VGAs - Who Watched It and Who Actually Liked It? A Rant and Review of the VGAs.

Watching the VGAs was a no brainer for me. As a Halo fan, I just had to get the first live preview of the new Halo Reach game. I didnt expect the awkwardness and frustration and cringing of watching the VGAs. Awards shows arent supposed to be that way. The show was entirely repetitive, and obviously scripted. Variety on nominations in different categories were limited to games released in the past 5 or so months. I kept hearing Modern Warfare 2, Assassins Creed 2, Left 4 Dead 2, Uncharted 2 and Batman Arkham Asylum. Now, all these games are great, I know, but its just the fact that they were in about every category made me frustrated. There were plenty of big games that came out in 2009, which were not mentioned in anything. Some games like Halo Wars, Resident Evil 5, New Super Mario Bros, Tekken 6, Guitar Hero 5, and Street Fighter 4 just to name a few.

I should have remembered Spike is a guy network trying to be the male version of Lifetime or Oxygen, other main female channels. Spike is for people who look like average joes. The guy into cars, fighting, football, women, and other things. All of those are good, I like them all, but Spike is just so heavily focused on it that they spawn dumb distasteful shows filled with eye candy (people getting beat up, explosions, women.....mostly women) such as Manswers, Deadliest Warriors, 1000 Ways to Die (kinda interesting), and more crap.

Back to Spike's VGAs, Their use of celebrities were...a bit ok and unnecessary. Most, if not all that appeared on stage were at some point related to gaming in their career. Zach Braff, I did not know he was in Kingdom Hearts 2. Samuel L. Jackson, as badass as he is and claims to be, he has lent his voice to various games, such as Star Wars and playing as his samurai anime character in the game adaption of Afro Samurai. At first I did not understand the use of Olivia Wilde, as beautiful as she is, until I learned that she will be in the next Tron movie, which I'm not excited to see or interested in; she kinda promoted the new game of Tron and the movie, so she did her job. Tricia Helfer was good, she lent her likeness and voice for Halo 3: ODST's Veronica "DARE." But the "celebrities" that bugged me the most were the cast from Jersey Shore and the cast of the football show appearing on Spike soon. Jersey Shore is a show about spoiled 20 somethings that have some Italian relation in their blood, built and sexy bodies and over gelled spiked hair and tans. Their relation to video games or the awards was not present, and their presentation duo on stage with Mike Tyson didnt make sense either. They were probably just there to promote the show for another network, MTV. The other people, the "football players" in the new football show, play as frat-boy football players that try their best to find the hottest looking girl on their fictional college campus. Their inclusion for the VGAs was somewhat understandable, as they presented the award for Best Sports Video Game of the Year, which went to the NHL series.

Usually at awards shows, they have some very entertaining musical performers. Those are good awards shows. Those that play a variety of flavorful music heard by everybody. The VGAs failed that. Their choice of "good" music was an awkward performance by Snoop Dogg and a sad performance by The Bravery. The Bravery is good, but their performance at this awards show made me want to sleep. Snoop Dogg on the other hand, did not want me to go sleep, it made me want to burn my TV. What I saw was the weirdest performance and dancing I have seen recently. It cannot be UNSEEN. Also the VGAs cannot be UNSEEN.

As mentioned earlier in this post, I wanted to see the new Halo Reach trailer, 2 minutes and 30 seconds of game intro, no game play but that's alright. VGAs delivered alright. It was an exciting event for me to see the trailer, the flavors of new characters and the beefed (or beefed down?) weapons shown in this small time frame was great. I downloaded the video from the Bungie website and watched it over and over, taking in every detail and names of the Spartans.

Not only did the VGAs delivered Halo, they delivered more goodies as well. Trailer for what can be assumed as Batman: Arkham Asylum 2 was shown, showing the asylum in extra chaos with a maniacal laughing Joker. A trailer for a new Spec Ops game was revealed, one that surprised me. I remember playing the very first Spec Ops game on the first Playstation 1. It was a fun game of my early childhood which i can hardly remember. I hope this game is good.

Another trailer for a new, revamped, and new age for the Medal of Honor series appeared, though I wasnt impressed. MoH used to be a WW2 heavy series......I guess seeing the success of the Call of Duty franchise, and how it moved up to a modern theme made a lot of money, EA thought it was time to push it up a notch, and compete with juggernauts like Infinity Ward and their Modern Warfare games. Seeing the trailer seemed cheap though, like I should have really cared about watching it, but I didnt. The game almost looks like a Modern Warfare clone, different story, different factions, different action. I just thing EA and the MoH creators should have jumped into the Modern Genre a little while back. I'm not saying that IW should have the exclusiveness of modern themed games, its just that currently, well, they do it better.

One thing I wont write about in this rant/review is about the awards given. It was such a joke and a shock to me. I mean, who the hell is Rock Steady Studios? If its anything, Best Studio should have went to Naughty Dog or Infinity Ward or Valve. Come on! Rock Steady Studios made a great Batman game and all, but it wasnt that impressive.I dont remember RSS making any other games or showing community interaction. I know Valve did some and Infinity Ward did a lot with the use of Twitter, whom they thanked in their credits at the end of Modern Warfare 2, which shaped multilayer a little bit, not a great bit, but it counts as community interaction. Well, their I've done it, I wrote about an award given, big woop, mistake, whatever, I didnt do all of them and I dont want to because it will feel and look like explosive diarrhea come out of an 12 year old's Xbox 360 mic during a match of COD4 or Halo 3 (COD4 because my ears have not witnessed the atrocities and horrors of the voices in Modern Warfare 2 ).

Now the questions mentioned in the title of the post needs an answer it needs, "Did anyone watch the VGAs, and if you did, did you enjoy it?" If you didnt watch it, be glad and hope you dont accidentally land on a rerun while channel surfing. Share your experiences. Thanks for reading.

 

... I liked it for the most part, but some of the stuff I didn't really enjoy... like we need another halo game... how about starcraft 2 of starfox?