News: It's the little things

Good commentary can make anything interesting.

Last night I was trying my best to be unproductive and I watched this short Starcraft 2 tournament match. As a below average Starcraft player, I found the commentary by the broadcasters just as interesting as the game. These are game commentators, but they weren't the stereotypical type, where every other word is "yo yo yo" or "this is fucking awesome" or "omfg pwoned". These broadcasters opted for a more rare method of commentary: they used the English language. Full sentences were spoken, coherent, informative, and fun. They actually talked about the current state of the game and of the game play styles of the two contestants, including their recent matches! Professionalism in my video games? It's more likely than you think!

The match itself was interesting. The Little One had lost 0-4 to the other player in another tournament and in the game TLO was in trouble from the beginning. Since I rarely play this game with people, it was interesting to see their strategies. The commentators made the match accessible enough for even casual viewers to get what is going on and why some decisions were important. You usually can't get this type of commentary in fighting game tournaments because the fights are over in less than a minute, but in strategy games, games last anywhere from ten minutes to over an hour.

A few years back, when Video Game and Technology channels were being announced, like G4, this is what I thought they were going to look like. I would have loved a gaming channel that streamed tournaments from all game genres, documentaries of the productions of games, shows on how to create small games, etc.. But instead, the whole gaming channel idea crumbled and the only one left is G4, where you can watch per day 10 hrs of Cheaters, that ninja competition show, and endless commercials of penis enlargement pills (by the way, they didn't work! ;_;).