Gaming on TV

This weekend I was flippin through the channels and I happened to land on USA. Mostly because there was female wrestling and the girls were fairly attractive. I didn’t watch long, but during a commericial I happened to see an advertisement for MLG. After the wrestling they were having an hour long or half hour (I can’t remember) show on this Halo 2 tournament. A while back I posted about USA starting to have gaming events on TV and lo and behold here they are. As the women wrestlers exited the stage and the men came on, I changed the channel and watched something else while waiting for the MLG to start.

Once the appointed time came I clicked back over and watched to see what was their first day of gaming. I was curious as to how they would treat it and watching the show go on, I was fairly impressed. I was expecting a lot more over the top hype like Spike TV does and they kept it fairly clean. The feeling I got most out of it was that it felt like an “extreme” sport. Like how you’d see the XGames or something. They focused on the players sitting there in front of TVs and they’d flash up bios on the big teams and their team members. It wasn’t bad. Then they’d cut to footage of the gameplay and thankfully they knew that’s what people really wanted so they gave that plenty of airtime.

They’d do a quick overview of the gametype they were playing and of the map and then they had this neat thing where they could take a snapshot of the map and show a player’s progress from point to point. The commentary wasn’t awful and all in all I’d be willing to watch it again if I was more of a Halo fan.

So a kudos to USA for not making gaming seem stupid and for having a show that was passable as gaming entertainment.