It's very easy to say a "Top Gear" style show - but it's a much too vague request. With cars, there's something tangible that can be explored, experimented with... with games, you've got people playing them, and in game competition challenges generally aren't very interesting. There's not much you can do with cinematography too, you want the game footage and audio to be representative of what people will get when they play the game itself.
Of the elements of Top Gear that actually could practically work, the magazine format with cutaways, entertaining yet informative tone, and the presenter dynamic with the banter.
However, there's the misguided impression that there should be a one size fits all show. Maybe one show that would cover everything, but it couldn't possibly appeal to all audiences - it's oft forgotten games are just another entertainment medium, such as TV, movies or films - and say, Screenwipe, whilst it covers all TV, the audience for the show is not the audience for everything covered within it.
So, there's the audience problem. Yes, a general population review show would be safe, but I think there's room for the enthusiast, more industry look at the world of gaming. I don't mean anything to do with looking at sales as graphs, and the second a pie chart would come on screen the show should be axed, but maybe more intelligent discussion and features. Not a Newsnight panel show, but high calibur interviews with people within the industry, films showing an interesting take on development, retail and PR... a show for the enthusiast who isn't specifically in the industry.
Yet another problem is the industry itself. It's very backwards, in a way. Most of the time, the more coverage from games companies, the better. So, you'd think games companies would be going to the press, and I'm talking the big sites, pretty much just throwing ideas, interviews and stuff at them - but no, it's much more of a bug PR, beg PR and try and get anything out of them, and the internet has caused that quite a bit - it's easy for anyone to start up a site, so you really need to convince the PR team it's worth them blessing you with their time. To build up the respect a show like Top Gear has, the way companies still pay it attention despite not always being positive (with the exception of the incident at the start of last week's road trip), it's an uphill struggle that would take forever.
As briefly touched upon in the Screenwipe thread, and as hinted towards by Wells, I've tried making a games show online. It started with the BGB Wire, about 3 years ago, which had a 1 hr (over 3 episodes) in depth interview with the then Guitar Hero developers (now doing Rock Band) Harmonix, a type of interview I'd like to do again - really got a sense for the development team behind it, decisions being made... but not a casual friendly thing at all, not a trade show "so how awesome is your game, what are you doing with it" interview. There was an event coverage episode, and then things really took some shape with a
Deal or No Deal DVD Game review. It wasn't perfect by any means, but it was obviously influenced by Screenwipe. That was followed by the
Alternate Awards 2007, which personally was a fun episode, again obviously made by one kid in his free time, but wasn't half bad.
This year, I decided to move to a spinoff series, which quickly became the main "brand" for video content on the site I do with a few friends, BritishGaming.co.uk - which has made a surprisingly (relatively) big impact in the industry. The show was
BGB Newswire, which was a weekly satirical take on the news. Things changed, it improved, I'd obviously recommend the later episodes, and as well as the Screenwipe influence from before I also was going for a bit of a The Late Edition thing. It was for people in the know, but tried to be entertaining as well as informative, where I wasn't too bothered about being the first there with the story. There's also some E3 summary episodes and event coverage in there, the Summer Athletics special, and the latter 5 minutes of that is possibly my favourite video editing work I've done.
I should probably reflect on lessons from Newswire, but it's 1am and this post is getting long and I'll come back on that at some point.