Awa on the ran-dan
A gamer cult icon that had (until recently) slipped beneath my radar was Consolevania, a videogaming show created in Glasgow, Scotland. It features reviews, skits, pisstakes and commentary that is actually rather excellent. This is in stark contrast to essentially every other videogaming show in the history of the universe, which have sucked horribly. Well, that's not exactly true. Some of them have been staggeringly, staggeringly bad, with legions of MTV reject bimbos and pierced faux-extreme d00ds reading publisher sales guff off cue cards in a low, emotionless monotone, but some cracked the shackles of their bondage and soared above the seething abyss of games show suckage and reached the dizzying heights of... well, just "ok". They never actually reach "good".
Consolevania, on the other hand, takes video game shows well into the good zone, and beyond. They have real games knowledge, intelligence, passion, lunacy, and a seriously warped sense of humour. They also have broad Scottish accents, which instantly makes them forty times as funny as any American gaming show host who has ever lived. They rant, they swear, they do embarrassing inteviews with bemused Glasweigens, and they run around dressed as Hitler. It's beautiful, and it's stuff that you'd never ever ever see on American gaming shows. Even tame stuff like the Shenmue drinking game, where Mr Robert takes one sip, drops his trousers in the middle of the pub and staggers outside to flounder on his hands and knees on the wet Glasgow cobbles mumbling incomprehensibly would probably be stomped flat in a microsecond by any American television producer.
An odd and wonderful thing happened though, which is that the Consolevania crew was picked up by BBC Scotland, to do videoGaiden, which is essentially Consolevania with a bigger budget. This is the BBC we're talking about though, so in true Doctor Who "aliens made from green spray painted cardboard and spaghetti" style, the production and props are still fairly shabby. Not that anyone cares, anyway... we're not watching the show for the CG intro and the hair gel. It's the games. The gaaaaaammmes.
The swankiest, best, and greatest thing about both shows is that they're downloadable. Consolevania episodes can be grabbed via http or torrent from the official site's download page, and although you can grab videoGaiden episodes from their official site, don't do it. They're all in Real video format, which instantly gives you cancer and makes all the ice cream in your fridge taste like pee. Better to grab them from this mysterious site, which has them in a far more sensible AVI format. Tell your friends.