2009 Spike TV Video Game Awards Recap

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.