i've seen cinematech described as being "the most niche tv show ever" which i think is honestly accurate, even among a host of niche shows on G4 it was hard to call it anything other than the one that was the most for it's audiance, dorks who think cutscnes and trailers are the coolest thing, which realistically is also the kind of person that would read sites like this, so this show is and was absolutely for you and i think it was a standout for its channel and easily the show thats the least difficult to go back to, while so much of G4 has aged badly in terms of jokes here and there that may not be in good taste or well, the entirety of X-play, this doesn't have those issues since it's just trailers and cutscenes and an occasional AMV long before AMV's really took off on places like youtube and it's one of the main shows from G4 i would really reccomend going back and watching. there's a lot of value here.

as i've hinted at the show was just a compilation of cinema scenes, trailers, cutscenes, amv's with the shows own music, sometimes they'd be random upcoming games, sometimes it was themed with things like old even for its time atari commercials or an ep on cancelled games, it was a cool way of getting more insight into games at a time when many wouldn't have had a ton of net access, not enough to download a trailer anyway and the episodes had enough variety that you were bound to come across at least something you found cool in each ep, even now they still have value, not all of these trailers are easily accessable online because of how the net has decayed and doubly not in as good quality as even some of the cinematech uploads are in, it's one of the more well preserved shows in terms of picture quality, it's a far cry from the VHS camrips you have to put up with watching things like judgment day or game on, most of the eps available look shockingly good. you're also still bound to come across new games this way, i know i have and i'd like to think i'm pretty knowledgable about games from its time period, you can even use it to gage what games were hyped or popular at the time, expect to see a lot of chaos legion and DOA, and that for sure has some historical value, at least to me, it's cool to see!. the show also just had a real vibe to it, i love the look and sound of the inbetweeny menu, it reminded me a lot of old ps2 demo discs and the fact they were more curated meant that you'd see more interesting trailers. if you do want to check it out it's very easy to since you can find the show in things like big 3 hour block compilations or in preserved individual episodes which there's a ton of and unlike most G4 shows, its actually still ongoing.

while most G4 shows outside of the reboot were left to rot (and even there look what happened, only 3 shows brought back and the rest disregarded for a focus on influencers and syndicated youtube videos, one was cancelled and the other two died anyway!) cinematech is still ongoing thanks to the youtube channel G4ZDtechTV who uploads occasional new episodes and even brought back the sister show cinematech: nocturnal emissions, they've also done a great job of preserving old episodes too, check out their channel if you can. that sister show is also worth mentioning, mostly because it's.... the one aspect that did age a little badly. nocturnal emissions was a late night version focused on import games, which is great though at times i do wonder if the intent was your usual "le whacky japan" BS that was and still is super prevelant and more than a little racist, but they also focused very heavily on ecchi and outright porn games, and considering the direction late G4 was going it's obvious the audiance this was aiming for, it's sleazy and i'd say avoid these episodes, the bad outweighs the good there. if you do want to check out the good show though there's tons of it, i'd say a large chunk of it is preserved, if not the outright majority of it so it's not difficult to find episodes at all, hell there's even a 200 video long playlist on youtube so give it a try if any of this interested you, there's some really cool trailers here that give some insight into how the games scene used to be, the games are cool as heck and the new show is neat too, it stands to me as still one of G4's best shows.