Jeff Gerstmann is Still Alive

After spending a few hours setting up microphones and yelling at a laptop, we’ve recorded another installment of the Ryan Davis Weekly Podcast Classic, the Arrow Pointing Down podcast.

Sounds like there’s a bit of echo, primarily from mic bleed if I had to guess, but the high ceiling in my living room probably didn’t help matters much. Either way, it sounds way better than the Skype-based test we did last week, and is probably more scattered and insane than last week’s, too! So check that out!

Did he look at the road ahead, see a future where all he was talking about for the next year is the recently-displayed Motorstorm 2, and run away screaming?

We’ll probably never know the exact details (employment issues usually work out that way), but yeah, Phil Harrison is resigning from his position at Sony Computer Entertainment. Kotaku’s got the details in the form of a press release, a statement from Harrison, and more.

There’s a lot of speculation about the move, with plenty of it claiming that Harrison’s frustration at the way Sony’s Japanese arm operates led to the move. He’s been a little vocal about that in the past. If that’s the case, he certainly wouldn’t be the first guy to throw up his arms and say “I can’t work for a Japanese company ever again!” Though most of my experience on this subject comes from the world of Public Relations. I’ve heard plenty of stories of people unable to deal with Japan’s business practices, which can seem awkward and slow-moving to outsiders.

Phil Elliott, intercontinental playboy and editor for GameIndustry.biz, has an interesting follow-up to this story, which cites “sources” who say that Harrison is headed to Infogrames, the parent company of Atari. Regardless of what you call them, Infogrames hasn’t exactly been putting out oodles of quality product lately. Perhaps Harrison’s up for a challenge, then?

Either way, Phil Harrison always seemed like a very key asset to Sony, as their best public speaker, and as someone who always seemed genuinely passionate about the products, not just the business. While there were probably plenty of internal clashes that we’ll never be privvy to, this seems like a short-term loss for Sony.

You know, I’m not a huge fan of chasing down business stories. It’s hardly my specialty. But I do like to watch a good business fight from the sidelines. Check out this story on EA’s rejected bid to buy Take-Two.

T2 turned EA down, so there’s a new letter from EA head John Riccitiello. It’s one of those carefully-worded statements that sounds so sweet and nice on the surface, but has a much harder undercurrent to it. Much like the whole Yahoo/Microsoft thing, EA is taking it to the shareholders:

“Our strong preference is to conduct a private negotiation. If you are unwilling to proceed on that basis, however, we may pursue other means, including the public disclosure of this letter, to bring our offer and the compelling value it represents to the attention of Take-Two’s shareholders.”

My gut tells me this deal will eventually happen, maybe once GTAIV has come and gone and Take-Two starts to worry about what’s next. I’m also not immediately repulsed by the concept, to be honest.

Also, now that I think about it, I think I prefer GTA4 to GTAIV as an abbreviation. Once you start abbreviating, why not go all the way, right?

I would have called this the “Day 3 Wrap” or whatever, but I just realized that GDC is actually a five-day event. I just didn’t go on the first two days, because it’s mostly focused on mobile games. Anyway, onward!

Today was the lightest day of the three, so we showed up around 12:30 or 1PM. I hadn’t really wandered around the show floor yet, so I did that for a little while.

Nintendo was showing Smash Bros. Brawl and Wii Fit. I stared at Wii Fit for awhile and think it looks really good. It’s got stuff like ski events, hula hoop stuff, and one where you must shift your weight on the balance board to tilt a playing field and try to get balls to fall through holes.

I got in and played a round of Brawl with three other show attendees. It’s essentially exactly what you would expect it to be. Down and punch with Mario makes the Mario Sunshine backpack appear on his back and he shoots some water!

Intel was showing off a few upcoming PC games on their new hardware, like the SKULLTRAIL board. They’ve since changed the name to something more official sounding like “Extreme Multi-CPU Super Boner Jam” or something, but that’s not nearly as cool as SKULLTRAIL. I suggest that everyone reading this should get together and start a heavy metal band called SKULLLLLLTRAAAAAAIL.

Bionic Commando looks really nice on the PC. They were showing some jungle-based action and I caught a bit of a destroyed city level that made great use of HDR lighting. With messed up buildings, cracked streets, and destroyed cars in every direction, it totally sets a mood. The action looks pretty neat, too. The guy manning the booth was playing it with a 360 controller. Not a huge surprise, but I guess consider that confirmation that the PC version will have controller support, if they haven’t said that already.

I also spent some time watching a guy use a gun to shoot at a bush in Far Cry 2. He’d sever a piece of the bush, it’d fall off, and then blow away in the wind. The bullet points on the FC2 display included my new favorite/ridiculous-sounding feature: “high quality vegetation systems.”

The indie games from the IGF were there, as well, and I got to meet Audiosurf’s Dylan Fitterer. He seems like a totally smart dude who knows what the people want and is dedicated to supporting Audiosurf post-release. I’d say he’s already off to a great start. If you’re not on-board with Audiosurf yet, there’s a demo available through Steam now.

I didn’t stop to play any of the indie games because I figured I could probably download most of them later. I quickly wrote down the names of a few so I could try them later. Of course, not all of them are available just yet. Noitu Love 2: Devolution, for example, isn’t available yet, but the original game is. Polarity, Battleships Forever, Clean Asia!, Fez, and World of Goo were the others that immediately stood out. Someone also highly recommended Crayon Physics Deluxe to me. Anyway, check out all of the entries at the IGF entries page.

After some floor time, it was time for lunch. Alex and I decided to take advantage of the free lunch offered to GDC attendees and got some decent pastrami sandwiches. As we were finishing up, we met four guys from Io Interactive, the developers of the wonderful Hitman series. We all took some very funny photos together, took turns saying “hey, sorry about what happened,” and had a good laugh. I was hoping I’d get to meet some of those guys at GDC, and I suspected it would go like that, though I guess I wasn’t 100% sure if it would be smiles or knives.

From there it was on to my first session of the day, which was titled “Up Against the Wall: Game Makers Take On the Press.” Here, Newsweek’s N’Gai Croal solicited questions from game developers to ask to the panel, comprised of Andy McNamara, Brian Crecente, Stephen Totilo, Garnett Lee, and Geoff Keighley. It was interesting, with a couple of tough questions asking about why (and should) preview coverage be generally positive. Though there were a couple of moments of “well we don’t do things that way” posturing, it was a decent session. Though I have to say that I wish the questions were a little more savage. There are a lot of things about gaming criticism and journalism that feel like they’re either on the verge of or in the process of changing dramatically, and the hard questions are the ones that help shape the future.

As I expected, aggregate review score sites were brought up, though solely from the perspective of “hey, that means no one reads our reviews anymore and that sucks.” Garnett Lee made it sound like 1up’s upcoming review score revamp is partially designed to break sites like Metacritic. But 1up isn’t the first site to use a school-style letter grading system. And in my mind, an A grade pretty readily translates to a 90, a B to 80, and so on. EA and other publishers need to realize that with sites like this changing the way they rate games, year-over-year statistics (like the 77 to 72 average score drop that EA groused about in a recent conference call) are completely meaningless, because too many factors change every single year. If it’s not an existing site changing its review scale, it’s a new site coming in and deciding that a 7 is average instead of a 5, or vice versa. The aggregate score sites are designed for the consumers and they’re fine for that, even though trying to mash together a collection of subjective scores into an objective-sounding average isn’t exactly sound science.

As a writer, the worry is that no one reads the actual reviews anymore. If that’s the problem, then people should be writing more compelling reviews. Though there’s probably a way to tie aggregate scores to LTD sales figures, too many people inside the game industry are using those numbers for evil, rather than good. Just ask a developer with a track record of low-scoring licensed fare who can’t get publishers to sign on to put out their exciting new original product “because their Metacritic score is too low.” Or the developer who has a bonus clause with its publisher based on its Metacritic score, only to miss it by a tenth of a point because an outlet assigned the review to freelance reviewer who isn’t well-qualified in that particular style of game. I heard both of those stories over the course of GDC.

OK, where was I? Right, so the game press grill session could have been more fiery. After that I had to sneak into line where Alex was already waiting for the Portal Post-Mortem, which was the last session of the day and was completely packed. Kim Swift and Erik Wolpaw put on a compelling show about their game and got into the way that the gameplay influences the story, only to later have the story influence the gameplay. Since there was nothing using the room afterwards, the Q&A at the end of the talk went on way past its scheduled conclusion.

Once it was over, I turned around to realize that Greg Kasavin had been sitting behind us the whole time. We went up front to have a few words with Erik about his days as an expert reviewer of Romanian games, then Alex, Greg, and I took off to have some drinks with Brad Shoemaker, Tor Thorsen, Matt Rorie, Billy Berghammer, and a few others that stopped by. At that point, things get a little out-of-focus, and my car is still sitting over at Alex’s house. Anyone wanna give me a ride over there so I can get it?

All in all, certainly the best time I’ve ever had at GDC. It was great to get around and talk to a ton of people, and I feel like I made the right session choices, though I suppose I would have liked to have seen the Fable 2 talk that Peter Molyneux gave. It felt like a valuable show, something I can only really appreciate now that I’m not totally product-focused.

Be sure to visit Ryan’s Day 2 entry for more on the show, including a video that actually has sound this time, and a pretty crazy story that reflects the weird sort of “hey, I heard you guys have a new podcast” thing that happened to he and I a lot over the course of the show. It’s one thing to hear a few people claim that “the whole world is watching to see what you do next.” It’s another, more surreal thing to have several representatives of that world come up and effectively say “keep on talking about Gatorade Tiger because that’s a viable way to cover gaming.”

Speaking of which, I bought some. The red and grape flavors are great, and I’m about to try the citrus-golf style in a few minutes.

Alex and I decided to hold a coin toss to determine who would drive today. I won. Today is already awesome.

I will preface this by saying that tonight is the big party night for GDC and that my recollection of today’s events may be slightly… blurred. Also, I intend to write lengthier entries on the subjects of Street Fighter IV and Prototype, but in the interests of getting some sleep, I’ll probably keep it short here.

Today started out pretty slowly. That’s probably because the first thing we did after arriving in San Francisco was grab lunch, then hang around the press room. Before too long, Alex and Ryan ran off to go do something, and I caught the session on Radical’s upcoming open world game, Prototype. The duo giving the talk spent a lot of time talking about their approach to building a game for the current generation of consoles, and it was really quite interesting. But they also played the game for around 10 minutes or so, which was waaaay more interesting.

Prototype is a fast-moving game, from the looks of things. Granted, the team’s last game, Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction, wasn’t exactly a lumbering, slow-moving game. But something about the way things come together in that game looks pretty magical right now. Watching Alex Mercer haul ass through the streets on foot while getting his parkour on–a very cool use of the silly French running arts that involves your dude doing wall jumps off of box trucks and hopping over and around cars as they are exploding and flying past–was truly a sight to see. Seeing the camera swing around to reveal all sorts of destructive power giving chase drove the point home. Open world games are certainly good at doing chaos, but with all the tanks, choppers, and infected creatures running around New York City–which is still full of civilians trying to stay out of the way, mind you–Prototype seems like it’s operating on another level. It also doesn’t really look that much like Crackdown, though that’s still probably the closest comparison. Also, it has helicopter-jacking. Sold!

After that, it was over to see EALA’s Louis Castle talk about the game that EA has been developing with Steven Spielberg, Boom Blox. It was mostly focused on the process involved in bringing Boom Blox to life, and how the team essentially ignored most of EA’s “best practices” for development for the first 50% or so of development. Lots of iteration, lots of quick prototyping, stuff like that. It reminded me a bit of what Sid Meier had to say yesterday about how valued being able to quickly test out his own crazier ideas without involving a huge team of programmers. I think Boom Blox looks very cool, and hopefully all the work they put into making sure the Wii Remote responded to the on-screen action properly pays off in the end.

From there, Alex and I booked over to a nearby hotel where Capcom had a Street Fighter IV arcade cabinet set up. It was a smallish room that filled up fast, becoming hot, sweaty, and full of dudes. Ryan Mac Donald showed up and we reminded each other about how we used to spend our nights back at CES crammed into the entryway at the Acclaim party, because they always had a Mortal Kombat machine there. It was very much the same sort of deal.

The game itself feels right. That’s not to say it’s tuned and finished or anything like that, Capcom’s still got a ways to go on that front. Some of the move timing and stuff like that currently feels a bit off in spots. But it’s definitely getting there. And it mostly feels like a real Street Fighter game should. Concerns about the switch to polygonal graphics seem sort of silly at this point, because the characters are big, bold, and expressive. I also think the concerns about the character faces looking completely weird will turn out to be minor in the end, too. They look weird in screens, but I think it looked just fine in motion. Long story short, I like the way it looks. Of course, I managed to lose all of my fights, mostly because GameTap’s Jared Rea was playing a pretty mean Zangief. But he apparently didn’t actually win the tournament.

I didn’t stick around to see how that all panned out, though, because I took off with Alex and Giancarlo (who didn’t seem to be eating any potstickers today) to an EA party, where Will Wright was speaking and Ryan Davis was drinking. Both are very good at their assigned tasks. I was convinced that all the time I spent making sure my favorite Ken and Honda tactics still functioned would mean that I wouldn’t get to his Wright’s talk, but we made it just in time.

Many words have already been written about how special Will Wright is, and how much he means to the game industry. I completely agree, and I hope this talk makes its way online at some point because any description of it isn’t really going to tell you what you need to know. Weaving together things like The Sims, Spore, Gilligan’s Island, the Russian space program, James Bond, and Godzilla is no easy task. Will Wright made it look easy. The thing I took out of there was something I’ve been thinking about a lot over the past few years: the slow death of the large-scale “shared experience” and the rapid splintering of pop culture. There are very few things out there that all of us follow. I, as an example, don’t watch Lost. Or American Idol. There are plenty of people out there who I can’t talk about BioShock with, because they haven’t played it. Look at music. What the heck qualifies as “pop” music these days, and who is listening to it? I know way more people that are interested in French house music than whatever MTV is playing these days.

The day sort of wrapped back onto itself, because once Will Wright wrapped up and the open bar closed down, most of the EA party seemed to head over to a party for Prototype, which was a loud, overfilled room–exactly how it should be. I kept hearing people say the words “fire marshal” and “overcrowded.” A developer told me that he thinks that aggregate review sites like GameRankings and Metacritic are ruining the game industry. They had hot dogs there. I believe at one point I said “woooo!” Then Alex showed up and we left.

Like I said, I’ll probably have more to say about SFIV and Prototype once I get some time to think about it, but that’s the basic gist of both games. Also, I’m finding that I have faith in the game industry again. Getting out there and meeting some new folks, or seeing some people I haven’t seen in awhile has sort of made me realize that there are still people out there who are at least as passionate–probably more passionate, really–about making games as I am about playing and writing about them. It’s easy to get jaded and start thinking that the whole thing is controlled by a bunch of soulsucking suits who just want to make sure their game ships before the end of the quarter, regardless of quality. That’s not the case.

At least, not yet.

So Street Fighter IV is pretty cool. Definitely not finished yet, but it feels good.

Just got out of the Prototype session. That game looks like it’s probably going to be awesome. More later.

Decided that the Prototype session was going to be more interesting. This session seems to be attracting a slightly younger crowd than the ones I’ve been to so far. That’s probably because it’s more focused on a game that isn’t out yet.

The session title, “Open World, Open Mind: Next Generation Thinking” is pretty silly.

Three minutes until go time. I think I’ll actually take real notes during this one, in case something rad is shown.

Hello, checking in from my cell phone. I’m currently in the west hall of the Moscone Center with around an hour to kill.

The next set of sessions start at 2:30 and I can’t decide which session I should see. There’s a Mass Effect-related talk on the subject of dialogue that sounds neat, but Radical is going to be talking about the next-gen-ness of its upcoming game, Prototype, right next door.

After that, Louis Castle is going to be spitting game on Boom Blox, which I definitely want to see.

But until then, T-minus 50 minutes until there’s something meaningful to see.