Spike TV Video Game Awards 2009 recap -- Part 4 of 4

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Click hereto go back to the 3rd part.

After the commercials, Stevie Wonder has found his way to the stage to present the Best Music Game Award. The audience gives him a standing ovation for still being alive. Awkwardly, someone is feeding Stevie stats about the VGAs and handicapped people through his earpiece, so Stevie sounds like he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Stevie points out that, as a handicapped individual, he’d like to see more handicapped-accessible music games. But then again, Stevie would just like to see anything. BA-DUM-BUM!
Winner: The Beatles: Rock Band
A developer from Harmonix comes up to accept and gives Stevie a look of “what’s a famous person like you doing here?” Also, this guy must be the smallest writer in the world because he reads off his entire acceptance speech from a paper the size of two fortune cookie fortunes taped on top of each other.

The British announcer introduces musical act The Bravery. Who are The Bravery? Well, I’ll never know because after seeing a guy play an electric guitar with a violin bow and hearing the lead singer sleepily mumbling into the microphone, I said “fuck it” and fast-forwarded. Sorry Bravery fans, this is a video game show, not the Music Video Awards. Anyway, I’m happy I fast-forwarded. Even sped up, this act takes fucking forever.

Commercials. Still doing the adult thing with ads for razors and eHarmony.

Next up to the stage is Tricia Helfer from the recent Halo 3: ODST game. Tricia asks which game is well-orchestrated and has such an “artfully-complete” story line? Halo, of course. Even Tricia cracks herself up over that one. After building up Halo as the greatest FPS experience ever EVER, they show the World Premiere of Halo Reach. There’s really not much to say about this trailer. It’s set long before the first Halo game with a group of Spartan armored soldiers who all look different than Master Chief – for example, one guy has a skull painted on his helmet and a woman has a robot arm. They are quickly briefed by their commander and then take off in helicopters. None of the game was shown, so it’s hard to judge what to expect, but it will be curious to see if Halo can win back interest in a Modern Warfare world.

Jake Gyllenhaal is back to put an end to this with the Game of the Year Award. Jake implies that “Game of the Year” means gamers have been playing nothing but this game all year, although of the five games nominated, the earliest (Arkham Asylum) came out less than four months ago.
Winner: Uncharted 2: Among Thieves
Four developers from Naughty Dog accept and seem really grateful to win. They also pick up two other awards for Best PS3 Game and Best Graphics. One of the developers identifies Nolan North, the voice of Nathan Drake (the camera still won’t show him) as well as one of the British announcers from tonight as Claudia Black, which is more than Spike could do. After their thanks, the trophy girl herds them off-stage so that Jake can re-introduce The Bravery to play out the show. This set is a little better than the last one, going from drunk mumbling to incomprehensible British mumbling. After they perform, there is no mass exodus from the arena, mostly because I think the audience is now comatose.

Well, that does it for the 2009 VGAs. All-in-all, not really much to write home about. Sure, the lack of a host and all the terrible skits kept the bullshit down to an absolute minimum, but what’s the fun in that? I came for a train wreck, people. All you got instead was a bunch of “surprise” trailers and a bunch of mostly questionable awards. Let’s start with the trailers. They were either obvious titles that didn’t show much to get excited about (ie. Arkham 2 and UFC 2010) or they were unexpected properties that nobody asked for. Are you really going to try and reboot True Crime and Medal of Honor to try to take down GTA and Call of Duty? That ship already sailed with Saints Row 2 and Killzone 2/ODST.

Now about the awards. If you’re going to bust their balls over disregarding awards, they had about as many awards presented as there were trailers. But this year proved that the awards just need to go. Overall, a lot of the winners were questionable, considering many of the game journalists on other podcasts said they got different categories to vote for than on the website – such as the Megan Fox award. Second, how does Assassin’s Creed 2 win for Best Action/Adventure Game and Uncharted 2 wins for G.O.T.Y.? Could it be because UbiSoft got Jake Gyllenhaal there to show off the new Prince of Persia game and he was about the biggest star of the night? Or was it because, in presented awards, no winner won twice. This was evident by a game winning one award and the devs walking back with a handful. This would be like if, when Titanic won for Best Picture at the Oscars, they wheel out a giant cart with all the rest if that movie’s Oscars on it. So obviously, recognition isn’t the big deal of this show either.

So the bullshit was mostly gone, the trailers were lackluster, and the awards were questionable. And sadly, I do see this as being as good as it gets, in its current condition. But I think I need to talk to the producers at Spike. Come closer, I want to tell you something. First, thank you for killing the bullshit and treating me like this at least isn’t on Nickelodeon. But these awards. You don’t want to give them and I understand that. And that’s ok. They don’t hold any value or prestige anyway. Look, just make it a trailer premiere show. You know you want to. Quit lying to yourself. Now go back to showing more UFC, you guys. We’ll talk again next year.