Did you hear?  Tuesday was opening night for World Cyber Games Ultimate Gamer!  It’s the reality show where twelve accomplished gamers attempt to master a variety of genres.  The winner gets 100,000 dollars and a spot at 2009’s World Cyber Games.  Since the WCG was nice enough to YouTube the episode, I’ve supplied annotations!

Episode 1: “Are You Ready to Rock?”

0:02 – Narrator: “Tonight, an epic battle begins.”  With Los Angeles in the background, we can assume this is the first reality show where twelve teens try to keep a state from going bankrupt.

2:03 – And our player synopsis begins with Adande “sWooZie” Thorne, a “national Dead or Alive 4 champion”.  Adande wants you to know “[t]here’s a misconception about gamers… a stereotype that guy that’s locked in his basement, still lives with his mom.”  Hey, easy with the subtle humor…I’m working on getting out of the place.  Unemployment is ten percent where I live!  What do you want me to do!?  I’m trying!!!

2:18 – Up next is Ciji “StarSlay3r” Thornton, rocking a fashion style somewhere between ‘unapologetically emo’ and ‘I’m an attention whore’.  “I’m here because of my daughter…she’s the reason I’ve tried so hard to be a good gamer.”  The single parents who make ends meet by working two jobs will be thrilled with that.  Fortunately for you, they are working two jobs and don’t have time to watch this show.

2:27 – And here’s our competitor with World Cyber Games experience, Geoff “iNcontroL” Robinson.  “To be the spokesperson, the representative, would be a tremendous opportunity.”  I guess we’re pretending your prompt 2007 elimination never happened?

2:38 – Amy “Athena” Brady, co-founder of Pandora’s Mighty Soldiers, says: “I really want a female to be crowned the world’s best gamer, I think that would be huge for female gaming.”  I respect your accomplishments, but the “world’s best gamer” claim is a crock.  America has the aforementioned “locked in his basement” stereotype.  The South Koreans don’t.  They didn’t earn the “gaming gods” stereotype because the Jews wanted to shed a label.  You win a tournament in Seoul?  Girls want your dick.  That doesn’t happen here.

2:45 – Jamal “Zophar321” Nickens’ introduction to television audiences: “I have two clients, they both have muscular dystrophy.  They’re like brothers to me.  I don’t know if I could handle being stuck in a wheelchair, everything that you wanted, you have someone else to do it for you, it just sucks.  So I’m gonna do best as I can and do it for these guys.”  So yeah, make your own personal joke.  I’ll pass this one up.

3:03 – Mark “Applesauce” Smith, on potentially winning the competition: “That’s the stuff that dreams are made of.”  My dreams are much different from yours, apparently.  They usually end with me beating the crap out of someone.

3:26 – And we’re introduced to our hosts: Joel Gourdin from “Attack of the Show” and Hannah Simone from “I wish I was anywhere else right now.”  They really couldn’t get Morgan Webb to do this?

4:09 – The contestants head into their home outside of home, where…
4:16 – THE SAMSUNG AD PLACEMENT ROBOT HAS DETECTED SAMSUNG AD PLACEMENT.

4:22 – And we say hello to Kelly “MrsViolence” Kelley.  Yes, Kelly Kelley.  Ladies, think marriage will ruin your name?  Kelly Kelley wants you to look at her name and Kelly Kelley doesn’t want to hear your crap about it.

4:42 – “I’m not just a pretty face, but I am attractive.”  Hello to Chelsea “Delicate[<3]” Alek-Finkelman, de-facto reality show hot chick.  She proceeds to throw a hissy fit over a bed, and feels as though she’s accomplished something when Adande gives up the bed like a gentleman.    You’re not just a pretty face, you’re also obnoxious.

4:56 – And we’re introduced to J.D., who goes by the gamertag “KosherHamm”.  Since he enjoys sports and appears to be sociable with warm-blooded, beer-drinking, middle-class white Americans, he will be the most hated person on the show.

5:08 – Alyson “nin9ty nin9” Craghead: “Throughout my entire gaming career, I’ve always been underestimated because I’m a girl.” No, you’re underestimated because the Laws of Gamertags indicates you need cheat codes to beat the game on easy.

5:25 – Cut to Daniel “Dante” “DevilsAlastar” Kim.  Presumably, he is the first pro gamer to nickname both of his bangs.  He “feels like an outsider in this house”, though I’m unsure how many places he wouldn’t.  We also get our first mention of Robert “Prod1gy X” Paz, who is apparently the greatest video game player of all-time.

5:49 – Robert: “My gamertag is ‘Prod1gy X’.  I am the best gamer.  That’s a definite.”  That’s nice to hear.  Sentence fragments are short.  True.

5:58 – And Robert, Dante, and Adande give us our first “girls suck at gaming” conversation of the series!  “These girls are all fairly attractive, and that kind of puts me at ease ‘cause I don’t think they really have what it takes.”  Ironic, given you’re Dante.

6:19 – And we learn that Ciji still has a crush on Dante.  Ladies and gentlemen, our first sexual tension of the show!

7:10 – And our first game is…with dramatic buildup…drum set to the right of what’s under the curtain…a rhythm game!  Who would have guessed?  I keep reading comments that Rock Band has no place on a show designed to test gamer ability.  Really?  A hand-eye overload doesn’t suit the bill?  Watching people play Guitar Hero is boring to all hell, but it’s fine as a single step in a greater competition.

7:45 – But first, the “real life” challenge.  Hannah: “Now, we know you’ve mastered a Rock Band guitar, but we’re here to find out if you can play a real guitar.”  Well, that’s cliché.  Hopefully, we get an appropriate Call of Duty segment to match this.

9:40 – Dante swipes singing duties from JD because he has “a really manly voice”.  JD’s rebuttal: “And   Miss Dante jumped in, ‘I want to be the singer! I want to be the singer!’ So sure, I’ll let the guy with the girly voice take the girl song.”  And boom goes the headshot…

10:40 – Real band time!
16:55 – The Donnas are trying their best to feel good that their music was butchered.  Nothing says ‘softening your criticism’ like “[y]ou did forget some lyrics…”

19:35 – Robert’s band finished last in the “real life” challenge, so he gets a plan going:  “I’m thinking of creating an alliance.  People I can trust.  Anybody who’s on an alliance.  Will make it final four.”  I’m not adding periods to be funny, you can see the dude’s brain short-circuiting every couple of seconds.

21:10 – The pursuit of sexual tension now wafts between Geoff and Kelly…immediately followed with the latter stating “Currently, my husband and I are separated.  We’re just trying to like figure out, what we want.”  So Ciji is trying to support her daughter through professional gaming, the other is on leave from her marriage.  And they play video games for a living?  You don’t say… (Update in the comments section for clarification.)

23:08, 23:13, 23:16 – Something interesting here.

Why are the players hitting every note late?  Want to know why?  My 46-inch Sony is a great gaming television.  It was released prior to the current generation of plasma televisions, which all have video latency issues.  A tenth-of-a-second delay is hell on Earth for gamers.  Now imagine a rhythm game where the timing window for hitting a note is a tenth-of-a-second.   So in our first episode, we can completely call the results of the Rock Band segment into question because nobody calibrated the televisions.

24:30 – Dante offers advice to an opposing team and promptly gets his emotions handed to him by Ciji.  Unable to come to terms with the fact that the grand prize is serious business, Dante comes close to tears and storms out of the room.

25:47 – And hello to the Isolation Chamber™.  It’s no Aggro Crag, but I’ll live with it.

25:55 - THE SAMSUNG AD PLACEMENT ROBOT HAS DETECTED SAMSUNG AD PLACEMENT.

26:07 – Adande: “That is quite the TV.”  Jamal: “TV was huge; I’ve never seen a TV that big in my life.”  Who makes it?  Enlighten me!

26:39 – Mark, on contradicting the entire message of the show: “The only place I’ve played video game were people’s basements and in my room…”

26:50 – THE SAMSUNG AD PLACEMENT ROBOT HAS DETECTED SAMSUNG AD PLACEMENT.

27:12, 27:53, 27:59, 28:03 – Guess what’s still there?  It’s not peaches and cream!
28:28 – Trust me, that’s not the face of disappointment.  That’s the face of “my controller is fucking lagging”.
28:44 – Robert: “I could have done a lot better if anything.”
28:54 – Kelly: “I really do think everyone’s performances could have been better.”

29:23 – And after one round, the man up for elimination is…Robert!  The competitors give their best “They shot the president?” look.  Adande finishes in first and will get to select his opponent.  The logical pick to eliminate the “best player in the tournament” is Ciji, but…
29:45 – Robert: “Oh, I’m coming back, that’s for sure.”

31:07 – Guess what, kids, the Rock Band lag is gone!  Why didn’t they just retape the entire segment?  Video lag does more to damage the credibility of the competition than a do-over.

32:52 – Adande: “The person I’m gonna pick to face off against Rob, “Prod1gy”, in the elimination round…is somebody I view as a threat…and that person…is JD.”  The fix is in!  The fix is in!

34:09 – JD: “I figured, you know, the smart move, the good move, would be to put the best guitar player in against Robert.  Fine sWooZie, just proves that you got no balls.”  When Adande referred to JD as a threat, I presume that was upgraded to “his own physical well-being”.

35:45 – Chelsea: “Robert, he didn’t even really practice, and you really never know what can happen in the elimination challenge.”
36:56 – Ciji: “JD went from ‘I can barely do easy’ to like, ‘I’m doing very very well.’”

Yeah, JD is fucked.

38:04 – THE SAMSUNG AD PLACEMENT ROBOT HAS DETECTED SAMSUNG AD PLACEMENT.

40:24 – Announcer: “Now this should be a particularly tough challenge for JD, he’s a strong athlete, and he’s broken his hands several times, and he says playing games like Rock Band is quite difficult.”

40:55 – And after the intro guitar section on Offspring’s Come Out And Play, Robert is up by the score of 5,850 to 3,400.  And this is why Rock Band is a boring game at the competitive level.  Know how during presidential elections, news outlets can call a state when three-thousand votes are in?  With one percent of the song over, I can already call this for Robert.

41:40 – Enough with the shenanigans.  Tripling a player’s score in Rock Band is sodomy.  I know the show is trying to sell a tight race, but JD is done, guys.  Let it go.

43:38 - JD: “You know, I did what I came to do, my gameplan was to go out and just give my best score like I’ve done every time the lights went on, it just so happens the game that I wasn’t well-versed in happened to be the next competition.”  I’m getting vibes from the game over scenes in The Indigo Prophecy.  “So that’s how my story ends…I wasn’t good at Rock Band…and Adande was a dick.”  Dude gets my sympathy.

Next week, on WCG Ultimate Gamer: Adande thinks he has food poisoning, but finds out someone has impaled his stomach with a long metal pole!  Who did it? Stay tuned!

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 14th, 2009 at 1:32 am and is filed under E-Sports, Rock Band (series), Television, WCG Ultimate Gamer. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.