Due to a family outing, I didn’t manage to catch the Spike VGAs live when they aired on Saturday, December 10th at 6:00pm MST. I did the next best thing, though, and taped the broadcast for watching later. Yes, dear readers, I used a VHS cassette to record the ceremony so that I could watch later. This is what you call “successful at life.”

I have a write-up on my larger thoughts of the event being published on Gamer’s Guide life later this week, so I’ll reserve this post for how my predictions fared, as well as a few smaller bits I left out of my GGTL write-up.

This year I went 14/24, which seems right contemptible. Most of the big categories were easy enough to guess, but I was surprised at how gaga for Portal 2 the VGA judges were. Perhaps I would be less surprised if I actually played the game; I must rectify that, and soon. I was also caught off guard by the love for Bastion’s soundtrack, though I can totally see why it won both Best Song and Best Original Score.

Action Adventure should have been easy to guess, based on how pro-Batman the event was, and Best Graphics seems kinda arbitrary, considering that Uncharted 3 largely looks like Uncharted 2, but those sorts of slips happen. The strangest award was for Best Team Sports Game, which was flat-out not announced for the first 24 hours after the ceremony. It was like someone being forgotten for an In Memoriam, except instead of a famous person, it was the award for Best Supporting Actress.

The actual broadcast itself, putting aside the very large gaffe of barely spending time any awards, was about as good as the VGAs ever have been, and in many cases better. Zachary Levi had the exact balance of nerd cred and celebrity panache that I hoped he would have, and I thought he did rather well as host, even in the face of joke-writing that clearly came from folks with only a passing familiarity with video games (though I did kinda like the Alec Baldwin/Words With Friends and Veteran & The Noob commercial references).

I also appreciated the Activision/Call of Duty salute to the troops, with Captain Price and Sgt. Frost from Modern Warfare 3 giving props to US soldiers fighting overseas; it was a neat way to slightly de-trivialize the overabundance of military shooters in the current market. Lastly, the context trailers for each of the five Game of the Year nominees was pretty neat, cribbing one of my favorite bits from 82nd Academy Awards.

Alas, some bits still dragged on (and on, and on, and on). Most uncomfortable was a stupid (stupid) bit where a YouTube VGA-hater named Black Baron was invited to attend the show, and nearly five minutes were spent on him, his antics, and his diss record-style taunts at Spike CEO Neil Shermans. And while I liked Felicia Day’s Japanese game show-style challenges on behalf of gaming charity Child’s Play, there was way too much time spent watching her and her cohorts eat cupcakes for cash. Lastly, I haven’t seen Comedy Central’s Workaholics, but after the cast plugged horror icons “Steve King” and “Albert Hitchcock,” I’m not sure I ever will.

Of course, the main reason for anyone to watch the VGAs, apart from the twelve of us masochistic folk who actually like award shows, is the promise of exclusive trailers for new games, and this year’s were pretty killer. Best of all was the very first trailer for a new Naughty Dog property, a character-driven survival game called The Last of Us. Equally awesome, but marred by the jackasses from Workaholics, was the trailer for Alan Wake’s American Nightmare. I loved the crap out of the first game, and I will buy each and every available episode of AWAN. Transformers: Fall of Cybertron was pretty neat, and while the slow motion and mourning music reminded me heavily of Gears of War’s “Mad World” ad, I’m not sure if anything bearing the comparison to “Mad World” is in a position to be criticized.

All in all, the 2011 VGAs were definitely a step in the right direction, and was actually pretty decent at times (again, I like award shows, so take that with a grain of salt). Each year, the VGAs have gotten closer and closer to nailing the sweet spot between peer recognition and entertainment, and I truly believe it’ll be something special in a few years. Until then, well, it didn’t completely suck, and that’s something that past years haven’t had the luxury of saying.