a forgotten view of eve

You would think that being interviewed for a TV show, even one aired online, would be something you wouldn’t forget in a hurry. In this case I had completely dumped all memory about a show I was asked to be a small part of for Joost a couple of summers ago, back when I was also heavily involved with EVE TV.

Called “Around The Net In 20 Games”, the series was simply a bunch of games journos yabbering on about their favourite interactive vices (it didn’t involve any net navigation). I had expressed an enduring love for a game called Total Annihilation and was invited along to an East London studio to justify my appreciation before a man with a camera and a presenter with impossibly white teeth. When I arrived and announced I also quite liked a game called EVE, I was interviewed about that as well.

(Watch: Around the Net in 20 Games: EVE Online / Total Annihilation)

As I say, I’d totally forgotten about the interviews and hadn’t even seen the shows until receiving an email this evening saying that Joost.com was now browser-viewable. With my memory pricked I decided to seek them out. I’m glad I did. …You may not, since to view them you need to register. However, they are fairly interesting, if only to see an unusually animated Zapatero with long hair and a view of EVE that seems quiant and outdated. How quickly things change… EVE I mean, not my view of it :)

missing the action

It appears the EVE TV crew has returned from the broadcast of the 5th Alliance Tournament, after what was by all accounts a successful two weeks of camera-poking fun, culminating in what was without doubt the most exciting final in tournament history. Despite missing most of the broadcast due to family and football commitments, I did manage to tune in for the very last match and witness the tense showdown between Ev0ke and Triumvirate.

Witnessing a classic final leads me to think I may have missed a classic tournament, and whilst I’ve tried to catch up on what was missed by way of the replays that have been posted online, there seems something altogether more magical in watching everything progress live. Don’t get me wrong, it’s great that the matches are online (I was there during the 4th Tournament helping to upload and organize the replays), but I’m sure that there are some who missed the live stream because, like me, they had “better things to do”, with hopes that viewing the replays would make amends. I’ve since come to realize that EVE TV coverage of gang warfare between alliances is, like football, a dish best served live. They say you only fully realize what you’ve missed when it’s gone and that is the exact case here.

On the plus side, Pompey being in the semi-final of the FA Cup is not something I would have wanted to miss either. I only hope Tournament VI doesn’t clash with any of Portsmouth’s Champions League matches come next season. (Chance would be a fine thing.)

clash of the titans

The 5th Alliance Tournament is almost upon us and I predict it will be the best yet. I have no scientific evidence on which to base this assumption, nor any kind of foresight or behind-the-scenes knowledge, just an old-fashioned hunch. Sadly I will have to miss most of the fun and games due to prior arrangements across both weekends of the broadcast (a small matter of an F.A. Cup showdown between Manchester United and the mightyness of Pompey), but I hope to be able to tune in for the final day… some of it, at least.

Picking a winner is hard – there are lots of new teams I know little about. My safe-hands choice to take home the £5 book token will have to be Pandemic Legion, although I do hope The Star Fraction goes at least as far as it did before. Regardless, I expect some good battles, controversial decisions and enraged tears in equal measure and the usual attempts at mimetic engineering. (And, of course, Pompey through to the semi-finals on April 5th… which will clash with another EVE event, sadly.)

cast aside

Sadly, I never got around to mentioning EVECAST in the mag. …Or rather, I did, but after some necessary deadline-day re-jiggery just before Xmas, it was decided to make room for another story and mark a mental note to make good the decision in another issue. Unfortunately EVECAST has since gone the way of EVE TV Weekly, which it was doing a decent-enough job of replacing. Rather less tragically it seems that after just four irregular episodes, tribute in print will elude the fledgling game station a while longer… a mention here in the blathering online footnotes of the real thing will have to do for now:

Hosted by the immobile VampireZIM, EVECAST.TV seemed to pretty-much do what EVE TV Weekly did; namely put together news, interviews and regular bits into the tried-and-tested TV magazine format. Some of these it did very well and some of these it didn’t, but considering it had a couple of big and very expensive shoes to fill, it’s perhaps not so surprising that the dark-glassed host (and director / producer / pretty-much everything else) had to call it a day.

Premature endings are not exclusive to TV broadcasts (insert Firefly reference here). The EVE community is littered with the half-built skeletons of fan projects that didn’t quite get off the production line. EVECAST got further than most and for that deserves much appluase. Mr. ZIM managed to hit the nail on the head however in his video eulogy when he said that crafting the show was a little too much work for one person (which perhaps explained the need to shade the eyes). Frequently, no matter how many people you enlist, it is always one person that drives such projects, especially when the good-intentioned volunteers drop back into their real lives. Ambition is a great motivator, but one big TV show is a beast of a project, and without the resources to fuel it, the tanks will quickly run dry. Perhaps a number of smaller shows might have worked – we may never know. I’m borrowing from my old EVE TV notebook here, but how about “The 0.0 Show” or “Carebear Corner” – shorter pieces that wouldn’t have needed a host to read to camera, or that could have been as irregular as real-life permitted.

I still hope to see a regular EVE videocast being made, but it may have to come directly from CCP in light of the work and costs required. Given the talent that has passed by both sides of the cameras to end up there, it would be remiss of Iceland’s top codeshop not to make use of the resources that it has so diligently acquired. Still, at least there is the Alliance Tournament to look forward to…. which is where EVE’s TV ambitions originated, after all.