Despite my unwitting appearance on Attack of the Show, I’m not a huge fan of G4tv. I see clips of it once in a while on YouTube, and the hosts always seem like they need to cut way, way back on the caffeine. Having said that, once in a while I see something that really captures my interest. Here is a good example:
I found this while searching for Half-Life 2 gameplay videos. (Which I’ve been watching for reasons I can’t even begin to explain.) It’s Hal Robins and Merle Dandridge, who play Dr. Kliener and Alyx Vance from Half-Life 2. (Merle phones into the show so you can’t see her, but if you want to see what she looks like you can do so at her official website. You can see her in an interview relating to her Broadway work here.) As the hosts point out, it’s really strange hearing these familiar voices coming from unfamiliar faces.
I was also surprised at how much Hal Robins looked like Jerry Holkins of Penny Arcade.
Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.
Someone commented that my previous post seemed a little nit-picky. That’s a natural part of what I do when I love a game, is to pick it apart and see what worked and what didn’t. Just so nobody gets confused and thinks I have a problem with the game: This was tremendous fun. I want to make it clear that the gripes are a bit of armchair game development on my part. It can’t be helped, really. Anyway, onward…
As you drop into chapter 2, you meet Griggs and Sheckley. I don’t know what these guys are doing down here. The only route to the surface is the broken elevator. I’d assume they lived here with the Vorts, but they seem genuinely surprised to see the Vorts when they show up, and their banter makes it sound like neither one of them has seen Vorts fight before. There doesn’t seem to be any living space nearby, or any sort of food. As far as I can tell, the turrets and tunnels are set up so that they can live here and take care of the turrets and tunnels.
What are you idiots doing here? How did you get here? Where do your supplies come from? Curse Valve software for making Gordon mute so that I cannot ask these all-important questions!
Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.
I’m currently playing in a D&D 3.5 campaign, as opposed to going to all the trouble of running one. This has made me very lazy, so I’m not reading many roleplaying sites these days. When the pendulum swings back to my chair I’ll start reading again. Probably with some sort of anxiety. I was happy to see Treasure Tables and Chatty DM both placed high on the list. I enjoy both sites, and as we all know “Top X” lists like this one only exist to make us feel good about choices we’ve already made.
Anyway. Number twelve. Yay.
Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.
Most common question here in the comments and in email last weekend: What do you think of the thing with Jeff Gerstmann?
Some people have been waiting for my take on this. Others will have no idea what I’m talking about. I haven’t commented on this yet because it’s one of those things that needs a thousand words or none, and I wasn’t sure anyone would be interested to hear my efforts to join the predictable pile-on now that the story is over and everyone else is dusting themselves off and walking away.
Here is a quick recap of the story. Note that that I’m just passing along details as I read them – the story goes something like this.
Jeff Gerstmann, reviewer for Gamespot, gave a bad review to the newly-released Kayne & Lynch. You can see a subset of his complaints about the game here:
The game sounds dull and tedious in a number of very predictable ways. We’ve played this game before, as it were, but with more varied gameplay and more likeable characters. Those few minutes of gameplay footage tell a story that hardly needs the narration of Jeff Gerstmann to help make its point.
After the negative review, Eidos (the publisher) pulled their advertising from Gamespot. (Gamespot was drenched in Kayne & Lynch promotions at the time of the review.)
Gamespot fired Jeff Gerstmann.
Eidos advertisements reappeared.
Excuses were made in an attempt to airbrush over what looks to be the abandonment of the pretense of journalistic integrity.
Life goes on.
For an even quicker summary of what people see when they look at this story, check out this Penny Arcade. To those of us pressing our noses up against the frosted glass of videogame journalisim and trying to look inside, it looks a lot like Eidos pressured Gamespot to fire Gerstmann. Of course, Gamespot denies this. Gerstmann has no comment. Eidos isn’t likely to subscribe to this view of events either. Some people doubt. “Anonymous sources” confirm, and hint that the story is everything it seems to be and more.
Gamespot’s stated reason for canning this ten-year employee – that they had a “problem” with the “tone” of his articles – is nebulous enough to mean nothing, and sounds pretty weak when used as justification for getting rid of a high-profile guy like this. This guy has been with you since the original Quake hit the shelves. A decade. And now his tone is suddenly a problem? Did his tone aburptly change? If not, what did?
Gerstmann claims he can’t comment on his firing, which is only true if what he has to say is negative towards his former employer. A few words from him could take the wind out of this story: “I was fired for repeatedly emptying the office coffee pot and not making more.” He hasn’t done this, which means he probably has something nasty to say and is avoiding doing so in hopes that he’ll be able to find work elsewhere in this industry. Humiliating your former employer is not the way to make a good impression on prospective employers.
Deprived of a reasonable alternative explanation for the firing, this story has gained traction and is quickly becoming the accepted version of events. I guess I’m buying it, since it reinforces my preconceived notions about gaming journalism.
For cynics like me, this just makes clear what I’ve always suspected, which is that mediocre big-budget games tend to garner better reviews than they deserve because the publishers make life difficult for reviewers if they don’t play along. I’ve always thought they did this with the more nebulous threat of cutting off “access”. As in: If you pan this Tomb Raider game, then maybe we won’t bother sending you screenshots, granting interviews, or giving you a review copy for the next one, thus giving the “inside scoop” to other, more malleable game sites and magazines. Review sites went along with this because of their OCD-like obsession with being “first” to review / preview something.
(And this is why I’ve come to loathe game previews. What possible use could I have for a four-page article filled with publisher-approved prose and screenshots about a game? Such a thing is essentially indistinguishable from advertising from the consumer’s point of view. It’s worse, really, since it’s presented as journalism. It’s gotten to the point where more page space is dedicated to previews than reviews, which shows just how screwed up things have gotten.)
But until this happened I would never have guessed that money was used this way, that the use of it as a weapon would be this explicit, or that they would have been so brazen about it. If this was some sort of aberration they might have tried to disguise what they were doing. They certainly could have waited a few weeks before taking action, thus spanking Gamespot back into line in a way which would have been undetectable to those of us on the outside. They way they’ve done things indicates to me that they think there’s nothing wrong with doing business this way and they don’t care if we know.
Many times I’ve played a game which had glaringly obvious flaws, and wondered how, during a two-page article filled with squealing about graphics and the mechanic du jour, the reviewer never found space to mention them. Eventually I (and a lot of other gamers) decided that either gaming magazines and websites employed abject masochists, or the review process was broken. I don’t expect a reviewer to predict if I like a game or not (How could they?) but I do expect them to accurately describe the contents and experience of a game. The moment I realized they stopped doing that they became useless to me.
Will gamers care about this in the long run? Is this going to be a blow to Gamespot, now that they have revealed that publishers can essentially buy positive reviews, simply by buying advertising space?
Not really.
I gave up on review sites years ago. A lot of us did. What about readers who still turn to those magazines and sites? Next year, when reviews tell them that the next Tomb Raider game feeds the hungry and heals the sick, will they think back to the whole Jeff Gerstmann story of ’07 and hesitate? I don’t claim to be a psychic or anything, but I’m going to go out on a limb and predict that they won’t give Jeff Gerstmann a nanosecond worth of thought. If their memories reached back that far, they would remember the last review of [overhyped game from a big publisher] and how that compared to the actual experience of playing the game. There will always be a contingent of people who buy first, and use reviews to rationalize their foolishness later. That group is large enough to constitute a market, and Gamespot has decided to go after it.
I do hope Gerstmann is able to find work elsewhere. If I was running a gaming site I’d grab this guy in a second, if only to establish a reputation as a fearless rogue and a tell-it-like-it-is publication. Interesting that nobody has done this yet.
Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.
We were bitten by the Wii bug over the Thanksgiving holiday. We gathered at my parents’ house for the usual family time, and my little brother brought his new Wii. The experience was remarkably different from the behavior I’m used to seeing around consoles.
In previous years, nobody would have wanted the Playstation 2 to be in the living room during a family gathering. It would have stayed back in one of the bedrooms, and the guys would have taken turns sneaking away from the group for a little fun blowing things up and eviscerating a genre-appropriate bad guy. The older generation and females would have been indifferent to the thing, and they would not have shown any interest in the game if they found themselves in the same room with it for a few minutes.
By contrast, the Wii was a welcome and natural addition to the living room. Everyone enjoyed watching it. Suddenly all the non-gamers were able to connect with the game and care about what they were seeing. My mother actually looked at the Wiimote and asked to take a few swings in baseball, something that would have been unthinkable if we’d been doing the same thing using Dual Shock controllers. My eight year old daughter was able to play bowling against an adult, and the resulting game was fun for both of them and interesting for everyone else.
I’ve heard the Wiimote referred to as a “gimmick”. I didn’t have an opinion before because I’d never used the thing, but now that I’ve held one and experienced it for myself, I will say it is not a gimmick but an innovation. Instead of improving visuals – which are already so good that even bad graphics are still pretty awesome – Nintendo decided to improve the input device. And not by adding another thumbstick or more shoulder buttons, but by looking at the way people played games and figuring out how to make it more fun. It worked. Wii Sports (the game you get with the Wii) is about as simple as they come, and there was never a moment where anyone grew bored of the thing. In fact, we amused ourselves with just bowling and baseball – two of the (I think) six games available in Wii Sports. I’m more convinced than ever that people who laugh at the modest graphical abilities of the Wii and tout the raw visual prowess of the XBox / PS3 are missing the point of gaming entirely.
We decided we want one for ourselves, although now is about the worst time of the year to come to that conclusion. The thing is neigh-unobtainable at the height of summer, and here in the frantic runup to Christmas we may just as well be in the market for Sasquatch on a unicorn.
What’s the deal, Nintendo? You’ve had a whole year to work out this production problem. You’re missing out not just on the money you’re not making by not selling units that people want to buy, but you’re missing out on all the money they’d be spending on games and controllers. You’re pissing away millions, if not billions. Convert some of those giant robot factories you’ve got over there in Japan, fill it with Meganekko schoolgirls, hire some Ninjas, do whatever you gotta do. Just build some damn Wiis already.
Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.
I never got around to finishing my thoughts on Half-Life Episode 1. I enjoyed the game, but I wasn’t driven to write a lot about it at the time. Fans of my long, rambling posts and self-indulgent blather will be delighted to hear that this is not the case for my Episode 2 commentary. It weighs in at around 6,000 words and will be split into a number of different posts. I’m not sure why I’m inflicting this on you, except that I feel a need to get this stuff out of my system and this seems to be the most expedient way of doing so. That fact that you’ll likely go blind trying to read it all is indeed regrettable.
Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.
50,000 words (the NaNoWriMo target) isn’t really a novel.
Writing all the time just for the sake of reaching a predetermined word count is a great way to force yourself to write crap.
If you want to write, do so! Don’t wait for an arbitrary start / stop point just because everyone else is doing it.
Those are all fair points. Everyone works a little differently. Some people are goal-oriented: I want to be a published writer and therefore I need to sit down and crank out a book even though it’s a lot of work. Other people – like me – are more obsession oriented: I have this idea and I need to get it out of my system by writing it down, even if it never gets published. I’m most certainly the latter, and something like NaNoWriMo is useless to me. But the former sort of person can probably get a lot out of it.
I’ve already written a novel, and I don’t feel any strong desire to do so again. If an idea strikes me, then I’ll end up writing one whether I want to or not.
One thing I don’t understand is why NaNoWriMo is in November of all months. In the US November means Thanksgiving, with all the related chaos of guests, huge meals, Christmas shopping, etc. Rotten time to write a book. January, February or March would be a lot better. There aren’t any major holidays, and (in the northern hemisphere) the world is a dark, joyless ball of ice. Good time to stay inside and write a book.
I write between four and seven thousand words a week here on this site, which means I’d fall short of the NaNoWriMo goal even if I replaced all of my post-writing with novel-writing. Fifty thousand words, despite not being enough for a “full” novel, is still a huge honkin’ load of words to put together in the space of a month.
But I’m curious how it went for people. I wonder what percentage of participants reach their goal? What fraction of those people go on to write a “complete” book? What (miniscule) portion of those people go on to get published? What (even smaller) portion of those folks manage to sell enough to justify the time spent on it? It’s a tough gig.
Did you take part? How did you do?
Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.
T w e n t y S i d e d
