In previous years, we had made a holiday tradition of LIVEcasting the Spike TV Video Game Awards. Things are changing, however, both at Spike TV and GameCola.net: Gaming Outside the Mainstream.
Last year, we made fun of Spike TV for making antiquated references to South Park and Snakes on a Plane. This year, they continue their trend of living in the early 2000s by renaming the show “VGX“—because the letter X is 2tally kewl. They haven’t said what VGX stands for, but we’re assuming that the X stands for X-TREME.
But, that’s not the only reason why they decided to remove the “A” from the title. While our dedicated team of analysts was busy researching the possibility of another LIVEcast, we stumbled across a recording of a secret meeting of top Spike TV execs discussing this year’s awards show. We’ve transcribed the recording below:
Old, White-Sounding Exec: We need more money! How can we fit MORE advertisements into this show?
—Mumbling can be heard throughout the large and expensively-decorated boardroom—
Young, White-Sounding Exec: Here’s an idea… What if we removed…the AWARDS?
The recording continued for two more hours, but it was almost entirely filled with cheering and the sound of champagne corks being popped. Either way, according to the show’s hip new website, they’ve abandoned the old awards show format and moved on to a more modern format entirely composed of game trailers. The show is also moving to an all-digital format, available on every media platform that isn’t their actual TV station. We’re assuming the time slot that would normally host the awards show will instead be broadcasting three hours of Chevy Sonic commercials.
Their website does list nominees for awards, but there’s no mention of when during the show the awards will be announced. Considering the history of their actual awards show, we’re assuming that all of the awards will either be given in the last five minutes, or will be given as quickly as possible and purely for the sake of showing a given game trailer twice. Considering that the show is now an hour longer than it was in years prior, we’d rather avoid the legal implications of submitting our staff or our viewers to that kind of torture.
With that said, we here at GameCola.net: Gaming Outside the Mainstream must bid farewell to Spike TV’s Spike TV Presents the Spike TV Video Game Awards on Spike TV. We know that we won’t be watching the VGX, and we expect that nobody else will be, either.
But what am I supposed to do with my Saturday early evening?! I’m so sad right now.
GameCola could run its own awards show!
We should boycott it anyway, transmisogyny and cissexism being a core part of their humor.
It seems like not a whole lot changed, really. They just finally started getting honest about the fact that the actual awards on that show are prioritized pretty low, right under advertisements, cornball jokes written by people who barely have a vague idea what a videogame is, and huge demon penises.
Okay, I have never heard of the Spike TV Video Game Awards. Video Game Awards on TV actually sounds cool, but since you have a tradition of MSTing it, and since they’ve changed it, I guess it wasn’t as good as it should have been.