(Nowadays properly "Tilt.tv") A TV computer/console game program, shown weekly on MTV3 and SubTV in Finland.
The perfect program for people who like to watch the opening movies of Playstation 2 games, and see ads for SMS games!
Previously, there was an IT/Internet news program called Verkoss@ that had their own game reviews. Some time after that, when that section gained popularity, the game reviews were split to a program of their own. Verkoss@ is no more, but Tilt! keeps limping on even after a couple of years...
Tilt! used to be a decent program. Here are some of the features that are not in the program any more:
- Celebrities telling of their own favorite computer and video games - and the game itself was brought up and they played it. No, not all of the local big figures of popular music play Tomb Raider like crazy. Someone played some D&D clone on Atari and told how he had played that as a kid...
- Their own Quake ladder! Interviews of the heads of then-famous Quake clans! (They do have game competitions these days, but not for good games - one of their recent attempts sounded like "The Big Game Company gave us a zillion to set up this contest, buy this obscure piece of shit game to practice to enter the contest and win a tiny fraction of this money!")
- Weekly "classic game" - various platforms. My sister laughed aloud when she saw the Ghostbusters C64 game on TV. I wonder why, I don't even have it...
However, lately, they've become victim of MTV3's notorious love of SMS stuff.
To make a long story short: here's a rough estimation of what the half-hour show contains these days. (I may provide exact figures some day, but I think this isn't far off the reality =)
- 1 minute of messages from sponsors
- 5 minutes of commercials
- 2 minutes of same babbling of what's on today's show (the same stuff as always) and what's coming next week
- 3 minutes of game news
- 2 minutes of telling what's going on at the show's website
- 8 minutes of game reviews (mostly consoles, of which mostly PS2, which I don't have so I couldn't care less)
- 5 minutes of "mobile game" reviews (they find surprising amounts of good things to say about simple SMS games...)
- 1 minute of "feedback" - reading one irrelevantly stupid question that should have been put to their FAQ list at the website (due to challenge involved in answering these questions, I doubt they even have such list - too lazy to check)
- 5 minutes of pitching/explaining the rules of the same lame "mobile games" (admittedly the 3D-rendered demo/intro videos for these games are sometimes pretty cool)... or alternatively explaining how to join a gigantic game competition (described above).
Not to even mention that these reviews are fairly superficial - and the game footage in the TV consists mostly of opening movie clips, with some luck something from early beginning.
Likewise, most of the "interviews" consist of game company marketroids hyping the game and giving no actual substantial information - if game designers or implementors are interviewed for some obscure reason, they carefully cut all juicy stuff out and only describe million times described details, or irrelevant little details.
I think I'll stick with Pelit website and MoonTV game news programs, thank you...
(Oh, and before Tilt! came about, Niko Nirvi predicted something very similiar to it would surface if there were a TV program about computer games... =)
Tilt! is, according to some people, the second Finnish program format that has been sold to other countries (Poland, in this case, with other countries being discussed of). The first was, I heard, Far Out. But personally, I don't see how come Tilt! even has any "format" to sell, with a little bit of creativity you can make a lot better game news program! =/
Oh, and I think Tilt GameWorld 2001 (I think?) was the worst thing ever - apparently the event was very good (due to the fact they weren't organizing it alone =) - but their own TV coverage of what happened in the expo was very very weak. ("Hey look, a shady hall with big shiny game logos and lots of people walking around! Some playing games with consoles!") MoonTV's game news program did much better report on the expo!