Decent video game shows are hard to find these days, arguably reaching their peak in the 90s, and despite rising in popularity as an entertainment form reviews and industry news tends to be hidden away on websites or in graveyard TV slots. Gone are the days when GamesMaster or Sky One’s Games World were going strong and actually pulled in millions viewers. You don’t even get the horrible snippets on Saturday morning children’s TV (mainly because that doesn’t really exist anymore).
There is one on Australian TV called Good Game which is a mix of industry news, reviews of the latest releases, retrospective features about important consoles and game series such as the SNES or Sonic The Hedgehog and interviews with developers from that part of the world. Some of these are also broken up with little video game based sketches and great gaming moments. Sounds good, and it is.
Video Game News, Reviews and Features
The show, now in its fifth series, is presented by Jeremy “Junglist” Ray, Steven “Bajo” O'Donnel and new for this year Tracey “Rei” Lien; all three of them are likable people with a sense of humour but Rei’s inexperience does show at times. There’s a lot to squeeze into half an hour a week and although it tries to cover all consoles there is a heavier focus on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. It does focus on its target audience and sections do use hints of jargon that don’t resolve to sentences composed entirely of acronyms.
The reviews are concise yet basically reveal what you want to know about the game, giving reasons for any negative comments without taking 15 minutes to do so and final scores in rubber chickens out of 10 (nope, no idea either). The banter between the two hosts during these sections does border on conversational but also suffers from being obviously scripted and a bit clunky at times. Then again there’s probably not an easier way to critique when a camera is shoved in your face.
There’s also a very useful website to accompany it – which is what made this review possible – where episodes can be streamed with zero loading time or downloaded, and includes exclusive content. The webisodes are also broken up into many different chapters making it easy to find the part you want.
A Good Game Show that Speaks on the Level of its Viewers
Good Game is described as a show for gamers by gamers, meaning that if you have no interest in the industry or watching two nerdy blokes fiddling about with controllers you would hate it but then again you wouldn’t tune in to start off with. For hardcore video game fans it does what it says on the tin without being patronising or overlong, in short the complete opposite to the truly awful Gamezville.
It’s a shame there aren’t more shows like this as they are relatively cheap to film as they mainly consist of people sitting in a room yet the production values are rather snazzy and it’s a whole bunch of fun. Good Game gets 8.5 rubber chickens.
Good Game is shown every Monday at 8.30pm on ABC2.
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