The Video Game Awards: Absolute cancer.

...whoops.

If anyone is in tune with gaming today, you should know what the Video Game Awards are: An event in which the hottest games are given awards for everything but what really matters: Being a video game. You also get world premieres which are glorified movie trailers, and ten times out of ten, they're just that: movies.  Basically, it's a massive circlejerk of western games and publishers, with that ONE nod to the eastern side of things, usually Nintendo or someone else. In this case:

And rightfully so. Kojima is a good man and a good creator in general.

However, for the rest of the show, we were treated to a slew of world premieres showing no gameplay, a performance by Killer Mike which served for a product placement for Gears of War 4, an award was presented to an e-celeb because he literally couldn't make his way to the stage, actual celebrity cameos, an award for the best visual style (no surprise there), an award for best voice actor, an award for best e-sports athlete(see the very last image in this post), and the one that took the cake, an award presented to a man who made a game in honor of his dying son, and went on to donate the proceeds of the Ouya version to charity. Now that's disrespectful and in poor taste. As far as I'm concerned, he may as well have been texting while putting on an act. Oh, and there was another performance of some men shouting and the lead singer on a guitar, or something.

The only reason I even tuned in to the show was for one title:

Still waiting.

We got a teaser trailer before the show, which looked nice and a hands-on look again around eighty minutes into the show, which looked not-so-nice. The framerate was bad, and as quickly as I got excited, they ended it. With that, I tabbed out and went and did something else.

All these awards shows are as I stated before is just a circlejerk of western developers, product placements (Don't get me started on that razor blade advert made for US GAMERS HURK), echo chambers for social issues and everything else your casual gamer (If you can even call them that) eats up. And isn't it ironic that the one company that showed some actual gameplay is the one reason I keep coming along for this dreadful ride? I was excited for 2014's show just for that exhibition with Zelda U, or in this case, Breath of the Wild. I was hoping for 2015 to give us some more footage, but nope, I sat through another bad show with all the problems stated above. I'll give credit to Geoff Keighley for actually having some integrity within this industry and basically being the driving force behind this presentation. He wanted to acknowledge some fan games as well, mainly the Metroid 2 remake and Pokemon Uranium. However, Nintendo bitched about it and they remained unmentioned. But hey, at least we saw more of Zelda, right?

Right?

...right.

If you really want to pull in some more viewers, or at least make the show worth watching, show some damn games. What about Sonic Mania? I'm sure SEGA would love the press and exposure. Moreso since gamers today love retro games and pixelated paradises (Well, not everyone). When I think of video games, the last thing that comes to mind is That Dragon, Cancer. For a show about video games, you sure don't show a lot of them.


Just sayin'.