video-game-awards posts

Last Saturday's broadcast of the 2010 Video Game Awards on Spike TV was actually less about the awards and more about the many game announcements and trailers that were shown during the event. But did all of that translate into people watching the awards show?

Variety has the ratings breakdown for this year's award and its somewhat of a mixed bag for Spike TV. Overall ratings for the 2010 VGA came in at 627,000 viewers which is a 3 percent drop from last year and is also the fourth straight year that the broadcast lost overall viewers. On the other hand the much valued (by TV advertisers) 18-49 age group actually rose ratings 12 percent. Overall the 18-34 age group went up 5 percent and men aged 18-34 went up 15 percent. So it seems that even with overall losses the VGAs are hitting the right demographic in terms of viewers.

StarCraft II managed to win two awards in the 2010 Video Game Awards on Spike TV earlier tonight. Blizzard's hit RTS game won for Best PC Game as well as for Best Performance By A Human Female for actress Tricia Helfer's voice work as Sarah Kerrigan. Other notable winners for games that came out for the PC include Call of Duty Black Ops for Best Shooter, Mass Effect 2 for Best RPG and Need For Speed Hot Pursuit for Best Driving Game.

The award ceremony itself was better produced than most of the previous ceremonies. The show featured a number of clever virtual stage and prop elements that could be seen by the TV viewers but not the live audience. Host Neil Patrick Harris did a solid and entertaining job as the show's overall host (although he hinted at the very end that this would be the last awards show he would do which would be a shame). Once again the actual giving out of the awards took up only a small fraction of the broadcast in favor of all of the world premiere trailers for various upcoming games.

Of all the games that are getting world premieres at this Saturday's Video Game Awards show on Spike TV, none is perhaps more mysterious than the game that developer BioWare is prepping to reveal. The latest teaser for that title has shown up at Computer and Video Games which claims to have a new screenshot from the title.

As you can see above, the image is a first person sniper viewpoint of what appears to be a person standing up and above another person who is on the ground. Publisher Electronic Arts has apparently confirmed the images as part of the trailer reveal for the BioWare game. In addition the unnamed source who have the image to Computer and Video Games claims that when the game is finally revealed it will make "a lot of hardcore BioWare fans jumping out of their seats."

Update: Our sister site Joystiq has word from its own unnamed sources that the game will in fact be revealed to be Mass Effect 3 with support for multiplayer.

So what's going to be different about this Saturday's Video Game Awards on Spike TV compared to previous years? We already know that the show will be a bit classier thanks to the decision to pick Neil Patrick Harris as the overall host. Now, via a chat with Entertainment Tonight's web site (yes we are linking to an ET news story; the apocalypse must be near) Harris states that the awards set will also be a bit different.

Harris says, "Rather than having lots of set pieces everywhere, the sets are going to be done digitally." That should be ... interesting to see if that can be pulled off well. Harris also calls himself a "medium-sized video gamer" (he plays Call of Duty; we guess that qualifies). Harris says that as far as his style of hosting he likes to become one of the Rat Pack, saying, "I try to be as drunk as Dean Martin, that makes it all go away much faster." Indeed.

Last week we saw a teaser site called Murderyourmaker.com which showed only a guy with his back turned to us and a somewhat burred background. Now that same site has posted up a five second teaser trailer that seems to let the cat out of the bag on what game it is supposed to be teasing us about.

The imagery points us and many others to predict that the game is in fact Prototype 2, the sequel to the 2008 open-world action game from developer Radical Entertainment and publisher Activision where you played an amnesiac man who has a body that can shape ship to plenty of people. Hopefully we will learn more at the Video Game Awards in about a week.

Spike TV's Video Game Awards broadcast is now nine days away and the video teasers of what games will get their official reveal continue to be sent out. A new video today has GameTrailersTV show Geoff Keighley talking more about the BioWare game that will be officially announced during the December 11 event. Keighley states that a snippet of gameplay from the BioWare title released last month is "not all set in that location that you see. You may see something else in there that will get you pretty excited."

The speculation has been that the game is Mass Effect 3, a multiplayer shooter set in the Mass Effect universe or something else entirely. You can check out the new video after the jump:

Wow. We are just one month away from the end of 2010. Still no second manned Jupiter mission. Still no first manned Jupiter mission, actually. American and Russia, you have 31 more days to make our sci-fi dreams come true.

• As promised the PC ports of Super Meat Boy, DeathSpank: Thongs of Virtue, and ArmA II: Private Military Company have been released on Steam.
• The PC port of nail'd is also out on Steam with a 10 percent discount for the next week.
• Steam bug updates are available for Zombie Driver, The Polynomial, Gratuitous Space Battles, and Puzzle Agent.
• Next weekend's Video Game Awards will be broadcast live to both US coasts for the first time.
• Want to dance in Fallout New Vegas? This mod makes it happen.

Activision looks like it might be prepping to launch a new game in the near future. The publisher launched a new teaser site, MurderYourMaker.com, which is apparently going to fully revealed during December 11's annual Video Game Awards event on Spike TV.

The teaser site has a bald guy wearing a coat to the back of us with some blurry backgrounds and a mysterious music score. We have no idea what this is supposed to be about (although some online speculations state that it could be a sequel to Prototype). Activision announced True Crime at last year's VGAs but the game's releases has been delayed until sometime in 2011.

[Via VG247.com]

We have yet another vague video clip that's supposed to be a teaser for a big world premiere game reveal at December 11's Video Game Awards TV show on Spike. The clip, which you can check out after the jump, shows a planet which then swoops down to a mountain side and finally ends with a blurry video that seems to show a helicopter and (maybe) a car.

What does it mean, to quote the Double Rainbow guy? We don't know but the video says we should "get ready to take on the Planet". The page is tagged with "ea games" as well which may or may not mean Electronic Arts is the publisher.

As it does every year, Spike TV's annual Video Game Awards pretty much make the actual awards ceremony secondary next to all of the world premiere trailers that reveal mostly unannounced games. In the latest TV commercial promoting the December 11 event it looks like an image slipped in that may or may not be one of those unannounced games.

As you can see from the image above it would seem like its a zombie-based game with some speculating it could be related to Valve's Left 4 Dead series (which refer to its zombies as "infected" in its game universe). The bottom right hand corner has "1 of 3" that set up to be upside down. What does it all mean? Is it a hint about an announcement for Left 4 Dead 3 or is it something else? Stay tuned.

[Via VG247.com]