Be Excellent To Each Other

It seems that Bravo are the only channel on TV that commission programmes on gaming these days. The problem is that they get bored of their usual providers every 2 or 3 years and go with someone cheaper and inevitably shitter.

Starting with the entertaining Violent Berlin and Gamepad, who obviously knew her stuff and came across as genuinely enthused about the subject.

Domininkink Diamond did that 1 series of When Games Attack, which I really enjoyed.

Then it moved on to GamerTV, which was irritating and voiced by the nasal twang of Sam Delaney, Zio's best chum. He was a mountain of shit housed in a scrawny gibbon like body, and was responsible for the line "Games based on films are always crap, and we're old enough to remember Ghostbuster on the Spectrum. That was awful!" which made me kick in my TV with anger.

Now we have Playr, which is much worse and much cheaper. I've been watching it for a few days now. Monday they publicly felated Peter Moleneueyuxu over screenshots of Fable 2. Yesterday had a half hour special on Mirror's Edge where it appeared the largest chunk involved sitting with a Swedish developer at DiCE drawing collision boxes in a CAD program. And today's I had to turn off halfway through a review of Gears of War 2. Apparently GoW2 is "the most obvious successor to Doom around today. While other shooters have diversified and added more story and puzzles, GoW is all about shooting things." Gasted was my flabber.

Why can't people make entertaining games TV nowadays? Don't mention consolevania, because I don't find it funny at all.

Gaming, like kites, is unsuitable for telly. You are better off just getting on with it.

In the USA there is a channel called G4 : Tech TV.

I didn't watch it very much because as has been said, it was a bit shit really.

Blatant Sony fanboys, trying to get people all riled up and excited for the launch of PS3 which ended up as a flop. So much so that three people I knew camped outside Best Buy thinking they would'nt get one otherwise.

The thing the TV forgot to add was the $600 price tag attatched. That would be a large part of the reason they were everywhere then.

The problem with 99.9% of gaming websites, TV stations and magazines is they won't bite the hand that feeds them. All of the GTA4 reviews I have read for the PC are simply rehashed 360 reviews with a small mention as to what the PC one does. All of them appear as though the reviews were pre determined and they hadn't even bothered to play the PC version yet, just taking the word of Rockstar.

If you want excrement, and hollow excrement at that, look no further than this choice slice of tubular poo from the BBC:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7780094.stm

I mean honestly, it's like computer games were invented yesterday specifically for idiots.

Painfully bad.

fuck me that was woeful. For a 3 minute clip im sure that man said Gears 2 was the ultimate blokes game every 10 seconds, suprised he didnt go on about it when they wer eplaying spyro

The only good games show ever was Cybernet, as it did nothing but SHOW YOU THE FUCKING GAMES. Granted, they needed to get in some people who were good at games to play them for the footage (the GTA review was just someone repeatedly crashing and getting shot or run over, which made the game look like crap) but otherwise it was good.

In Canada, we had 'Video And Arcade Top Ten' which was a Nintendo fanboy show, it was decent enough except for the fact they called it the 'Super Ness'.

When he used the phrase "A bunch of good stuff on offer" I turned the rancid illiterate off.

http://www.gamedamage.net/

Also:



Also:

MAN YOU SO WRONG ABOUT CONSOLEVANIA

Beyond the first 5 minutes, does that keep editing back and forth to each of their gurning chuckling fizzogs while each of them are speaking? If so, I can't be arsed to watch anymore.

My statement about Consolevania:

I fail to see how that can be wrong.

Consolevania didn't float my boat either. Although their Resi Evil 4 review was top notch.

Actually, can I retract that post? I'd literally just finished watching this week's Zero Punctuation and Yahtzee pimped Game Damage at the end so I posted it up.

I'm currently halfway through and not sure I can be arsed either. Also Yahtzee looks a little bit unnerving in the flesh.



Choose your own adventure reply!

Flippant:

Serious:

It is not funny and I did not ever laugh. Also Video Gaiden too.

Banter my dirty sphincter.

My god, this is awful. That clip of GoW2, nothing happened. Why is every woman presenter currently at the BBC a simpering simpleton?

*snaps rubber glove*

G4 commissioned Code Monkeys.

They're fine by me.

I love some CV/VG now and again, but I'd be the first to admit it's a very mixed bag. When they've got a tight script and a good setup going, they can be fantastic. When they try to just riff off things on the fly, it can rapidly descend to deeply embarassing.

Parts of VG series 3 seemed to go on forever with no purpose or punchline at all. And when you're heartily sick of it five minutes into a ten-minute episode, something's gone badly wrong. Some people were surprised they didn't get picked up again after that, but fuck's sake, a lot of it felt like commercial suicide. Almost everything good in there was buried in so much awkward in-jokes and padding that I'd all but given up by the end. Initially I thought VG3 would be a good crossover show to bring some of my more casual gaming mates into CV. Christ was I ever wrong there. They thought it was a load of self-indulgent toss, and looking back on it, they weren't far off.

That said, bar one or two missteps, I thought S1 and 2 of VG were pure gold, and merrily rewatch them to this day. Same for a lot of CV series 2 and the start of 3. It all seemed to go downhill around the time S3 petered out into nowhere with that terrible satellite games TV parody. The new 'waves' haven't been bad, still a bit too heavy on the umming and ahhing though.

There's some review show on that annoying games channel now (Pulse or something? It used to be XLeague). I kept seeing the trailers during a bleary-eyed session watching some Virtua Fighter tournament. It looked fucking awful.

People that play games should not be on the tellybox. Except me, as I'm acebest.

In fairness, they only had 3 minutes to stick 3 games in, so any amount of indepthness would just not be possible.

Perhaps the main problem is that any TV programme about games is going to be competing for the time that anyone interested could spend actually playing games instead. I'm not sure I would really set time aside to watch such a programme even if it was halfway decent. In much the same way as I love films but never really bother to watch stuff about films.

But teenage boys really like sex and spend an awful lot of time watching (Mary Poppins - Moral guardian Ed)...

Yeah, but they wouldn't if they could spend that time actually having sex instead.

Precisely, exactly this.

Their finest hour was probably the first series of VG, where the ten-minute running length meant everything felt a lot tighter and more focussed than anything else they've done.

I like VG/CV a lot better when it's two knowledgable, passionate blokes talking about games than when they're going off on some rambling comedy riff.

A million times that. I cringe whenever I watch any kind of video review for a game - I don't know why, but the same words written down just don't seem as bad.

Erm... I used to quite like Bits...

I wrote that post, but then remembered the video games programme presented by Charlie Brooker that doesn't exist, which is of course the best gaming show of all time.

As for that Zara Ribenatits, I'm pretty sure she could be confused into perpetrating any number of anal perversions without too much effort - if you are going to be painful to read or listen to, not being painful to look at just adds to the 'thick totty' quotient in tech journalism, which is way too high and will continue to be so as long as these people realise they are not cut out for the job.

At least occasionally very good journos like Ellie Gibson can form some sort of rapport with the camera, even when she's halfway off it interviewing - yup - a bimbo. I'm sure most people have plenty of time for attractive, stupid women - just in the pub or somewhere, not where I'm trying to learn about tech.

Telly games reviews need to be edited highlights of a four-hour session with teo or three people playing/watching a game. No script, you don't even need to put a crack in the fourth wall, just let them chat away about it - verbose intersting types with a nice line in critique, obviously - but let them game. Thirty bemusing seconds of Spyro the Cunt-rash doesn't cut it. I mean - how does that compare to the Lego BatWars Jones franchise, which it appears to resemble and everyone knows?

the worst thing about the Bravo shows is when they wank one out about the Cyber Olympics or something.

Bits was good.

Did you like bits for the hyperactive tarts (Bouff) or did you like it for the games coverage, though?

I remember PSW used to give away a DVD of preview videos. I had to turn the damned commentary off as a Southeastern lass reading 'amusing' copy was excruciating.

Could someone direct me to the offices of that "Playr" Tv programme please? I wish to strangle the life out of the cretins that reviewed Mirror's Edge I've just sat down and watched. Their conclusion? "Needs more guns, and a permanent sidearm to shoot anyone you want anytime." Fucking. Retarded. Cunts.

That. It's not just games programmes, though - it's even the adverts. Microsoft in particular had a terrifically stupid and bad campaign for the last couple of months with all that "MUSIC GAMES ON XBOX 360" where they spent lots of money on flashy effects but showed ABSOLUTELY NONE OF THE GAMES THEY WERE TRYING TO PLUG. They did about five variations on the same thing, none of which showed a second's game footage of anything. It wasn't until a week or two before christmas that they finally showed any game footage at all, and that was all pre-rendered cut scenes from Gears of War 2 (which is great, but not showing actual gameplay footage - which cut scenes ARE NOT, regardless of what the advert claims - can fuck off). Utterly miserable. And Sony haven't done much better, although they at least plugged Little Big Planet by showing the game being played. Nintendo show some games, but spend far too much time focussing on obviously uncomfortable wankers pretending to enjoy pretending to play the game with some strangers in a hideously soulless fake living room. How fucking hard can it be to advertise something by actually showing it in use?

Because game footage always looks terrible. Mostly because you're not the one playing.

Not for seven or eight seconds at a time, it doesn't. The LBP ads make it look like a great wee romp with barely longer than that, and there are loads of episodes of cybernet that showed proper game footage well. Properly edited, you'd have tonnes of decent footage for most games now.

The LBP adverts make it look like absolute pointless shite. Honesty in advertising?