Bloodworth gives his impressions of this year's presentation.
Written: 03/06/2004
Walking in to the Rain Nightclub at the Palms Hotel, my first question, of course, was where I should sit. After finding an attendant to assist me and waiting for him to ask around, I was informed to go up to the center bar. I got up there and was told that I could sit anywhere, including the sky boxes, but it was easily the worst place to put media. The "center bar" area was directly above and behind the stage, and although you could see the ceremony from the sky boxes, there was no way I was going to stand up there and take pictures of the tops of people's heads. The club was nice, but it clearly was not designed for this type of event because there were plenty of other areas with views that were just as bad.
So, I sat up there for a minute, thinking that perhaps this was a mistake, and I ate some of the sushi and shrimp that was set out for dinner. I walked around to ask another attendant about a better place when I spotted some other members of the press up there eating as well. It was for real; this is where they wanted the media to be, so of course I decided to find my own way to cover this event. There were a few couches near the stage, and I found myself a decent spot, without getting spoken to about it for the rest of the night (there were even women happily offering me cheesecake). I had a good view, except there was another camera man standing in front of the stage that I had to wait to finish before I could take any pictures of my own, which should be up early next week.
Last year's awards tried to be a big gala event like the Oscars, and they crashed and burned in the attempt with poor jokes and random celebrities, so I was very curious to see how this year's presentation would turn out. In comparison, it was very low-key. Diane Mizota (of G4 fame) hosted the event, but it seems each presenter wrote his own introductions to the categories, resulting in some similar comments made by different people. The choice of presenters seemed odd as well, since rather than being winners from prior years, they seemed to be randomly chosen from different parts of the industry, the most surprising of which was Infinium Labs' Kevin Bacchus. The nominees were presented with little fanfare. Only the box art was shown on the screen; not a single clip from gameplay or cut-scenes was shown the entire evening. Another issue was that you never knew just who was receiving the award. I understand that entire development teams worked on these games, but I'd still like to know who the person accepting the award is, even if it's only for photo captions.
The Prince of Persia team won award after award much to their own surprise, and they were clearly embarrassed, but they always managed to find someone to thank each time. At one point they even thanked the bar down the road from their office where many of the ideas for the game were born.
A two-man band, consisting of a guitarist and a DJ armed with 8-bit samples, performed between awards, but at times the samples were screechingly painful over the PA system, and sometimes ill-timing had samples drowning out presenters just as they began to speak.
Overall, being low-key kept the show from being an embarrassment, but there is still a long way to go before the show can garner the same kind of prestige as the Grammys or Oscars.
Topic: The 2004 AIAS Awards Ceremony (Read 1401 times)
