Maybe I’m getting soft, but I’m not gonna shit all over Geoff Keighly’s awards show this year. Someday I may write why I poo poo on him, his shows and the gaming industwy as a whole…but not in this post. Besides it being fashionable to shitpost about the VGA’s I just lump it together with what I don’t like about video games media in general. Not that I loved the show this year, just that there were enough things I liked so I didn't have to yell at the screen when they were pushing some obvious agendas they wanted to spew. I’ll tell you the “it takes a village” BS was very yell-worthy, though. Also, one game being put on a pedestal in every category it was in (except the player voice vote) was a bit ridiculous…all to push the “wow, it’s an ‘indie’ game beating out AAA”...yeah whatever.
What did I like about it though? CAPCOM, Evanescence (more for Sarah, than for me, but still entertaining), Ralph the dog poking fun at the VGA’s rigged biases and that they dialed back the BS I hate. While there still was some of this in there, it’s like they had someone more sensible taking out the crap ‘cos there was way less:
filler white-knighting about diversity/culture
industwy puff pieces
talk about the “academy” itself
comparison’s to The Oscars
wowing cinematics/storytelling in games
Kojima worship
Sony worship
CAPCOM…seriously CAPCOM used this show to their advantage. They had an old-school grunge ad, added a nice little pop-up Switch 2 logo for Pragmata (as a Nintendo nut, I loved that and want more of that, plus did you see there will be an Amiibo for this game), debuting Leon in Resident Evil 9, debuting a Mega Man return, Evanescence doing Afterlife which is the Devil May Cry 2 anime theme and that Street Fighter movie segment with the actors coming out…sorry, that’s hype for me. CAPCOM made the VGA’s this year, which is crazy ‘cos I heard the USA branch was cut back a while ago, yet they did more good marketing here than they have at their own events in recent years.
The Game Awards also had just more of what matters: games! And they were better game reveals. Not enough Nintendo stuff considering they have a new system…and while the VGA’s were better this year, Nintendo should probably just do their own show.
GameStop also did their own award show which was kinda cute. Blatant self-advertising but also able to poke fun at themselves as a company. Scott The Woz (which I had seen before in my YouTube scrolling, but never actually watched) was a hilarious host and they had other YouTube personalities as presenters. Familiar ones like AVGN, Asmongold & Emiru, but also others I didn’t know much about. One presenter dropped a fun fact I didn’t know, which was that Sakurai married the woman who designed the menus in his games…neat. The categories were silly, yet…some were better than the VGA categories.
Then, there’s the upcoming award show that really matters…