So the other night I went to my friend’s place and discovered that his roommate, for reasons that I’m still not totally clear on, was watching the Spike Video Game Awards. It’s pretty much a known fact that these awards are an abomination – a night dedicated to acting like video games are still an underdog medium despite outselling Hollywood blockbusters by a long shot, and hiring celebrities to act like they’re actually aware of these things. Of course, lots of people watch the awards DESPITE these glaring issues with the whole tone of the show. So what I understand it boils down to, for those not just heckling the whole thing from their sofas, is the awards themselves, and to a much greater extent, the trailers.

More after the jump…

Now, the only thing that really comes out of the awards is people getting pissed off. For most, the whole show is guaranteed to piss you off, so for those people (like myself) the obvious solution is to not watch the awards. I should mention, before getting into this, that I actually had no intention of watching the show to begin with, and only stuck with it until me and my friend TJ decided to go watch old episodes of Aeon Flux in a different room.

There are plenty of recaps available on the internet, so I won’t go into detail about everything. Several times today I typed “How much did the VGAs suck last night” into Google, and was upset that nothing succinct like the graph at the top of this post came up. Luckily, my friend Ric has got us covered on that angle. He also made up an award category which could pretty much replace every section of the award show given the end results – “Game most successful with target demographic.” It would do a much better job of explaining how secondary characters from first person shooters can win “best character”, among other questionable award choices. It would also be silly of me to miss mentioning how the host of the show, Neil Patrick Harris, actually won an award. Don’t awards shows generally try to make sure things like that don’t happen?

On the topic of the trailers, I think it’s almost too obvious to point out that you can watch them all online the next day, and that way never suffer through the stupidity of the show itself. None of the trailers really told us anything that we couldn’t have already guessed about the games. Arkham City will take place in a city, and Mass Effect 3 will be about Earth. Elder Scrolls 5 is… well, it’s called Skyrim, and it’s coming out. That’s about all we know. I actually am pretty interested in the Volition title Insane which will be made by Guillermo Del Toro, but again, the trailer didn’t tell us anything about the game beyond what I just mentioned. None of these trailers were so groundbreaking that it was worth watching Denise Richards pretend to know… well, anything about video games. Hell, since they had both her and NPH, they could’ve at least gone for a Starship Troopers reference, but alas, such sparks of imagination have no place at this awards show.

So, what have we learned? Well, I for one am now quite convinced that Neil Patrick Harris doesn’t play video games. This is kind of surprising to me, because he seems like the kind of celebrity who would, but I think it’s very likely he just doesn’t have the time. Hell, I hardly do either. At the very least, no self-respecting gamer would ever plug Kinect so vehemently, and just like everyone else he had to stress how big a deal video games are, as if anybody even mildly aware of the VGAs would debate that point. What I HAVEN’T learned is why the cast of “It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia” would be an appropriate choice to announce the year’s best first person shooter, or why an actress from 90210 would be involved with the VGAs in ANY WAY. In fact, let’s just open this question – why all the TV actors? There were literally dozens of great actors doing voices for games this year, even without using someone who WON A VGA AT THE SHOW as the host. Honestly, Fallout: New Vegas alone had Danny Trejo, Felicia Day, AND Ron Perlman. Call Of Duty: Black Ops had GARY FUCKING OLDMAN!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9Q5oo0zdgE

But this leads me to a bigger idea that will probably never be applied but would salvage almost 50 percent of the entire show. See, this year one of the big things about the show was that they applied a cool virtual reality hologram type deal to the whole ceremony which allowed them to essentially put CGI effects on stage which could be seen by anyone watching the show on a screen. This wasn’t really put to much use, but the possibilities with this kind of technology, especially in regards to a video game awards show, are really cool when you think about it. For instance, instead of paying through the nose to get celebrities to pretend they’re interested in video games, they could have had the entire thing hosted by actual video game characters! While this would require more work on the CGI animation department’s part, Spike was already paying them for this stuff anyways, and they would probably end up saving a lot if they switched from celebrities to video game voice actors, even after the extra money they’d have to put into the CGI end of things. And imagine how awesome it would be! The cast of Left 4 Dead 1 and 2 together to announce the best multiplayer! The scout from Team Fortress 2 introducing the musicians performing that night (by the way, this year we had My Chemical Romance playing a song off their new album – not the good one), and then Alyx Vance and Gordon Freeman announcing the best character! Well… only Alyx would talk, of course.

Anyways, in summary… well, the VGAs sucked, and that’s not really a surprise. Why did I even write this article? Maybe Spike will do us all a favour and steal these ideas. Then at least I wouldn’t resent my friend’s roommate for watching the VGAs in such close proximity to me. Hell, I might even tune in of my own free will.

This might be the best thing that comes out of Christmas this year. It just might…

Ben Craw of the Huffington Post created this awesome supercut that compiles many, many instances of people in movies telling each other that they look like shit. I think is the best supercut yet! I recognize so many of these movies! I like that it goes off on related tangents, too, like the handful of moments of characters saying that others look like “hammered shit”. Awesome stuff. How many of the movies featured can you name?

Am I strange because I find this heartwarming?

After five years, we’re finally seeing what Team Bondi has been up to. I must admit, L.A. Noire is looking to be a pretty solid representation of its namesake film genre. This is also some of the best facial animation I have ever seen in a game. Good thing too, since it will apparently play a role in interrogations. Colour me excited.

The original Starcraft was a sensation back in 1998. It brought to the aging Real Time Strategy genre an intricate story line, top-notch graphics, and three distinct (yet impeccably balanced) factions. To RTS fans playing games like Command & Conquer, Age of Empires, and Warcraft 2 it was something totally unexpected and definitely welcome. Blizzard didn’t so much expand the RTS formula, but they refined it into something damn near perfection. With Starcraft 2, Blizzard is forced into a balancing act: The competitive multiplayer needs to maintain its winning core, but too little ionnovation will have people screaming “rip-off.” Did they succeed?

Warning: This review may contain traces of spoilers, and may have come into contact with spoilers from other games.

The crux of the Starcraft experience has, as expected, largely remained unchanged: Worker units harvest resources to fund base expansion and unit production, and armies of units are used to lay waste to your opponents. There are some cool new units, and a few mechanics have changed (Zerg creep production, for example) but we’re definitely still talking about Starcraft. Each race has received a few units to fill in some of their weaknesses, which leads to more interesting strategy and counter-strategy in multiplayer match-ups. In addition to new units, Blizzard has added environmental elements like the Xel’Naga Watchtower and destructible rocks. The former, once activated by a unit, allows vision of a large portion of the map, while the latter can shape the course of attack and expansion.

Whether you’ll enjoy the multiplayer is entirely dependent on whether you enjoyed Starcraft’s multiplayer. It’s the same fast-paced game you remember and, if that sort of thing appeals to you, you will absolutely love it. The biggest change that Blizzard brought to multiplayer is the new Battle.net. Your first five online matches will place you in a league. Each game pairs you with a player of similar skill, occasionally testing you against a more skilled opponent to see if you are ready to move up. I’ve found the matching to be extremely well paced. I lose as much as I win, and most of the matches are nerve-rackingly close.

The new Battle.net also adds a full Achievement system (heavily influenced by World of Warcraft), with some achievements unlocking visual rewards like character portraits and unit decals to be used in game. The full force of the social-web revolution is also brought to bear, allowing you to compare and compete with your friends for ePeen. This semblance of persistent character progression adds another layer of addictiveness to the Starcraft multiplayer experience that’ll keep you playing to unlock the next reward. The multiplayer innovations may seem a bit sparse – and they are – but Blizzard wisely decided not to mess with the magic (C&C4, anyone?). It is in the singleplayer campaign that Blizzard was truly free to tweak and fiddle, and they succeeded wondrously.

There are around thirty total missions in the Wings of Liberty campaign, with a single play-through hitting about 25 of them depending on the choices you make. That’s right, there are choices. Each mission is bookended by in-game cinematic cutscenes that progress character-level plot. These scenes are well shot, the voice-acting is tight, and the Starcraft 2 engine shows that it is more than capable of rendering highly detailed characters and sets. There’s also a distinct Firefly vibe, which nets the game huge points in my book. After the closing scene for a mission, the player is left to explore the mission hub world. The locale changes occasionally, but you spend most of your time about Raynor’s ship, the Hyperion. This is where you get the chance to hobnob with the crew, research persistent tech upgrades and select missions to embark upon.

The meta-game of tech upgrades and research is an excellent one. Most missions have optional objectives that net you research points in either a Protoss or Zerg tree (generally depending on who you’re fighting against). Every five points unlocks one of two upgrades in that tree. Selecting one will lock the other, so choose wisely. These upgrades become quite powerful in the end-game, which lends some serious weight to optional objectives. Each mission also awards you with cash money, which you can spend to upgrade your existing units. These upgrades aren’t nearly as interesting as the spoils of research, usually consisting of a flat damage, health, or range increase but they are still useful.

The missions themselves are extremely well designed, with each new mission adding at least one unique twist on the general gameplay formula. My personal favourite, titled Outbreak, tasks the player with defending a base against ever increasing waves of infested Terrans during the night, while cutting a swath through the enemy bases by day (making sure to pull your forces back to the safe confines of your base by nightfall). To add to the challenge, the optional objective requires the player to seek out and destroy Infester units, which only appear after dark. This kind of creativity in level-design is prevalent through the entire Wings of Liberty campaign. Thinking back, I can’t recall a single mission that was simply a standard skirmish against the AI.

If balance is the most praised aspect of Starcraft 2, the second-most is the plot. Indeed, the Starcraft universe feels vibrant and alive, the characters are multi-faceted, and the scope of the plot is suitably epic. The story itself, though? Honestly, it was a little weak. There, I said it. Like Dragon Age and Mass Effect 2 before it, Starcraft 2 falls into the category of “games renowned for their plots that really had very little plot to speak of.”

Allow me to explain.

All three of these games succeed gloriously in allowing players to affect the direction of the story by choosing which missions to undertake, and in which order. The result of this is not unlike the plot arc of a serial TV show. The player is left with tiny, independent chunks of story strung loosely on an overarching framework. While the morsels may be delicious, the meal as a whole is a little lackluster. Anyone summarizing the plot of Dragon Age would only be able to scrape together a single sentence: “Monsters are attacking, and the player gathers and army and defeats them.” Mass Effect 2 had a very similar story-line, and so does Starcraft 2. There are no real plot twists, any betrayals you face are largely inconsequential, and the plot chugs forward exactly as you would expect it to.

Now, I am not ignoring the fact that Wings of Liberty is the introductory chapter to a trilogy of campaigns. I fully expect the combined plot of all three games to far exceed the stories told in each individual arc. Wings of Liberty, like Dragon Age and Mass Effect 2, doesn’t have a bad plot, it’s just not as incredible as the ravings of nerds would have you believe. Strip away the gameplay, and you’re left with a pretty generic made-for-tv movie.

Despite my misgivings about the plot, Starcraft 2 is a masterpiece of the highest caliber. Blizzard has taken on the challenge of creating a successor to one of the most popular games of all time, and has delivered on all counts. From hyper-competitive online gamers to solitary lore nerds, this game has a little of something for everyone and I cannot recommend it more.

Here’s hoping we don’t have to wait another twelve years for the next installment.