The VGAs - Good, bad, ugly, and extremely questionable

The VGAs have finally passed for yet another year, and again this one was set to be the "best one yet!" by the one and only Geoff Keighly again and, what a show eh!.......right?

Celbrating 10 years. Wait, they've ran for 10 years?!?

There was a lot of speculation on what this would turn out like before it even began, and not only that, there was a fair bit of debate about some of the awards as well, considering that at the time of announcing them, The Walking Dead(which was in GotY and such) had an episode left to be released, and two of the games for the Wii award weren't even out yet as the Wii U hadn't hit anywhere! So they where questioned as to why they where added. No response was ever given from what i remember, but i still never agreed with the idea. Trailers flew everywhere, two new title announcements where thrown in the loop, some update trailers to games and some new content trailers shown as well. That was all good and fine, but this never felt like an award ceremony in the end. Before i begin, here's the list of awards and who won each(taken from Destructoid):

• Game of the Year: The Walking Dead
• Studio of the Year: Telltale Games
• Best Xbox 360 Game: Halo 4
• Best PS3 Games: Journey
• Best Wii/Wii U Game: New Super Mario Bros U
• Best PC Game: XCOM: Enemy Unknown
• Best Shooter: Borderlands 2
• Best Action/Adventure: Dishonored
• Best RPG: Mass Effect 3
• Best Multiplayer: Borderlands 2
• Best Individual Sports Game: SSX
• Best Team Sports Game: NBA 2k13
• Best Drviing Game: Need for Speed Most Wanted
• Best Song in a Game: "Cities" by Beck, from Sound Shapes
• Best Original Score: Journey
• Best Graphics: Halo 4
• Best Independent Game: Journey
• Best Fighting Game: Persona 4 Arena
• Best Handheld/Mobile Game: Sound Shapes
• Best Performance by a Human Male: Dameon Clarke in Borderlands 2 as "Handsome Jack"
• Best Performance by a Human Female: Melissa Hutchison in The Walking Dead as "Clementine"
• Best Adapted Game: The Walking Dead
• Best DLC: The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim - Dawnguard
• Best Downloadable Game: The Walking Dead
• Best Social Game: You Don't Know Jack
• Game of the Decade: Half-Life 2
• Character of the year: Claptrap from Borderlands 2
• Most Anticipated Game: Grand Theft Auto 5

Now here's where the issues arise. Only six of these awards where shown during the 2 hour ceremony. Six. Take that as 1 every 20 minutes. This is disgusting. You've made an award ceremony more like an entertainment event and less of a congratulations for those that made these titles. What's more, if the situation with Jennifer Hale is anything to go by, we know that awards that where given away outside of the screened event weren't even mentioned to all the nominees. During an interview 45 minutes after the Best Performance by a Human Female was given out, she was told that Melissa won it. She didn't even know beforehand and was still hoping for a win. How terrible can you get at this? For an event that is 10 years old this year, they certainly haven't learned how to run it properly yet. It also tells me that these promises of Keighly, and Spike TV no less, are all empty and hold no solid ground.

The trailers shown throughout weren't bad i'll admit, and we got a good dose of them too. South Park : The Stick of Truth opened the event fairly well, and Castlevania: Lords of Shadow 2 got a good showing. The Last of Us was dated finally for the 7th of May next year, far earlier than i had expected it to be, and showed off a new trailer. Tomb Raider had a new trailer, but was kind of ruined by the camera going to focus on the orchestra more, as much i respect the music, we where there for the game. Halo 4 and Assassins Creed 3 showed off new content in the works for it, Halo 4 with the latter half of the Spartan Ops season, and AC3 with The Tyranny of King Washington, a "What if" kind of DLC focusing on if he was a tyrant instead of a hero, basically.

Watch as MGS reveals itself to you.

Finally, two new trailers showed themselves. We got The Phantom Pain from Moby Dick Studios, which we may as well just say now is Metal Gear Solid V. it was quite obvious by some of the tells on the screen as well as the title screen shown. Also, noone is fulled by "Joakim Mogren", Joakim is an anagram of Kojima, and Mogren is a reference to Project Ogre. All in all, say Hi to MGSV. One other title was announced, Dark Souls II. Presented by Jessica Alba, which was ok, but i felt she was a little out of place with the whole event. Dark Souls 2 has me both excited and concerned. It means more Dark Souls, which is never a bad thing, but at the same time it's not Hidetaka Miyazaki directing, but Tomohiro Shibuya, who's more well known for Resident Evil: Outbreak. He wants to make it more "straightforward" and "understandable" for players. This worries me, but a topic for another day.

We then got a fair dose of music from Tenacious D, Linkin Park(for Medal of Honor: Warfighters theme i think) and some orchestrated music from composers who worked on AC3 and other titles. All seems well and good right? Well, not really. Sure Samuel L Jackson presented it well, but where were the awards? where the heck was the respect to the other nominees for awards given out outwith the screened event? Where was this "return of a classic franchise", as it sure as hell wasn't Castlevania, as we knew it was there already. This wasn't an award show, it was an excuse to blow their budget on whatever big names they could get and make it look fancy, and as such turned into a show of nothing more than trailers, music, with nothing much else to speak of. If this is the way things are going to continue moving forward, i don't want to be a part of it. And i hope to hell that companies catch on, avoid all the glamour this seems to bring with it companies as best you can, it's not really well designed and it sure as hell ain't fun to watch either. Give us a proper set of awards, ones where all games are out for the public to vote on, where we don't need big names to make it fancy, because it doesn't need to be fancy in the first bloody place. Keep it clean, keep it simple, and keep it fair. Try it for a change, you may learn something. Oh, and don't tell NeoGAF what you are doing when you aren't, it's not always a good idea to get them angry, or so i hear.

Ah well, i guess we can take one major positive out of this. Micheal Pachter said The Walking Dead would never win Game of the Year. DIDN'T PREDICT THAT ONE WELL, DID YOU NOW?!?

Gaming news round-up 20th - 22rd August

Howdy and welcome to what i hope to be a regular feature on my blog, the news round-up. Unfortunately due to my work and how it's laid out, i can't get these out on a daily basis, so i'm going to throw these out twice a week and cover some of the slightly more interesting story pieces of each week, probably every wednesday and saturday. So without anymore waffling, let's get started!

The World Ends With You 2 teaser site?

At midnight UK time on monday, Square Enix opened up a new teaser site which contained a 7 day timer and silhouettes of buildings in the background. With this was a piece of music playing with a very urban style akin to that of TWEWY. Going by the url link having "subaseka", it was easy to assume that this was probably linked to a new TWEWY announcement(or if you prefer the japanese name, Subarashiki Kono Sekai) after the timer had finished. Too add more to this, each day that passes alters something on the site. The background gets lighter and the buildings more noticeable, and the music has, as of today, become a new iteration of the fan favourite, and possibly staple song from the series "Calling". Whether or not this actually hits as a sequel, an iOS remake, or a social game still remains to be seen, but my hopes lie on a full blown sequel back in Shibuya for the 3DS. Regardless, we will see the result in the next few days, and no doubt we will get a showing of it at TGS in a months time.

Calling~ you hear me Calling~

Teaser Site

New Final Fantasy XIII teaser site

Keeping that ball of teaser sites rolling, Square Enix announced earlier today that they would be revealing a new chapter in the Lightning Saga for Final Fantasy XIII on the 1st of September. Not much else is shown bar that the Producer, Director and Art Directors will be at an event in Tokyo to present these details as part of the 25th anniversary of Final Fantasy. It seems to me that Square just love announcements of announcements this week, it's funny.

Teaser Site the Second

Ubisoft claim that their PC games have a 93-95% piracy rate

This kind of cracked me up. Yves Guillemot spoke with GameIndustry International earlier this week and claimed that the free-to-play games and PC games are getting roughly the same amount of income as one another. He mentions that about 5-7% of the F2P playerbase buy through micro-transactions and that those that purchase their regular PC games is about the same, and that about 93% to 95% of the rest of players pirate their games. This struck me as weird because, if a game is to be pirated, how would they know the actual numbers for that? A pirated copy wouldn't be connecting to their Uplay service, someone would have built a crack to by-pass it, so essentially, these feel like numbers taken out of a hat. I won't doubt his F2P numbers, but i doubt the accuracy of the regular retail title sales. Not only that, but they wonder why the PC market for them is so terrible. The DRM + delays + for some, bad porting cause PC gamers just to ignore such titles and purchase other titles elsewhere. The addition of their Uplay site/hub they are intent on bringing to their titles on PC adds insult to injury as it brings even more DRM to the table. If it wasn't for the large amount of DRM, i expect their "93-95% pirated games" would be far lower, and the sales far higher. It just doesn't add up.
Maths bit: If, say, that 5% was Assassins Creed 3 selling, say, 5 million. then at 100% sales, that would suggest a total of 100 million sales. Do you honestly see that being accurate? I thought not.

For the full interview, check it out on Gameindustry International

And finally for this edition...

Jay Wilson(Diablo 3 Director) hits at Diablo 1/2 Project Lead - David Brevek

Back on monday, The Diablo 1 & 2 Project leader David Brevek commented on Diablo 3 saying that it was "very different" from the game he would have created, also adding that they made a lot of advancements with Diablo as a whole, but it was "not the game i originally designed for Diablo 3". He commented on the skill system being a bit like a load-out system from a shooter and perhaps too generous, and that he wouldn't have chosen to allow items and weapons to power skills. He did also make a comment on the always online DRM for the game and said he wouldn't have made the same choices. All of these comments where fair game, considering he now doesn't work with them(please correct me if i'm wrong on this), and these comments where all made in an interview with IncGamers. The issue was that, not long after this hit the web, those that work at Blizzard, and those that did once previously all jumped onto facebook and commented on the interview in question, with Jay Wilson adding "**** that loser" which was quickly deleted soon after. This hit forums, reddit and so on fast, and soon became known worldwide. From what is known now, he has written a formal apology to David Brevek(which can be read here) and should hopefully be the end of the tale, but this all stemmed from the team of Diablo 3 jumping on what was easily just a mild comment on the game. He never once said it was a bad design choice, just one he wouldn't have gone with.

You can find most of the details for this everywhere, but if you want the image of the facebook comments + more details, check out the reddit post here and the image here

And that ends the news round-up for the week. I probably haven't mentioned much at all, but these stood out as major things to me. If you want to suggest other ways for me to lay this out, please leave me a message and i'll get on it. Until later!