Spike Video Game Awards 2008 ignore handheld gaming
It’s only a game if you play it on a console, apparently
To be fair, the Spike Video Game Awards (VGA) – founded in 2004 to recognise achievements in video game development – have never really acknowledged pocket gaming, though we’d hoped the iPhone might have helped wrench their fixed gaze from the super consoles this year, even briefly.
Unfortunately, no such luck. Amidst the cacophony of aging rappers, GTA love-ins, obnoxious Jack Black PR campaigns and slew of celebrities who look like they’re being attacked by Scanners as they try to read from an autocue, only one handheld game managed to garner a brief mention.
Professor Layton and the Curious Village (a Pocket Gamer Gold Award winner) was named as Handheld Game of the Year in a rushed rundown of winners so the hyper-fluorescent show could get back to watching Jack Black laughing at his own jokes. The developers didn’t even make it to the stage to receive their awards – brushed under the gaming carpet as quickly as possible so the army of VGA sponsors could continue to lavish in the screen-time spotlight.
No mention of the PSP even as a game nominee, and a continued ignoring of the mobile platform leaves little reason for pocket gamers to watch the star-laden, superficial award ceremony. You’d think that after platforms like the iPhone have sold more hardware units than most of the console games that took away the awards, Spike TV would have realised there’s more than just the Xbox 360 and PS3 currently on sale (to be fair, the Wii was pretty much ignored, too), but for the time being it seems one of the most prolific and profitable areas of the video game industry will continued to go unrecognised by the Spike TV Video Game Award ceremony.
Maybe next year? Yeah, right…
