We're all Hypocrites

I spent a hell of a lot of my childhood watching television - Nickelodeon was something of an obsession of mine. For hours I'd sit and watch the same old Sister-Sister episodes that I'd seen 14 times already, and still enjoy every moment. Between my SNES and my Television addiction during the first few years of my life, I had little time for anything else. There are many programmes which I miss from my childhood - decent Ninja Turtles episodes, Garfield and possibly even Alex Mac (however much I hated that horrid girl at the time, I'd still love to laugh at it's poorness now), but out of the legions of programmes that I'd love to see again, there is only one which I'd pay to be re-made - Gamesmaster.

Still today GM is talked about in gaming circles, and about how much they'd love it to start up again, especially when a new games programme starts up. This new 'gamezville' on Sky 1, for example, is being compared to the legend of Gamesmaster, and getting slated by all and sundry. My opinion is that Gamesmaster, however fuzzy my memory of it is, wasn't that good of a programme. Yes, it was funny (thanks to Mr. Diamond), but it did have a hell of a lot of annoyance in. Take that talking head in the sky - he gave you codes for games that you never owned, and when he did you could never remember them long enough to turn on your SNES, get to the required cave and press the button combo, all whilst trying to intimidate children unsuccessfully. No, this isn't another rant about rose tinted glasses, which you're expecting it to be. What I'm trying to make a point of is the gaming community being full of hypocrites.

After the end of GM, gamers cried out for more media attention, demanding the television companies take notice of the thriving industry and make more games programmes in accordance to that. Then, finally, after years of waiting, a major player in television steps up to make a gaming programme to fufill our needs, and on Easter Monday of 2003 a Gaming Awards programme went out on ITV1 at almost peak time. By midnight of the same day the gaming community was in uproar. 'It was crap! They didn't show any new footage of games! The presenter didn't know anything about games! That was SO for casual gamers!' Yes, the awards were far from perfect, and did have a lot of flaws - the greatest gamer part was an insult to gamers across the country, but it was what we'd asked for - a show solely about gaming, on at prime time on a major channel. It was a starting block on which the television gaming revolution could've been built on. But instead of encouraging the small steps that ITV had made towards our dream, we destroyed it. We destroyed what we'd been hoping for.

The fact is that we all love to moan - look at any decent gaming forum (yes, do it again) and you'll see an endless barrage of complaints, either about the delay of the next Nintendo game, how poor the newest PS2 AAA title is or how Brute Force pales in comparison to Halo. Very rarely will you see a post which actually praises a game, despite its bad points, and focuses on what a game has done well rather than what it has done poorly. I do it myself - when I bought 'Wreckless', the first thing I posted about it was its poor handling and FMV, despite the fact that I was enjoying it.

We need to change. Maybe if we gave constructive criticism about games rather than just branding them 'crap', we'd see the changes which we wanted in games. Maybe we wouldn't have to moan as much. Maybe I wouldn't have wasted your time with this article. Maybe