Josh Larson Senior Manager, Market Research	Now Playing: Advance Wars 2: Black Hole Rising (GBA), Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos (PC) Least Favorite Gaming Cliché: "I’ve been playing games since Pong."

Not Really in Euphoria From G-Phoria

Is a caption necessary here?

For those of you without G4 on your cable system (and it's the majority of you), I'll do my best to recap the event. It went down last Friday in Hollywood, and G4 has replayed the event about four times a day since. Hey, when you're a young cable channel scrapping for content, you do what you have to--anyone remember Australian rules football on ESPN back in its early days?

Our G-Phoria event host was Jamie Kennedy, the guy with film credits like Scream, Scream 2, Scream 3, and Malibu's Most Wanted. I guess James Van Der Beek was unavailable. Picture an MTV-style awards show with B-list celebrities, an audience of 100 people who stood the entire time, hosts/presenters reading word by word from cue cards, and people in game-character costumes bouncing around onstage every so often. That pretty much sums up G-Phoria.

But it wasn't all terrible--here are some good and not-so-good moments from the event:

Good: Public Enemy performing "Fight the Power" from Def Jam Vendetta. But where were the S1Ws?
Not So Good: A middle-aged, long-haired, goateed, scratchy-voiced band claiming to be Flock of Seagulls performing "I Ran" from GTA: Vice City.
Good: Trailers (and playable demos at the event) for upcoming games like Final Fantasy X-2 and Star Wars Rogue Squadron III: Rebel Strike.
Not So Good: People in costume on stage reenacting scenes from Kingdom Hearts and lip-synching the dialogue.
Good: Video clips from the Game of the Year nominees accompanied by sound bites from top industry editors (including some of our GameSpot brethren).
Not So Good: Celebrities accepting the awards, like Jenna Jameson accepting the Game of the Year award for GTA: Vice City with the quote, "It's such an innovative game--you can kill a lot of people and have sex with hookers. We like that!"
Good: Mario receiving a "legend" award.
Not So Good: A digitized Mario with a bad Italian accent giving a rambling acceptance speech that literally put me to sleep.

I went to an awards show...and a volleyball game broke out!

Celebrities: Let's get some firepower in there--I want to see Tiger, Britney, Ahnuld, and Senator Joe Lieberman, to name a few.
Bad Blood: The Oscars always have some bad breakup (Matt Damon-Minnie Driver, Tom Cruise-Nicole Kidman), and the Hip Hop Awards were shut down due to a backstage brawl. How about the Sony and Microsoft groups in a bleeped-out shoving match?
Voting: We need a central group of self-important industry folks to vote and have it tabulated by an accounting firm, something more comprehensive than visitors to G4's Web site.
Skits: Where is the genius of Ben Stiller and Vince Vaughn spoofing the process of making a game?

Hopefully, someday, we'll get this awards thing right.