Who Cares About VGX?

Here we go again folks!  It's getting to the end of the year, so it's now time once again for everyone to start putting their game of the year lists together!

If anyone doesn't know what VGX is it's some video game award thing hosted by Spike TV and it involves talking about games for a bit, and then announcing a load of awards given to whoever made the best of whatever category they are pushing.  The show is produced by Geoff Keighley, the man known to the masses as "Dorito Pope", so you know it's probably a load of bollocks.

Now when I woke up this morning it was already underway but having a quick look at my twitter turned me right off the whole thing.  The first thing I saw was that Nintendo announced a new Donkey Kong game, which I thought was cool but apparently the rest of the internet was just complaining about it.  The day has come when people are cursing a new DKC game....and that's a sad day.

So aside from the Dorito Pope the whole thing was hosted by Joel Mchale, who I'm not familiar with but he's not much of a game fan by the looks of things.  From what I saw and heard about the goings on, he spent most of his time looking like he didn't want to be there but he did manage to ask a couple of really awkward questions to certain people, which gave me a little chuckle.

Now I have a bit of a problem with these kinds of award shows because the winners are always really really predictable.  The game of the year winner at VGX was, surprise surprise, Grand Theft Auto 5.  Not that I'm saying that there's anything wrong with GTA5, I've not played it yet, it's probably a good game at the very least however the game of the year really can only go to like 1 of maybe 3 games off the top of my head.  Most of the big review sites will probably give their game of the year award to either The Last of Us, Bioshock Infinite or Grand Theft Auto 5. 

In fact, I'll make a bet with people right now, for every major gaming site that gives it's GOTY to something different, I'll give £5 to charity, so make sure you email me and make me aware because I'm not going to go hunting for it.

Not that those 3 are bad games, they are all passable titles, well put together with lots of polish and all that jazz but the fact that every gaming site will give their awards to one of these three is a little boring and sort of smells a bit of that whole "paid review" thing that gets talked about sometimes.  I just wish that they would be more open about what their game of the year could be, so that when I watch I don't just fast forward through nominees because I know exactly what they are going to pick.

I heard though that fucking Gone Home of all goddamn things won indie game of the year.  THIS I don't fucking agree with, because it's barely even qualifies as a game.  If you want to tell me that Gone Home was better that Rouge Legacy, Don't Starve, Gunpoint, Antichamber and many others (that's just going off my sidebar) then take your shitty opinion and fuck off out of my face, I reject your awful taste in video games.  I'm not sure if it actually did though, so if I'm wrong I'll be happy to discover that.

I didn't ignore the VGX completely but what I did see seemed low budget, badly made bullshit.  The reveal about DKC was cool and I didn't see the others but the awards were so predictable I ended up closing the tab and playing fucking Gynoug on the Mega Drive.  Do people actually give a flying fuck about these award shows? They know which handful of games is probably going to win so why bother?

Although if the VGX did one thing right it bored me enough to make me get up from my computer and work through my PS3 backlog for a few hours.

Podcasty Thing! Violence, Video Games and Bad Parenting

With the release of Grand Theft Auto 5, this debate has popped up and all manner of idiots who don't know anything about games are throwing in their opinion.

I go on a 7 minute rant on how it's not really violent games that cause violent people, but a lack of proper upbringing.  Enjoy!

I Don't Understand Midnight Launches

Recently Grand Theft Auto 5 got released and the release of this game is easily one of the biggest things to happen in gaming this year.  The amount of hype people have for this game is astounding and while I don't share quite the same amount of excitement, I am looking forward to eventually picking it up and playing it through.

So I'm not here to pass judgement on the quality of the game but I really don't understand this whole midnight release stuff.  I went to a midnight release once, for Modern Warfare 2, and it was shit.  I went down to the local GAME store with my buddies from university and we were surrounded on all sides by idiots and there was a thick smell of weed in the air, it was most unpleasant.  Even then when I eventually got it home I thought that I couldn't really enjoy it all that much because I was tired so I ended up playing it in the morning anyway and if I was going to do that I didn't need to go to the midnight release at all.

It's not like the stores are going to run out of pre order copies anyway, they realise how much of these big title games they need to get in and how many orders they need to meet so it's not like your pre order is just going to vanish over the course of 2 hours at midnight and they aren't going to sell it off either if the store is any good.

Also GTA5 was released on a Tuesday which makes the whole thing even more confusing to me.  Sure, if it's a Friday midnight release at least you can stay up all night and recover on Saturday, but surely a great deal of people who went to go grab GTA as early as possible have jobs or school or some kind of mid week responsibility?  So wouldn't that mean one wouldn't have all that much time to play it anyway?  I don't get why these people can't just wait a few days or whatever and then really sink their teeth into it.  With a game with this much hype you'd think that's what people would want to do.

Still, who am I to judge? I'm sure there were plenty of happy customers that day and a great majority are enjoying the game right now.  For me, if GTA5 turns out to be anything like GTA4 I'm going to be underwhelmed and disappointed but like I said, no judgement until I have a copy.