Greek mythology.
The goddess brings out Tony Hawk. Since he's been irrelevant to video games for the past couple of years, he's here to present the newly-made Gamer God award to Will Wright. Hopefully this becomes a new yearly lifetime achievement award, and not just a cheap way for EA to give some credibility to Spore, which has been pirated and humiliated into obscurity. But seriously, Will Wright is a pioneer in the field of god games and should be praised for all the work he has done. No, not by his peers and fellow game designers. This is the VGAs. Knowledge of game designers and creators have no place here. Instead he gets praise from three of his creations: a Sim-ant (developed in the Spore Creature Creator), a Sim guy, and a Spore monster that surprisingly doesn't look like genitals.
Winner: Will Wright
Will gets on stage and gives the obligatory “back in my day” speech and then talks about how he gets greater messages from today's video games then he does from books or movies. Considering that the winning games featured so far were Gears of War, Call of Duty, and World of Goo, that doesn't speak highly of today's books and movies.
Geoff Keighly, game journalist and host of Spike's GameTrailers.tv, is introduced. He is going to debut the trailer to the long awaited GTA IV DLC, named The Lost and Damned, coming in February. The trailer shows the Lost biker gang and identifies each member by name. Apparently, the game is not about Niko at all, but about the Lost gang and their rivals. Keep in mind that I am a huge GTA fan when I say this, but I don't give two shits about this DLC. The characters still look like plastic. The tone is still serious, so they didn't learn anything from Saint's Row 2. Not to mention that I was on board until they said it was about biker gangs, because the bike missions were the absolute worse missions in GTA IV. If you thought the cars handled like shit, the bike handled like a turd sliding on ice and you always had to cock the camera just to shoot the guy in front of you.
Commercials. This commercial break was the oddest line-up of commercials I think I've ever seen. Between the ads for things aimed at kids like that Call of Duty Wii ad with the psychopath it, and a Lebron James Nike ad that promotes cocaine use, there's also an ad for Prilosec heartburn medicine, starring a dancing 40-something woman, and Saturn cars. This confusion finishes up with an ad where a VGA stagehand is seduced by a near-naked Burger King, because of his “flamebroiled” smelling cologne. Very weird.
Back from commercials, Jack is dressed in a plaid suit (still wearing the 360 headset) and singing a vaudeville song. If it's all right with you we're just going to move on. The only thing worth mentioning in this skit is that Jerry Stiller (yes, he was on the show) gets bleeped for saying “hopped up on goofballs”, but Jack gets away with saying “shit” and “titty”.
Jerry brings out Kristin Kreuk and Chris Klein from the new Chun-Li Street Fighter movie that will either tank, go straight to DVD, or both. Even though both look embarrassed to be there, they both say they are super-excited to be there to present the Best RPG award because they both love video games. Kristin is so excited, her nipples are showing through her dress.
Winner: Fallout 3
Three Bethesda guys accept and seem genuinely thankful to get the award and that Bethesda got to make the Fallout sequel. One guy thanks his mom, and in a funny moment, one guy tells his kids to go to bed and stop playing Left 4 Dead.
Suddenly confetti rains down from the ceiling and the goddess introduces Busta Rhymes. Remember him? He must not think so because he immediately plugs his album coming in March to validate his existence. Busta asks the audience if they hate seeing game previews with bullshit CG in them. The cameraman nods. Well, here's a bullshit CG trailer for Uncharted 2 that allegedly uses the in-game engine. Also, Busta cannot say the words “in-game engine”. But he does say “NATHAN DRAKE IS BACK, BAY-BAAAAY!” The scene that is shown is Nathan falling out of a train car that hangs over a cliff. At no point does this look like gameplay footage, so I still call bullshit CG.
Marisa-bot is backstage. “It's amazing in Gamer's Heaven. All your favorite old school characters are here.” End of Line. Fittingly, she tells us the world premiere of the Terminator Salvation video game is up next.
Commercials.
Back from break, the goddess introduces Odette Yustman from Fallout 3 and Stacy Keibler, who has nothing to do with video games. They are going to present the new Terminator game trailer. Both look like they can't believe the shit they're reading and are about to crack up at any moment. Odette says she bought a T-1000 but it broke. And then pours a bucket of silver paint into an empty fishtank. Wow. Really? Anyway, the Terminator footage looks like what you'd imagine a licensed Gears of War knockoff would look like. The environment is still a devastated city, but the characters and enemies all look dull and the cover system looks sloppy.
It's a double-shot of ads as the goddess presents the non-awaited sequel, Mafia 2. It's a bullshit CG trailer with a Mafia guy confessing in church to doing a bunch of crazy shit in the 50's, like crashing cars and smoking cigarettes with women. Overall, this just looks like Vice City, cleaned up and set in the 50's.
Now is it time for an award to be presented? Nope, here's Tony Hawk to kick off a performance by 50 Cent. 50 will be performing his “Get Up” song that's all over the radio. You know, the song that's desperately trying to get his rap credibility back. 50 mumbles his way through the song, and the censors must have pulled up the lyrics to this thing, since stuff is getting censored right and left, but I can't make out a damn thing he's saying. It should also be noted that footage of his next game Blood in the Sand is playing behind him, but since, last I heard, Activision had dropped it and it was stuck in limbo, no mention is made of this game.
Going to break, the goddess says she will give us a “Front Line First Look”. What the hell is that? Is it like Front Line the recent game, or a new game, or that Front Line flea medicine? You'll have to wait until after Spike TV shows an ad for a Manswers marathon. Apparently, this Manswers show is like an “Ask Mr. Wizard” show for idiots and wifebeaters who ask questions like “can beer make your girlfriend's boobs bigger?” Oh, and that Front Line segment? It was just an army-sponsored Nvidia ad for their 3D glasses for video games.
And this concludes our third part. If you look, this award show just presented only one award in the past 30 minutes.
Coming back, the goddess presents a world premiere of the video game Watchmen: The End is Nigh. Now, I'll admit I'm not the biggest Watchmen fan so I don't get off on all the environments and characters, but this game looks like just another licensed third-person action game with different Watchmen characters doing brawler moves. Basically, without the environments and characters, this game could just be another Iron Man game or Lego Batman game.
The drought passes as two guys from Weezer who aren't the lead singer come out to present the Best Music Game award. Last year, this was called the Best Rhythm Game and I predicted that it wouldn't be around the next year after Rock Band and Guitar Hero 3 came out. Well, I forgot about sequels and that Activision is now a big whore about their IPs. Also, I'm guessing people have come to their senses about these games and that “rhythm” isn't really necessary for karaoke games and games about matching colors to different classic rock songs. Anyway, the Weezer guys come off as offended by the whole plastic guitar trend and then deadpan their lines like they're auditioning for the Daily Show.
Winner: Rock Band 2
Unfortunately, Mega-Boobs chick from Harmonix is not there this year, but instead some random guy accepts and then goes out of his way to kiss the asses of MTV and Weezer. You don't want to piss off Weezer. What if they take their four hit songs out of Rock Band?
Up next is one of the most prestigious awards of the night -- Studio of the Year. An award to identify and salute the individuals responsible for their company's success. So who does Spike get to present this award. It's the King of Queens guy riding a segway and in character to promote a new movie where he plays a bumbling mall cop. You have got to be shitting me. But Spike is not shitting. Soon, King of Queens Mall Cop is joined by his apparent nemesis in the movie -- a grungier version of the lead singer of Nickelback. Nickelback is a skater and says no mall cop can stop him. So he challenges King of Queens to a trick-off. Actually, the mall cop has no jurisdiction outside of the mall, so Nickleback could do whatever he wanted. Wait a minute, this is the fucking Studio of the Year award! What the fuck is this shit? Anyway, the skit ends when the mall cop calls in backup and the MadTV version of Terry Tate howls at Nickelback until he leaves.
Winner: Media Molecule for Little Big Planet
It is also mentioned that Little Big Planet won for Best PS3 Game. A British man and woman accept and are very genuinely thankful, like they won a real legit award. They say that they are honored to be nominated with the likes of Rockstar North, Bethesda, and Harmonix, and then proceed to thank everyone they ever crossed paths with, like Peter Molyneux and Valve. Unfortunately, this all seems a little unceremonious as you see the two mall cops still posing in character behind them.
A graphic then comes up reading “And the Winners Are”. It must be time for the Non-Award Awards. These are all the awards that they can't be bothered to present, or else they would be cutting into the amount of time given to the world premiere advertisements.
Best Driving Game: Burnout Paradise
Best Game Based on a Movie or TV Show: Lego Indiana Jones
Best Fighting Game: Soul Calibur IV
Best PC Game and Best Multiplayer Game: Left 4 Dead
Best Handheld Game: Professor Layton and the Curious Village
Best Wii Game: Boom Blox
Best Individual Sports Game (aka the Tony Hawk Award): Shaun White Snowboarding
Big Name in the Game Female: Jenny McCarthy as Tanya in C&C: Red Alert 3
Best Performance by a Human Male: Michael Hollick as Niko Bellic in GTA IV
Best Performance by a Human Female: Debi Mae West as Meryl Silverburgh in MGS4
Best Graphics and Best Original Score: Metal Gear Solid 4
Hideo Kojima and 3 other people are shown holding awards for MGS4. Wait, you had fucking Hideo Kojima there and you can't present him an award on stage, or ask him to comment on Will Wright's award. But let's look at these awards. As usual, Nintendo and the PC get the shaft, but what about the individual awards? They bring them back out of nowhere, and when unknown people win for giving voices to very memorable characters, they can't present awards to them in person. Not to mention that some of these awards have almost never been presented live, or are now unnecessary (does there need to be a Tony Hawk Award anymore?), so why even bother mentioning them?
Phew! That was a lot of awards, so let's get back to the shilling. And what better time for the mandatory Verizon Wireless spot. Melaina Scanton from VCast (who looks like if Tara Reid worked for QVC) is backstage to present cell phone games that wish they were Game Boy games. No, not like iPhone app games, but regular cell phone games. The camera man gets bored and puts some bikini models in the shot. Melaina says she's showing the hottest new mobile games, which from the looks of them are Peter Griffin fighting a giant chicken, a skeleton patting its groin and then exploding, and a sniper scope looking down a gray hallway.
Melaina is replaced by Geoff Keighly with Tony Hawk. Tony confesses he's been to all 6 VGAs and then pimps the Gears 2 DLC. Geoff points out that there was no Tony Hawk game nominated this year and Tony admits the game took a year off. But he says that the Tony Hawk franchise will be back next year with a “revolutionary” game and that “people aren't ready for what they have in store.” Is there still even a market for skateboarding games? I haven't heard anyone excited about any type of __boarding games, whether it's Tony Hawk, skate, Shaun White, or SSX, in a really long time.
Commercials.
Coming back, we are again reminded that tonight's playlist is provided by Interscope Records. We will not be forgotten! Anyway, Jack is on stage with a giant plastic flamethrower, looking like he just stole it from that one obstacle course on American Gladiators. Jack tells us to get ready to be launched into the air and land on our skulls. Then he brings out the super-duper-mega-ultra angel of video games, Tim Schafer. Tim comes out in a rickshaw pulled by those bikini models from earlier, while Jack stomps around stage trying to get a “Tim-Freaking-Schafer” chant started in the audience. The crowd looks on disinterested, because a sea of Guitar Hero players doesn't know who the creator of Grim Fandango and Psychonauts is. Tim is here to present Brutal Legend. Jack is spazzing out with the flamethrower, while Tim tries to calm him down.
Tim: “Are you just doing this because you're in the game?”
Jack bring out Rob Halford from Judas Priest, who is also in the game. Rob has a sword for Tim to martyr himself in the name of Brutal Legend, but Tim just wants to show the trailer.
Jack: “We were gonna kill you.”
Tim: “Roll the trailer!”
The trailer is mostly vehicle and animal driving, but looks very funny. Supposedly this is a third-person action game like God of War, but this trailer doesn't really focus on that. For me, as a huge Psychonauts fan, this is a day-one purchase, if anything to support DoubleFine Studios, even though I'm not a heavy metal fan. And I will actually congratulate EA for putting such a focus on a crapshoot like Brutal Legend, even if it was handled kind of childishly.
Megan Fox, who has absolutely nothing to do with video games, is here to present the Game of the Year. Megan looks like she has no idea why she's there.
Winner: Grand Theft Auto IV
It is mentioned that GTA IV also won the Best Action/Adventure Game award. A suburban-looking couple accepts the award and, for some reason, Megan pinky-shakes the guy's hand. The two look genuinely thankful, and say that the rest of the people at Rockstar are busy working on the next chapter of GTA IV. Great. How long is that DLC gonna take?
Jack is lowered from the ceiling on a swing and he is getting slap-happy. He stumbles over the year and calls the Video Game God by his real name, pointing out he has a sore throat. As Jack is reeled up to “Gamer Heaven Heaven” (don't ask), he presents Weezer to end the show. I apologize for the lack of total coverage, but this is 2008 and I came to watch video game content, so fuck the Weezer act. If you care about what Weezer sang, go find the video online. All I got from fast-forwarding through the thing is that it sounded like a typical Weezer song, the lead singer had a white suit on and a choir was singing along.
The crowd waits until after the performance to begin the mass exodus, so that's an improvement. And then I quickly turn the VCR off before the immediate encore shows me Jack Black fucking an Xbox again.
So what is there to say about the 2008 VGAs? Well, last year I used the term “eventommercial” to describe that award show because of all the obvious whoring, and that term applies more than ever this year. There were 12 trailers, as opposed to only 8 presented awards, and 2 of those had no nominees. As much as I like EA for what they've been doing lately with new franchises (ex. Dead Space and Mirror's Edge), they sure had their hands in this thing all over the place. And the skits were downright embarrassing. With last year's low-key ceremony based around fantastic games, I had figured all the “sexless nerd” crap was behind us. But something worse happened -- games like Gears and Guitar Hero went mainstream. Now instead of backhanded asides to nerds, they are trying to win over Beavis and Butthead. Not to mention that with mainstream acceptance comes mainstream attention. Many of the presenters had hardly anything to do with video games, including the presenter of the biggest award of the night. I suppose I shouldn't be too harsh on the VGAs. If you consider the MTV Movie Awards, their format is the same thing (or it was last time I watched it long ago) -- each presenter has a new movie coming out and the award winners are based on a popularity contest. I have no problem if that's the way they want to go with it -- as a fun time for gamers (and ad space for companies), but the MTV Movie Awards seem pointless compared to the Oscars. But, video games have no Oscars. To be honest, I think certain people consider this show the Oscars of video games because it gets the most viewers (as opposed to something like X-Play's Year-End Award Show). So I guess what I am asking for is a better showing of the best of a year's video games. Get knowledgeable people involved (I still have no idea who picks the damn VGA winners), put the designers, creators and voice actors all over the show, and keep the bullshit to a minimum. Or at least within reason. If Jack Black does a “I'm dancing like on vaudeville” joke, fuck you. If Jack Black does a joke that the nominees where posted on the NXE, but he couldn't find the fucking things, that's ok. I guess what it all boils down to is that, as much as I love recapping train wreck shit, as a gamer, I wish Spike would either cut the shit and make a real awards show (I'm sure real gamers wouldn't mind and the mainstream would learn something), or just cut out the “awards” and make a trailer premiere show. Oh well, see ya next year!
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
2007 Spike TV Video Game Awards Recap
Well it’s that time of year again. It’s time for my annual review of the SpikeTV Video Game Awards. What? You forgot it was coming up? Well, that makes two of us, because I honestly forgot this show even existed until I saw a blog on Destructoid about them being at the awards show taping. The blog came out on a Thursday, and I thought “Wonder when that will air” and it was set for that Sunday. But I guess that sets the tone for this year -- downplay. Despite this being one of the biggest years for gaming, between console sales and quality of games, the entire awards show had a feeling of nothing matters.
Maybe it was due to the lack of starpower at the awards show. Checking out the nominees on the NeoGAF forums about 2 months prior to the show, I noticed that Spike ditched all the “celebrity” awards (Best Male, Best Cybervixen, etc.) in favor of more credible awards, like Best Game for each system. Never mind that all the games nominated for Game of the Year were also nominated for Best Xbox 360 game, or that, once again, half the games nominated weren’t even released at the time of nomination (basically any game released after Bioshock). Some other changes happened to the program, but I’ll touch on those as we go. Let’s get started.
The show starts with a Viewer Discretion warning. The reason is due to the M-Rated games that will be shown during the awards. I couldn’t tell you one M-Rated thing I saw on this show, aside from clips of FPS guns and a guy jumping off a building. Maybe mentioning the ever-present body painted, naked women would have been too much of a spoiler.
The actual show starts with gymnastic guys jumping out of a helicopter and then climbing walls and doing flips to deliver the Monkeybone award to the stage at the Mandalay Bay hotel/casino in Las Vegas where the awards show is taking place. Finally, after all these years, the statue is declared the Vector Monkey. I still have no idea why this is the shape of the award and not a Space Invader like the first couple of years. The gymnasts arrive on stage and do flips, accompanied by Power Ranger type explosions. Keep in mind, the stage is designed to look like a combination arcade cabinet and air hockey table. The gymnasts give the statue to host Samuel L. Jackson who, not to be undone, stomp on a giant button that makes the stage explode with pyrotechnics.
Sam kicks off the event by showing off the award, which has gotten a five year anniversary makeover. Has this award show been running for 5 YEARS? I didn’t think Spike TV even existed for five years. Anyway, the makeover to the award was nothing special. Basically, since keeping it gold would give the award too much credibility, its been painted devil red and given anime eyes and a stubby cigarette. Once again, Spike TV, there have been literally thousands of items that symbolize video games. A mushroom. A question mark box. A Galaga ship. Or, call me crazy, a controller. Why Monkeybone? Why not… I don’t know…a golden spike?! But then, these awards just go to the highest bidder, so that goes back to the whole ‘no value’ thing.
A body painted model comes to the stage with the award show logo painted on her. Sam says this girl is an example of the trophy girls/envelopes for each winner tonight. Each girl will have the winner painted onto them. The girl then turns around and Sam points to her butt saying “And the winner is…”. I swear, I thought she was going to spread her ass cheeks and it was going to say Bi*shock.
Sam presents Steve Wiebe, the guy from the King of Kong documentary (which is probably the inspiration for the arcade stage design), who is working his way on an old Donkey Kong machine trying to get to the kill screen. I’d call bullshit on the kill screen, but Wikipedia and YouTube prove it exists, so what do I know?
Sam also presents Tommy Talarico and the Video Games Live orchestra that will only be used to play NES tunes to go to break.
Sam then starts the ever-dreaded monologue. As a gamer, I can honestly say video game jokes are painful. Especially monologue style jokes. Pain-ful! Sam says there’s a hidden scene in Manhunt 2 were you torture a man’s testicles with pliers. The code to see it is Up, Up, Down, Down, B, Aaaaaaaaaa-thosemynuts! PAIN! FUL! After a Dick Cheney joke, a Britney Spears joke, and a Detroit joke all fall flat, Sam tells a joke about the Beowulf movie’s motion-captured breasts. Somebody’s mom in the audience ROFLs over this, so Sam calls it quits with the jokes.
Two “stars” from the MTV “show” The Hills come out to the podium (shaped like a joystick -- nice touch). I refuse to identify these people as celebrities or even as people of value. They would like to present hot newcomer Kristen Bell. A montage is shown of her in Assassin’s Creed, and then the Hills girl tells her to come up and get her monkey. Apparently, she’s won for Hottest Newcomer.
Winner: Kristen Bell for Assassin’s Creed
Wait, so now there are no nominees? And where was the body paint girl with Kristen Bell’s name on her? This show is off to a great start by undoing the guidelines it just set up three minutes ago.
Magician Criss Angel is introduced and he starts talking about all the David Copperfield tricks he does here in Las Vegas. So who better to show the new trailer for Rainbow Six: Vegas 2? Actually, the trailer is just stock footage of gamblers mixed with stock footage of an assault team suiting up. The only gameplay shown is about two seconds of an assault team firing guns among rows of slot machines. So far I’m not sold. But if you are, the trailer reminds you to reserve your copy at GameStop.
Before going to break, the show remembers it’s an awards show and it has to show a list of the presenters. Reading the list of presenters, the sudden Kristen Bell award makes sense. She’s nearly the only damn star on the show this year. And -- SPOILER -- half of the list are the people accepting awards. Guess that’s what happens when you take away all of the masturbatory awards -- nobody shows up. Another sad note is that the announcer is never mentioned. Unlike in previous years when it was Funkmaster Flex and his annually untouched turntables, or Stewie Griffin, this year it’s just a generic SpikeTV/G4 announcer. Man, it’s really bad when they can’t even get a celebrity announcer.
Commercials. Three ads of note on this break.
Ad 1: Starting with this commercial break, Burger King shows an ad where one of their restaurants tells the customers they have stopped selling Whoppers. The customers then act disappointed and belligerent. I guess Burger King wants to tell us that, besides the Whopper, the rest of their menu is shit.
Ad 2: Verizon has finally completed their IPhone knockoff. Complete with a real keyboard, because the IPhone’s is shit. Good work, Verizon. Now you’re thinking like Sony.
Ad 3: There’s a movie coming out called Jumper, starring the shitty 20-something guy who played Anakin Skywalker. He can teleport like Nightcrawler in X-Men 2, except he’s played by a shitty actor. Samuel L. Jackson’s also in it as a blond detective trying to pin bank robberies on him. After XXX2 and Snakes on a Plane, seeing goofy-looking Sam Jackson in a trailer actually confirms that movie will be shit. Sorry, Sam.
Dave Navarro is announced to present Best Game Based on a Movie or TV Show. First, they show a strange skit about motion-capturing. An extremely bitter female executive tells a male executive not to make a game based on the Beowulf movie. The punchline is a guy covered in giant Styrofoam balls and the female exec saying “I hope a fish swims up your dickhole.” Anyway. Dave makes the body paint woman turn around to reveal the winner, even though she has Simpson faces drawn all over her body.
Winner: The Simpsons Game
Matt Groening and pals accept the award. Groening says he learned that EA execs aren’t big assholes like TV execs. Let’s see: TV execs have let The Simpsons stay on the air for almost 20 years, despite most seasons sucking. EA execs took one of the best possible story ideas for a game, let alone a Simpsons game, and botched it by having unplayable controls and a crappy camera. Yeah, I’ll take the EA guys any day over TV.
Tony Hawk presents the Foo Fighters to perform next. Unlike in previous years where bands just perform songs totally unrelated to video games, Tony justifies them being there by saying their music was in Tony Hawk’s Proving Ground. I’ll have to take his word on that. The Foo Fighters sing “The Pretender”. The only reason I know this is because their set goes on and on for about 10 minutes and the stage keeps blinking “Foo Fighters” and “The Pretender”.
Remember when I said I almost missed this show because I don’t watch SpikeTV. Well neither does anyone else, apparently. Right after the Foo Fighters number, they run an ad for the new season of Pros Vs. Joes on SpikeTV. Looks like their big star this year is Rocket Ishmael. Good luck with that, Spike. After that the show can finally go to break.
Commercials. Two ads really stand out in this break.
Ad 1: It’s a sad day when the URL democracy.com takes you to a Mountain Dew creation contest site. NO ONE involved in politics thought to outbid Pepsi for this?
Ad 2: Among all the Gamestop and Air Force ads, there was a serious birth control pill ad. Not to promote safe sex, but an “ask your doctor about this medicine” ad. Wha…huh?!
Coming back from break, the Burger King endorsed King of Fans is running loose backstage with a video camera. The announcer says we voted for this King of Fans. Well, sucks for that guy because they never show him on camera.
Sam says the time is finally upon us. Afro Samurai is coming to the Xbox 360! You remember Afro Samurai, don’t you? It was the Boondocks-meets-Aeon Flux cartoon voiced by Sam that they premiered last year. Well, even though I don’t remember the cartoon ever airing, it’s got a 360 game coming soon. From the looks of the trailer -- just shots of a bloody CGI-anime arm holding a sword and the bloody CGI-anime forehead of the samurai -- the game makers were also surprised this game was coming out.
Bobby Lee, the token asian from MadTV, is here to remind us MadTV still exists. He talks about losing at games and blaming controllers, followed by a skit of anonymous gamers confessing that they are douchebag players. Like one bored guy who keeps saying “headshot” to the guy next to him on the couch. Oh-kay. So, this is the FPS award? Nope. Let’s look at the nominees for Best Team Sports Game (aka the Madden Award). Before the nominees shown, and from this point on before the nominees, bizarre fake YouTube videos are shown that mostly have nothing to do with the nominees, or categories. For example, this video is 2 guys playing basketball and one gets decapitated. Moving on.
Winner: Madden NFL 08
This year Madden reclaims the Madden Award (last year NBA2K7 won it) so it’s good to see EA’s check to SpikeTV cleared this year. The EA guy accepting the award proclaims Madden 08 “the greatest sports game of all time.” If it’s so great, never make another one.
Rapper Chingy is introduced and talks about how the original Gran Turismo was sick and each year it gets sicker and sicker. Chingy apparently thinks Gran Turismo has cancer. He also says the game “has all the horsepower you need to check out the world premiere.” Anyway, it’s the usual GT trailer. Yes it looks photo-realistic, but in true Sony fashion, the jaggies start to give it away. That and all the low-res classic race cars they’ve plopped into it.
Verizon Wireless now presents the Hottest Wireless Games. Thankfully SpikeTV retired the Best Wireless Game after the bullshit last year. Last year, a cell phone game got an actual presented award, receiving more recognition that year than Zelda: Twilight Princess, New Super Mario Bros., Guitar Hero 2, or the Nintendo Wii. As far as these “hottest games” go, it’s your standard “we wish cell phones were Game Boys” fare -- generic poker, generic BMX racing, and a God of War game that was apparently ported from a Game Boy Color.
Commercials. Absolutely nobody must watch SpikeTV, because there’s an ad for the channel itself. The ad also has two guys pointing guns at each other, talking about having sex during a girl’s period. SpikeTV -- It’s like period sex.
We come back and the King of Fans is still loose with the camera. At no point does this person think to put himself on camera.
Stan Lee comes out screaming that he loves video games. You know, he used to just write Iron Man, but now the “geniuses at Sega” will get a chance to fuck up Iron Man, just like they fucked the rest of their IPs. Stan presents the trailer to “Iron Man...something or another.” Basically, this looks like your run-of-the-mill comic book/movie game. It’s got generic 3rd person action and some flying elements, because Iron Man can fly. In fact, the only thing that makes this game look shinier than other bargain bid fodder is due to Iron Man being made of metal.
Ralphie May, a fat comedian, is presented to tell video game jokes. Just kidding! Of course he’s going to tell fat jokes. Ralphie’s so fat he looks like a loaf of bread when he lays in the tub. Sigh. Can’t fat comedians tell ANY other jokes? Ralphie runs out of fat jokes so he presents some unknown actor from that 01-18-08 Cloverfield movie. After Ralphie screws up his “we look like the number 10” joke (skinny guy standing on the wrong side), it’s on to the nominees for Best Individual Sports Game (aka the Tony Hawk Award).
Bizarre Nominee Video: A mom catches a 20-something guy in the bathroom sounding like he’s jerking off. He’s playing paddleball.
Winner: skate.
A group of people come up, who I guess were the “professional” skaters in the game. The big black guy goes out of his way to state that he is “Big Black”, not “Big Boi”. Sure thing. I’ll get it right next time I see you.
Kurt Angle and his wife come out to present the gameplay trailer for the TNA Impact wrestling game. They call Samoa Joe a girl and then roll the trailer. It’s your standard wrestling game -- footage from the show, CGI intros and generic moves inside the ring. No special matches are shown, and it doesn’t even look like the roster is that full. There are no women and no recent WWE castoffs that TNA has sucked up. Overall, pretty blah for a game that’s basically been in development since before Kurt Angle, his wife, or probably Samoa Joe was hired by TNA.
Next is a special edition of A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila. For those who don’t encounter MySpace or MTV, let me say that Tila Tequila was one of the first MySpace whores and MTV, hoping to secure the kids who live and breathe MySpace, hired Tila to run all over the network with her bisexual Bachelorette-style show. Since MTV = Viacom = SpikeTV, that’s why she’s here.
Tila is trying to decide which bachelor to choice -- it’s a Wii, a Xbox 360, and a PS3 on display stands. This is one of the unintentionally funniest parts of the show, hands down. Tila will say an incoherent, yet flirty line to one of the machines, and they’ll show a 2-second shot of the console as a reaction shot. Something like this…
Tila: “Xbox 360. Your name says it all, and we even have all the same parts.”
Shot of an unplugged Xbox 360 on a stand.
Tila eventually decides to choose them all, confessing that she’s “tri-game-ual”. Remember kids, your personal sexuality is a joke, especially if it’s marketable. With that out of the way, Tila presents the “earlier winners from tonight.” Basically this is the annual montage of awards that they didn’t want to present on stage. I like to call them the Non-Award Awards.
Bizarre Nominee Video: Reverse footage of a man building a house of cards.
Best Role Playing Game: Mass Effect
Best Handheld Game: Zelda: Phantom Hourglass
Best PS3 Game: Ratchet and Clank Future: Tools of Destruction
Why create individual console awards and then not focus on them?
Best Graphics: Crysis
Best Action Game/Best Wii Game: Super Mario Galaxy
As usual, Nintendo is snubbed from receiving an award, despite having the most successful hardware.
Best Driving Game: DiRT
Pontiac finally gave up sponsoring this category. So much for their Gamers That Like To Buy High-End Cars demographic.
Best PC Game / Breakthrough Technology: The Orange Box
Even though these awards were given “earlier tonight”, they cut back to trophy girls placing awards on tables and the people at the tables looking disappointed. So what did we learn from those awards? That RPGs, Nintendo, the PS3, and the PC are all bullshit.
Before break they show Chingy playing Wii Bowling against Team USA (Pro-gamers going to some worldwide event) and sucking horribly. Chingy, two clicks to the right and swing the Wiimote like your going to throw it at the ceiling. Guaranteed strike every time.
Commercials. During this break, there is a Sneak Peek at I Am Legend. Will Smith: “There’s no safe place for the last man on Earth if someone was out to get you.” First of all, if you’re the last man alive, who’s coming to get you? And second, you would literally have millions of safe places if you were the last man alive. OK, picture this. You’re the only person left in your town (no matter how big or small). Now think of a secure place to hide, or set up camp. I could probably name a hundred in my town just off the top of my head.
Coming back, Sam is now lounging on the stage steps and introduces Brian Po-something from the Sarah Silverman show. Brian has four hobbies. “I play video games, I smoke pot, I masturbate, and I cry.” A gay Hot Topic employee in the crowd ROFLs over that. Brian says since he plays games, he can say the n-word -- nerd. After that joke bombs, we get to the punchline. It’s a Photoshop picture of him naked in a cubicle with a piece of pizza over his dick. I’ll never get male nudity jokes. Let’s see who won Best Studio of the Year.
Bizarre Nominee Video: A man uses a Plug-and-Play game joystick to clone a woman.
Winner: Harmonix for Rock Band
A guy from a ska band and a huge-breasted woman come up to accept. The best part is the camera catching Brian checking out the woman and raising his eyebrows. The two Harmonix guys then show a video of the ENTIRE staff at Harmonix rocking out to say thanks for the award.
Tia Carrera comes out, looking about 10 years past whatever Wayne’s World/True Lies hotness you may recall her having. She’s here to present a performance by Kid Rock. Remember a couple of years ago, after seeing Motley Crue and Def Lepard, I guessed Poison was going to be the next retro act? Nope. It’s Kid Rock. Thankfully, Kid has abandoned his rap-rock sound, and recent country music for just plain rock. In fact, he sounds like David Lee Roth mixed with Steven Tyler of Aerosmith. Not that anyone notices. In true VGA fashion, only a handful of people in the crowd seem to be rocking out. The rest are staring at the dancing girls in the aisles. David Lee Tyler sings about a girl who is “so hooooooaaaaaaaah!” that he’ll “wanna f___ _ou like I’m never gonna see you again.” Just to make sure he’s listed as the retro band, halfway through the song, for no reason, he starts singing the “Slow ride…take it easy” song, and then goes back to the “so hoooooooaaaaaaah” one.
Before the break, there’s a Spike TV ad for TNA Impact. Now with two hours! Because the demand was so great. Or maybe they need to fill more time on the channel since every other Spike program besides UFC or CSI gets shitcanned.
Commercials. Three more noticeable commercials:
Ad 1: This is my most hated commercial to date. A man goes throughout his house giving his wife and two kids cell phones with different features because they are his “number one.” Yes, he tells all 3 that they are his #1 family member. He then walks outside and whips out the best cell phone. “Saved the best for numero uno.” He walks by the Verizon guy and says “Oh yeah” like he’s admitting he’s that big of a dick. The Verizon guy shrugs it off because dick money pays the same. Keep in mind, this ad plays constantly in my city, where Verizon’s had a monopoly for many years, and you can see how I can hate this commercial.
Ad 2: A kid doesn’t like what drugs are doing to his friend. To help him realize this, the kid wheels a full-length mirror from his house to the school lunchroom. He sets the mirror up in front of his friend, who appears to have no ill effects from taking drugs. Yeah, that’ll keep the kids off of the stuff. Wait, didn’t a presenter just confess to doing drugs as a joke?
Coming back, Tag Deodorant has resurrected Hot Girls with Cheat Codes. A girl in a Tag shirt says to type “sweetstuff” into Tony Hawk’s Proving Ground to unlock all the items for your crib. This is a skating game, right? She says more babes reading codes are on SpikeTV’s website. No thanks. I can think of shitloads of better places to find porn and tips online.
Patton Oswalt comes out to present the Most Addictive Video Game Fueled by Dew. He jumps on the pyro button that Sam used earlier and nothing happens. Patton: “It must only work if you’re black and talented.” Then he says gamers buy adult diapers so they don’t have to pause Bioshock. Sure.
Bizarre Nominee Video: A kid swirling his CGI eyes.
Before Halo 3 wins (since there was a Halo 3-themed Mountain Dew flavor this year), Patton reminds us that this is the only award voted on by the gamers. Or by Mountain Dew ad execs. Wait, he just admitted the other awards are rigged.
Winner: Halo 3
Nice camel toe on the body paint girl, by the way. Two nervous Bungie guys accept and present a Red vs. Blue skit promoting the new DLC maps. The Bungie guys should have come up drinking the Halo 3 Mountain Dew to prove that enabling “voting” on a sponsored award is bullshit.
Sam says he’s all for video games, but since this is an election year they have to be unbiased and give time to opposing viewpoints. Unless a video game is running for congress, that doesn’t really make sense, but I see where they’re going. A video is shown linking past evil-doers to video gamers. Everyone from John Wilkes Booth to Kim Jong Il played violent video games. Paid for by friends of Jackie Thompson. We still care about Terrorist Jackie Thompson? Wasn’t he disbarred?
Kristen Bell presents the trailer for the new game Borderlands. I’ve heard nothing about this game, and the trailer doesn’t offer much info either. It’s all CGI and no gameplay. A scarred women says you’ll never find the treasure, but along the way you’ll see futuristic bikers, alien dinosaurs, and you’ll need lots of guns. I’m guessing this will be an action RPG that wished it came out before Mass Effect (which it was copying).
Geoff Keighley (whose SpikeTV just got canned so he can go back to gametrailers.com) and Steve Wiebe are still at the Donkey Kong machine. Still no kill screen, of course. They present a medley performed by Video Games Live, with Tommy Talarico on electric guitar. It’s a retro number, going from Space Invaders to Frogger to Dragon’s Lair and finishing up with Tetris. It sounds great and if you look up something like “video games live medley” in YouTube, you can see it yourself.
Commercials. Nothing of note this time.
Sam introduces Don King, who will be making a boxing game for 2K Games next year. Don King? I haven’t heard that name since 1986. What a coincidence -- Don comes out dressed like and acting like he’s still in 1986. He said classic video games are like fights. Frogger was “The Toad vs. the Road”. So what sports award is he giving out? None. Since everyone loves to plug plastic guitars into their consoles, Spike created the Best Rhythm Game category. I can almost guarantee this category will be gone next year, after all the plastic guitar franchises run out of classic rock songs for their soundtracks and everyone’s bought 3 damn guitars for 3 different games.
Bizarre Nominee Video: Three guys sitting on a couch. One’s playing Guitar Hero, the other two are farting on him.
Winner: Rock Band
Ska Guy and Mega-Boobs come back up to accept. Ska Guy turns the mic over to Mega-Boobs, who is trashed. First, she thanks Spike for the Best Soundtrack award. Then she says that Slayer rocks and it’s good that Guitar Hero III got them. OK. Give Daddy back the mic.
Ska Guy presents Foo Fighters again and then the teleprompter guy leaves him hanging on which song they’re playing. Even I can recognize this song as “Learn To Fly”, and apparently so does the audience. This is the most responsive I’ve ever seen a crowd for a VGA musical act.
Going to commercial, there’s a SpikeTV ad for The Guy Movie. Every week they’ll play a movie Just For Guys. This week, it’s the world premiere of Edison Force. You know, that movie with explosions starring Morgan Freeman, Justin Timberlake, and LL Cool J. You know, that Direct-To-DVD movie sitting at your local Blockbuster with cover art disguised to look like a more recognizable movie.
Commercials. I’m not stopping now. Too close to the end…
Coming back, the King of Fans is still backstage with that damned camera. All right, set down the camera. Pose with a star. Get it on film. Otherwise, fuck you Burger King. And if it is just a regular cameraman, tell him this isn’t 1990’s MTV. He can stop tilting and jiggling the camera.
UFC president Dana White come to the stage for a VGA exclusive. Are you ready? The coaches for next season’s Ultimate Fighter are Forrest Griffin and Quinton “Rampage” Jackson. I know, I couldn’t believe it either. Hey, here’s a question. This is the Video Game Awards, right? If MMA and UFC is so popular, why isn’t there a video game? Recently, I’ve seen video games for Dancing With The Stars, Are You Smarter Than A Fifth Grader, and even High School Musical -- but no MMA game. Just sayin’. Anyway the two coaches are here to present a skit on World War 2. Kids playing WW2 games don’t even think WW2 existed. Did I mention that no recent popular shooter takes place during WW2. Great timing, Spike. Moving on to the Best Shooter Game.
Bizarre Nominee Video: A guy walks up to a guy on a date and uppercuts him into the sky. Like Super Smash Bros.-style launching him into the atmosphere. Shouldn’t this have been a grenade exploding?
Winner: Call of Duty 4
Two game developers accept and give a shoutout to their..clan..maybe. Look, a guy yells incoherently into the camera. You figure it out.
Rocket Ishmael and Vida Guerra start saying vague terms to promote the next trailer they’re going to show.
Rocket: “He’s a living weapon.” “He gets more powerful as you kill bad guys.”
Vida: “This game kicks ass……and I know a thing or two about ass.”
The trailer is actually for a game called Prototype, and this is honestly the first I’ve ever heard of it. From the looks of the trailer, that was their plan -- to wait for all the other sandbox games to come out, steal from them, and call it Prototype. The trailer starts with a man jumping of a tall building and safely falling below, ala Assassin’s Creed. Then, he starts going crazy on people and his surroundings like Crackdown. But all this takes place in a city like in the GTA4 trailers. Speaking of which, if this game comes out even close to when GTA4 finally comes out, good luck selling it.
Before the break, there is a SpikeTV ad hyping up their presentation of Kill Bill: Volume 2. Nevermind that this is the boring Kill Bill movie, or that I’ve seen this on TNT like three times in the couple of weeks before the SpikeTV awards aired.
Commercials. Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story. Ways to tell a comedy will be horrible:
1. It’s a parody of the Johnny Cash movie from a year ago.
2. Its main joke in the commercial is a kid lipsynching to an adult singing the blues.
3. The character’s name is Cox. Hope you like dick jokes.
4. It’s associated with Talladega Nights.
Back from commercials, Zachary Levi and Joshua Gomez from the show Chuck come up to show a trailer to Little Big Planet. They start “improvising” jokes about liking girl games. And by improvising, I mean blurting out phrases like they have some ADD version of Tourette’s.
Both guys: “You know…(yeah)...I like...(what?)...Barbie Horse Adventure, YES!...(yes)...yes.”
As for Little Big Planet itself, this game either sounds extremely revolutionary, or extremely lame depending on who you ask. Unfortunately, this trailer doesn’t do it any favors. It shows none of the creation aspects, just what looks like Tim Burton’s version of unwashed one-dimensional Miis on a pirate ship. And this is supposed to be a game?
Sam presents Hayden Christensen and Rachel Bilson from the new movie Jumper. If you stay tuned after the VGAs, they’ll be showing a sneak preview (spoiler alert -- it’s the same stuff as in the commercial from earlier). Hayden and Rachel are finally going to end this bitch by presenting the Game of the Year. Hayden still walks and talks and reads the teleprompter like a block of wood, just like in the Star Wars movies. And still someone thought to star him in a movie being a teleporting, bank robbing bad boy.
Anyway, there is no Bizarre Nominee Video this time. In a nice touch, as the 4 nominees are read, the Video Games Live orchestra plays music from those games. Without question, the best (and most recognizable) is the Bioshock theme, with its haunting violin instrumental. So, obviously...
Winner: Bioshock
It’s announced that Bioshock also won Best Xbox 360 Game, once again negating the new console-only categories. In fact, all 4 GOTY nominees were also the 4 Best Xbox 360 Game nominees, but we won’t get into that. Not to mention half of the nominees weren’t even released by the time they were nominated, but we won’t get into that either. The Bioshock developers come to the stage closely followed by the Gamecock guys (as you may have read, Gamecock is an up-and-coming game company that decided to steal Bioshock’s thunder, and then regret it later). The Gamecock guys are dressed in capes with rooster comb hats. A guy dressed like a Big Daddy comes out to the stage, but it’s too late. The Gamecock guys steal the mic. “Gamecock is for the children, and we will rise up some day.” The mic is given to a French man with an outrageous accent, who never lets Ken Levine speak.
And that’s it. Sam calls back out the body paint girls, who line up on stage. How dumb do you have to be to appear nearly-naked on a 3rd-rate cable channel’s video game eventomercial? Pretty dumb, because after repeatingly telling the girls to take a bow, only 2 respond and do it. Sam checks back with Steve Wiebe who obviously hasn’t gotten to the Donkey Kong kill screen. Could he have been able to after only two hours? Since he couldn’t get the kill screen, Sam stomps the pyro button again to “kill” the giant monitor on stage. Groan. And with that, the show ends. Unfortunately, the camera doesn’t pan back far enough from the stage to show the mass exodus that they usually show.
Overall, this was one of the most lackluster VGAs ever. And that’s saying a lot, thinking back to shows like the one Snoop Dogg hosted that was nothing but musical acts. Or even the first abomination with David Spade. But this one had a different feeling of failure. I think it was the inverse effect of how amazing the year 2007 was for video games. Many new properties were created, and many lived up to, if not exceeded, their hype: Bioshock, Mass Effect, Assassin’s Creed, The Orange Box, Uncharted, and Rock Band. And even many of the sequels released totally exceeded expectations: Super Mario Galaxy, Call of Duty 4, God of War 2 and to a lesser extent Halo 3 and Metroid Prime 3. What do all these games have in common? Many of them are excellent games that the mainstream public has never picked up on. None of them are a “Mortal Kombat” or “Grand Theft Auto”. Bobby Beerfart in charge of the SpikeTV awards can’t make a dick-and-fart-joke about a game like Portal. And if he did, the frat boys waiting to jerk off to Tila Tequila aren’t going to get it. And speaking of those fratboys, many, MANY are playing Guitar Hero while they or their girlfriends are playing a Wii. Or trying to find one. Once again, Bobby Beerfart can’t make a “sexless nerd” joke when all of his writers are trying to beat “Freebird” on Expert and his own mother just hit Pro status in Wii Bowling. And finally, let’s discuss no stars being there. That’s because all these stellar new games got by without almost any stars in them. Looking back on 2007, what stars could they have gotten besides Kristen Bell? The voice actors for the Simpsons and Naruto, that’s who. So while The SpikeTV Video Game Awards show was unmemorable for 2007, my heart gives a sigh of relief that it stunk not because it was a televised abortion, but because video games in general stepped up so much that sarcastic idiots outside the loop didn’t have a leg to stand on. Here’s hoping that the VGAs for 2008 are just as dull, or the advertisers learn that gamers can be over the age of 12, and that they should up their game beyond “Hey you nerds want to see boobies, don’t you?!” Catch ya all next year!
Maybe it was due to the lack of starpower at the awards show. Checking out the nominees on the NeoGAF forums about 2 months prior to the show, I noticed that Spike ditched all the “celebrity” awards (Best Male, Best Cybervixen, etc.) in favor of more credible awards, like Best Game for each system. Never mind that all the games nominated for Game of the Year were also nominated for Best Xbox 360 game, or that, once again, half the games nominated weren’t even released at the time of nomination (basically any game released after Bioshock). Some other changes happened to the program, but I’ll touch on those as we go. Let’s get started.
The show starts with a Viewer Discretion warning. The reason is due to the M-Rated games that will be shown during the awards. I couldn’t tell you one M-Rated thing I saw on this show, aside from clips of FPS guns and a guy jumping off a building. Maybe mentioning the ever-present body painted, naked women would have been too much of a spoiler.
The actual show starts with gymnastic guys jumping out of a helicopter and then climbing walls and doing flips to deliver the Monkeybone award to the stage at the Mandalay Bay hotel/casino in Las Vegas where the awards show is taking place. Finally, after all these years, the statue is declared the Vector Monkey. I still have no idea why this is the shape of the award and not a Space Invader like the first couple of years. The gymnasts arrive on stage and do flips, accompanied by Power Ranger type explosions. Keep in mind, the stage is designed to look like a combination arcade cabinet and air hockey table. The gymnasts give the statue to host Samuel L. Jackson who, not to be undone, stomp on a giant button that makes the stage explode with pyrotechnics.
Sam kicks off the event by showing off the award, which has gotten a five year anniversary makeover. Has this award show been running for 5 YEARS? I didn’t think Spike TV even existed for five years. Anyway, the makeover to the award was nothing special. Basically, since keeping it gold would give the award too much credibility, its been painted devil red and given anime eyes and a stubby cigarette. Once again, Spike TV, there have been literally thousands of items that symbolize video games. A mushroom. A question mark box. A Galaga ship. Or, call me crazy, a controller. Why Monkeybone? Why not… I don’t know…a golden spike?! But then, these awards just go to the highest bidder, so that goes back to the whole ‘no value’ thing.
A body painted model comes to the stage with the award show logo painted on her. Sam says this girl is an example of the trophy girls/envelopes for each winner tonight. Each girl will have the winner painted onto them. The girl then turns around and Sam points to her butt saying “And the winner is…”. I swear, I thought she was going to spread her ass cheeks and it was going to say Bi*shock.
Sam presents Steve Wiebe, the guy from the King of Kong documentary (which is probably the inspiration for the arcade stage design), who is working his way on an old Donkey Kong machine trying to get to the kill screen. I’d call bullshit on the kill screen, but Wikipedia and YouTube prove it exists, so what do I know?
Sam also presents Tommy Talarico and the Video Games Live orchestra that will only be used to play NES tunes to go to break.
Sam then starts the ever-dreaded monologue. As a gamer, I can honestly say video game jokes are painful. Especially monologue style jokes. Pain-ful! Sam says there’s a hidden scene in Manhunt 2 were you torture a man’s testicles with pliers. The code to see it is Up, Up, Down, Down, B, Aaaaaaaaaa-thosemynuts! PAIN! FUL! After a Dick Cheney joke, a Britney Spears joke, and a Detroit joke all fall flat, Sam tells a joke about the Beowulf movie’s motion-captured breasts. Somebody’s mom in the audience ROFLs over this, so Sam calls it quits with the jokes.
Two “stars” from the MTV “show” The Hills come out to the podium (shaped like a joystick -- nice touch). I refuse to identify these people as celebrities or even as people of value. They would like to present hot newcomer Kristen Bell. A montage is shown of her in Assassin’s Creed, and then the Hills girl tells her to come up and get her monkey. Apparently, she’s won for Hottest Newcomer.
Winner: Kristen Bell for Assassin’s Creed
Wait, so now there are no nominees? And where was the body paint girl with Kristen Bell’s name on her? This show is off to a great start by undoing the guidelines it just set up three minutes ago.
Magician Criss Angel is introduced and he starts talking about all the David Copperfield tricks he does here in Las Vegas. So who better to show the new trailer for Rainbow Six: Vegas 2? Actually, the trailer is just stock footage of gamblers mixed with stock footage of an assault team suiting up. The only gameplay shown is about two seconds of an assault team firing guns among rows of slot machines. So far I’m not sold. But if you are, the trailer reminds you to reserve your copy at GameStop.
Before going to break, the show remembers it’s an awards show and it has to show a list of the presenters. Reading the list of presenters, the sudden Kristen Bell award makes sense. She’s nearly the only damn star on the show this year. And -- SPOILER -- half of the list are the people accepting awards. Guess that’s what happens when you take away all of the masturbatory awards -- nobody shows up. Another sad note is that the announcer is never mentioned. Unlike in previous years when it was Funkmaster Flex and his annually untouched turntables, or Stewie Griffin, this year it’s just a generic SpikeTV/G4 announcer. Man, it’s really bad when they can’t even get a celebrity announcer.
Commercials. Three ads of note on this break.
Ad 1: Starting with this commercial break, Burger King shows an ad where one of their restaurants tells the customers they have stopped selling Whoppers. The customers then act disappointed and belligerent. I guess Burger King wants to tell us that, besides the Whopper, the rest of their menu is shit.
Ad 2: Verizon has finally completed their IPhone knockoff. Complete with a real keyboard, because the IPhone’s is shit. Good work, Verizon. Now you’re thinking like Sony.
Ad 3: There’s a movie coming out called Jumper, starring the shitty 20-something guy who played Anakin Skywalker. He can teleport like Nightcrawler in X-Men 2, except he’s played by a shitty actor. Samuel L. Jackson’s also in it as a blond detective trying to pin bank robberies on him. After XXX2 and Snakes on a Plane, seeing goofy-looking Sam Jackson in a trailer actually confirms that movie will be shit. Sorry, Sam.
Dave Navarro is announced to present Best Game Based on a Movie or TV Show. First, they show a strange skit about motion-capturing. An extremely bitter female executive tells a male executive not to make a game based on the Beowulf movie. The punchline is a guy covered in giant Styrofoam balls and the female exec saying “I hope a fish swims up your dickhole.” Anyway. Dave makes the body paint woman turn around to reveal the winner, even though she has Simpson faces drawn all over her body.
Winner: The Simpsons Game
Matt Groening and pals accept the award. Groening says he learned that EA execs aren’t big assholes like TV execs. Let’s see: TV execs have let The Simpsons stay on the air for almost 20 years, despite most seasons sucking. EA execs took one of the best possible story ideas for a game, let alone a Simpsons game, and botched it by having unplayable controls and a crappy camera. Yeah, I’ll take the EA guys any day over TV.
Tony Hawk presents the Foo Fighters to perform next. Unlike in previous years where bands just perform songs totally unrelated to video games, Tony justifies them being there by saying their music was in Tony Hawk’s Proving Ground. I’ll have to take his word on that. The Foo Fighters sing “The Pretender”. The only reason I know this is because their set goes on and on for about 10 minutes and the stage keeps blinking “Foo Fighters” and “The Pretender”.
Remember when I said I almost missed this show because I don’t watch SpikeTV. Well neither does anyone else, apparently. Right after the Foo Fighters number, they run an ad for the new season of Pros Vs. Joes on SpikeTV. Looks like their big star this year is Rocket Ishmael. Good luck with that, Spike. After that the show can finally go to break.
Commercials. Two ads really stand out in this break.
Ad 1: It’s a sad day when the URL democracy.com takes you to a Mountain Dew creation contest site. NO ONE involved in politics thought to outbid Pepsi for this?
Ad 2: Among all the Gamestop and Air Force ads, there was a serious birth control pill ad. Not to promote safe sex, but an “ask your doctor about this medicine” ad. Wha…huh?!
Coming back from break, the Burger King endorsed King of Fans is running loose backstage with a video camera. The announcer says we voted for this King of Fans. Well, sucks for that guy because they never show him on camera.
Sam says the time is finally upon us. Afro Samurai is coming to the Xbox 360! You remember Afro Samurai, don’t you? It was the Boondocks-meets-Aeon Flux cartoon voiced by Sam that they premiered last year. Well, even though I don’t remember the cartoon ever airing, it’s got a 360 game coming soon. From the looks of the trailer -- just shots of a bloody CGI-anime arm holding a sword and the bloody CGI-anime forehead of the samurai -- the game makers were also surprised this game was coming out.
Bobby Lee, the token asian from MadTV, is here to remind us MadTV still exists. He talks about losing at games and blaming controllers, followed by a skit of anonymous gamers confessing that they are douchebag players. Like one bored guy who keeps saying “headshot” to the guy next to him on the couch. Oh-kay. So, this is the FPS award? Nope. Let’s look at the nominees for Best Team Sports Game (aka the Madden Award). Before the nominees shown, and from this point on before the nominees, bizarre fake YouTube videos are shown that mostly have nothing to do with the nominees, or categories. For example, this video is 2 guys playing basketball and one gets decapitated. Moving on.
Winner: Madden NFL 08
This year Madden reclaims the Madden Award (last year NBA2K7 won it) so it’s good to see EA’s check to SpikeTV cleared this year. The EA guy accepting the award proclaims Madden 08 “the greatest sports game of all time.” If it’s so great, never make another one.
Rapper Chingy is introduced and talks about how the original Gran Turismo was sick and each year it gets sicker and sicker. Chingy apparently thinks Gran Turismo has cancer. He also says the game “has all the horsepower you need to check out the world premiere.” Anyway, it’s the usual GT trailer. Yes it looks photo-realistic, but in true Sony fashion, the jaggies start to give it away. That and all the low-res classic race cars they’ve plopped into it.
Verizon Wireless now presents the Hottest Wireless Games. Thankfully SpikeTV retired the Best Wireless Game after the bullshit last year. Last year, a cell phone game got an actual presented award, receiving more recognition that year than Zelda: Twilight Princess, New Super Mario Bros., Guitar Hero 2, or the Nintendo Wii. As far as these “hottest games” go, it’s your standard “we wish cell phones were Game Boys” fare -- generic poker, generic BMX racing, and a God of War game that was apparently ported from a Game Boy Color.
Commercials. Absolutely nobody must watch SpikeTV, because there’s an ad for the channel itself. The ad also has two guys pointing guns at each other, talking about having sex during a girl’s period. SpikeTV -- It’s like period sex.
We come back and the King of Fans is still loose with the camera. At no point does this person think to put himself on camera.
Stan Lee comes out screaming that he loves video games. You know, he used to just write Iron Man, but now the “geniuses at Sega” will get a chance to fuck up Iron Man, just like they fucked the rest of their IPs. Stan presents the trailer to “Iron Man...something or another.” Basically, this looks like your run-of-the-mill comic book/movie game. It’s got generic 3rd person action and some flying elements, because Iron Man can fly. In fact, the only thing that makes this game look shinier than other bargain bid fodder is due to Iron Man being made of metal.
Ralphie May, a fat comedian, is presented to tell video game jokes. Just kidding! Of course he’s going to tell fat jokes. Ralphie’s so fat he looks like a loaf of bread when he lays in the tub. Sigh. Can’t fat comedians tell ANY other jokes? Ralphie runs out of fat jokes so he presents some unknown actor from that 01-18-08 Cloverfield movie. After Ralphie screws up his “we look like the number 10” joke (skinny guy standing on the wrong side), it’s on to the nominees for Best Individual Sports Game (aka the Tony Hawk Award).
Bizarre Nominee Video: A mom catches a 20-something guy in the bathroom sounding like he’s jerking off. He’s playing paddleball.
Winner: skate.
A group of people come up, who I guess were the “professional” skaters in the game. The big black guy goes out of his way to state that he is “Big Black”, not “Big Boi”. Sure thing. I’ll get it right next time I see you.
Kurt Angle and his wife come out to present the gameplay trailer for the TNA Impact wrestling game. They call Samoa Joe a girl and then roll the trailer. It’s your standard wrestling game -- footage from the show, CGI intros and generic moves inside the ring. No special matches are shown, and it doesn’t even look like the roster is that full. There are no women and no recent WWE castoffs that TNA has sucked up. Overall, pretty blah for a game that’s basically been in development since before Kurt Angle, his wife, or probably Samoa Joe was hired by TNA.
Next is a special edition of A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila. For those who don’t encounter MySpace or MTV, let me say that Tila Tequila was one of the first MySpace whores and MTV, hoping to secure the kids who live and breathe MySpace, hired Tila to run all over the network with her bisexual Bachelorette-style show. Since MTV = Viacom = SpikeTV, that’s why she’s here.
Tila is trying to decide which bachelor to choice -- it’s a Wii, a Xbox 360, and a PS3 on display stands. This is one of the unintentionally funniest parts of the show, hands down. Tila will say an incoherent, yet flirty line to one of the machines, and they’ll show a 2-second shot of the console as a reaction shot. Something like this…
Tila: “Xbox 360. Your name says it all, and we even have all the same parts.”
Shot of an unplugged Xbox 360 on a stand.
Tila eventually decides to choose them all, confessing that she’s “tri-game-ual”. Remember kids, your personal sexuality is a joke, especially if it’s marketable. With that out of the way, Tila presents the “earlier winners from tonight.” Basically this is the annual montage of awards that they didn’t want to present on stage. I like to call them the Non-Award Awards.
Bizarre Nominee Video: Reverse footage of a man building a house of cards.
Best Role Playing Game: Mass Effect
Best Handheld Game: Zelda: Phantom Hourglass
Best PS3 Game: Ratchet and Clank Future: Tools of Destruction
Why create individual console awards and then not focus on them?
Best Graphics: Crysis
Best Action Game/Best Wii Game: Super Mario Galaxy
As usual, Nintendo is snubbed from receiving an award, despite having the most successful hardware.
Best Driving Game: DiRT
Pontiac finally gave up sponsoring this category. So much for their Gamers That Like To Buy High-End Cars demographic.
Best PC Game / Breakthrough Technology: The Orange Box
Even though these awards were given “earlier tonight”, they cut back to trophy girls placing awards on tables and the people at the tables looking disappointed. So what did we learn from those awards? That RPGs, Nintendo, the PS3, and the PC are all bullshit.
Before break they show Chingy playing Wii Bowling against Team USA (Pro-gamers going to some worldwide event) and sucking horribly. Chingy, two clicks to the right and swing the Wiimote like your going to throw it at the ceiling. Guaranteed strike every time.
Commercials. During this break, there is a Sneak Peek at I Am Legend. Will Smith: “There’s no safe place for the last man on Earth if someone was out to get you.” First of all, if you’re the last man alive, who’s coming to get you? And second, you would literally have millions of safe places if you were the last man alive. OK, picture this. You’re the only person left in your town (no matter how big or small). Now think of a secure place to hide, or set up camp. I could probably name a hundred in my town just off the top of my head.
Coming back, Sam is now lounging on the stage steps and introduces Brian Po-something from the Sarah Silverman show. Brian has four hobbies. “I play video games, I smoke pot, I masturbate, and I cry.” A gay Hot Topic employee in the crowd ROFLs over that. Brian says since he plays games, he can say the n-word -- nerd. After that joke bombs, we get to the punchline. It’s a Photoshop picture of him naked in a cubicle with a piece of pizza over his dick. I’ll never get male nudity jokes. Let’s see who won Best Studio of the Year.
Bizarre Nominee Video: A man uses a Plug-and-Play game joystick to clone a woman.
Winner: Harmonix for Rock Band
A guy from a ska band and a huge-breasted woman come up to accept. The best part is the camera catching Brian checking out the woman and raising his eyebrows. The two Harmonix guys then show a video of the ENTIRE staff at Harmonix rocking out to say thanks for the award.
Tia Carrera comes out, looking about 10 years past whatever Wayne’s World/True Lies hotness you may recall her having. She’s here to present a performance by Kid Rock. Remember a couple of years ago, after seeing Motley Crue and Def Lepard, I guessed Poison was going to be the next retro act? Nope. It’s Kid Rock. Thankfully, Kid has abandoned his rap-rock sound, and recent country music for just plain rock. In fact, he sounds like David Lee Roth mixed with Steven Tyler of Aerosmith. Not that anyone notices. In true VGA fashion, only a handful of people in the crowd seem to be rocking out. The rest are staring at the dancing girls in the aisles. David Lee Tyler sings about a girl who is “so hooooooaaaaaaaah!” that he’ll “wanna f___ _ou like I’m never gonna see you again.” Just to make sure he’s listed as the retro band, halfway through the song, for no reason, he starts singing the “Slow ride…take it easy” song, and then goes back to the “so hoooooooaaaaaaah” one.
Before the break, there’s a Spike TV ad for TNA Impact. Now with two hours! Because the demand was so great. Or maybe they need to fill more time on the channel since every other Spike program besides UFC or CSI gets shitcanned.
Commercials. Three more noticeable commercials:
Ad 1: This is my most hated commercial to date. A man goes throughout his house giving his wife and two kids cell phones with different features because they are his “number one.” Yes, he tells all 3 that they are his #1 family member. He then walks outside and whips out the best cell phone. “Saved the best for numero uno.” He walks by the Verizon guy and says “Oh yeah” like he’s admitting he’s that big of a dick. The Verizon guy shrugs it off because dick money pays the same. Keep in mind, this ad plays constantly in my city, where Verizon’s had a monopoly for many years, and you can see how I can hate this commercial.
Ad 2: A kid doesn’t like what drugs are doing to his friend. To help him realize this, the kid wheels a full-length mirror from his house to the school lunchroom. He sets the mirror up in front of his friend, who appears to have no ill effects from taking drugs. Yeah, that’ll keep the kids off of the stuff. Wait, didn’t a presenter just confess to doing drugs as a joke?
Coming back, Tag Deodorant has resurrected Hot Girls with Cheat Codes. A girl in a Tag shirt says to type “sweetstuff” into Tony Hawk’s Proving Ground to unlock all the items for your crib. This is a skating game, right? She says more babes reading codes are on SpikeTV’s website. No thanks. I can think of shitloads of better places to find porn and tips online.
Patton Oswalt comes out to present the Most Addictive Video Game Fueled by Dew. He jumps on the pyro button that Sam used earlier and nothing happens. Patton: “It must only work if you’re black and talented.” Then he says gamers buy adult diapers so they don’t have to pause Bioshock. Sure.
Bizarre Nominee Video: A kid swirling his CGI eyes.
Before Halo 3 wins (since there was a Halo 3-themed Mountain Dew flavor this year), Patton reminds us that this is the only award voted on by the gamers. Or by Mountain Dew ad execs. Wait, he just admitted the other awards are rigged.
Winner: Halo 3
Nice camel toe on the body paint girl, by the way. Two nervous Bungie guys accept and present a Red vs. Blue skit promoting the new DLC maps. The Bungie guys should have come up drinking the Halo 3 Mountain Dew to prove that enabling “voting” on a sponsored award is bullshit.
Sam says he’s all for video games, but since this is an election year they have to be unbiased and give time to opposing viewpoints. Unless a video game is running for congress, that doesn’t really make sense, but I see where they’re going. A video is shown linking past evil-doers to video gamers. Everyone from John Wilkes Booth to Kim Jong Il played violent video games. Paid for by friends of Jackie Thompson. We still care about Terrorist Jackie Thompson? Wasn’t he disbarred?
Kristen Bell presents the trailer for the new game Borderlands. I’ve heard nothing about this game, and the trailer doesn’t offer much info either. It’s all CGI and no gameplay. A scarred women says you’ll never find the treasure, but along the way you’ll see futuristic bikers, alien dinosaurs, and you’ll need lots of guns. I’m guessing this will be an action RPG that wished it came out before Mass Effect (which it was copying).
Geoff Keighley (whose SpikeTV just got canned so he can go back to gametrailers.com) and Steve Wiebe are still at the Donkey Kong machine. Still no kill screen, of course. They present a medley performed by Video Games Live, with Tommy Talarico on electric guitar. It’s a retro number, going from Space Invaders to Frogger to Dragon’s Lair and finishing up with Tetris. It sounds great and if you look up something like “video games live medley” in YouTube, you can see it yourself.
Commercials. Nothing of note this time.
Sam introduces Don King, who will be making a boxing game for 2K Games next year. Don King? I haven’t heard that name since 1986. What a coincidence -- Don comes out dressed like and acting like he’s still in 1986. He said classic video games are like fights. Frogger was “The Toad vs. the Road”. So what sports award is he giving out? None. Since everyone loves to plug plastic guitars into their consoles, Spike created the Best Rhythm Game category. I can almost guarantee this category will be gone next year, after all the plastic guitar franchises run out of classic rock songs for their soundtracks and everyone’s bought 3 damn guitars for 3 different games.
Bizarre Nominee Video: Three guys sitting on a couch. One’s playing Guitar Hero, the other two are farting on him.
Winner: Rock Band
Ska Guy and Mega-Boobs come back up to accept. Ska Guy turns the mic over to Mega-Boobs, who is trashed. First, she thanks Spike for the Best Soundtrack award. Then she says that Slayer rocks and it’s good that Guitar Hero III got them. OK. Give Daddy back the mic.
Ska Guy presents Foo Fighters again and then the teleprompter guy leaves him hanging on which song they’re playing. Even I can recognize this song as “Learn To Fly”, and apparently so does the audience. This is the most responsive I’ve ever seen a crowd for a VGA musical act.
Going to commercial, there’s a SpikeTV ad for The Guy Movie. Every week they’ll play a movie Just For Guys. This week, it’s the world premiere of Edison Force. You know, that movie with explosions starring Morgan Freeman, Justin Timberlake, and LL Cool J. You know, that Direct-To-DVD movie sitting at your local Blockbuster with cover art disguised to look like a more recognizable movie.
Commercials. I’m not stopping now. Too close to the end…
Coming back, the King of Fans is still backstage with that damned camera. All right, set down the camera. Pose with a star. Get it on film. Otherwise, fuck you Burger King. And if it is just a regular cameraman, tell him this isn’t 1990’s MTV. He can stop tilting and jiggling the camera.
UFC president Dana White come to the stage for a VGA exclusive. Are you ready? The coaches for next season’s Ultimate Fighter are Forrest Griffin and Quinton “Rampage” Jackson. I know, I couldn’t believe it either. Hey, here’s a question. This is the Video Game Awards, right? If MMA and UFC is so popular, why isn’t there a video game? Recently, I’ve seen video games for Dancing With The Stars, Are You Smarter Than A Fifth Grader, and even High School Musical -- but no MMA game. Just sayin’. Anyway the two coaches are here to present a skit on World War 2. Kids playing WW2 games don’t even think WW2 existed. Did I mention that no recent popular shooter takes place during WW2. Great timing, Spike. Moving on to the Best Shooter Game.
Bizarre Nominee Video: A guy walks up to a guy on a date and uppercuts him into the sky. Like Super Smash Bros.-style launching him into the atmosphere. Shouldn’t this have been a grenade exploding?
Winner: Call of Duty 4
Two game developers accept and give a shoutout to their..clan..maybe. Look, a guy yells incoherently into the camera. You figure it out.
Rocket Ishmael and Vida Guerra start saying vague terms to promote the next trailer they’re going to show.
Rocket: “He’s a living weapon.” “He gets more powerful as you kill bad guys.”
Vida: “This game kicks ass……and I know a thing or two about ass.”
The trailer is actually for a game called Prototype, and this is honestly the first I’ve ever heard of it. From the looks of the trailer, that was their plan -- to wait for all the other sandbox games to come out, steal from them, and call it Prototype. The trailer starts with a man jumping of a tall building and safely falling below, ala Assassin’s Creed. Then, he starts going crazy on people and his surroundings like Crackdown. But all this takes place in a city like in the GTA4 trailers. Speaking of which, if this game comes out even close to when GTA4 finally comes out, good luck selling it.
Before the break, there is a SpikeTV ad hyping up their presentation of Kill Bill: Volume 2. Nevermind that this is the boring Kill Bill movie, or that I’ve seen this on TNT like three times in the couple of weeks before the SpikeTV awards aired.
Commercials. Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story. Ways to tell a comedy will be horrible:
1. It’s a parody of the Johnny Cash movie from a year ago.
2. Its main joke in the commercial is a kid lipsynching to an adult singing the blues.
3. The character’s name is Cox. Hope you like dick jokes.
4. It’s associated with Talladega Nights.
Back from commercials, Zachary Levi and Joshua Gomez from the show Chuck come up to show a trailer to Little Big Planet. They start “improvising” jokes about liking girl games. And by improvising, I mean blurting out phrases like they have some ADD version of Tourette’s.
Both guys: “You know…(yeah)...I like...(what?)...Barbie Horse Adventure, YES!...(yes)...yes.”
As for Little Big Planet itself, this game either sounds extremely revolutionary, or extremely lame depending on who you ask. Unfortunately, this trailer doesn’t do it any favors. It shows none of the creation aspects, just what looks like Tim Burton’s version of unwashed one-dimensional Miis on a pirate ship. And this is supposed to be a game?
Sam presents Hayden Christensen and Rachel Bilson from the new movie Jumper. If you stay tuned after the VGAs, they’ll be showing a sneak preview (spoiler alert -- it’s the same stuff as in the commercial from earlier). Hayden and Rachel are finally going to end this bitch by presenting the Game of the Year. Hayden still walks and talks and reads the teleprompter like a block of wood, just like in the Star Wars movies. And still someone thought to star him in a movie being a teleporting, bank robbing bad boy.
Anyway, there is no Bizarre Nominee Video this time. In a nice touch, as the 4 nominees are read, the Video Games Live orchestra plays music from those games. Without question, the best (and most recognizable) is the Bioshock theme, with its haunting violin instrumental. So, obviously...
Winner: Bioshock
It’s announced that Bioshock also won Best Xbox 360 Game, once again negating the new console-only categories. In fact, all 4 GOTY nominees were also the 4 Best Xbox 360 Game nominees, but we won’t get into that. Not to mention half of the nominees weren’t even released by the time they were nominated, but we won’t get into that either. The Bioshock developers come to the stage closely followed by the Gamecock guys (as you may have read, Gamecock is an up-and-coming game company that decided to steal Bioshock’s thunder, and then regret it later). The Gamecock guys are dressed in capes with rooster comb hats. A guy dressed like a Big Daddy comes out to the stage, but it’s too late. The Gamecock guys steal the mic. “Gamecock is for the children, and we will rise up some day.” The mic is given to a French man with an outrageous accent, who never lets Ken Levine speak.
And that’s it. Sam calls back out the body paint girls, who line up on stage. How dumb do you have to be to appear nearly-naked on a 3rd-rate cable channel’s video game eventomercial? Pretty dumb, because after repeatingly telling the girls to take a bow, only 2 respond and do it. Sam checks back with Steve Wiebe who obviously hasn’t gotten to the Donkey Kong kill screen. Could he have been able to after only two hours? Since he couldn’t get the kill screen, Sam stomps the pyro button again to “kill” the giant monitor on stage. Groan. And with that, the show ends. Unfortunately, the camera doesn’t pan back far enough from the stage to show the mass exodus that they usually show.
Overall, this was one of the most lackluster VGAs ever. And that’s saying a lot, thinking back to shows like the one Snoop Dogg hosted that was nothing but musical acts. Or even the first abomination with David Spade. But this one had a different feeling of failure. I think it was the inverse effect of how amazing the year 2007 was for video games. Many new properties were created, and many lived up to, if not exceeded, their hype: Bioshock, Mass Effect, Assassin’s Creed, The Orange Box, Uncharted, and Rock Band. And even many of the sequels released totally exceeded expectations: Super Mario Galaxy, Call of Duty 4, God of War 2 and to a lesser extent Halo 3 and Metroid Prime 3. What do all these games have in common? Many of them are excellent games that the mainstream public has never picked up on. None of them are a “Mortal Kombat” or “Grand Theft Auto”. Bobby Beerfart in charge of the SpikeTV awards can’t make a dick-and-fart-joke about a game like Portal. And if he did, the frat boys waiting to jerk off to Tila Tequila aren’t going to get it. And speaking of those fratboys, many, MANY are playing Guitar Hero while they or their girlfriends are playing a Wii. Or trying to find one. Once again, Bobby Beerfart can’t make a “sexless nerd” joke when all of his writers are trying to beat “Freebird” on Expert and his own mother just hit Pro status in Wii Bowling. And finally, let’s discuss no stars being there. That’s because all these stellar new games got by without almost any stars in them. Looking back on 2007, what stars could they have gotten besides Kristen Bell? The voice actors for the Simpsons and Naruto, that’s who. So while The SpikeTV Video Game Awards show was unmemorable for 2007, my heart gives a sigh of relief that it stunk not because it was a televised abortion, but because video games in general stepped up so much that sarcastic idiots outside the loop didn’t have a leg to stand on. Here’s hoping that the VGAs for 2008 are just as dull, or the advertisers learn that gamers can be over the age of 12, and that they should up their game beyond “Hey you nerds want to see boobies, don’t you?!” Catch ya all next year!
Thursday, December 3, 2009
2006 Spike TV Video Game Awards Recap
It’s that time of year again. Time for the annual Spike TV Video Game Awards show. Each year, I both look forward to this show, and actually dread that it will return. To be honest, the first time I see an ad promoting this for another year, I get sick to my stomach. Mostly because I use this show as a barometer for how gaming and the gaming community is viewed, and I know it’s not at a socially-acceptable point yet. But, more on that later. Here we go...
The show kicks off with Tenacious D performing a song about heavy metal surviving all genres of music. This would explain why you hear so much heavy metal on the radio. They also have a guy in a big gray, plastic knight suit that looks like something from GWAR. He dances around pretending to smite the mentioned genres. Keep in mind that during this, the audience is sitting completely still, like they’re at some bad motivational seminar. Tenacious D come out to dance with GWAR Guy and pyro goes off as fake cheering is added in.
Introduction. Tonight we are “live from the Gaming Center” (no location is given). The “celebs” in attendance tonight seem pretty scarce and fairly unknown (you’ll see as the night goes on). The announcer this year is Stewie Griffin, which further proves that Funkmaster Flex and his neglected turntables are long gone. And, as with last year, the host is Samuel L. Jackson.
Sam is actually sitting backstage, lighting a cigar with money and says “The Video Game Awards. Easiest money in show business.” Suddenly, a guy dressed like a kidney holding a fairy wand (?!) storms into his dressing room. He does an “All your base are” joke and dies. Not looking good so far. Sam goes into first-person mode and walks into the hall, basically running into the Game of the Year nominees. The GRAW soldiers got hurt waiting for a PS3. A guy in a bad wizard costume gives Sam the Okami paintbrush and gets humped by a “wolf” (actual husky dog). He gets a Gears of War gun, in name alone. And then a guy comes out of the bathroom telling him to kill the Gamers of Oblivion. Sam comes out on stage to discover these people are actually about 30 college kids playing “Wayward Son” on Guitar Hero guitars.
Sam: “Kansas? That’s the anthem of the Gamers of Oblivion?!”
Sam dispatches all the stuntman guitar players and zaps all the slackers with wires attached to them into the background. The best one is when Sam lobs a grenade into the audience and an obvious mannequin, surrounded by obvious cardboard cutouts in seats, explodes.
The audience goes mildly nuts, and Sam starts his monologue. Gamers-need-sex joke, gamers-jerk-off joke, cell phone game joke (tonight is the Night of the Cell Phone Game -- more later), Madden Curse joke (it came true this year), Hot Coffee joke (still?), and a Bully gay kissing joke. But Sam really wants to address gamer stereotypes. Chubby nerdy guy stands up and a hot girl wants him. The mayor from Spin City (?!) stands up and basically says he’s Terrorist Jackie Thompson. He says he only exploits video games to scare soccer moms for his own personal gain. Sam: “And that’s what America is all about!” Finally, Kidney Guy and Tony Hawk the Barbarian stand up. Apparently, they’re cosplayers and proud of it. The nerd’s hot girl wants them, so Sam picks them as the “trophy girls”. But...shouldn’t he have picked...oh, never mind.
50 Cent comes out to present the Best Performance by a Human Female. If you recall last year, he mumbled and stumbled his way through a Lara Croft joke so bad, I wondered why anyone would put him in a movie (which he was promoting at the time). This year was even better. So much better that I actually wrote down exactly what he said on stage.
50: “Yeah...whassup? I seen a little...a lotta women performance. A lotta sports and things this year. So I know things...are too about -- check this out -- this is what we’re gonna do, alright? We’re gonna get into the Best...Human Female...in a videogame.”
Winner: Vida Guerra for Scarface (which 50 pronounces Guerrera)
Vida come up and lets us know that she got changed in 2 minutes today. Oh, and thanks for the award. And you wonder why she’s mostly on the Internet.
It should also be noted that, once again, the award is a gold Monkeybone statue wearing a crown. I still don’t get that. It’s not even the Spike TV logo. But, changed this year, the winner’s envelope is in a spiked bracelet the presenter wears. A little weird, but I guess they didn’t want any more mildly-retarded boxers fumbling with DVD cases used as envelopes.
Commercials. Nothing of note (just yet).
Coming back from break, Stewie (always offscreen) talks shit about not wanting to see Snakes on a Plane. Sam: “I will hit a baby.”
Rachel Leigh Cook and Seth Green come out to present the Best Game Based on a Movie or TV Show. As movie stars, they start to apologize for movies based on video games. You can tell that gamers don’t write for this show because the second movie they name is the original Mortal Kombat, which most gamers will tell you is about the best videogame movie that ever came out.
Winner: Lego Star Wars 2
A guy from Traveler’s Tales accepts with a list of ‘thank you’s. I argue that this was shown to prove that family games can win too. I mean, it’s not like they’re gonna acknowledge Nintendo any time soon. Nintendo’s just not cool enough.
Daniel Day Kim from Lost comes out to show a trailer for Bioshock. It looks like FEAR (creepy kids running around) mixed with Half-Life 2 (monsters and gravity gun) set in an underwater bunker.
Maria Menudos-or-whatever comes out, giggling and acting goofy like last year. She’s here to celebrate an unsung hero in the gaming industry -- the motion-capture actor. If you guessed this skit is about a fat guy acting stupid in a blue ping-pong suit, you’re absolutely right. As they go to commercial, they pan to show the dead crowd.
But before commercials, they show scenes from Rape King (aka Sneak King) and show a poll saying it’s a 50/50 split on who gamers would want to “wine and dine” between Cortana from Halo and Bloodrayne. Way to stay timely, Burger King. Actually, they show Rape King and ask a stupid question during all the breaks, so they just should have been rape questions. “Who would be a better rapist? Sam Fisher or Solid Snake? Go to BK.com now!”
Commercials. An ad shows for Black Christmas, a sorority slasher film that’s being released on Christmas Day. Since it’s a week and a half before Christmas, and this is the first I’m hearing about it, it’s gotta be good.
Brian the Dog presents Tila Tequila and Seth MacFarlane. Gee, how did they get him? Tila is deemed “the Queen of MySpace”, which to me is like saying you have the shiniest helmet on the short bus. They’re here to present the Best Wireless Game. Now, everyone knows cellphone games are shit if they aren’t like Snake, Tetris, or a card game. And this category has always been lumped in with other “who cares” awards in all the past years, so why is this being presented this year? Because it’s sponsored by Verizon Wireless. The same company that’s running those Chocolate phone ads that they’ve been showing every commercial break.
Anyway, Seth makes a good joke by asking if any these games would work on his phone, and then he pulls out the Saved By the Bell brick cell phone.
Winner: SWAT Force
A foreign-sounding lady, who I guess is from SWAT’s accounting department, accepts the award.
Sam comes out to address a very important subject -- video game violence. From your bitchy girlfriend LOL!! He got an email on his teleprompter from a guy who got his Xbox 360 smashed by a bitchy girlfriend. They accompany this with a picture of a fat guy holding a still intact 360 and hard drive (?!). Wait...is that the same guy as the fat motion-capture guy? I think it is. Anyway, Sam breaks it down in Operation-style terms -- guys have an Awesome Lobe in their brain, girls have a Complain-abellum. They then show a couple wired for brainwaves -- one’s a guy playing a game, and the other is his bitchy girlfriend. You can guess the rest.
Now, I’m no Dr. Flavin, but I’ll break it down as a gamer in a very stable relationship. Guys who are gamers relax by playing games. Girls like to relax by talking about stuff. Take this into consideration and play your cards right, or pick your battles. And seriously, “Awesome Lobe”? How old are we?
Emmanuel Vaugier and Tony Hawk come out to present the award for Best Supporting Male Performance. Is it by a human? Ooh, maybe not. They didn’t say. Tony botches another “All your base are belong to us” joke. I really think the writers just got back from 1996.
Winner: James Gandolfini for the Sopranos game
James is standing in his kitchen, and gives his acceptance speech like he’s leaving a message on an answering machine. It really sounds like “I can’t be there right now...thanks for the award...AndI’llseeyalaterbye.”
Commercials. Now I’m starting to notice a trend, and I see who’s really running the show. In order, the ads are for: Pontiac (an annual sponsor), Mountain Dew’s energy drink (they sponsor an award), the Air Force, Verizon’s Chocolate phone (cell phone award), Sony (Final Fantasy 12), and then local/Spike ads.
Yellowcard comes out to present the award for Studio of the Year. This used to be the Best Game Designer award in the past, so I guess a bunch of level editors pouted until they changed it. “How did only Jason win for Halo 2? I designed the repetitive Library level.” One Yellowcard guy says he should make a game, and then describes Minesweeper. I bet the accounting lady from SWAT Force was rolling in the aisles over that one.
Winner: Epic Games for Gears of War
Cliffy B. (announced by his full name) and 2 other guys come up to accept. They seem genuinely thankful, and point out that they make these killer Unreal engines with a staff of only 80 people. A dig at EA? You decide.
UFC President Dana White and Joe Rogan (who announces for UFC) come out to show the trailer for GRAW 2. Joe cracks up Dana by reading his cue cards like a bad infomercial. “Why yes...I do, Dana.” Overall, the trailer is all CGI, so it’s impossible to tell what the game is like, except that it looks like it’s in a Black Hawk Down-type setting.
Two cops from the upcoming Reno 911 movie (they’re making a movie?!) come out to talk about a GTA-style game that is pro-cops. The funniest part is that it looks like one guy is yelling at a tape measurer, but I guess they’re supposed to be playing the game on a cell phone. They’re here to show the winners of the awards that they don’t want to present to actual people. Keep in mind, these are sponsored by Blahblahblah Gum, the gum that blahblahblahblahblah.
Favorite Classic Game presented by Blah Blah Gum: Pac-Man
Must have been some poll on their website.
Critic’s Choice: Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess
This is one of the bones they’re throwing to Nintendo. Obviously, because most critics actually didn’t rate it too high.
Best Fighting Game: Mortal Kombat Armageddon
Arm-a-getting’ it when it hits the clearance bin.
Best Shooter Game: Gears of War
Best Graphics: Gears of War
Best Handheld Game: New Super Mario Bros.
It’s a sad day when a cell phone game gets more attention than this new portable classic.
Best Role Playing Game: Oblivion
Best PC Game: Company of Heroes
I’m glad they won something, since they were nominated for everything.
Best Multiplayer Game: Gears of War
I’ll talk more about this list at the end, but I’ll just say that most of these categories are more deserving of public attention than most I’ve seen presented so far.
Commercials. Coming Soon: Rocky 2006 - Let’s Kill Off Rocky
Sam comes back talking about online multiplayer games like “WOW Xbox Live.” In fact, he’s hooked up with someone special he’s meeting for the first time tonight. Yep, it’s a dude. In fact, I think it’s the fat motion-capture guy again. What is he, the producer or something? The skit is saved, although, when Sam asks the guys in the booth to edit out what happened, but they say it’s already on YouTube. A picture comes up, looking like the video is actually on YouTube, entitled “SAM JACKSON PWNED!”
Eva Mendes comes out to present the award for Best Cast. This is what awards like Best RPG are getting snubbed for?! She says some games have bad casts like the new Mortal Kombat game -- she shows a picture of the 4 women from The View’s heads on MK fighters. The audience groans, so Eva just barrels through the joke and moves along.
Winner: Family Guy the Game
Obviously. Between Seth MacFarlane and Seth Green, we’ve seen 90% of the cast so far tonight. Both Seths accept, and MacFarlane goes through some voices, including the dog’s voice. Oh wait, that’s his real voice.
Michael Irvin and Xhibit come out carrying Wiimotes. If this leads to a joke about “my black Wii remote is five times bigger”, I’m turning this show off. Instead, Irvin acts like he’s going to play Wii Golf and just chucks the remote at the camera. And still it looked more believable than most of the videos on YouTube. They’re here to present the award for Best Individual Sports Game.
Winner: Tony Hawk Project 8
I’m renaming this the Tony Hawk Award, because he gives essentially the same damn speech from last year. “New consoles, new games.” “You keep buyin’ ‘em, we’ll keep makin’ ‘em.”
Sam shows up to preview his new cartoon on Spike named “Afro Samurai”. Basically, it looks like the makers of The Boondocks and Aeon Flux got together and made an anime.
Commercials. Coming up, some of the stars from “Heros”. Guys, even my spell-check picked up on that one. Or you could just look it up in any TV listing.
Coming back, AFI performs a song that sounds like a whinier version of “Move Along”. If this is emo, I want no part of it. Seriously, what’s the appeal of dressing gay-goth and whining like a bitch?
As Sam presents the next award presenters, people have started to throw around the standups from the mannequin skit. This isn’t looking good.
TNA wrestler Kurt Angle and the host of Spike’s Game Head show come out to show some previews. First of all, if you’re wondering why Angle is in TNA, it’s because he’s a mentally, physically, and emotionally broken man who’s addicted to pain killers, and TNA just wants to get ex-WWE guys, no matter what their condition. And also, Game Head is a fairly decent show, and least compared to G4’s general lack of game coverage. Anyway, here are the games and my opinions on them:
TNA Impact (wrestling game) -- just CGI entrances so far
John Woo Presents Stranglehold -- imagine Max Payne 2006
Metal Gear Solid 4 -- same CGI clips you’ve seen before
EA’s Army of Two -- looks like Gears of War (using cover and teamwork), minus the good and fun stuff.
The Reno 911 cops are back out to present more non-award awards. One cop “peed a little” when the other draws a Nerf gun at her. If stuff like this is in the movie, it should be high-larious.
Cybervixen of the Year: Alyx Vance from Half-Life 2: Episode 1
They show all non-sexy shots of her, so it makes sense.
Best Original Score: Oblivion
Best Military Game: Company of Heroes
Best Driving Game: Xbox 360 Burnout Revenge
No longer presented by Pontiac, although they’re a sponsor. Curious.
Best Performance by a Human Male: Patrick Stewart for Oblivion
Guess they couldn’t get him, or anyone else to accept the award.
Best Supporting Female Performance: Rachel Leigh Cook for Kingdom Hearts 2
OK, she’s in attendance so give her the award. On second though, don’t. She played Tifa in the game and, including if you beat Sephiroth, she has like 6 lines in the whole game. Four being “Grrr. Where’s Cloud?!!”
Best Soundtrack: Guitar Hero 2
Breakthrough Technology: the Nintendo Wii
The last of Nintendo’s thrown bones tonight.
Best Action Game: Dead Rising
Commercials. Stewie says to go to Gametrailers.com to see the previews they’ve shown tonight. As if the people who’ve wanted to see those certain trailers haven’t been there already.
When we return, Sam wants to talk about what to do with your old consoles. You could give them to a third-world country. A picture is shown of a mildly-Asian child eating a giant Atari cartridge. Oh-kay. Or you could do this...and out comes the Genesis equivalent of SNES Chick. Actually, she’s just got a red bikini on with two controllers glued on the top, and a slim-lined Genesis glued to the bottom. Sadly, Sam doesn’t do a humping or blowing into her slot joke. Instead it’s Token Fat Guy running up in a speedo with controllers on it. Thankfully, there is no erect joystick or Wiimote glued to the front. The best part is, as the girl is leaving, Sam genuinely looks like he’s trying to regain his concentration.
Tyrese and Method Man present the Best Song award. As usual, Method Man doesn’t want to be there.
Tyrese: “And the winner is...(tries to get off bracelet)
Method Man: “.....deez nuts.”
LOLOLOLOL!!! (Run around stage)
Winner: Yellowcard - Lights and Sound for 360 Burnout Revenge
Thankfully, one tradition remains intact as Yellowcard does not get to perform their winning song. Come on. It’s can’t be any worse than AFI whining for 5 minutes.
Hayden Panatasomething (she plays Wolverine on Heroes) is out to present the award for the Most Addictive Game Fueled by Mountain Dew game. She must also have the power to suck the life out of a crowd, because even her adjusting her mid-pubescent boobs can’t draw a reaction from this crowd.
Winner: Oblivion
Two guys from Bethesda, who look like they would work on a game like Oblivion, come up to accept the award. You know, I just got to thinking...are they saying Mountain Dew is addicting, based on the award name? Is that a good thing?
Commercials. Coming up next is the WOW Burning Crusade preview they’ve been teasing all night. And yes, another sexless nerd joke is made. And yes, it’s being directed at the players of one of the most successful mainstream games in history.
Sam brings out Sarah Silverman, who is here to berate gamers as being nerdy, sexless, and wasting their time. At about the point where she says the government should ship Playstations to Africa because “if it can stop you guys from getting laid, we’ll wipe out the AIDS epidemic over there”, she starts to get boos. The set ends rather backhandedly, and you can tell there’s a feeling of disdain in the air.
Now I’m not taking this personally (my son will prove I’ve probably seen a woman before), and I know she’s there because she’s popular and likes to stir up shit, but I find it interesting that they make her the icing on the “You guys are dorks” cake. I mean, you never see them making fun of those statistic-spewing fantasy football fucks on the ESPY Awards. And you’ll never see Oprah making fun of those 300lb. Peg Bundy-wildebeests during the Daytime Emmys for watching her show instead of their kids. I’m just saying, it takes real stones to make a show promoting shitty games and stupid phones named after candy, and then laugh at the target audience for buying them.
Stewie presents Samuel L. (who’s still standing in the same spot when he announced Sarah Silverman) and asks him what the ‘L’ stands for.
Stewie: “I bet it stands for ‘Likes to kiss dudes’”.
Sam: “You’re pretty mouthy for a cartoon that didn’t get funny until Season 4, muthafucka.”
Sam presents Masi Oka (Nightcrawler on Heroes) by saying the “save the cheerleader, save the world” catchphrase. Am I the only one who thinks that sounds stupid? Like her cheerleading ability is what holds the key to whatever danger there is. Or you’re expecting someone to say “Oh shit! Juggernaut’s on his way to the pep rally! Let’s move, people!!” Just say “save the girl, save the world.” It’s more mysterious, and it rhymes.
But actually, Nightcrawler is funny as he presents the award for Best Team Sports Game (aka The Madden Award). He says some sports weren’t eligible, like “Team Bum Hunt: Bum vs. Tiger” and “the (air-quotes) WNBA.” But, just to piss me off he says the “cheerleader” line before announcing...
Winner: NBA2K7
OMFG! Madden did not win! Some Take-Two guys come up to accept, but really they could have made this real funny. They should have shown a black guy and a frat boy with a single tear in their eye, and John Madden shaking his fist, going “Next time, Take-Two. Next time!”
Brandon Roush (the new Superman) comes out to premiere the preview for the World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade expansion. To show how out-of-touch this show is, I actually get surprised when he uses the term “MMO.” And then he stumbles through the rest of his cue cards. Superman, my ass.
The trailer is your usual CGI fantasy stuff (a guy turns someone into a sheep, though), so no real game preview is shown. The odd thing is that, as the trailer plays on the stage, a choir of hooded druids is chanting along to the trailer’s music. Between the trailer and the druids, this in no way makes WOW look like some evil fantasy cult.
Commercials. Once again, take note of the ads: Mountain Dew’s energy drink, Chocolate phone, Xbox 360, Blah Blah Gum (actually “Stride”), Pontiac, Burger King Games, and then Spike ads.
We come back and Sam is going to announce the Game of the Year. But first, Sam’s going to open up a magazine and read fake reviews off the teleprompter. Not once do his eyes glance at the magazine.
Winner: Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion
The same two Bethesda guys come up, but now they’re shadowed by their creepy, white-haired boss. Just sayin’.
And with that, the show is over. To all the game haters out there, Sam says “I’m in your muthafuckin’ base, killin’ your muthafuckin’ dudes.” And then a giant skeleton Monkeybone sign explodes. It should also be noted that during the credits, there are no longer any extreme close-ups of girls’ asses. But in the 45 seconds it takes the credits to roll, 90% of the crowd has filed out and emptied the arena.
So overall, it was a pretty uneventful year. Maybe because only six actual games were presented as award winners, and one of them was a cell phone game. And, even though Samuel L. Jackson appeared to genuinely be having a good time, they couldn’t get anyone else to be on the show. Not that it’s a bad thing, but this show isn’t designed for showcasing games. 11 out of 29 awards were actually presented on the show this year, and 4 of those 11 were actors doing voice-overs, or a song. Add to that all the gamer bashing, and it doesn’t make for a very positive showing. As a gamer, you get the feeling as you watch this that you are seen as nothing but a socially-inept dork that does nothing but buy what is presented to you, like the tech-obsessed sheep you are. But, if I were watching this show as someone trying to understand gaming and what’s good in gaming, I would have no idea what the appeal is and I’d feel like I'd probably be wasting my time anyway. So, once again, the question arises -- will there be another Spike TV Video Games Award show next year? Wholeheartedly, I can say yes. I can rest assure that as long as there are energy drinks, overpriced cars, and poorly-named cell phones to sell, I will be watching and reporting on this show for many years to come.
The show kicks off with Tenacious D performing a song about heavy metal surviving all genres of music. This would explain why you hear so much heavy metal on the radio. They also have a guy in a big gray, plastic knight suit that looks like something from GWAR. He dances around pretending to smite the mentioned genres. Keep in mind that during this, the audience is sitting completely still, like they’re at some bad motivational seminar. Tenacious D come out to dance with GWAR Guy and pyro goes off as fake cheering is added in.
Introduction. Tonight we are “live from the Gaming Center” (no location is given). The “celebs” in attendance tonight seem pretty scarce and fairly unknown (you’ll see as the night goes on). The announcer this year is Stewie Griffin, which further proves that Funkmaster Flex and his neglected turntables are long gone. And, as with last year, the host is Samuel L. Jackson.
Sam is actually sitting backstage, lighting a cigar with money and says “The Video Game Awards. Easiest money in show business.” Suddenly, a guy dressed like a kidney holding a fairy wand (?!) storms into his dressing room. He does an “All your base are” joke and dies. Not looking good so far. Sam goes into first-person mode and walks into the hall, basically running into the Game of the Year nominees. The GRAW soldiers got hurt waiting for a PS3. A guy in a bad wizard costume gives Sam the Okami paintbrush and gets humped by a “wolf” (actual husky dog). He gets a Gears of War gun, in name alone. And then a guy comes out of the bathroom telling him to kill the Gamers of Oblivion. Sam comes out on stage to discover these people are actually about 30 college kids playing “Wayward Son” on Guitar Hero guitars.
Sam: “Kansas? That’s the anthem of the Gamers of Oblivion?!”
Sam dispatches all the stuntman guitar players and zaps all the slackers with wires attached to them into the background. The best one is when Sam lobs a grenade into the audience and an obvious mannequin, surrounded by obvious cardboard cutouts in seats, explodes.
The audience goes mildly nuts, and Sam starts his monologue. Gamers-need-sex joke, gamers-jerk-off joke, cell phone game joke (tonight is the Night of the Cell Phone Game -- more later), Madden Curse joke (it came true this year), Hot Coffee joke (still?), and a Bully gay kissing joke. But Sam really wants to address gamer stereotypes. Chubby nerdy guy stands up and a hot girl wants him. The mayor from Spin City (?!) stands up and basically says he’s Terrorist Jackie Thompson. He says he only exploits video games to scare soccer moms for his own personal gain. Sam: “And that’s what America is all about!” Finally, Kidney Guy and Tony Hawk the Barbarian stand up. Apparently, they’re cosplayers and proud of it. The nerd’s hot girl wants them, so Sam picks them as the “trophy girls”. But...shouldn’t he have picked...oh, never mind.
50 Cent comes out to present the Best Performance by a Human Female. If you recall last year, he mumbled and stumbled his way through a Lara Croft joke so bad, I wondered why anyone would put him in a movie (which he was promoting at the time). This year was even better. So much better that I actually wrote down exactly what he said on stage.
50: “Yeah...whassup? I seen a little...a lotta women performance. A lotta sports and things this year. So I know things...are too about -- check this out -- this is what we’re gonna do, alright? We’re gonna get into the Best...Human Female...in a videogame.”
Winner: Vida Guerra for Scarface (which 50 pronounces Guerrera)
Vida come up and lets us know that she got changed in 2 minutes today. Oh, and thanks for the award. And you wonder why she’s mostly on the Internet.
It should also be noted that, once again, the award is a gold Monkeybone statue wearing a crown. I still don’t get that. It’s not even the Spike TV logo. But, changed this year, the winner’s envelope is in a spiked bracelet the presenter wears. A little weird, but I guess they didn’t want any more mildly-retarded boxers fumbling with DVD cases used as envelopes.
Commercials. Nothing of note (just yet).
Coming back from break, Stewie (always offscreen) talks shit about not wanting to see Snakes on a Plane. Sam: “I will hit a baby.”
Rachel Leigh Cook and Seth Green come out to present the Best Game Based on a Movie or TV Show. As movie stars, they start to apologize for movies based on video games. You can tell that gamers don’t write for this show because the second movie they name is the original Mortal Kombat, which most gamers will tell you is about the best videogame movie that ever came out.
Winner: Lego Star Wars 2
A guy from Traveler’s Tales accepts with a list of ‘thank you’s. I argue that this was shown to prove that family games can win too. I mean, it’s not like they’re gonna acknowledge Nintendo any time soon. Nintendo’s just not cool enough.
Daniel Day Kim from Lost comes out to show a trailer for Bioshock. It looks like FEAR (creepy kids running around) mixed with Half-Life 2 (monsters and gravity gun) set in an underwater bunker.
Maria Menudos-or-whatever comes out, giggling and acting goofy like last year. She’s here to celebrate an unsung hero in the gaming industry -- the motion-capture actor. If you guessed this skit is about a fat guy acting stupid in a blue ping-pong suit, you’re absolutely right. As they go to commercial, they pan to show the dead crowd.
But before commercials, they show scenes from Rape King (aka Sneak King) and show a poll saying it’s a 50/50 split on who gamers would want to “wine and dine” between Cortana from Halo and Bloodrayne. Way to stay timely, Burger King. Actually, they show Rape King and ask a stupid question during all the breaks, so they just should have been rape questions. “Who would be a better rapist? Sam Fisher or Solid Snake? Go to BK.com now!”
Commercials. An ad shows for Black Christmas, a sorority slasher film that’s being released on Christmas Day. Since it’s a week and a half before Christmas, and this is the first I’m hearing about it, it’s gotta be good.
Brian the Dog presents Tila Tequila and Seth MacFarlane. Gee, how did they get him? Tila is deemed “the Queen of MySpace”, which to me is like saying you have the shiniest helmet on the short bus. They’re here to present the Best Wireless Game. Now, everyone knows cellphone games are shit if they aren’t like Snake, Tetris, or a card game. And this category has always been lumped in with other “who cares” awards in all the past years, so why is this being presented this year? Because it’s sponsored by Verizon Wireless. The same company that’s running those Chocolate phone ads that they’ve been showing every commercial break.
Anyway, Seth makes a good joke by asking if any these games would work on his phone, and then he pulls out the Saved By the Bell brick cell phone.
Winner: SWAT Force
A foreign-sounding lady, who I guess is from SWAT’s accounting department, accepts the award.
Sam comes out to address a very important subject -- video game violence. From your bitchy girlfriend LOL!! He got an email on his teleprompter from a guy who got his Xbox 360 smashed by a bitchy girlfriend. They accompany this with a picture of a fat guy holding a still intact 360 and hard drive (?!). Wait...is that the same guy as the fat motion-capture guy? I think it is. Anyway, Sam breaks it down in Operation-style terms -- guys have an Awesome Lobe in their brain, girls have a Complain-abellum. They then show a couple wired for brainwaves -- one’s a guy playing a game, and the other is his bitchy girlfriend. You can guess the rest.
Now, I’m no Dr. Flavin, but I’ll break it down as a gamer in a very stable relationship. Guys who are gamers relax by playing games. Girls like to relax by talking about stuff. Take this into consideration and play your cards right, or pick your battles. And seriously, “Awesome Lobe”? How old are we?
Emmanuel Vaugier and Tony Hawk come out to present the award for Best Supporting Male Performance. Is it by a human? Ooh, maybe not. They didn’t say. Tony botches another “All your base are belong to us” joke. I really think the writers just got back from 1996.
Winner: James Gandolfini for the Sopranos game
James is standing in his kitchen, and gives his acceptance speech like he’s leaving a message on an answering machine. It really sounds like “I can’t be there right now...thanks for the award...AndI’llseeyalaterbye.”
Commercials. Now I’m starting to notice a trend, and I see who’s really running the show. In order, the ads are for: Pontiac (an annual sponsor), Mountain Dew’s energy drink (they sponsor an award), the Air Force, Verizon’s Chocolate phone (cell phone award), Sony (Final Fantasy 12), and then local/Spike ads.
Yellowcard comes out to present the award for Studio of the Year. This used to be the Best Game Designer award in the past, so I guess a bunch of level editors pouted until they changed it. “How did only Jason win for Halo 2? I designed the repetitive Library level.” One Yellowcard guy says he should make a game, and then describes Minesweeper. I bet the accounting lady from SWAT Force was rolling in the aisles over that one.
Winner: Epic Games for Gears of War
Cliffy B. (announced by his full name) and 2 other guys come up to accept. They seem genuinely thankful, and point out that they make these killer Unreal engines with a staff of only 80 people. A dig at EA? You decide.
UFC President Dana White and Joe Rogan (who announces for UFC) come out to show the trailer for GRAW 2. Joe cracks up Dana by reading his cue cards like a bad infomercial. “Why yes...I do, Dana.” Overall, the trailer is all CGI, so it’s impossible to tell what the game is like, except that it looks like it’s in a Black Hawk Down-type setting.
Two cops from the upcoming Reno 911 movie (they’re making a movie?!) come out to talk about a GTA-style game that is pro-cops. The funniest part is that it looks like one guy is yelling at a tape measurer, but I guess they’re supposed to be playing the game on a cell phone. They’re here to show the winners of the awards that they don’t want to present to actual people. Keep in mind, these are sponsored by Blahblahblah Gum, the gum that blahblahblahblahblah.
Favorite Classic Game presented by Blah Blah Gum: Pac-Man
Must have been some poll on their website.
Critic’s Choice: Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess
This is one of the bones they’re throwing to Nintendo. Obviously, because most critics actually didn’t rate it too high.
Best Fighting Game: Mortal Kombat Armageddon
Arm-a-getting’ it when it hits the clearance bin.
Best Shooter Game: Gears of War
Best Graphics: Gears of War
Best Handheld Game: New Super Mario Bros.
It’s a sad day when a cell phone game gets more attention than this new portable classic.
Best Role Playing Game: Oblivion
Best PC Game: Company of Heroes
I’m glad they won something, since they were nominated for everything.
Best Multiplayer Game: Gears of War
I’ll talk more about this list at the end, but I’ll just say that most of these categories are more deserving of public attention than most I’ve seen presented so far.
Commercials. Coming Soon: Rocky 2006 - Let’s Kill Off Rocky
Sam comes back talking about online multiplayer games like “WOW Xbox Live.” In fact, he’s hooked up with someone special he’s meeting for the first time tonight. Yep, it’s a dude. In fact, I think it’s the fat motion-capture guy again. What is he, the producer or something? The skit is saved, although, when Sam asks the guys in the booth to edit out what happened, but they say it’s already on YouTube. A picture comes up, looking like the video is actually on YouTube, entitled “SAM JACKSON PWNED!”
Eva Mendes comes out to present the award for Best Cast. This is what awards like Best RPG are getting snubbed for?! She says some games have bad casts like the new Mortal Kombat game -- she shows a picture of the 4 women from The View’s heads on MK fighters. The audience groans, so Eva just barrels through the joke and moves along.
Winner: Family Guy the Game
Obviously. Between Seth MacFarlane and Seth Green, we’ve seen 90% of the cast so far tonight. Both Seths accept, and MacFarlane goes through some voices, including the dog’s voice. Oh wait, that’s his real voice.
Michael Irvin and Xhibit come out carrying Wiimotes. If this leads to a joke about “my black Wii remote is five times bigger”, I’m turning this show off. Instead, Irvin acts like he’s going to play Wii Golf and just chucks the remote at the camera. And still it looked more believable than most of the videos on YouTube. They’re here to present the award for Best Individual Sports Game.
Winner: Tony Hawk Project 8
I’m renaming this the Tony Hawk Award, because he gives essentially the same damn speech from last year. “New consoles, new games.” “You keep buyin’ ‘em, we’ll keep makin’ ‘em.”
Sam shows up to preview his new cartoon on Spike named “Afro Samurai”. Basically, it looks like the makers of The Boondocks and Aeon Flux got together and made an anime.
Commercials. Coming up, some of the stars from “Heros”. Guys, even my spell-check picked up on that one. Or you could just look it up in any TV listing.
Coming back, AFI performs a song that sounds like a whinier version of “Move Along”. If this is emo, I want no part of it. Seriously, what’s the appeal of dressing gay-goth and whining like a bitch?
As Sam presents the next award presenters, people have started to throw around the standups from the mannequin skit. This isn’t looking good.
TNA wrestler Kurt Angle and the host of Spike’s Game Head show come out to show some previews. First of all, if you’re wondering why Angle is in TNA, it’s because he’s a mentally, physically, and emotionally broken man who’s addicted to pain killers, and TNA just wants to get ex-WWE guys, no matter what their condition. And also, Game Head is a fairly decent show, and least compared to G4’s general lack of game coverage. Anyway, here are the games and my opinions on them:
TNA Impact (wrestling game) -- just CGI entrances so far
John Woo Presents Stranglehold -- imagine Max Payne 2006
Metal Gear Solid 4 -- same CGI clips you’ve seen before
EA’s Army of Two -- looks like Gears of War (using cover and teamwork), minus the good and fun stuff.
The Reno 911 cops are back out to present more non-award awards. One cop “peed a little” when the other draws a Nerf gun at her. If stuff like this is in the movie, it should be high-larious.
Cybervixen of the Year: Alyx Vance from Half-Life 2: Episode 1
They show all non-sexy shots of her, so it makes sense.
Best Original Score: Oblivion
Best Military Game: Company of Heroes
Best Driving Game: Xbox 360 Burnout Revenge
No longer presented by Pontiac, although they’re a sponsor. Curious.
Best Performance by a Human Male: Patrick Stewart for Oblivion
Guess they couldn’t get him, or anyone else to accept the award.
Best Supporting Female Performance: Rachel Leigh Cook for Kingdom Hearts 2
OK, she’s in attendance so give her the award. On second though, don’t. She played Tifa in the game and, including if you beat Sephiroth, she has like 6 lines in the whole game. Four being “Grrr. Where’s Cloud?!!”
Best Soundtrack: Guitar Hero 2
Breakthrough Technology: the Nintendo Wii
The last of Nintendo’s thrown bones tonight.
Best Action Game: Dead Rising
Commercials. Stewie says to go to Gametrailers.com to see the previews they’ve shown tonight. As if the people who’ve wanted to see those certain trailers haven’t been there already.
When we return, Sam wants to talk about what to do with your old consoles. You could give them to a third-world country. A picture is shown of a mildly-Asian child eating a giant Atari cartridge. Oh-kay. Or you could do this...and out comes the Genesis equivalent of SNES Chick. Actually, she’s just got a red bikini on with two controllers glued on the top, and a slim-lined Genesis glued to the bottom. Sadly, Sam doesn’t do a humping or blowing into her slot joke. Instead it’s Token Fat Guy running up in a speedo with controllers on it. Thankfully, there is no erect joystick or Wiimote glued to the front. The best part is, as the girl is leaving, Sam genuinely looks like he’s trying to regain his concentration.
Tyrese and Method Man present the Best Song award. As usual, Method Man doesn’t want to be there.
Tyrese: “And the winner is...(tries to get off bracelet)
Method Man: “.....deez nuts.”
LOLOLOLOL!!! (Run around stage)
Winner: Yellowcard - Lights and Sound for 360 Burnout Revenge
Thankfully, one tradition remains intact as Yellowcard does not get to perform their winning song. Come on. It’s can’t be any worse than AFI whining for 5 minutes.
Hayden Panatasomething (she plays Wolverine on Heroes) is out to present the award for the Most Addictive Game Fueled by Mountain Dew game. She must also have the power to suck the life out of a crowd, because even her adjusting her mid-pubescent boobs can’t draw a reaction from this crowd.
Winner: Oblivion
Two guys from Bethesda, who look like they would work on a game like Oblivion, come up to accept the award. You know, I just got to thinking...are they saying Mountain Dew is addicting, based on the award name? Is that a good thing?
Commercials. Coming up next is the WOW Burning Crusade preview they’ve been teasing all night. And yes, another sexless nerd joke is made. And yes, it’s being directed at the players of one of the most successful mainstream games in history.
Sam brings out Sarah Silverman, who is here to berate gamers as being nerdy, sexless, and wasting their time. At about the point where she says the government should ship Playstations to Africa because “if it can stop you guys from getting laid, we’ll wipe out the AIDS epidemic over there”, she starts to get boos. The set ends rather backhandedly, and you can tell there’s a feeling of disdain in the air.
Now I’m not taking this personally (my son will prove I’ve probably seen a woman before), and I know she’s there because she’s popular and likes to stir up shit, but I find it interesting that they make her the icing on the “You guys are dorks” cake. I mean, you never see them making fun of those statistic-spewing fantasy football fucks on the ESPY Awards. And you’ll never see Oprah making fun of those 300lb. Peg Bundy-wildebeests during the Daytime Emmys for watching her show instead of their kids. I’m just saying, it takes real stones to make a show promoting shitty games and stupid phones named after candy, and then laugh at the target audience for buying them.
Stewie presents Samuel L. (who’s still standing in the same spot when he announced Sarah Silverman) and asks him what the ‘L’ stands for.
Stewie: “I bet it stands for ‘Likes to kiss dudes’”.
Sam: “You’re pretty mouthy for a cartoon that didn’t get funny until Season 4, muthafucka.”
Sam presents Masi Oka (Nightcrawler on Heroes) by saying the “save the cheerleader, save the world” catchphrase. Am I the only one who thinks that sounds stupid? Like her cheerleading ability is what holds the key to whatever danger there is. Or you’re expecting someone to say “Oh shit! Juggernaut’s on his way to the pep rally! Let’s move, people!!” Just say “save the girl, save the world.” It’s more mysterious, and it rhymes.
But actually, Nightcrawler is funny as he presents the award for Best Team Sports Game (aka The Madden Award). He says some sports weren’t eligible, like “Team Bum Hunt: Bum vs. Tiger” and “the (air-quotes) WNBA.” But, just to piss me off he says the “cheerleader” line before announcing...
Winner: NBA2K7
OMFG! Madden did not win! Some Take-Two guys come up to accept, but really they could have made this real funny. They should have shown a black guy and a frat boy with a single tear in their eye, and John Madden shaking his fist, going “Next time, Take-Two. Next time!”
Brandon Roush (the new Superman) comes out to premiere the preview for the World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade expansion. To show how out-of-touch this show is, I actually get surprised when he uses the term “MMO.” And then he stumbles through the rest of his cue cards. Superman, my ass.
The trailer is your usual CGI fantasy stuff (a guy turns someone into a sheep, though), so no real game preview is shown. The odd thing is that, as the trailer plays on the stage, a choir of hooded druids is chanting along to the trailer’s music. Between the trailer and the druids, this in no way makes WOW look like some evil fantasy cult.
Commercials. Once again, take note of the ads: Mountain Dew’s energy drink, Chocolate phone, Xbox 360, Blah Blah Gum (actually “Stride”), Pontiac, Burger King Games, and then Spike ads.
We come back and Sam is going to announce the Game of the Year. But first, Sam’s going to open up a magazine and read fake reviews off the teleprompter. Not once do his eyes glance at the magazine.
Winner: Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion
The same two Bethesda guys come up, but now they’re shadowed by their creepy, white-haired boss. Just sayin’.
And with that, the show is over. To all the game haters out there, Sam says “I’m in your muthafuckin’ base, killin’ your muthafuckin’ dudes.” And then a giant skeleton Monkeybone sign explodes. It should also be noted that during the credits, there are no longer any extreme close-ups of girls’ asses. But in the 45 seconds it takes the credits to roll, 90% of the crowd has filed out and emptied the arena.
So overall, it was a pretty uneventful year. Maybe because only six actual games were presented as award winners, and one of them was a cell phone game. And, even though Samuel L. Jackson appeared to genuinely be having a good time, they couldn’t get anyone else to be on the show. Not that it’s a bad thing, but this show isn’t designed for showcasing games. 11 out of 29 awards were actually presented on the show this year, and 4 of those 11 were actors doing voice-overs, or a song. Add to that all the gamer bashing, and it doesn’t make for a very positive showing. As a gamer, you get the feeling as you watch this that you are seen as nothing but a socially-inept dork that does nothing but buy what is presented to you, like the tech-obsessed sheep you are. But, if I were watching this show as someone trying to understand gaming and what’s good in gaming, I would have no idea what the appeal is and I’d feel like I'd probably be wasting my time anyway. So, once again, the question arises -- will there be another Spike TV Video Games Award show next year? Wholeheartedly, I can say yes. I can rest assure that as long as there are energy drinks, overpriced cars, and poorly-named cell phones to sell, I will be watching and reporting on this show for many years to come.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
