Saturday night, Spike TV and Viacom attempted to fix everything that was wrong with the annual VGAs with the help of a rebranding and a three-hour long streaming event. The new VGX model may have succeeded in providing more in-depth coverage for the core gaming community, but not without a few moments of unscripted awkwardness. All right, maybe it was more than just a few moments...
In the pauses between announcing the evening's big winners, interviewing creators, and revealing world premieres of next-gen gameplay footage; co-hosts Joel McHale (The Soup) and Geoff Keighley (GameTrailers TV) demonstrated an amazing example of awkward on-screen chemistry. Many of McHale's jokes fell flat on their own, but even when he did land a clever quip the Community star didn't get much help from straight man Keighley. McHale's attempts to tease Keighley (particularly about his excitement over the Titanfall footage) or talk of diapers led to painful interactions that are surprisingly hard to watch.
Prepare to experience some off the charts awkwardness, people. Like The Office (UK) or Curb your Enthusiasm kind of awkward... but not in a good way. If you're anything like us, you may even need to look away at some points...
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It's hard to pick just one winner for 'Most Cringe-Worthy Moment' from such a long string of painful interactions, but Keighley sending a text message in the middle of an interview with Double Fine's Tim Schafer is probably the frontrunner. To be fair, it was a live broadcast. As McHale's recurring, and so very strange, diaper-themed jokes reminded viewers all evening, the hosts didn't have many opportunities to step away during the broadcast. Let's try to assume that Keighley had a very important show-related message to respond to...
If you're interested in seeing how well the editing team does slicing and dicing the VGX footage into an hour-long televised event for a more mainstream audience, tune in to the VGX Replay on Spike TV tonight at midnight.
The goal of the three-hour broadcast was to put the focus back on creators, games, and the core audience of gaming fans. Debates about whether or not the VGX approach achieved that goal are still raging on forums around the internet. The producers of the show likely learned a number of lessons from this year's live stream and we are interested to see how Spike and Viacom will continue to tweak the new format when the 2014 awards come around. At least they're trying and giving more screentime to the devs.
Did you enjoy the new format, despite all the awkwardness or would you have preferred something closer to the classic VGAs? Sound off in the comments.
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If you missed the show on Saturday, be sure to revisit all of our VGX coverage.
Follow Denny on Twitter @The_DFC.
Source: Gaming Byte