What is Professional? March 21, 2011

Funny Story.  I fix computers on the side since I’m really good at it and twice a week I go to classes for training in computer certification.   I was told in class last week that the guidebook clearly states you’re expected to look professional when you go out to a computer repair job and I just laughed hysterically.

I’ve been fixing computers most of my life, but mostly just for my own personal amusement.  I hadn’t discovered until recently (my family was always against me making profit from my computer skills, they rather I stay in college until I died) that fixing computers could be a lucrative business if you had a customer demand for it in your area.  With only my experience and no formal training to inhibit my expectations, I would go to these computer repair jobs dressed how I normally dressed, with a video game t-shirt and zip up hoodie (weather appropriate).

In fact I told my A+ Certification class about a time when a private school called me in to look at some laptops.  I went to diagnose and fix them wearing a Doom 3 shirt.  None of the staff batted an eye at my appearance, I was treated with the utmost of respect, and a lot of the students (who averaged around age of 6) were extremely curious to what was my experience and how they could get a job fixing computers as well.

I was told by the instructor that was just AWESOME.

I think that the times have changed, in that people expect real technical experts to dress like how I normally do, instead of dressing how Best Buy does commercials about how their technicians look.  The times of the MIT graduate IBM engineer wearing a button down white shirt and black tie, armed with horned rim black glasses and a pocket protector have passed and people have come to expect a computer expert to come wearing a video game or rock band t-shirt. Dressing like a stereotypical geek is not professional anymore.  Ironically, dressing in a Halo shirt actually makes you look more like you know what you’re doing.

Obviously it’s a bad idea to wear long dangling chains, especially if you’re working inside a pc, so things like dog tags cannot be worn, but even something as professional as a tie can also easily get in the way of your hands when you’re building a new PC.

From what I’ve been told by my peers, the corporate level still expects their employees to cater to their stereotypical dress codes, leaving personal individuality to when they leave their homes.  Other than basics of cleanliness, there is really not a good reason for these policies to be in effect, espessially when a guy like me looks like more of an expert to a typical person than someone depicted in a Best Buy commercial.  More progressive software companies like Google, eBay, and Apple have bucked this trend without incident, to say nothing of the dozens of game development studios in the US alone.

Something that I’ve noticed, especially in the computer games industry is that you can’t judge anything about a person just by appearances anymore.  I think for the most part people still will judge others by appearances in every other field (business especially) but in all my experience, for technology they expect the out there to be the norms.  This might have something to do with the exposure a lot of people have had to technology enthusiasts as depicted to them in movies and on television, or it could be expectations formed from people they have in their own families who have technical backgrounds.

I think that’s one thing that A+and compTIA is behind on, maybe someone should inform them to update their manual.  Has the games industry influenced this trend, or has the media been more responsible?  I’ll leave you to decide that, and also what you should look for when you need help the next time your computer breaks. 

The New Wave of Marketing March 18, 2011

So you’re a development house with a pedigree of games, and you decide you want to make your next game an entirely new IP that no one up to this point has heard of before.  You’re releasing in a time where the market on all the current-generation consoles are flooded, with tons of games already out, many of them contenders for best game of the platform, and plenty more to come that year.  You need to sell your game, and sell them as close to release day as possible.  Because brick and mortar retailers don’t like keeping inventory on shelves that isn’t selling and after a few months they will start to mark down the price of something they want to get rid of, regardless of what price point you’re telling them to sell at.

You could market the game through the usual channels, like through television ads, billboards, and magazines.  However, marketing on TV and in print costs a lot of money, and your core demographic doesn’t really pay any attention to advertising that way anymore.  They’ll usually just ignore them, change the channel or have them deleted from their recordings.

You could offer your customers something to get them to preorder, like a physical promotional item or day one DLC.  By telling your customers to preorder at a certain chain store, you can offer them exclusive downloadable or unlockable content as an incentive.  Retailers like this because it can get them guaranteed customers when the game finally releases, and money paid for games that aren’t even out yet.  It also gives them a good barometer of just how many copies of each game to stock on the day of release.  The problem is that this will make a lot of customers who didn’t preorder feel penalized, and make them think twice about paying full retail price for a copy of the game that doesn’t have the DLC offered with it.  Also it can really anger customers if you offer different promotional items spanning over many different retail chains, making many completionists wary of the value of their own Day 1 DLC when there are other items for a game out there they can never have.

You could release a Collector’s Edition (CE) of your game and charge a premium price for it.  You can fill it with little in-game trinkets or include things of actual substance like a documentary disc and art book.  The low quantity of those at release could bring out a lot of preorders and day one purchases getting you full price sale on each game, on top of the extra money from charging a premium price.  However a CE costs more money to make and your publisher might not be interested in offering one if they don’t see a demand for one.

So what do you do?  You have to be creative.  Coming soon I’ll be talking about the most creative marketing campaigns for new IPs I’ve seen over the past few years.  If anyone has any ideas they’d like to pass along to me, post a comment!

Award Shows, Do We Need Them? February 14, 2011

If you’ve known me on a personal level long enough, you’d know that I think of most Awards Shows as farces.  That gladly includes organizations such as the Academy or Golden Globes.  Over the entire span of my life, I’ve not only disagreed with their decisions on what makes a good movie, actor, song, or director but the very people and movies I believe should win an award for Best (Insert Award Here) of the Year not only don’t win, but  don’t even receive a nomination.  See it happen enough times and you start to look down upon the Awards Organizations in general and start to think, “What’s the point of having a Best Award for anything when the actual best of the year aren’t even up for nomination?”  I know a lot of people were thinking along those lines when the Academy spat in the face of Christopher Nolan in 2008 by not nominating The Dark Knight, the actual best picture of that year, for Best Picture.

You could say, “Oh you’re just being egotistical again by thinking your opinions of what makes a good film is better than anyone else’s.”  Now, normally you’d be right.  But seriously, if the movies that I believe deserve the awards aren’t even nominated, and a lot of my peers are listing off names of their own favorites of the year which aren’t getting nominations either, you slowly come to the conclusion there’s a fix in place somewhere, and if you’ve continued to see a downward trend where lousy movies you’ve never heard of not only get nominated but win awards they have no business winning, you lose faith in a system which claims to declare a true BEST.

Then there’s the Grammys, which are awards for music, not movies.  I’ve seen parts of a few of them.  I have always wondered why most of the awards don’t actually get presented to the winners on stage, and instead just have their names called out, and why the majority of the awards aren’t mentioned or given out on the actual awards show.  Steven Colbert learned that one a few years ago when his self narrated book didn’t win a Grammy a few years ago.  They never even broadcasted the section of the show for category he was up for.  He had to find out he lost online.

But, something surprising happened at the Grammys this year.  A song which was made specifically for a video game won an award last night.  “Baba Yetu” by Christopher Tin won “Best Instrumental Arrangement Accompanying Vocalist(s)”.  This is a fantastic song I first heard accompanied by a full orchestra on the Video Games Live Level 2 Blu-Ray.  I am ashamed to admit I was never a Civ player despite the heavy classic gaming pedigree that goes with that franchise (and it’s Game God creator) but I was just blown away by this song.

It is my guess that the Grammys had absolutely no idea that this game was originally designed for a video game theme, as it was introduced in this year’s Grammys for Christopher Tin’s Album Calling all Dawns, which released on CD in 2009.  Although games have had fully composed scores on the level of movies for the past ten years, Best Video Game Score is NOT a category the Grammys recognises, and because of that a lot of fantastic scores over the last ten years have gone ignored by the Grammys, which is seen by a lot of musicians as the award only the greatest of them can aspire to.

If you’re a fan of the song as I am, here’s the official music video for it made for Civilization IV.  The game has been out for five years now, so you might be able to find yourself a copy if you wish.  If you don’t want to play, you can buy his CD Calling all Dawns, which is what got him the nomination in the first place.  The game is also featured on the Video Games Live tour, and it is one of the songs on the Video Games Live Level 2 DVD and Blu-Ray concert. 

Congrats to Christopher Tin and the makers of Civilization.  Your win has broken down a barrier of hypocrisy that deserved to be trampled.

UPDATE:  The Video Games Live Official Site states that Calling all Dawns won the award for Best Classical Crossover album.  So that’s two for Christopher Tin.

My Ode to Palm February 11, 2011

HP has announced their first set of devices that will use the software engineered by Palm before HP bought them out.  With HP giving no credit to the company they have apparently completely absorbed, this looks like the end of Palm as we know it.  Now say what you will about the Palm Pre or the Palm Pixi (it’s already been said before, and there’s nothing at all I can contribute further about either device) but I have plenty about the company that I wish to say.

All this recent talk about hint books, guides and E3 got me to thinking about just how our society has evolved in just the last ten years, and just how powerful the computers in our pockets which call themselves phones have become.  I’d like to think that Palm is partially to thank for that, especially since a lot of what my iPhone can do is what my old Palm Pilot could do almost ten years before the iPhone hit a single shelf.

In 2000 I got a PALM VII as my first ever PDA. In the years before I had a cell phone, this thing was a serious precursor to the latest smart phones such as the Droid or iPhone.  It had tons of useful programs you could write notes with, or if you preferred you could use an optional keyboard attachment to type files up.  But its main draw was the wireless palm.net service you could pay fifteen dollars a month to access, and you could get e-mail or make use of free internet connected applications (apps!).

Now you’re probably going to tell me if you want to look up a phone number nowadays you just simply can download the White Pages app to your iPhone, run the program, and look up the address and phone number of whoever you’d like, what the Palm VII could do was certainly no different and nothing special.  Well, let me stress I was using this hardware across the country in 2001, this was easily 6 years before the release of the iPhone and 7 years before smart phones started to be used by the masses.

I took the VII everywhere, in 2001 the Delta Application had all my airport information ready for me when I flew out to Florida.  I took it to California, Nevada, and Massachusetts.  It worked everywhere and never had bad reception.  I could check my e-mail for the first time without needing to fire up my Personal Computer.  I could get the address of any business I needed on the go as well as their phone numbers, and I could even find out what meal I was getting on my flight before I even got to the terminal.

One of my favorite Palm programs at the time was an app that allowed me to download the headlines from gamasutra.com and read them on the go every time I synced my Palm to my computer.  However, when GDC was about to happen for that year, they included something special along with their headlines.  By tapping a new GDC specific option in the program, I could access a whole new area.  The new area provided the whole GDC schedule, and it was now on my Palm!  If I chose to attend, I would know exactly where everything was all at the tap of a stylus.  The entire schedule, a map of the show and a bunch of interesting interactive tidbits was at my fingertips.   This was my first exposure to what technology would eventually be capable of.

The downside was that it couldn’t make phone calls and it couldn’t play games, music or videos.  The processing power and the fact that it was a monochrome screen didn’t make me feel all that bad about it.  I was trading off that for the ability to have mobile internet functionality for the first time in my life.  Also, cell phones had not yet taken off in the States yet.  My mom’s was still very big and bulky with a large antenna, and the LCD display could only display what a simple pocket calculator could, numbers and that was all.

Palm would eventually start ushering in a new series of smart phones (the Treo) which offered Palm’s software along with phone capability.  They were manufactured by a company that would later be bought by Palm, but they would use Palm’s Operating System.  However they would eventually be competing with more than just the Blackberry.  By 2007, phones had become an enormous business.  Everyone had one, and even though the US was slower to adopt more advanced phones than the rest of the world (the cell phone companies held us back pretty good) a new company was ready to give the consumer the future, and it was Apple, who would eventually release a heavily functional cell phone with a consumer price in mind.

Being the first affordable major consumer device to market REALLY helped out Apple a lot.  Unlike PDAs or MP3 players, people are only going to want to have one cell phone.  The Pre released some time after the massive popularity of the iPhone 3G release, where many iPhone owners were unable to change their phones and cell plans without bringing about massive fines.  Their customers were people who were willing to wait for Palm.  By the time the Pre came out, they did in many ways have a superior phone to the iPhone (built in keyboard and OS level multitasking), but they also really shot themselves in the foot by making themselves exclusive with just one provider.  They also got a TON of bad press among many groups for the way they went around iTunes syncing, by falsely getting iTunes to identify it as an Apple product.  They solved most of these problems with the Pixi by the time of its release but it was too late, and the company was too far in debt.

With the purchase of Palm has come its end.  Its software will continue to live on through HP, who will be using it to power their new handheld devices.  Rest in peace, Palm, knowing you were the catalysts to ushering in the future.

The New Trend With Guide Books January 30, 2011

For as long as there have been games, there have been guide books.  In the early Nintendo days, they would be a part of each issue of Nintendo Power.  In 1993, I was seeing trade paperbacks full of tips in my school library for many popular games bundled together.  By 1997, in the golden age of PC CD-ROM gaming, official and unofficial guide books would be posted for all the latest games.  In fact, there were so many of them, a lot of bookstores would have their own little section on the shelves devoted to them.

Guide Books can offer a lot more than what an online cheats site can aside from the fact that you can read them on The John.  Now I will be the first person to admit I’ll just look up an FAQ for a simple answer I need when I’m playing through an older game, but I’ll also admit that a Guide Book has a lot of advantages.  They’re out on day one of a game’s release, well before some of the more in depth FAQs can be written.  They also have more of a visual and artistically appealing look to them then an HTML loaded TXT file.  They are printed on glossy paper with quality inks and will include every secret, code, hint, biography, and storyline explanation a curious gamer requires.

About a year ago I did a piece on the cousin of the Guide Book, the Video Game Art book.  Artwork, developer interviews, and a beautiful (usually hardcover) book to read it out of. And the really nice ones are bound just like coffee table books.  If a gamer was really lucky back in the old days, and the game was big enough, a seperate art book would be released for a game, it happened with Halo 1 and 2, Doom 3, Half-Life 2 and The Force Unleashed.

Here’s a video so you can have a good idea what I’m talking about.

As time progressed, the Guides started to get more elaboriate, and then (as you could see in some of the examples I showed in the video) they started getting bound seprately with the guide book, like for Mass Effect 1 and Alan Wake.

Over the past two years, a new trend has started with these books.  Now, instead of releasing a guide book and art book seperate, they seem to be going for creating a single big book of everything and releasing it at a premium price.  A lot of the newer releases (Halo Reach, Dead Space 2) have some FANTASTIC looking Collector’s Guides that as a game collector and coffee table enthusiast I couldn’t ignore.

Now, the downside of this is that these guides can cost almost twice as much as a regular guide can.  A traditional guide book can cost about $19.99 US, a price that a lot of people believe is far too high.  These new Collector’s Books can cost anywhere from $29.99 to $39.99.  Also, the art portions are integrated with the guides themselves, preventing seperate resale (and making them much bigger on a shelf).

Time will tell what will happen to these monoliths of a physical era in a digital age.  Will they continue to be published, or will the popularity of free information on the Internet finally overcome them?  Until then I’ll still be taking that guide book of this year’s E3, thank you very much.

Xbox Live Updates Getting Longer January 21, 2011

When an update used to come to the Xbox 360 around the time of launch up until recently, it would download and install quite quickly. Obviously this was due to the fact that Xbox 360 updates were very small in file size given the low capacity of early memory units and the lack of internal memory in the low end 360s.

Occasionally a major seasonal update would come along and could take around a minute or two to download, but most smaller updates or firmware patches would take less than 30 seconds.

Recently the November update brought Kinect support and understandably, it took a while to download. It was (as far as I could tell) the longest update the Xbox 360 ever had. (I can’t compare file sizes, MS doesn’t provide them). It made sense, a new interface and a new control system was being added, so a lot of data was going to be expected.

Today, a smaller update was brought to Xbox Live, which (according to the release notes) added in only one simple feature, the ability to boot to disc, something the 360 was previously able to do. The update took much longer than earlier ones, around 2 minutes to download and install.

Is this the start of a new updating trend? Quick and small firmware updates were a smart move by Microsoft, as it leaves the system less vulnerable to firmware errors caused by power loss during an update. This was something the Xbox 360 holds over the Playstation 3 (and technically still does, a PS3 firmware update takes around 10 minutes), but things are changing.

I think this has started since the 360 now supports USB flash drives. Fine print says they require at least 1GB storage for “system files”. Has anyone with original 360s with no HDs lost compatibility with Xbox Live?

Time will tell if the trend will continue, but does anyone but me mind (or even notice) the longer updates? I want to hear what you have to say. Please post your comments!

Why Do Playstation 3 Games List 1080p Support Even if the Game Doesn’t? January 9, 2011

This is a small gripe but I’m worried it’s going to turn into a trend and I don’t like it one bit.  Unlike the Xbox 360, the Playstation 3 does not have its own way to upsample PS3 games or Blu-Ray discs to support the maximum resolution of your HDTV.  About the only things it does upsample are regular DVDs, video files, and PS1/2 games (if compatible).  This was a serious problem at launch, as many early HDTVs lacked support of the native 720p resolution.  Since they couldn’t be upsampled to 1080i like what the Xbox 360 could do, many unfortunate gamers would have to play their games in progressive scan (480p) and be forced to like it, while Xbox 360 games would play just fine in full HD resolution on their HDTVs.  Many at the time thought this was going to be a temporary inconvenience, like something that Sony just forgot to implement into the hardware.  However, PS3s have been out since the end of 2006 and PS3-Game upsampling is still not a part of its internal software.  By this point it’s unlikely they will add it, and after three years many of the early adopters like myself who had the problem upgraded to newer HDTVs that had 720p support.

So since the Playstation 3 doesn’t upsample its PS3 games, it falls to the developers to have their game support the resolutions they want.  While the typical HD resolution in a PS3 game is 720p, many Playstation 3 games can support resolutions of 1080i and 1080p, either natively or through their own graphical upsampling.

I submit for your approval the PS3 case of the game Dead Space.  On the Greatest Hits box released in the US, it lists native support of 720p, 1080i, and 1080p resolutions.  When I popped in the game a week ago, I was looking forward to seeing my tv announce 1080p resolution as the game booted.  It didn’t.  The game was actually 720p.  For whatever reason, the information on the box was incorrect.  While I don’t have the original box (the non-greatest hits one) I know for a fact that it also listed 1080i and 1080p resolutions on it as well.  I can understand the mistake made on an original box, but there was plenty of time to fix the mistake

Dead Space isn’t alone.  Brutal Legend for the PS3 also incorrectly listed 1080i and 1080p resolution support, and did not actually provide it.  I guess the demo should have tipped me off to that (the demo is also 720p), but I guess I trusted the packaging more than I should have.

The only clue the packaging provided which could’ve clued me into this support being iffy was the statement next to the resolution support on the bottom of the packaging that 1080p could only be supported through the HDMI connection using HDCP compliant HDMI cable.  Well, I have that.  My HDMI cables are fully HDCP compliant, and have no problem whatsoever with Blu-Ray transmission, and my TV and Receiver are also fully HDCP compliant.

So, what’s with the false advertising?  I’ve seen plenty of other PS3 games list the proper resolution support on their boxes, so it can be done.  Granted, the Xbox 360 will usually list 720p, 1080i, and 1080p supported resolutions on all their game packages even if the game does not natively support those resolutions, but that’s because the game can display on those resolutions using the native upsampling feature of the Xbox 360.  Unlike the lies on some of the PS3 cases, the Xbox 360 games are accurately listing what HD resolutions their games will display on.

Sony, have better oversight on what resolutions your games can and can’t do, and if you made a mistake on a package, don’t keep the mistake when it’s re-released.  Either that, or finally introduce a native upsampling feature into the PS3.  That’s been requested for years already, it would be a nice feature your customers would happily download.

Project Natal Vs Kinect Follow Up January 3, 2011

I’ve had a few days now to play around with the Kinect, the Xbox 360 perphial which formally went by the codename of Project Natal.  While my previous article on Project Natal vs Kinect was based entirely upon my research, I wanted to write a bit of a follow-up to my earlier article which would include my personal experience with it.  This article is going to provide a bit of updated information to the original article, and answer some of the questions I couldn’t.  I recommend reading that article first before reading this.  Now this will mostly revolve around the interface of the Kinect in the Xbox 360, and my experience using it, and compare that to what I had written in my original article, as well as provide deeper information on the perphial.

Well, first off I can give a ruling that the Kinect will be able to detect hand motions from any position.  On startup the Kinect scans the room for its user and keeps the camera at the best perspective it needs to see them.  Because of that, it will be able to scan you whether you’re sitting, squatting or standing and read your hands.  You have to wave your hand slowly (which was something a friend of mine simply could not do correctly no matter what instruction the system and I gave them how to wave) in order for the system to recognize you want to use it, and then it treats your hand in the interface like the pointer to a wiimote.  Since there’s no button, it detects what you want to select by how long you hold your hand over the option.  It works well, so long as you don’t get too close to the camera, and it’s quite fun when you’re setting up your initial Xbox Live Avatar.

That split-screen soccer game I mentioned in the original article which if it wasn’t already out at the time of writing was probably going to be out by Christmas was in fact out when I wrote the article.  I can confirm that the Kinect-Exclusive launch game Kinect Sports has a soccer mode which is more in-depth than just goaltending.

I’ve also gotten some experience with the facial recognition setup of the Kinect.  When I initially theorized in the article that in order for the Kinect to take a 3D model of its user for later purposes, you would need to stand in front of the Kinect and do a very specific series of turns while it took pictures of you and mapped it onto your 3D model, I said there was no incentive for the user to do this.  It turns out that this is EXACTLY how it sets up facial recognition, so there is some incentive for the user to do it.  Unfortunately I’m currently unable to set it up myself, as my room is set up in such a way that if I was to follow the moves that Kinect wants me to do in order to map my 3D body, I would need to saw off half of my bed and sledgehammer through my wall.  Fortunately the facial recognition system is optional and you don’t have to add it to your Xbox profile if you don’t want to.

As for my experiences with the audio recognition system, they were mixed.  There is an audio interface built into the new Xbox 360 dashboard when you have a Kinect plugged in, which will respond to you whenever you say the word, “XBOX” clearly enough for the system to hear it.  You really have to talk to it like you’re commanding it, otherwise it might not pick up on the word.  Unfortunately, if you’re in the regular controller interface, you have to first tell it to bring up the Kinect-specific dashboard by saying, “KINECT” right after saying, “XBOX”.  Only from there can you give it commands like “Play Disc”, “Next Menu”, “Open/Close Tray”, or “Cancel”.  If you try to skip the Kinect menu and give it one of the commands without booting it, like if you just want it to open your disc tray because you’re lazy, it won’t listen to you from the normal menu.  However, you can also wave and use your hand to command the Kinect menu if you’d rather not wake up everyone in your house by commanding the tv.  You still can’t turn the Xbox on and off by voice, something a lot of people are still disappointed about as it was something that was initially promised.

Update:  The Fall 2011 dashboard update has changed a lot of what was initially written here.  You can turn the Xbox 360 off by voice command while in the Xbox dashboard.  The dashboard can also be operated by Kinect voice command without having to go into a seperate menu.

There was no bigger disappointment for me than the Kinect Video Chat program.  It is completely different than what was shown in the video.  Wheras the girl was able to get one of her friends immediately to Kinect chat with her, I have only one friend who actually has an Xbox 360 with a Kinect at the time of writing, and he so far has refused to take any Kinect chat call I send him!  Then there’s the interface, it doesn’t seem to accept voice commands, and so far I’ve only been able to use it with either a controller or hand motions.  This is probably because the Kinect chat system sorts people by their gamertag, not their real names, and we all know that the pronunciation of a lot of people’s gamertags are debatable.  There’s also the video quality of the chat, which I can only say is total shit, even locally.  I think the Xbox Live Vision Camera offered a more fluid FPS in that camera than the Kinect offers.  Like I theorized, because the Kinect’s camera is not HD (any), on an HDTV setup, the chat windows would have to keep windowed or the image would blur.  Well they are windowed, and on a 1080p TV screen like I have, you can still see a minor blur.  But the blur is just not as bad as the non fluid motion of your local image.  This to me was the biggest disappointment of the Kinect.  The Kinect chat was supposed to be a whole new way of communication between two people, moving us one step closer to what was possible in Back to the Future Part II when an older Marty talked to an older Needles on the big screen HDTV in his den.  Instead, it feels like a webcam chat when you’re using two crappy cameras.  In fact the program happily announces to you that it uses the webcam software which is part of Windows Live Messenger, so now I know who to blame.  I’d like to tell you what the experience is like when two people could talk, and what I have to wave my hand over to help me try out dresses, but like I said, the only friend I have with a Kinect refuses to even plug it into his Xbox 360 when he’s not gaming on it (which definitely tells you something), making having a Kinect video chat experience unlikely for me.

Well that’s my follow-up on the Kinect.  I went a little deeper into what is actually being offered by these cameras opposed to what was initially promised in E3 2009 back when it was called Project Natal.  Hope you enjoyed it!

Spike’s Video Game Awards Show Tonight: Should You Care? December 11, 2010

Tonight an event will air on national television which since its inception has been a never ending farce, and an embarrassment to the entire video game industry, the Spike Video Game Awards Show.  Started in 2003 with the simple and commendable purpose of being to the video game industry what the Oscars are to film industry.  I was highly anticipating its inaugural event.  Fresh from my first E3, I felt like a major player in the video game industry, and I was really excited to see what I thought was going to be the next step of legitimacy to the gaming industry.

I turned on my TV to the station one hour into the broadcast.  They were going over the list of the most anticipated games for 2004.  Halo 2 was on the list, and when it appeared it got a large cheer from the audience.  Then footage from Half-Life 2 came on the screen and the crowd went absolutely berserk.  You can tell they were all really looking forward to that game, as was I.  As the footage ended, David Spade stood there completely puzzled as to why people were cheering for something he had absolutely no personal understanding of and yet was somehow able to host.  He asked the crowd, “What did you think [Alyx] was going to take her top off?”  I shut the TV off in horror.  Various members of the industry spoke to the gaming press after the event to literally say that they were ashamed they had participated in the event.  I figured it would be over when Game of the Year went to Madden.  I mean no one could possibly screw something up like this so badly and have the balls to continue doing it.  I was wrong.

There’s been so much wrong with this show I don’t even know where I’m going to start.  I’m not going to even talk about who decides the names on the ballots.  “Angry” Joe Vargas already did a really good job at that.  But who decides who wins?  Traditionally it’s been a majority online poll.  If you left it up to a simple online majority poll decision then Megan Fox is going to win best female actress in a video game over someone who actually deserved it, like Emily Rose.  Or Madden will win Game of the Year!  If you want to do it right, there is a right way to do it, and other events have already figured out there needs to be an “academy” to select the game.  It can be formed of the best game critics, independent bloggers, and industry veterans to select the games and cast their ballots.  This would mean heavily marketed and awful licensed garbage won’t get through, and insightful games like Psychonauts or Bioshock 1, which were all praised by the industry, could win.

Who picks the acts?  Traditionally there has been a lot of music at these events and when I say music I mean popular rap music.  I mean if you aren’t switching off your channels after you listen to bad decision after bad decision get called out, listening to what some of the musical acts perform will likely make you do it.  If you want to have musical acts at your show, try taking a page from the Oscars.  They’ll do live performances of songs that were up for award because they were in one of the movies being considered for the night!  You would be more than welcome to perform any musical piece from a game that was up for consideration.  Heck, I’m sure Tommy Tallarico is more than willing to get a whole orchestra together to perform any song from any game that you want, that’s part of his livelihood!

Then there are the comedians who are usually terrible.  When Ralphie May stood up and said the Xbox 360 should be called “It don’t work” did anyone really laugh?  I mean we all know the red ring of death, and had he been experienced in telling technology-centric jokes, he likely could’ve made the joke work, but he didn’t.  Now this is no slam on Ralphie May or comedians in general.  But people have to understand that comedians, no matter how famous they are, are only good in their element.  If they’re used to making jokes based upon their life experiences, asking them to insult a guy is just not going to be funny.  If you don’t believe me, watch the roast of Jeff Foxworthy where three of his best friends, all of which fine comedians, insult him for an hour.  Not once did a single joke they told make me laugh, and usually these guys would.  Inversely, when Dennis Leary was roasted the year before, it was one of the funniest events put to tape.  His peers were expert insult comedians.

If there’s been one positive thing the show has added over the past few years, it has been the world premiere game footage.  This was added around the time E3 downsized, almost turning parts of the awards show into venue to premiere new, highly anticipated games.  This tradition is expected to continue as Uncharted 3 and Batman: Arkham City are both expected to get premiere trailers aired, as well as a few other games.  Other premieres I would consider successful would be the first actual footage of Halo Reach.  Again, this was an honor usually bestowed upon E3, but I guess with the fact that the show downsized, it would make sense developers would space their announcements out.  I was disappointed they’d choose this venue to premiere, as ANYTHING would’ve been more worthy for the reasons I described earlier.

It has been getting better though, just very slowly.  From everything I’ve read so far, I’m going to force myself to give the show one more chance.  The VGAs are coming on tonight at 8pm on Spike TV.  If you’re lucky enough to have a provider which offers you the station in HD, you have a nicer provider than I do.