Tonight saw the latest entry in Spike TV's annual Video Game Awards "extravaganza" and while I couldn't be bothered to fly down to Los Angeles to attend this thing in person I've spent the last few hours watching the tape-delayed televised feed.

If you wanted to be polite, you could say I'm unimpressed.

If you wanted to be accurate, you could say I've been cringing with embarrassment for the last hour and a half.

It's one thing to ape the Oscars, but by replacing the attractive glitterati of Hollywood with the exceedingly plain looking (at best) denizens of the world of gaming while ignoring the fact that the development side of gaming has the sex appeal of a 70-year-old Jewish woman, the end result is a program that seems like a grade school art project with gee-whiz special effects and celebrities who Seth Green looks down on.

Gaming may need something like this to push it into the coveted mainstream spotlight, but Spike should really stick to metaphorically jerking off teenagers with television shows about mixed martial arts and the mystery of female underoos.