VGAs

The Video Game Awards from Spike TV have become quite hyped up and a fairly major event for the industry. The show itself is pretty typical with celebrities reading from teleprompters and a couple of naff bands. The awards themselves are also pretty underwhelming seemingly quite evenly distributed across all the major games releases. It's all a big advertising excuse I guess from a TV channel that call itself a "network for men", although it seems UFC & wrestling is a big part of their schedule. However they did do some nice things with augmented reality and virtual sets.

Still I was glad to see Bioware win "Studio of the Year" and to see StarCraft 2 win "Best PC Game". Mass Effect 2 of course won "Best RPG" although I would have thought it would get more, in particular "Best DLC". I was surprised to see Red Dead Redemption win "Game of the Year", especially up against Call of Duty: Black Ops and Mass Effect 2. It's possible though that I'm being unfair to RDR as I've not played it due to it's Xbox only nature. Portal 2 being "Most Anticipated for 2011" I would have agreed with, up until the VGA show. The show has become so big that some studios are using it to make major announcements. Two in particular got my attention.

There's no official way to watch the awards show here in the UK. The Pre-show is streamed on the Internet but for the main show you need the Spike TV channel in the US. Thanks to that I ended up on one of those slightly dodgy websites that let you stream TV channels from other countries. I even had to swap a couple of times as there were dropping out under the extra pressure. Normally I wouldn't have bothered (just read about it) but over the last two weeks Bioware has been teasing followers of their Facebook & Twitter feeds with hints that there will be major announcement at the VGAs. There's been all sorts of speculation about it recently but in the end it turned to be for Mass Effect 3. This was a little bit of a let down as we've known Mass Effect was going to be a trilogy since the beginning so it was not really a big surprise. I, like many others, were hoping they were starting a new IP. However we did get a release date "Holiday 2011" and a fancy trailer which you can see here: Mass Effect 3 Trailer

What was a big surprise was Bethesda making an announcement which I had no idea was coming. Seeing as it's an ongoing series I knew there would be one eventually but same as ME3 I wasn't really expecting to see this until 2012. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim has been announced and will be out in less than a year on 11/11/11. There's not a lot of information about this yet as no-one knew it was coming so soon. The teaser trailer seems in indicate dragons will be involved and of course from the title we know the game will take place in Skyrim this time, but that's about it. I can't wait to see some screenshots for this as they've apparently got a brand new engine. Watch the teaser here: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim