‘Liveblogging’ Spike TV’s 2008 Video Game Awards

December 15th, 2008

They sucked pretty bad last year, but I’m going to suffer through the annual trainwreck that they put on. Mostly because it’s the closest thing to mainstream coverage my favorite industry gets.

Watch this space to be updated periodically as the awards take place.

7:57 PM CST: Just finished reading last years’ notes. It doesn’t fill me with confidence.

8:00 PM CST: Jack Black is funnier than Samuel L Jackson, right?

8:01 PM CST: A pseudo-sex scene… waiting for the inevitable Wii gag.

8:02 PM CST: Right on cue.

8:03 PM CST: I guess I was aware that diapers were made in that size, I just chose to not consciously think about it.

8:04 PM CST: OMG, games provide stories just like books? You can play games by exercising, and not all gamers are closeted xenophobic hermits? Shocking! Though I guess some mainstream folks might know that.

8:06 PM CST: I’m sure that shooting sparks out of the genital area means something symbolic, and that it’s just over my head.

8:08 PM CST: Hot model tells us that she’s hot. Good thing she’s humble, too.

8:09 PM CST: Gears Maps will be ‘Available tonight… Pacific time’ I’m not sure that’s even English. Ah well, at least the maps look OK.

8:10 PM CST: LL Cool J?! Seriously? I thought he was retired, or dead.

8:15 PM CST: Back from an impossibly long commercial break to watch some Cool J… Might be time to refill my refreshments.

8:17 PM CST: We didn’t even get the full song? Lame. Oh, but we get to see some UFC game footage… probably because UFC airs on Spike TV.

8:18 PM CST: Just realized that the audience is sitting on couches… probably because people play games on couches. Clever.

8:19 PM CST: Twenty minutes in to get to the first award on an awards show… could be worse, I guess. Best shooter goes to… Gears of War 2, which apparently also won Best Xbox 360 game.

8:21 PM CST: Is it just me or do the silver-clad women with the harpy wings just look completely out of place and kind of horrifying?

8:22 PM CST: God of War 3 footage, not a whole lot of footage, actually.

8:25 PM CST: We’re 25% done with the show, have given out two awards, and the host hasn’t been seen since 8:06. Who’s in charge of scheduling this thing?

8:28 PM CST: Jack Black antic-ing… And then introducing Peter Moore with some world exclusive Fight Night footage… and Mike Tyson?! Dear Lord, who’s next, Duran Duran?

8:30 PM CST: The Fight Night footage was so-so, just some pre-rendered footage. Neil Patrick Harris is out to give out the best ‘Independent Game Fueled by Dew’

8:32 PM CST: HA HA SHOOTING A HECKLER!

8:34 PM CST: Pregnant pause because Neil did not come prepared with the card with the winner printed on it… fantastic. Turns out World of Goo wins.

8:35 PM CST: Commercial time again, but this time with an Afro Samurai commercial. Guess I won’t be able to go the whole evening without hearing his sweet, sexy voice… er, I mean gravelly, displeasing voice.

8:38 PM CST: The VGA page says that there are 25 categories, and we’ve done three in 35 minutes. Thinking some of them are going to either get cut or combined together again.

8:39 PM CST: Didn’t her this pretty lady’s ‘silly last name’, but she’s here to introduce some voiceover work.

8:40 PM CST: Keifer Sutherland won, but we didn’t get to hear who the other nominees were. Screw you, Liam Neeson!

8:42 PM CST: I guess I’m showing how out of touch with popular culture I am, but I have no Earthly idea who the All American Rejects are. Do they wear the ill-fitting, stylishly bankrupt, and mismatched thrift store dregs ironically? Or is that just the band’s ‘thing’?

8:45 PM CST: All I can think of is how I saw the lead singer’s back fat lapping over the back of his too-tight women’s pants.

8:46 PM CST: More commercials. It’s about time, I was getting tired of watching actual show.

8:51 PM CST: Konami Code is in the graphics on the back of the screen, clever.

8:52 PM CST: Kim Khardashian (don’t care if I spelled that wrong) “Dante’s Inferno is a game… based on a book… *giggle*…” I really want to thwack her with a Cluebat.

8:53 PM CST: The game doesn’t actually look like the book did in my mind’s eye.

8:53 PM CST: Tony Hawk is here to introduce Will Wright, I can see the connection.

8:54 PM CST: I think this is the first time I’ve actually heard Will speak.

8:56 PM CST: I must be the only person that finds Geoff Keighley annoying.

8:57 PM CST: People give me a hard time because I haven’t played any of the GTA games, and to those people I say, “Go lick a running meat slicer, I don’t have to play it.”

8:58 PM CST: More commercials. And the host hasn’t been seen in over 30 minutes. He’s doing a fine job.

9:02 PM CST: Aah, the Burger King commercial was a sly allusion to their sponsorship.

9:03 PM CST: Oops, they let an unbleeped ‘shit’ through. I guess arguing with Jerry Stiller will do that to you.

9:05 PM CST: Our gracious host allows us another award to be given. Best RPG? Guarantee the lone DS title isn’t going to be in the running. Pretty sure it was thrown in there so that the whole show wasn’t going to be the Xbox 360/PS3/PC song and dance.

9:06 PM CST: Fallout 3, no big surprise there.

9:07 PM CST: Busta Rhymes. Fan. Tas. Tic.

9:08 PM CST: Mr. Rhymes is a poor public speaker, has trouble pronouncing the word ‘engine’. Also he mangled the name of the game so bad, I don’t know what the preview is for.

9:09 PM CST: Uncharted 2, and that’s about all I know. It look OK, I guess. More footage from ‘Gamer’s Heaven’ that’s just a bunch of old-school games being played backstage by celebrities… woo? And more commercials. I guess it has been almost ten minutes since I’ve been reminded how extreme Mountain Dew is or how long-lasting and tasty Stride Gum is.

9:13 PM CST: The show’s half over and less than 25% of the awards have been given out. Probably going to see the ‘awards not important enough to show us giving them away’ blip here in the next two or three segments.

9:15 PM CST: Terminator premiere footage.

9:17 PM CST: Mafia 2 premiere footage. I thought we just got done with watching commercials.

9:19 PM CST: Tony Hawk again? Did they run out of celebrities with nothing better to do?

9:20 PM CST: 50 Cent performing. I need to check the listings again, I thought I was watching an awards show, not the ‘Two-Hour Random Variety Show Crap Hour’.

9:21 PM CST: At least they’re showing footage from Mr. Cent’s game in the background to keep it tangentially related to gaming.

9:22 PM CST: More commercials, and then more ‘world premiere’ footage.

9:25 PM CST: Looking over the nominees for the awards we’re probably not going to see, I can’t help but notice that Super Smash Brothers Brawl didn’t even get a nomination for Best Multiplayer Game.

9:27 PM CST: About 25 seconds of Watchmen footage, I feel like i should probably care more about it than I do.

9:28 PM CST: Weezer is actually painful to watch, even when they’re not performing. They’re here to present the award for best music game.

9:28 PM CST: Wii music is the second game on a Nintendo platform that I’ve seen all night. Probably thrown in as a pity nominee. Rock Band 2 wins… Shocker.

9:32 PM CST: Kevin James used to be kind of funny, but this skit is just kind of sad.

9:33 PM CST: Studio of the Year nominees.

9:34 PM CST: Media Molecule wins, kind of surprising. They also won PS3 game of the year, way to consolidate the show, guys.

9:35 PM CST: Holy crap, all the awards that they didn’t bother showing.

Best Driving game: burnout paradise
Best Game based On A Movie: Lego Indiana Jones
Best Fighting Game: Soul Caliber 4
Best PC Game: Left 4 Dead
Best Multiplayer Game: Left 4 Dead
Best Handheld Game: Professor Layton and the Curious Village
Best Wii Game: Boom Blox
Best Individual Sports Game: Shaun White Snowboarding
Big Name in Gaming, Female: Jenny McCarthy
Best Performance by a Human Male: Michael Hollick as Nico Bellic
Best Performance by a human female: Debi Mae West as Meryl Silverberg
Best Graphics: Metal Gear Solid 4
Best Original Score: Metal Gear Solid 4

13 awards in about two minutes. Can’t clutter up the awards show by giving away awards onscreen, can we?

9:42 PM CST: Just saw a Little Big Planet right after Media Molecule won two awards for it. I thought that wasn’t going to happen this year?

9:44 PM CST: Our host has graced us with his presence to introduce Tim Schaefer.

9:47 PM CST: I can already tell that I won’t actually care about Brutal Legend, sorry.

9:48 PM CST: Game of the year time already? Did we miss some?

9:51 PM CST: Nope, GTA 4 wins, and takes Best Adventure Game. Good for them.

9:53 PM CST: All the awards are given out. Time for some skits and maybe some performances.

9:54 PM CST: I was almost going to be elated that I’d be able to go for one day without hearing a Weezer song.

9:54 PM CST: Yes, I’m aware that my television has a mute button.

9:59 PM CST: Credits rolling over Weezer, I guess we can call the show over.

Overall, I’d say that the tone of the show was a bit better this year, it was a whole lot less frat-party oriented and less amateurish, but the fact that they shoved more than half of the awards to the curb to make room for ‘entertainment’ is still kind of lame.

Also, Nintendo platforms get the short end of the stick again this year. Outside of Best Wii Game, we saw, what 3 nominations and one winner? Can’t shake the kiddie perception, I guess.

Given the progress the show has seen in this year’s presentation over last, I think there’s some promise here. But, seriously, the industry does not have a whole lot of folks that put on good interviews. That’s going to be a tough hurdle to overcome.

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User Cull

November 22nd, 2008

Just performed my semi-annual bad-user cull/mass banning. Mostly just the people that registered accounts and didn’t do anything with them and the jerks that registered just to promote their genital drugs herbal supplements.

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Community-driven websites, now with achievements

November 18th, 2008

If you’ve ever been to an online forum where you get a silly little title under your name to reflect your post count, you know how much people will go through for that little piece of kitsch.

Long-time friend to crummysocks.com, Stage Select has just implemented a kind of hybrid system somewhere between forum rankings and Achievements called, well, ‘Achievements‘. You get these achievements for general participation, forum posting, submitting codes, answering questions from users, and pretty much anything else you can do to make the database more complete.

Achievements are retroactively awarded, too. I had a flood of them waiting for me when I logged in this morning.

Gimmicky? Sure, but remember, I like gimmicky.

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Protip of the Day

October 22nd, 2008

I know what you’re thinking, you wish to be more pro. Don’t worry, lots of people do. You owe it to yourself to check out Protip of the Day to get a genuine Protip each and every day from our staff of genuine Pros. If not for you, then… well, who am I kidding? Do it for you. Take advantage of this resource to impress your friends, annoy your neighbors, and possibly learn a thing or two.

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The definitive list, exposed

October 10th, 2008

The other day I posted a list of every NES game (according to Wikipedia, at any rate), and then ranked them. A couple of sites picked up on the list and it generated a little bit of a controversy. So, what’s up with the list anyway? Was it just a ploy to get web hits? What do the ranks mean? I’m going to answer all those questions and more.

As I’ve posted before, all lists that attempt to rank video games in any kind of meaningful way are inherently flawed. They’re ways to quickly drum up content in a pinch, they don’t take a whole lot of research to compile, and almost every time you see one the discussion is rife with comments saying that the list failed in some way because Game Y was rated higher than Game Z and the editor must have been smoking hallucinogenic drugs to order the list the way that they did. In fact, a list from ‘worst’ to ‘best’ implies that the games in the list can be quantitatively broken down into numbers that somehow reflect the ‘goodness’ that might be in a game. It would be pretty awesome if there were a kind of ‘fun unit’ that we could use to determine the amount of pleasure one might get out of a game.

But we can’t. Primarily because experiencing video games is hugely subjective. Someone might favor graphics over all else. Someone else might give the edge to sound quality. A third might give passes to both of those as long as the story is well-written. And so on, ad nauseum. This brings me to my main point: There is no good way to rank games in any meaningful way because tastes vary too widely. Which, stated another way, is “All ‘Top X’ lists are essentially equally as valuable as another” and are little more than excuses for the authors to meander down Memory Lane. And there’s nothing wrong with that, so long as we recognize them for what they are.

My solution to this mess involved taking a list of games for the NES (though any platform would do) and creating a simple script to randomly order it into a list. I then sent notice out to a few key websites to see what reactions might be.

Bear in mind, now, that I never once mentioned how I ranked them, or what the rankings might be. Everyone pretty well assumed that the game at the top was the ‘best’ and the game at the bottom was the ‘worst’, but it was simpler than that. The game with the ‘number 1′ ranking was simply the game with the number 1 ranking. Immediately, comments started pouring in on various websites saying that I didn’t know what I was doing, or that Goonies II was ranked higher than Zelda II, when clearly it should be the other way around.

This was the expected response.

Most lists of this nature have some pretty loud objectors. Mostly due to their widely varying tastes (remember those?). I’ve taken note of that and created an outlet. Press F5 and *boom*, new list, exactly as valid as the last, and primed for new discussion.

Of course this has the (also intentional) side-effect of no two people seeing the exact same list (with the exception to the first couple of hours the list was up due to a snafu on my part) leading to two people arguing over their favorite game’s placement:

SomeGuy: No way, can you believe this moron put Bad Dudes at 468? What an idiot, that was a great game!

SomeOtherGuy: Are you insane? Bad Dudes is number 8 and that game sucked. 468 is Metal Storm, which is way too good to be so far down.

And that, friends, achieves my ultimate goal: to foster discussion. Which The List did admirably. There were no hidden motives, no ‘publicity stunt’, no ‘whoring for webhits’, or anything like that. For those that ‘got it’ and appreciated it, I thank you for your kind words, and those that didn’t… well, better luck next time, I guess.

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Every NES game ever, ranked

October 7th, 2008

It’s been a long, hard process. But, with the assistance of an esteemed colleague of mine we sat down and produced a ranking of every NES game that has seen domestic release (plus a few extras). I’m not really comfortable disclosing our methodologies, since we might sell them at some point to buy pizzas, and I’m quite sure that someone out there will find fault in this listing because we put some game he hated over some game he loved. And all I can really say to that is, “get your own website and make your own list”.

Now, hit the jump for the complete listings, and let the debates begin!

Posted in lists | 5 Comments »

Art break!

October 1st, 2008

Since I’ve been playing a fair bit of Mega Man 9 lately, I thought it was pretty awesome when my sister surprised me with this:

Mega Man

Yep, she’s pretty awesome.

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Crawling Dungeons

September 20th, 2008

I’ve somehow been bitten by the dungeon-crawling bug lately. Maybe it’s because Diablo II recently had its disc-checks removed. Though I only played the game long enough to verify that the CD-check is indeed gone, I’ve somehow managed to lose large tracts of time to two other games in the same vein at roughly the same time, Baroque and Final Fantasy Fables: Chocobo’s Dungeon.

Baroque is something of a train wreck of a game. You play as this silent protagonist whose actions somehow brought about the end of the world. You have to travel to the bottom of this massive tower in order to unravel the mystery. There are some other characters in the game, both inside and outside of the dungeon, and they give you clues, but they’re neither coherent or clueful. So you just kind of wander around trying to figure out what in the world you’re supposed to be doing, because the game doesn’t really tell you other than ‘go into the tower, get to the bottom’. So you go along and go into the tower, fighting enemies until you run out of health. Run out of health and you leave the tower, all the experience points/level ups you got are gone, as is any weaponry or armor or special items you may have found. Essentially, it’s like the game just gives you a giant middle-finger when you die. Oh, but you can send items back to the start, so that if you do die (and you will) you can grab them and start anew with stronger stuff and last a little longer before you die again. Problem is, though, that you can send a pathetically small number of items back to the start. ‘Pathetically small’ in this case meaning four. Four items when your inventory can hold over twenty. Four items when one of the subquests involves collecting souls of creatures in the dungeon, and you find far more than four. So, do you send back the souls to start to complete that quest, or do you send back items that increase your attributes, or do you send back weapons and armor? Either way you go, you’re going to be making a lot of runs through this dungeon to do anything worthwhile. I poured over twenty hours into this thing and managed to get far enough that I saw one of the fake endings, after which the game restarted and I began anew without all my stuff again, and still didn’t know what in the world was going on.

On the flip side, Chocobo’s Dungeon was far more coherent and had a storyline I could follow without having to resort to mailing the developer a Bundt cake to ask for an interpretation of the story. It involves a chocobo, those big birds from the Final Fantasy games, named Chocobo, who ends up in a town where everyone’s memory was erased due to some calamity before the game started. Chocobo has to go into the memories of the townsfolk and restore them to normal, and unravel the story along the way.

The dungeons here are a lot the same as Baroque. Each one is randomly generated, there are items laying around all over the place, you have to work your way to the bottom, that kind of thing. But! The game is far more lenient. You die in this game and you lose all your items except the ones you have equipped, so you won’t lose that super-awesome weapon or armor you found. You leave the dungeon and you retain your strength levels, and get to carry everything out of the dungeon you can carry, assuming you left of your own volition, that is. But other than that, Chocobo’s Dungeon shared a lot with Baroque, so I’ve put together this chart showing the similarities between these two games:

  Baroque FFF:CD
Silent Protagonist Yes Chocobo talks in bird-speak, I think that counts
Lose stuff when you die Everything you’re carrying, all your levels Everything you’re carrying except for what you’re actually using
Cursed stuff you can’t remove once you put it on Can’t tell until you put it on and can’t take it off The item is a different color, warning you
Randomly-generated levels Yes Yes
Gotta save the world? The protagonist did something real bad and has to make amends Everyone in the town forgot what they did, but it was probably because of something bad
Can understand the story after twenty hours Probably not Probably so

I guess it kind of goes without saying that I really liked Chocobo’s Dungeon a whole lot better than Baroque. I just have some sort of odd compulsion to know what’s going on with the story in a game, if it has one (yeah, the story in Tetris was riveting…), or if I can’t understand the overblown complexity of the story, I’d at least like to have enough information that I can at least pretend that I know what’s going on, or at the very least hit the highlights (see Final Fantasy VII). Which is something that FFF:CD was able to provide, while Baroque was just… broke.

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Duplicity

September 11th, 2008

Some months ago I decided to try out the free-to-play MMO Guild Wars, which fit in pretty well with my new-found casual approach to MMOs. But, I kind of got tired of the base game and decided that I wanted a bit more, so I decided to pick up a copy of one of the additional campaigns for the game, Guild Wars Factions.

I get the box home, tear it open, and go to enter my key, when I notice that something is a little weird. Apparently two keys had gotten glued together at the factory and stuffed in my box.

Since I don’t really have much of a need for two keys, I contacted NCSoft’s support to see what they suggested I do with the other one. After they verified that the keys were legitimate and valid, they gave their blessing to essentially do with it whatever I would like, which I thought was pretty generous of them. (It’s spoken for, sorry).

So, has anything like this ever happened to any of you guys? Leave a comment below if it has.

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Fishbots

August 19th, 2008

Saturday’s post about some kind of mysterious message showing up on my instant messenger just kind of weirded me out a little bit, but I thought very little of it and decided to move on. Today, though, I get a different, yet similar message in my IM window:

sentimentaltrout

At this point, I’m getting a little annoyed, so I decide to dig a little bit deeper, and what I found isn’t so much unsettling as it is just plain annoying.

These ‘troutbots’, as it seems, are robots that trawl the Internet looking for screen names. They then act as sort of a middle-man and relay both sides of the conversation to the victims, obscuring their names. So, when I was talking to OrbitingTrout the other day, the poor sap on the other end of the line was also talking to OrbitingTrout.

I can’t actually fathom why such a thing exists other than to momentarily confuse random pairs of people for a few minutes. But now that it’s happened to me twice in two days, it’s having the effect of making me very irritated.

There is more information to be found in the following places:

In short, if you get some message from someone with ‘trout’ or ‘salmon’ in their username, it’s a bot designed to annoy you and someone else for as long as the two of you keep bickering back and forth figuring out who IM’d who first. The best thing to do is to not respond to any of it and close your browser window, or better yet, disallow IMs from folks that aren’t in your buddy list, though that may be infeasible for some.

Oh, and please pass a link around to this page to spread the word to educate people about this completely ridiculous waste of time.

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