TV Videogame shows: Have they always sucked ass?

Bad Influence!: 1992 - 1996

Appearing nine months after GamesMaster on rival channel ITV, Bad Influence (we're going to drop the explamation mark as it looks damn silly in the middle of a sentence) tried to grab a chunk of the audience that Channel 4's show was eating up. Unfortunately, it went aboutthings all wrong.

Showing in a mid-afternoon slot, BI was very much a kids' show with occasional aspirations to be something greater. The focus was on hardware, software and industry news, but while there was a watchable and releventprogramme trying to break out, things were generally just too simplistic for older gamers to take seriously. For every appearance by Peter Molyneaux in the show there was a crap cartoon dinosaur in the opening titles. For every well-made report from the Tokyo Game Show or feature on pirate hardware there was a 'zany' cheats expert or an amateurish 'review' by a mumbling ten-year old.

Those reviews in particularly were legendary in theirmind-devouring badness. Usually delivered by pre-pubescents who seemed to have seen the game seven minutes before the cameras started rolling - and not another game before of after in their entire lives - they generally went as in-depth as "It's not got a lot of playability, but the graphics have good pictures and they move. Five out of five".

And it was a real shame, as BI had some decent on-screen talent who could have done a decent job themselves. In particular, presenter Violet Berlin had been a gamer since the days of the NES, and actually went for the job as a way to get free games. Thankfully though, as the series went on she was entrusted with more high-profile outside reporting and industry coverage than straight presenting work. But still, the show could have been a whole lot better than it was...