When Games Attack
20 episodes, approx 25 mins each.
I was excited to see Dominick Diamond in another video games review show, because GamesMaster (1992-98) had been so good, but the excitement was short-lived. WGA was mostly bad. If it was a gaming peripheral, it'd be a Virtual Boy or a Nintendo Power Glove!
It was a Gamer.tv production for the cable/satellite channel Bravo. Bravo was a kind of schizophrenic entity; it had a large roster of quality series from yesteryear that I could watch all day long, but its original content was made up of shows that seemed to have an alternative universe King Midas handling them, turning them not to gold but to shit. What's worse is that much of their output was targeted primarily at the kind of millennials who would routinely browse the top shelf of a magazine rack but leave instead with a copy of FHM or Loaded.
The show stuck to a rigid formula each week. Dom, rounder of face and paunchier, much like myself at time of writing, indulged his passion for all things football (i.e., soccer, for American readers) by having a large portion of each episode dedicated to an ongoing footy game tournament. I'm not a fan of the sport in any form, so could skip that part without remorse.
A weekly Top 5, such as Most Pathetic Games or Crappiest Game Plot, seemingly researched by juggling ducks, was stretched out over the running time.
Queeny and Cugly, a parody of Sooty and Sweep style puppets, would pit two similar games against each other with occasional attempts at irony. It was a disaster.
Perhaps the worst feature was a semi-regular rhythm game section where glamour models, I'm guessing on loan from the likes of the aforementioned magazines, bounced around amateurishly while lecherous commentary made the fiasco even more unbearable, if that's possible.
A section named 'Behind the Game' did what it claimed, giving information on the inspiration, development and release of a specific game, both retro and modern.
A weekly Top 5, such as Most Pathetic Games or Crappiest Game Plot, seemingly researched by juggling ducks, was stretched out over the running time.
Queeny and Cugly, a parody of Sooty and Sweep style puppets, would pit two similar games against each other with occasional attempts at irony. It was a disaster.
Perhaps the worst feature was a semi-regular rhythm game section where glamour models, I'm guessing on loan from the likes of the aforementioned magazines, bounced around amateurishly while lecherous commentary made the fiasco even more unbearable, if that's possible.
And finally, although sometimes outside the games-related remit, the on-location features hosted by either Dom or Caroline Flack were occasionally fun. But overall, in aspiring to fill the gap left by GamesMaster's absence, all it really achieved was to increase the loss felt by fans of the latter show and help it be even more fondly remembered by folks of a similar age to myself.
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