Aw, here it goes, here it goes again....

Another year, another Spike TV Video Game Awards show. I've covered this particular "event" in the past. Perhaps a bit too much than any sane person should, but I have to address this because we seem to shrug our shoulders and "just go with it" when we could honestly get something better than this. So instead of writing "Don't watch this" for the third year in a row, I'm going to suggest what I'd personally want out of a televised video game awards show.

First, I think the VGAs shouldn't be a holiday event. Every year the event airs in November-December and usually games that just came out recently -- Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, Saints Row the Third, The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim just to name a few -- are being nominated for major awards without taking into consideration stuff that came out earlier in the year, unless someone pipes up and says "Hey, what about Portal 2?" Now I'm not saying Skyrim is not game-of-the-year material, but there's a reason most award shows tend to avoid nominating stuff that came out just 2-3 months prior. One year we had nominations for 50 Cent: Bulletproof and King Kong: Jesus christ this is a long god damn title for a video ga- I mean, King Kong: The Official Game of the Movie, when those two games had not been released when the award show was taped. It'd be like giving the Academy Award to a movie that just came out this week, you just don't do that.

The other problem I have is just getting famous video game faces. In past years we were given the grace of Samuel L. Jackson saying his favorite game was "Grand Theft Auto III: San Andreas" and Sarah Silverman belittling the audience as if most of the 20-something audience gives a crap about her depreciating humor. I understand we're still in a period where game designers aren't necessarily household names, but I'd settle with getting actors who voiced characters in a game recently. Get Nolan North up there, get Tim Schafer on stage just for a goofy repartee, hell, make a famous games personality be the MC just so we feel like we're getting an awards show that feels more like its contemporaries.

Sponsorship is a common standard in award shows. Having a company back your award show with occasional sponsors is good. Having categories sponsored by Stride gum and Mountain Dew is not. I mentioned this before, but I don't see "Best Car Chase sponsored by Ford Motor Company," and seeing such blatant product placement just bothers me. I already have to be force-fed many commercials over the course of a day and seeing ads for Hooters and Tigerdirect.com in games like Homefront, I don't need ads on top of ads in my award show.

The last thing that irks me is the announcements. New trailers, new games, all incentives to make you watch. Incentives that go away immediately after the broadcast when they're on Gametrailers.com instantly. Again, traditional award shows don't do this. I understand this gives us a reason to watch -- hey, maybe Valve will announce Half-Life 2: Episode Three finally -- but I already don't watch your award show, you could make this announcement on GameTrailers TV or the VGAs, it doesn't matter to me.

I want the Spike TV VGAs to be more like the Oscars and less like the MTV Movie Awards. An award show that developers and gamers can be proud of watching. Where winning "Game of the Year" feels like an accomplishment given to underdogs and not just given to the newest Call of Duty game every year. Where I don't see naked chicks painted like box covers. I can't be the only one pining for something better, right?


This is why I never take this award show seriously.

Granted, some of my requests are perhaps too unrealistic -- this is on a network dedicated to seeing very "manly" things like MANswers and Auction Hunters -- but this blog is a million times better than a certain Angry personality who went up to Geoff Keighley saying he "had a bone to pick with him." I have a bit more tact than that. :P

I hate online passes. I could just stop there and leave it at that, but that would leave you confused and asking why. So I'll tell you. I consider them the worst thing that's happened this generation. Worse than overpriced map packs. Worst than viral marketing campaigns and yearly franchise installments. It is the ugliest thing to happen to gaming, and it needs to stop. Now.

I don't always pick up games the day they come out, the last ones I did get on launch day were games like Portal 2 and Rock Band 3. In the case of games that are known for their multiplayer, I'd like to be able to pick up and play it, even if I don't play it until a year has passed and there's only 50 dedicated fans still playing. Online passes are a nuisance, because they make me have to put in a code to unlock what is essentially half of the game that I paid a good amount of money for. If I don't do this, then either I'm locked out of multiplayer or I only get to play up to level 3, which doesn't give me enough time to form a proper opinion on a game's multiplayer component.



Keep in mind I rarely buy games used these days, most stores will discount games to $30-40 not long after it's release, so I see little incentive to save $5 on a worn out copy when I could save $20-30 for a copy still in the shrinkwrap. Besides, my used games consist of stuff that's hard to find new these days, such as early Xbox 360 titles, or older games from the PS2 era.

It's equally scummy when you see it on singleplayer-focused games. Batman: Arkham City has an "Online Pass," and it gives you extra Catwoman missions. Why the hell would you introduce an online pass for a game like this? At least with a game with a multiplayer like Dead Space 2, it kind of makes sense even if it's dumb, but Arkham City does not have any form of multiplayer. No co-op, no multiplayer frag-fests, nothing. It's just a dumb way to screw over those people who want to save that $5.

I must point out one other, very important thing: NOT EVERYBODY HAS THEIR CONSOLE HOOKED UP TO THE INTERNET! While a good chunk of us -- perhaps all of us -- have our consoles wired or wirelessly hooked up to our 15mbps high speed connections, there's a good chunk of the USA as well as the rest of the world who's out in the middle of Whoknows, Bumfuckistan and gets nothing better than 56K dial-up. You're basically screwing out people who have no way to download or use said codes, thus locking them out of content permanently. This is absolute bullshit on the highest level. While I am one that has my 360 and PS3 internet-enabled -- hell, I subscribed to SegaNet back in the days of the Dreamcast -- others aren't so lucky, and it feels like you're slapping them in a face with a urine-soaked glove just because they're not with the "cool kids."



Not only are online passes a god damn nuisance, but this whole "season DLC pass" stuff has to stop too. It started with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, now Uncharted 3 is doing it and others will probably follow suit. Look, I already don't buy your stupid overpriced $15 4-map packs, I'm not gonna buy them even if I'll save $20 or whatever on your DLC pass! It's just a dumb cash grab.

It's online passes, season DLC passes, and overpriced DLC that makes me want to say "fuck video games" and take up a different hobby, like model trains. Why the hell do we put up with this? I'd like for this to stop being a thing, please. I like video games, but I don't like this excess use of paying lodsofemone just to get the "full experience" of my video games. And to think, just a generation ago, we could buy old copies of games like Halo 2 and get the same experience somebody got when they bought the game new, without the need of a pass. How times have changed.

So PAX is two days away. But tomorrow I'm hopping on an Amtrak train one day early, just so I can hit the early pre-PAX events and chill with bros.


Might as well use this old-ass pic.

This will be my third year to PAX, and this time I'm better prepared than the last two years. No longer am I walking through dangerous city streets just to get back to my hotel. Now with my hotel being a mere few blocks away from the convention center, I can stay at damn parties 'til 2-3AM and still get back in time to sleep without worrying about bus schedules. (Still should've gotten a driver's license and a car, though.)

Also, since I decided to join the modern kids club and get a smartphone, it'll be 1,000x easier to get around the place. Seriously. Last year was hell for me as I had to borrow the PC section just to find out where Dtoid events where since I had an old-ass flip phone that could barely text, let alone get the internet.


If you're going to the Dtoid PAX events or roaming around the convention center, look for this schmuck right here and say hi.

Trust me, I'm a nice guy once you get me started on silly things like Team Fortress hats and talking about how Harmonix is crazy for giving us songs by Fall Out Boy and Stone Sour instead of a They Might Be Giants 40-pack. If you're not going to PAX, shame on you. At least I hope someone adopted your avatar, so you'll at least get the taste of an awesome PAX experience.

But seriously, PAX is one of the few things I actively anticipate. It's just that awesome.

I've noticed here on Destructoid as well as other places that I write about Call of Duty (and its derivatives) a lot. And I mean a lot. Which means I must love Call of Duty, and you're right. Yeah, I'm that person people hate because according to them I'm liking something that is contributing to the death of video games.


To these people, I'm the reason all shooters look the same. Funny enough, I've only played one of these three games and I play TF2 more often than I do COD.

But you know what? As much as I've enjoyed the games in the series, I think I'm finally suffering from franchise fatigue. That problem where you've played the games in the series, but realized that the initial thrill and shock isn't there anymore. That it lacks that excitement you remember playing Call of Duty 4 through the first time. It's like taking a drug for the first time and getting that extreme rush and excitement, with each subsequent time making it duller to a point where you're doing it out of habit more than for that initial high.

See, I was a guy who got into Call of Duty back when the first COD hit. Back when it felt more like a spiritual successor to Medal of Honor: Allied Assault than being Michael Bay: The Video Game. They were fun games, even the ones that weren't received as well, like Call of Duty 2: Big Red One and Call of Duty 3. (I'm probably one of the few who actually liked COD3.) But it was Call of Duty 4 that brought me back to the franchise almost in full force. It was the first game I ever got for my PS3 back in 2008, and I had loads of fun with its campaign as well as the ridiculously fun multiplayer.

So I became a fan. I read the official sites, occasionally glanced at the communities, watched trailers and gameplay clips. I got World at War for my 360 in early 2009, and I even made this dumb video when I got Modern Warfare 2 later that year.

Pay no attention to the overexcited fan unboxing MW2 and throwing Wolfenstein (a decent but flawed game) aside.

I was a fan of Call of Duty. I loved it. But when I played through MW2, I felt like some of that thrill that I remembered with COD4 was lost. It had become like a crazy balls-out action flick, being more bombastic than even COD4 was. Explosions in space, a ridiculous plot that made less sense than an episode of NCIS, and a multiplayer that emphasized the absurd like tons of helicopters in the air and Tactical Nukes. While I was enjoying it for a while, I realized in retrospect that it wasn't that good of a game.

Cut to June 2010. I got a GameFly subscription. I decided to pick up Treyarch's newest COD installment, Black Ops. I had played through some of the campaign with a friend prior, and while it was an enjoyable experience, it had that same "80s-90s action movie" vibe, complete with homages to The Manchurian Candidate and Apocalypse Now. While the locations felt different than the sandy desert worlds of MW2, I was still shooting dudes as I pushed forward through this mostly linear path with ridiculous weapons like a pump-action grenade launcher and portable miniguns. It was goofy as all hell. Oh well, at least Gary Oldman and Ed Harris made the game more interesting, countering the sub-par performance by Sam Worthington as main character Alex Mason. I still think Worthington's delivery of "You fucking sunovabitch" is the most hilarious thing I've heard in video game voice acting in years.

I'm surprised nobody told him to do another take. The voice acting is so amateur in this scene, making it almost like a B-movie.

Despite Black Ops adds some new stuff -- zombies is back from World at War, and refining multiplayer so you buy things rather than kill 100 dudes to unlock a scope, as well as wager matches for those credits -- it still had that feeling of shooting dudes with perks, getting killstreaks, and capturing objectives that I'd done years before. It started to feel old. Don't get me wrong, Black Ops is definitely a good game and worth it if you're into goofy action shooters that lump 70s and 80s weapons in a 1960s setting; but I'm not feeling it anymore. To me, COD has dulled me. That adrenaline rush and fun factor isn't there anymore.

Which leads me to Modern Warfare 3. The demo featured at E3 felt like the same stuff from MW2, except with more rail shooting segments. It didn't look too impressive, and felt similar to previous COD games, even the ones not by Infinity Ward. Whereas EA's Battlefield 3 actually looked fucking spectacular despite cribbing several things from last year's Bad Company 2. It just feels more fresh, whereas COD is almost rotten to a point where the smell is getting unbearable.

A lot of people wonder when the COD hype train's gonna go down. Well, let's go back a few years. Ten years ago (my god, has it been that long?), Medal of Honor was the top of the top when it came to shooters. People were hyped for that shit. Even MOH: Frontline and Allied Assault are considered classics. But what killed it was the same thing that's gonna hurt COD: sub-par titles and yearly releases. MOH: Frontline was a fantastic game, but Rising Sun was considerably less so. As years went on, MOH games got to that point of mediocrity where it felt like they had done everything you could possibly do. Even with MOH: Heroes 2 on the Wii, which has some damn fine shooting controls for that system, felt old and tired. EA even gave it one last chance with the modern reboot last year, and it wasn't doing COD numbers or anything close to a big success. If MW3 turns out to be a less-than-stellar game by the press and gamers at large, it won't take long for gamers to drop COD like a bad habit and take the new hotness in whatever new game that catches their eye. All it needs is a subpar showing, that's when it stops breaking sales records and starts being the subject of constant mockery.

It's entirely possible that this year could be the end of the COD juggernaut. Or it'll still be a critical and commercial success and COD keeps chugging on for a few more years. But I'm certainly done with it. I'm surprised I stayed with the series this long, I'm sure many of you left the club long before I did, or never got into the COD games period. At least I can stop writing about it, and focus on different things. Like hats in Team Fortress 2.

(Apparently embedding videos on the site at the moment is straight-up busted. Sucks, really. But hopefully the links get the point. I hope.)

Oh wow, I keep forgetting that thing called the "Electronic Entertainment Expo" is happening in just a few short days. The internet is abuzz with many pre-E3 articles, and already a bunch of trailers have been released, leaked or otherwise.



One of the greatest things about the modern E3 are the tales and memes that spawn from the various press conferences over the years. Hell, even Destructoid has gotten on this E3 bandwagoning covering the best (worst) E3 press conferences. Yes, Tak Fujii, Ravi Drums and Giant Enemy Crabs are abound in the article, but there are other things that have shown up over the years that make all three press conferences hilarious to me. To the "Skittles" demo of Kinectimals at Microsoft's 2010 conference, to Disney's strange dance session to cover High School Musical: Sing It! in 2007, even Peter Moore botching a Rock Band demo at Microsoft's 2007 press conference. It's these moments of spontaneity that makes E3 for me.

To be honest, those little things about the press conferences -- and sometimes the events around them -- are infinitely more fascinating than just going to the trade show itself. Hell, if I was a press guy, I'd just hang out at the press conferences and not do much else. To me, they hold a distinct charm of the best and worst of E3 more than anything else. Hell, I've been trying to chronicle all the infamous moments of the press conferences, and even then I might've missed a few because there's so many of them.



But the games, though? Can't wait for them. Announcements are the other great thing about the press conferences. Even though I bought it on PC when it was released, I was floored to see Gabe Newell at last year's Sony conference and announce Portal 2 to PS3, complete with cross-platform play for PC and PS3 owners. Granted, not all of the announcements are winners, but they're still awesome and bring out that giddy shocked kid in me who gets excited for all that stuff. Granted, it might be a bunch of arm-flailing again this year with new Kinect, PlayStation Move and Wii games, but hey, doesn't bother me. I try not to get hyped to see XYZ game or thing at E3, it's more interesting to be indifferent and be pleasantly surprised than be extremely hyped, only for the hype to deflate when the game you were hoping for doesn't show or doesn't hit those extremely high expectations.

Personally, I can't wait to get my Metal Gear Solid, Zone of the Enders and Silent Hill on thanks to another batch of HD re-releases. Thanks Konami for acknowledging gamers who didn't follow last generation that well, like me! Seriously, this doesn't bother me as much as it probably does for the rest of you. Certainly better than going to GameStop and buying dirty copies with missing labels/manuals and the disc with a mysterious substance on it.

(Although I did play the original MGS games... hell, I got a copy of MGS3 Subsistence Limited Edition that's apparently semi-rare and goes for $150+ on eBay... tempting.)

Man, remember when we used to read gaming magazines? Maybe you don't, but I do.

A few days ago, while I was on my way to give a friend an old Xbox DVD remote I wasn't using, I had picked up three old gaming magazines for $5 at a Goodwill: A March 2003 issue of Game Informer, and two early issues of Official Xbox Magazine, still in the shrink wrap with the demo discs inside. That moment made me want to dig out the other old magazines I found while perusing thrift stores, and remember my past with gaming magazines.

I guess I should go back to where I began reading this stuff. My friend had a cousin who had old Nintendo Power magazines. To me, these were an absolute treat, and I snagged a few of the issues. Unfortunately they're all torn due to negligence of my friends at the time, but I had issues that covered games like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III: The Manhattan Project and Super Mario All-Stars. A few years later, I had a subscription with Nintendo Power from about mid-1998 to mid-2000. I even looked in a Kmart to get all the 1998 back issues I didn't have at the time. Later, I got one of those complimentary subscriptions to PC Gamer that you signed up for if you did something for Publisher's Clearing House. That lasted from 2003-2004, which covered a lot of games that would later be praised or derided, such as Half-Life 2, Call of Duty, and Doom 3.


This was the shit when I was a kid. Useful, insightful, even if it was filled with excess Nintendo praise. (As it should, seeing as it was owned by Nintendo and all.)

Hell, even when my local CompUSA was going out of business, I snagged old PC Gamer and Computer Gaming World issues from around 2004-05. Nowadays I don't have any print magazine subscriptions -- the internet has usurped that medium -- but I do remember the good old days of reading gaming magazines.

While my game magazine collection isn't huge, it's certainly a sizable collection in which each issue is a snapshot of the era. I collected these magazines as a way to see what gaming really was like around this time. 2001-05 was a time where I was playing video games, but wasn't entrenched in them as much as I am now. I missed a lot of the classics, some of which I went back to play recently, such as Mafia.

Getting these slightly old magazines also show how different gaming was before the days of Call of Duty 4. Here's a few examples: Game Informer praising Counter-Strike for the Xbox as the "king of Xbox shooters" since Halo 2 was still a year and a half away. How about a 2007 Game Informer issue that covered Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, complete with an early version of Elena, looking more like an adolescent kid than looking like voice actress Emily Rose? One of my favorites is Electronic Gaming Monthly that had "Announced: Goldeneye 2!" on the cover. That Goldeneye 2 was actually EA's GoldenEye: Rogue Agent, an absolutely awful shooter. But it's funny to go back and realize things differently than when all this stuff was brand new.

To me, it was also funny to read these gaming magazines to find out the most silly and ridiculous things in them. Like Howard & Nester. Hsu and Chan. Talking about strange peripherals or looking at old dated software like GameScan. Interviewing Darius McCrary of Family Matters to ask him what his favorite Nintendo games were. All these, along with the writing of many famous games writers, some of which would go on to be famous in other mediums like Bryan Intihar, Shane Bettenhausen, Dan Amrich, and many others.

Not only was it interesting for me to still find gaming magazines at a thrift store, it was more fascinating when I found an issue of CUBE magazine, a European-press issue from 2004. Brits will probably scoff at me not having one of their more prestigious gaming magazines instead, but to an American like me, this is a treat to find in a Goodwill for a few bucks. It too shows a snapshot of gaming, not only from a different time, but a different place.

I feel grateful that these gaming magazines existed. They were something we used as our way to finding out the hot new games. We didn't really have the internet to go to, and even in the previous generation, we were just getting familiar with online gaming. Every once in a while, I read these magazines again, just for old times sake. That and to see how far we've come in terms of gaming. Hopefully this blog makes you wax nostalgic and get you reading any old gaming magazines you might have, even if it's just Official PlayStation Magazine's 100th issue.


I remember getting this last issue of this, and being sad in the process. OPM was a pretty good mag.

Writing this blog as well as cataloging my 85-issue magazine collection makes me want to do something like this, but with individual issues of magazines. What say you, Dtoiders? Would you read em? :)