The Great Good Game Scrapfight

This almost qualifies for the the Friday Funny.

If you've ever watch ABC 2 on Monday Nights at 8:30 (the timeslot for those who are sick of Southpark on SBS, because Matt Stone and Trey Parker have just gone _too_ far lately) then you'll be familiar with Good Game "the show by Gamers for Gamers". Recently they just celebrated their 100th Episode and even more recently...as in this Monday just passed, saw a changing of the guard of sorts with a new presenter (A Girl!) Hex taking over the original Junglist, who had been presenting the show from the very first episode (If I'm right).

The whole cross-over was handled kind of badly, I wish I had a You-Tube video of it, there was a particularly funny part where Margaret Pomeranz ended up in the chair where Jung normally sits and laughs and says "You N00b Bajo". That made me laugh, however the rest of the show was fairly cringe worthy.

So anyway, it appears the Junglist's Axing has caused a bit of Angst around the Australian Internet's sites for Gamers, So far its had a mention on Kotaku, OzSource and ZGeek. Yesterday, Good Game released a statement via their forums about the reason behind Junglist's sudden axing, which was hastily retorted by Junglist himself, then it was responded to by Bajo and the production team and then it was on for young and old... apparently (I'm reading al this today). It was all getting pretty nasty when suddenly Rupert Murdoch's flying monkey's picked up the story and ran with it at News Limiteds news.com.au site.... where the comments are just going nuts, much like the forums at good game and the comments at Kotaku. It would also appear, that a rival reviewer from another network has weighed into the Good Game Forums and posted the following under Anon (My guess is its Yahtzee from the Escapist Zero Punctuation reviews and the Game Review show on PayTV).

"Hi GG crew, guess who. Better yet dont, I'm writing as anon for good cause, one should never be fratenising with the competition ;)

I was actually turning in for the night when I got a call about this situation, now 2 hours later my morbid curiousity is sated. I've got to admit I've saved this thread for prosperity, something tells me its going to be the thing of legend and a textbook case for future generations.

Let me be blunt. This is a death spiral, 'syd' (Janet I'm assuming, I'm afraid I'm not to l33t) I've no doubt this has been thrust upon you, but you need to get spin on this and for the love of god get some control over your hosts. Honestly it's going to take a miracle to pull the show out of this, I'd instead be worrying about careers, this one's going to follow people around.

Every change in a series has led to angering the hardcore base and the forums flaring up, its inevitable... what makes this spectacularly gruesome is someone seems to have forgotten the nature of your demographic. You might as well have run a series of promo's with the hosts tearing strips out of each other... forums are how your demographic communicate, and you can be guaranteed this has already spread further than these boards. I've even noticed a few posts comparing it to a family breakdown... sobering stuff with this demographic, and you were planning on trying to crack into the tween market?

I wish the very best for all of the team. It's a young group and despite being on the other side of the fence, I'm gutted something like this has happened to them. Best of luck to all."

Zgeek also have put in their two cents (Again, I'm guessing this is Pirate)

This is so lame. I just wanted to add my voice to the many who say this is a rotten idea. There was no need to get rid of Junglist. They could have added Stephanie Bendixsen without getting rid of him and achieved the same effect.

Junglist's reviews where the reason I watched the show. The other guy annoys me.

Epic fail by ABC management. You guys need to fire your marketing people because they obviously know nothing about their audience.

Just to prove that we are still living in the digital age, there's now a Save Junglist website, where you can sign petitions, fax the ABC and pick up a complaint letter to email to them.

The whole thing is probably an excersise in HR "How to not fire Gamers" as they will take their greivances to the entire internet, and any message board or forum they post on with degrade into nothing but a Flamewar.

Of course, I liked Junglist, and I am fairly sceptical about Hex's reviewing ability (the Forza review was bit childish) but I'm no hardcore gamer (in fact, rather than Casual Gamer mines more of a passing interest).

So Good Game may be shooting themselves in the foot. Then again, they might not be! But you cant deny, watching a scrap fight from the safe distance of the sidelines is always entertaining! As are some of the videos made from the fallout (below Hitler getting mad at Junglist's axing, from the Savejunglist Website)