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SpikeTV "Video Game Awards" Results
Last night SpikeTV aired its second annual Video Game Awards. Commentary is available from the Video Game Ombudsman, who did some live blogging during the event. From his post: "Seven Awards in 50 seconds - And that's including the lame intro. and Bloodrayne's 9 second acceptance "speech" for cyber-vixen of the year. Way to stand there, BloodRayne. The categories and winners aren't even vaguely related. And these are major awards, not the largely immaterial technical awards at the Oscars. Oh well, I guess now they can squeeze in another musical number." Grimwell Online is also available for snarky analysis, as is Buttonmashing.com. For non-flash results, Voodoo Extreme has a list of the winners.
The MTV-ization of gaming culture has begun and it's not pretty. The people Spike, G4, and MTV call "gamers" are not the kids that grew up playing Nintendo; they're the kids that grew up beating up the kids that played Nintendo.
Home gaming is a commodity. What used to require thousands of dollars in an arcade to display primitive graphics has now been ecclipsed by inexpensive home machines for under $150 that offer compelling immersive experiences that compete with movies for your entertainment budget.
Gamers these days grew up with Doom, not Pacman. Of course these kids are going to expect a little more glitz.
The combination of Hip hop and video games together is pretty big right now. A lot of rappers and hip hop artists are very vocal about their support for video games.
... and in other news on the music-video game connection on the front page, iTunes is now selling video game soundtracks...
The new GTA has a very hip hop gangsta feel and a supporting soundtrack. NBA Ballers (a 1M+ platinum seller) has MC Supernatural and is full of underground jams.
Have you noticed the soundtrack even in Madden the last couple years has leaned more and more heavily towards "urban" music. I used to be on a team that was a Madden competitor and one of the things that was remarked in the design of the game was that we needed to target a more "urban" audience since that is where Madden gets a surprisingly large amount of their sales.
The rappers aren't necessarily the ones pushing for this. Quite a bit of it's coming from video game publishers who are putting more and more big name rappers and hip hop soundtracks in their products. At least from what I've seen, most of the times, the video games makers seek the musicians out, not the other way around... you only hear about musicians seeking to be on video game soundtracks for huge games like Doom.
Contrary to last years (madden game of the year, matrix goty, yuck!), the results were almost spot on. HL2 as best pc game, and GTA:SA as GOTY (instead of madden or def jaf vendetta) makes sense from a players perspective. It was a good idea to let actual viewers vote.
A couple of surprises though, is curious and sad that Doom 3 and MGS3 didnt won a single award and is kind of cool to know that MK:deception was voted as best fighting game, halo 2 as best fps over doom 3 and hl2 (Well... if you mean by the multiplayer game I think I can agree on that) although hl2 won best pc game and best graphics (to keep balance), burnout 3 beat everyone else as a racing game (is a game about spectacular crashing cars at 200mph you have to admit is tempting). Im kind of unsure about fable but considering it wasnt competing against kotor 2 (which was delivered later in the year) its a lot better than the other nominees.
Go ahead MOD my day!
More opinions here
It looked to me like it was an ad for a company that creates games out of 100% Human Misery. Just about all of the "segments" had to deal with EA games or people who perform on EA Trax, and even the categories were dominated by EA. (The ones that weren't were thrown into 60 second "and other games receiving awards..." commercial bumpers.) Hell, the Best Racing Game category were three EA games, and that's it.
Sure, other games won some of the categories, but just about all of the "segments" used EA properties or talent that appears in EA games.
Katamari Damacy was way more addictive than the other games in that category, but since it wasn't by EA and didn't have any rap music in it, it didn't stand a chance. (Also, the "Best Soundtrack" category was won by a game that used all licensed tracks from the early 90's...It beat out games that had original soundtracks that were amazing...Great message to send to publishers!)