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2010 Spike TV Video Game Awards Live Blog

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8:03 – Got a little late start tonight, but here we are. Feel free to chime your thoughts throughout.

8:07 – As I watch the first nominee for Game of the Year, Call of Duty: Black Ops, I wonder how hindered my enjoyment of these awards will be by the fact that I haven’t played some of these game.

8:09 – Arkham City trailer. Wow. That looked pretty amazing.

8:12 – First award: Studio of the Year goes to Bioware. Great call, I thought Mass Effect 2 was one of the best games this year and The Old Republic looks awesome, too.

8:15 – I used to love Dane Cook, who is know announcing the first Character of the Year, but for some reason his humor just doesn’t do it for me anymore. He was great in Mystery Men, though.

8:21 – Bethesda announcing it’s new game: Skyrim. Very cool trailer with the stone carved dragon coming alive.

8:24 – Kratos and Mortal Kombat. BARF (<- that's PS3 envy, nothing more) 8:26 - Thor: God of Thunder trailer. Nothing earth shattering, but I’m guessing James is going to excited for this one.

8:28 – Next award: Action Game of the Year goes to Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood. Another game I haven’t had a chance to play but I’ve heard nothing but great things about. Crowd reaction isn’t very positive, which probably speaks more to its excellence. The crowd shots look to be full of C and D list celebrities.

8:35 – Holy crap Denise Richards, that was some seriously horrible teleprompter reading there. Awful, just simply awful. Could you not practice once or twice before you came out? Ugh. And now it looks like My Chemical Romance needs the teleprompters, too. Our first moment of FAIL.

8:41 – Now talking about Mass Effect 2, another GotY nominee, which I wholeheartedly endorse. And now the Mass Effect 3 trailer world premier. Looks like Shepard has to save Earth. As if the universe wasn’t enough. The Mass Effect 3 trailer has a distinct Halo 3/Finish the Fight feel to it.

8:50 – Award: Best Shooter goes to Call of Duty: Black Ops. Yawn.

8:51 – Olivia Munn and NPH arguing who should be hosting the show. Very forced. But that leads to the premier of the Resistance 3. Which looks EXTREMELY lifelike.

8:54 – Oops, not anymore!

9:01 – I’m a big fan of Nick Swardson, but I feel like I should be ashamed for admitting that. His delivery kills me. These God of War stage effects are really distracting.

9:06 – Now were getting to the ridiculous awards: Best Performance by a Human Male goes to Neil Patrick Harris for Spider Man: Shattered Dimensions.

9:11 – Prototype 2 trailer on now. I played a good portion of the first one and liked it. This looks pretty much MOTS, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. That game is juicy.

9:17 – And now we are going to hurl chickens and pigs painted green. This obviously can only end in one way — AWESOMENESS.

9:18 – Of course, PETA had to come and ruin everything.

9:20 – Guillermo del Toro announcing his game — Insane. This guy seems pretty genuine. I like him. Three years out! If the creatures in the game are as fantastic as his creations are in his movie, this game is going to be awesome. He also announces the Best Independent Game, going to Limbo (again, another game I haven’t played yet. I am ashamed)

9:22 – Time for some Portal 2 goodness. Why do robotic eyes need to blink? That’s distracting, too.

9:26 – Now NPH is singing while they do a “Memoriam” of characters we’ve lost. This was actually very funny, especially the random civilian getting run over by a car (in GTA IV, I assume). Well done.

9:27 – And now they’re listing a bunch of awards that were obviously not important enough for their own announcement, including Mass Effect 2 as RPG of the Year.

9:32 – Red Dead Redemption, the next GotY nominee. Finally, a game I’ve actually played. Oh wait, no, it’s Jose Gonzalez playing music while Red Dead plays in the background.

9:38 – Dominic Monaghan absolutely bombing his bit before the Forza 4 announcement. Not that that is any surprise but it does come out of left field.

9:43 – This TMZ bit is good, too. Just like the show, they go through the stories and joke about it. Kratos eating a Greek Salad, Master Chief at the TSA, Pacman and Ms. Pacman getting divorced. That’s the second zinger they’ve had tonight.

9:44 – And from one good bit to another bomb — Nathan Fillion clearly flustered while the music swells over his own voice over for Halo: Reach.

9:48 – Here is the next world premier — SSX: Deadly Descents. These are starting to get old. Seems like they should have led with this one. Very weak.

9:54 – Award: Character of the Year goes to Sgt. Woods from CODBLOPS. I have no comment on this. Good call, I guess?

9:56 – World Premier — Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception. You say Uncharted 3, I say The Mummy.

9:58 – And finally Game of the Year — Red Dead Redemption. Even though I’ve only clocked in around 5 hours so far, I also heartily endorse this award.

And we’re done.

I have to admit that this is the first time I didn’t feel insulted or pandered to during this incarnation of Spike’s VGA. I know what Spike deals in, and it’s mostly stuff I’m not buying, but on this stage that treated video games with respect and had actual gamers involved. There were some missteps (Denise Richards being the most egregious) but overall it was positive.

I can’t believe I’m actually typing this, but I enjoyed the 2010 Video Game Awards.

VGA Live blogging will occur

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One of the first posts that garnered any real “attention” to buttonmashing.com was my Live Blog of the first Spike TV Video Game Awards. Four years later, I tried to do it again and couldn’t make it all the way through.

I will be subjecting myself once again to the pain. This Saturday, 8 PM I will be live-blogging the Spike TV Video Game Awards. Even I can’t explain why. But feel free to join in the craziness.

Misery loves company.

Spike TV’s VGA

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Tonight is Spike TV‘s Video Game Awards. I had originally planned on live-blogging the show, like I did last year, so I could make light of how Spike TV single-handedly damages any respectability our hobby has managed to garner, but I can’t. I’m not really sad, though. I know I won’t miss much. With the glaring lights, bad music (remember the Motley Crue Reunion?) and pandering to the lowest common denominator, it would simply be more than my brain can handle.

So I won’t be live-blogging this year’s VGA because I’ve got a Christmas party to attend and my sanity to protect. Besides, they held the event weeks ago and the list of winners has been available on the internet for quite some time. Kyle Orland originally said he was going to live blog it, so you may want to check his blog later to see if he ends up doing so. You could also check Technorati to see if anyone else decided to submit themselves to torture.

I will give the voters their propers, though, for selecting Resident Evil 4 as the Game of the Year. Had that not happened, my faith in humanity would have been shaken to the core.

Update: Rick “32_Footsteps” has not let us down. For the third straight awards ceremony, he gives us a play by play. There’s a lot of choice quotes in Rick’s drubbing, but my personal favorite was

12:00 – Apparently, 50% of the viewers voted the Black Revenge from Burnout Revenge the Best Ride. At this point, I think I truly stopped even understanding how Spike even comes up with these categories. We might as well give Bo Jackson a lifetime achievement award for his incredible moves in Tecmo Bowl.

Kotaku and Joystiq mention their inclusion in “Best Blog” category and Slashdot rounds up the links. There was a tie? That doesn’t sound right to me. Sounds like someone doesn’t like Joystiq.

This made me laugh.

Why must they torture us?

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It’s almost that time, fellow gamers, when a certain Cable TV station hijacks our hobby and makes a complete blubbering mockery of it for two hours and makes us feel nauseous. That’s right, it’s time for the Spike TV VGAs (Video Game Atrocities)!

You can go to Kotaku for the complete press release, but I’ll break it down for you, because that’s what I do. It’s well known that we at buttonmashing.com are not friends of the VGAs. I believe my exact words were, “Hey, Spike TV! I want those two hours of my life back.” So it looks like it’s going to be 2004 all over again.

Let’s get the obvious out of the way. What is World of Warcraft doing in the “Game of the Year” Category? Correct me if I’m wrong (I’m not) but WoW was released LAST YEAR. Shouldn’t that, uhmm, disqualify it from consideration? It’s not like 2005 had a dearth of good games and so they had to hold a carry-over from last year. There’s plenty of great games to choose from. How WoW slipped through the cracks boggles the mind.

Let’s get some obvious out of the way. How is a game (King Kong:Blah Blah Let’s make some money off Peter Jackson’s name!) that isn’t even out nominated for 6 awards? And King Kong is the only suspect. There are others. I can’t list them. My brain hurts. Why do we have an award for “Best Cast”? Why is Advanced Wars: DS not included in the “Best Military Game” but Splinter Cell is? Why is it that the more I think about this, the less I want video games to go “mainstream” (and by mainstream I mean hip-hop and Hollywood)? Arrggh!

I’ll just say this: If Resident Evil 4 comes away winless, I will turn off the TV (after the show airs in December), crawl into bed and weep silent tears for witnessing such a horrible tragedy take place. Yes, I will watch it. I will live-blog it so you, my faithful readers will not have to endure it. I will suffer the pain (and desire to gouge my eyes out) so you don’t have. It won’t be easy, but it’s the sort of thing I would do for you guys (and girls).

More: Oh, I almsot forgot! I’m not sure if I should congratulate the nominees for “Best Gaming Blog” or console them for being recognized by Spike TV period. And where’s the love for buttonmashing.com? This is easily the eighteenth or nineteenth most popular blog people visit, right? It’s worth $41k!

Week in review (Part 5)

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A day late on the review of the past week, but here it is, nonetheless.

A lot has been said about the Video Game Awards on Spike TV, you can read my live comments here and some of my comments about what others said here. I will sum up my thoughts on the VGAs with a haiku:

Spike TV, so wrong
Video games are more than
Babes and Rap. Puhleeze.

I haven’t commented much lately on Electronic Arts, but things are starting to look scary. First they score an exclusive agreement with the NFL and the Players Association for the next 5 years. After that, they start buying Ubisoft stock. And now they’re going after DICE. Scary. There has been some severe backlash against EA. I can’t link everything, but you can look here, here, and here. Of course, the best comment is definitely this one. This isn’t good press for EA, already reeling from the EA Spouse (which is still going strong) revelations and their impending lawsuits. It must be hard making crappy football games and having the prospect of no one wanting them. Of course Midway, in true Midway-rip-out-a-spine fashion has given a big, fat middle finger to the NFL and EA and are going to make a mature, drug-ridden football game complete with babes and booze. Great.

To further thin the sports gamer herd, Microsoft has closed shop on their sports games division, too. I would wager a guess that 90% of the sports gaming public don’t really care. They want to be spoon fed EA titles year after year, and I think EA has done a huge disservice to sports gamers by charging full price on each seasons “updates”. They hook you with a new feature, a-la playmaker controls, or the match-up stick, or the juke-jive-and-wail or whatever to get you to buy, at full price, a moderately updated, mostly rehashed, version of last years game. If EA would price their sports games between thirty and forty bucks they would make even more piles of money than they already have (and don’t share).

I like reading AFK Gamer, I like reading the current goings-on over at World of Warcraft. I like reading because ever since I swore of MMOGs (Neocron being my last foray) I’ve been pining to return to the fold and WoW seems so appropriate for me since I love Blizzard games (I logged countless Diablo 2 hours). I still can’t do it, but when he posts funny stuff like this, it makes me want to go back.

Finally, before I wax eloquent on the Top Ten lists of 2004, here’s the Gaming Gaffes of 2004.

Spike Video Games – The Gamers speak! (updated!)

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Well, now that we’ve had a day to digest what transpired during the Spike TV VGAs, we can now look back and see what others thought. Seems that VGO and I weren’t the only ones who were underwhelmed by the whole shooting match.

New-to-me Grimwell Online took notes and commented. This is a great read, read the whole thing. A couple quotes:

Not that I’m complaining, yet. You see, I can’t really blame Spike. They have no idea how to do an awards show about video games so why not just skip it and play some music matched with titties and see who notices??? It’s Spike after all, it should be about titties.

He is an 80’s metal-head, so he was looking forward to seeing Motley Crue back in action but, after watching Snoop Dogg join in the song, didn’t think that was quite such a good idea. I’ll let you read his exact words on his site.

Snoop walks off, the song falls apart. The Crue has no idea where in the song they should be, so Mick wanders into a solo…. the song crashes and burns. I cry.

At NetJak, Rick “32_footsteps” also followed along, with the play-by-play blows. He wasn’t as mean to Spike TV as others but wasn’t kind, either. He gives us these gems

Host Brooke Burke promises to show previews of upcoming games. I wonder if they’ll just give out 2005’s awards now. After all, doesn’t this show rely purely on hype and flashy visuals over substance?

and

Was it better than last year’s show? Yes. But then again, trepanning without anesthesia was better than last year’s show. This year’s show was dreck, but at least it wasn’t insulting my intelligence at all times. Just half of them. I just hope that I’m the only one who watched this – maybe in the future, Spike will leave such awards to people who actually know games, and not just people with conflicting allegiances.

Unfortunately, he wasn’t the only one watching.

Here, here, and here are a few forum threads discussing the awesomeness of the VGAs.

Of course there was the Video Game Ombudsman, who I followed during the show. He also chimed in with wit and biting sarcasm. But he sums up the way forward:

If we in the video game community — the press, the developers, the publishers, and the gamers — sit idly by and allow this type of show to speak for our industry, then we deserve whatever stereotypical bad-mouthing we get from the mainstream press and society at large.

Agreed.

Zonk on Slashdot has a great editorial as well, it’s worth a read:

I have enough problems in my day without having to explain to my family why a show honoring the entertainment I love is populated mostly by underdressed women in angel costumes. Once a year, wouldn’t it be nice to put the scruffy, anti-social gamer stereotype behind us? To sit down and watch some very intelligent people in tuxedos and gowns get their due for providing us so much entertainment? Seriously, wouldn’t it be great to see John Carmack present an award? Or get to listen to a Wil Wright acceptance speech? A gaming awards show taken seriously would be a sight to see. Even if that never happens, please — enough with the Spike-style awards shows.

Succint and to the point. Exactly the way I feel. My wife knows I love games. She even plays them with me. But when she sees things like “Cheat codes read by hot chicks” she gives me that “look”. I think she recognizes (and tolerates) the nature of the “stereo-typical” gamer demographic but even she can see through the Spike TV’s thinnly veiled attempts at pandering. But we can and should rise above this. I think these quotes and links prove that the award show in absolutely no way represented gamers as a whole. I hope enough of an outcry is made so changes can take place. The first step would be to prevent Spike TV from ever hosting a video game award show. That would be a step in the right direction.

Update (12/20/2004) – A couple other places on the ButtonMashing reading list have chimed in. The-inbetween had some choice words for Spike TV:

And to make it even more intolerable, the tape delay means that the Spike tight-asses are censoring about every other word that they say. My tv now sounds like a skipping CD.

Everyone (including myself) looks to Penny-Arcade for their comments and opinions on all things gaming, so I looked anxiously to see what they would say.

if your 2004 awards program does not include Metroid Prime 2 or World of Warcraft, it has no authority whatsoever to coronate the king of any genre. I’m not even saying that those games need to win. I’m simply stating that the games exist and are real, news which has not reached them out there on the ragged periphery of taste and intellect.

This is something I thought about but didn’t articulate. Even though I haven’t played Metroid Prime 2, the fact that they all but ignored Nintendo proves their insignificance and irrelevance.

Video Game Awards 2004

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9:06 – Just logged on, fricking laptop took forever to boot up. Anyway, here we are, and watching the opening act made me go YAWN. Let’s get to the games.

9:10 – Hmm, Snoop doesn’t do it for me. Neither does his co-host. No bother, I’ll deal with it. Geez, the writing sucks already. No feeling, just going through the motions. Okay, first award for female in a game. So far, outside of NFSU, the games are lame. Brook Burke. No comment here (in case the ButtonWife reads this)

9:15 – I love those AOL “I want my computer to make the sound of a Yeti” commercials. They make me laugh.

9:17 – Hmmm, this is degenerating more and more to the lowest common denominator. But Bam just came on, I dig Magera. They’re announcing the “Viewers Choice” – I’ll go out on a limb and predict that they are stacking the deck so Katamari Damacy wins, to appear “hip” and in touch with gamers, but my vote is for Burnout 3.

9:22 – The first non-surprise, Halo 2 wins best FPS. The footage they used wasn’t very flattering compared to the other games. I love Ron Perlman and I know he was involved in Halo 2, but let the guys from Bungie talk.

9:30 – OOOOoooh a world premier of a crappy game based on classic movie! From those artists at EA, no less. Gag. Now the award for best driving game.(oops, I’m sorry, “The Pontiac GTO Best Driving Game”). My money’s on Burnout 3, that game is some serious fun. But with only three games. Yup.

9:34 – I love Ribisi (when he’s Phoebe’s brother) but I can’t stand Sum 41, I’m gonna go read Video Game Omsbudman’s comments and watch some Scrubs. Good stuff there.

9:44 – Best song in a game. Shouldn’t that be something like “Def Jam Best Song in an EA game”? < -- I wrote that before they announced the nominees. What a freaking joke, all songs were from EA games, all top-40 pop, Blech. I don't care who wins that one. 9:52 – Best Mass multi-player game? WTH is that? At least the gave the DS the “Best New technology”. Most of those awards were weak. 9:57 – Almost an hour into the “Award Show” and I’ve supressed the gag reflex twice, felt guilty watching at least thrice, pitied myself as I write this, and hope for something redeeming in the next hour. I’m not counting on it, but you never know. 10:01 – No one makes fun of Christopher Walken. That was the lamest bit yet, the “failed audtions”. Samuel L. Jackson is a bad dude, though. I don’t play PS2 games, but GTA:SA looks fun. 10:11 – I wish Snoop would put that Xbox controller down. Why is he holding it? It’s obviously not a wireless controller, it’s driving me nuts. On the otherhand, Vin Deisel is a handsome man. 10:16 – Commercial break and then Motley Crue. I’m going to tuck my wife in, I need to get away from the TV before I gouge my eyes out. 10:30 – I’m tired of the musical acts beeing constantly muted while they saying naughty things. Gimme a break. And I forgot to mention earlier – Fable is the RPG of the year? I’ll go with that, if RPG means really pathetic game. 10:39 – Oh good, another video game first-look, Fear and Respect. Looks like another game I’ll be skipping. But now it’s Malcolm in the Middle. He’ll be the most believable, I’m sure. Welp, after that line, that went out the door. He’ll regret it. Anyway, Viewrs Choice is… Burnout 3 – just as I though. Good for them, I concur. The guy who did the voice for Burnout 3 is single-handledly redeeming the rest of this craptastic award show. 10:48 – Exactly who I associate video games with – Ludacris, Method Man, and Redman. So the moment we’ve all be waiting for, Game of the Year. My money’s on Halo 2, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was GTA:SA (considering the hip-hop slant of the award show) 10:51 – Wow, I was right, it was GTA. I’m actually surprised it wasn’t Burnout 3, considering how much of an EA love-fest the show has been. 10:53 – Hey, Spike TV! I want those two hours of my life back. I have no idea what Motley Crue has to do with Video Games and your show was quite possibly the worse way to spend two hours on a weekday night. I think you surpassed the crapiness that was last years show. Motley Crue and Snoop Dogg on the same stage, singing the same song. The Apocalypse is upon us. I’m gonna go play some Halo 2 on Live. I’ll check in later.
Update: Thanks to Kotaku for the link on their VGA review post (and all the traffic they’ve sent my way). If you’re coming via Kotaku, welcome! Did you think the Video Game Awards sucked as much as I did? Hopefully you’ll take the time to read some of my other ruminations, realize how insightful and witty I am, and you’ll come back for more. Or leave in disgust, wondering how someone could be so wrong. Either way, enjoy!

Update 2: Not quite a “slashdot” but I’ve also been linked via games.slashdot.org. It’s quite an honor, I will admit. I’ve read slashdot for years, but never thought I’d get linked. So welcome slashdotters, too!