Stu’s Web Wednesday: Video Games Awesome!

You know those times when you decide to make something completely just for the heck of it and it becomes your big launching point and what you're known for? That's Video Games Awesome. Born out of Awesome Video Games (a satrical take on the video game shows of the early 90s), Video Games Awesome is a live (and recorded) stream of five people; Fraser, Kyle, Ben, Becky and Deacon, playing whatever video game, no matter how popular or obscure, they can get their hands on and putting their own running commentary as they play. Now I know what you're thinking. "Stu, there are a billion shows like this on the Internet. Why is this one so special?".

Glad you asked, mysterious voice in my head. BTW: Stop telling me to burn things. Anyway. For one, it's their set-up. I'll utilize an older episode of the whole crew playing Ms. 'Splosion Man, including everyone's favorite tutorial ever, to prove my point:

Fraser made the unique call of using a real-time green screen set up where it chroma key's the image in real time, having the logo and the gameplay on the screen while still being able to capture all of their reactions on the sofa. This works to greater effect with the multiplayer games, like 'Splosion Man, when you can see them all trying to compete together. And none of it is done in post, in fact there's very little post-production done besides splitting the episodes up into Blip or YouTube able chunks. So when the crew does a live stream, it looks exactly like this.

Video Games Awesome also have created one of the more active and creative Minecraft servers around, creating a sub-show of Minecraft Awesome. The crew sets out different challenges for the server to build, anything from Dr. Suess, the future, underwater, to the Simpsons, lets the community (along with their amazingly awesome Mods) loose for a week to build what fits in that challenge theme, and then they come back and tour the handywork of the server. For example, one of the first challenges was an old west town, shown below:

Everything done in the town was done with absolutely no cheats in material gathering and building. If any of you Minecrafters know (I'm not one of them really) that takes a LOT of work. Their server is whitelisted for their own Turbo Club access, so don't bother trying to grief them. Their turbo club also allows them access to their TF2 server, to which is extremely tempting for me. (If you do happen to be on either server, bug the mod Otterphantom for me, would ya? Say "Stuart sent me.")

You can find Video Games Awesome primarally on Blistered Thumbs for the full records of shows and their Twitch.TV account for their live shows. To get the latest on when the crew goes live, follow them on Twitter and Facebook. Or be like me and randomly run into the whole crew on the streets of Seattle during PAX '09 (Becky was the one who took the picture. She also wasn't on the show at the time, but she's still a totally awesome woman):