A couple things I want to post about that I meant to post about last week.

First up: The Spike VGA's.

The 1st Annual Spike Video Game Awards were held on Thursday last week and it was interesting. On the one hand, they did a lot of stuff wrong. On the flip side, they did present games in such a way that someone who doesn't game all day could watch the award show and not be bored (at least not any more than any other award show.)

The Good

There were some pretty funny bits where they took game footage and reworked it and dubbed over to make it funny. The induction of the Dot from Pong into the Hall of Fame was funny too. And most of the awards were awarded to games that were deserving.

The Bad

The show was definately skewed to the LCD (Lowest Common Denominator) and was proud of it. The Gamespy article about the awards compares them to the MTV Movie Awards as opposed to the Oscars, which is spot on.

They had porn stars giving out awards, wrestlers having a match in the middle of the awards ceremony and other wierdness. Thankfully I was watching it on the VCR so I could just fast forward past most of the crap performances and non-game related drivel.

The Ugly

Where the VGA's really got off track was with the categories and winners of same. Soul Calibur 2 won for Most Addictive game, but not best Fighting Game. Who won that? WWE Smackdown. Sure, it's a fighting game by a really large stretch of the definition of what a fighting game is, but there's no way it's a superior fighting game than SC2.

Another example of odd categories and winners was with the Best Game Based On A Movie and the Best Fantasy Game. For the Movie category, they gave the award to Enter The Matrix. EtM was fun and filled out a lot of side-story stuff with relation to Reloaded and Revolutions, but as a game it was unpolished, ugly and felt like an unfinished game, even though it did have 4 years for development. Knights of the Old Republic or Return Of The King are both far superior games.

And Knights of the Old Republic won the best Fantasy Game, which was cool, but I still think it should have won best movie game. Ah well.

And probably the worst thing was that they gave out the Game of the Year award (Madden 2004) before the ceremony even started. They just had a montage of all the games up for nomination and then, before David Spade was introduced or the VGA's were even declared as starting, they say, "GAME OF THE YEAR! MADDEN 2004!"

It'd be like revealing the Best Picture Oscar during the red carpet show. Instead of the GOTY, they spent the rest of the show hyping the "Most Anticipated" game. (It was Halo 2. Yippee.)

The Wrapup

In the end, I didn't mind watching the VGA's, especially due to the fast forward button on my VCR remote. I appreciate that they're making an effort to give games the recognition they deserve, given that more money was spent on games last year than movies. I just hope they get their butts in gear and at least make the categories and winners actually make sense. For serious game awards, I'll go by the online rankings and yearly GOTY awards on Gamespy and Gamespot and Electric Playground.