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G4: The Pong Channel?
CoffeeNowDammit writes "Care to watch other people play Pong? You may be able to do so with the debut of G4, a new US cable channel (via participating Comcast cable providers) devoted entirely to video-gaming. G4 will air a marathon of Pong.. 24 hours a day.. see ball, see ball bounce.. for an entire week. Story is here . What a country." This has got to be a joke, right? A fake press release? Please, tell me it's a joke.
I agree the sega channel was interesting... one of the first cable based networks. too bad it failed in the end... just not enough support damnit! I bet the first show on G4 is about that fong guy who played quake... you know a 'where are they now' Dennis(I think thats his first name) Fong today lives with his parents in their surbaban home... even though he is 30 years old and has no job. He expected the money and 'ho's' to come rolling in after beating all in a quake tournment. After having an everCrack addiction however his life was nearly cutshort by losing his charecter in the dirty wastes.
The channel plans to offer 13 original weekly series, focusing on topics like sports games, gaming reviews, and hints and tricks for winning at popular video games. It is expected to have 350 to 400 hours of original content per year.
The seven-day Pong marathon is just hype - but the channel is real.
Which alternates between crap and crap with a Manowar soundtrack. The main show they have involves footage from games with 'real world' music dubbed over the top. Either Eurotrash pop or Power Metal, funnily enough.
They've now started to branch out a bit by having 'review' slots, which can be quite entertaining in themselves, having two guy geeks and a girl geek flirting around and occasionally mentioning the games. But they spoil it all by intercutting the real programming with extended 3-minute-plus adverts for premium rate phone in competitions which are apparently their only source of revenue.
It's crap, but it's watchable crap.
"Why did they cancel my favorite Sci-Fi show? I downloaded ALL the episodes!"
And it seems to be going ok, they have their own multiplayer online game apparently called Legend Of Mir even which does well.
They do things like game and hardware reviews, visit tech/game shows, interviews with designers, coders, etc etc, it can be very intresting.. Does have its extreme times of crap and theres FAR too many competitions that take up 10min slots..
Not wanting to get marked flamebait, but alot of their reviews are better than the more common web site reviews ALA Slashdot/TomsHardware/Hexus etc.
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Yes, in Europe, we already have dedicated game channel which show footage of video games being played. It's truly terrible.
See a typical schedule here, or check out the network's website here
I remember being very frightened of the whole thing (I was in high school, but it still gave me the creeps) - and now it is one of my favorite cable networks. Go figure.
Also, around 1990, a favorite station near me (it was 93Q in Toledo) went from being a top 40 station to an oldies station (I suspect that ClearChannel bought them out to make way for their own Top 40s station). Anyhoo, they played "Louie, Louie" nonstop for a week. Their press release said that they had looked at the demographics and concluded that people weren't getting enough "Louie, Louie". They were trying to fill that gap. Cute.
The press release is no joke - they really are showing Pong. But the reason behind it is because EVERY cable TV network has to test their feed before they truly go live. MOST networks do something boring like color bars with a low tone. G4 decided to be CREATIVE and show Pong for ONE WEEK and everybody gets all over them. The real programming starts on May 1st.
It figures, though. The last time G4 was announced on Slashdot in November, it got a very heavy critisizm that it wouldn't work from CmdrTaco. I submitted the story it was launching 3 times last week and it was rejected. I guess they were waiting for a NEGATIVE story to come in before covering it at all. So I guess Slashdot will be unsupportive of the new network. Yet I bet if they showed Linux all the time it would be hailed as the second coming.
There is a show like this on the network, called "Arena".
One of Slashdot's favorites, Wil Wheaton, is one of the commentators on the show.
This actually happens with a lot of new channels. If you're planning to show something you have to pay for, you don't want to start with real content. If your equipment gets delayed, or you have problems with it when you start, you don't want to be wasting content you paid for. On the other hand, you don't want to pay for your broadcast bandwidth if you're not going to broadcast anything.
So the usual thing to do is to broadcast something really cheap until you know it's all working correctly. Of course, you run into the danger of people actually preferring the fake content to what you actually want to show. (There was one station that broadcast a camera pointed at a fishtank until they got their studio ready, and then people called in to request the fishtank)
No, more like Rocket Arena 3 3rd person view mode after you die, or even better, Team Fortress demo style arena viewing. Imagine being able to spectate on the interaction between multiple players from a distance, instead of watching the game from a single player's perspective.
This is exactly what my show, Arena, does. (I write the show, and I co-host it with my friend Travis.)
We capture gameplay in team-based games like Unreal Tournament and Counter-Strike using observer modes. We use flying cameras to follow the players, and we use some static cameras to capture areas which always have lots of action in them (like bombsites in CS or bases in UT.)
Players compete in timed rounds, and win points for kills and capturing objectives (detonating/defusing bombs or capturing flags.) At the end of each show, we count up all the points and the team that wins gets to advance to the next episode, in a ladder-tournament.
I've been telling my producers that we should get some website teams together, so Team Slashdot could play Team K5, or Team FARK could play Team Something Awful.