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!