Jeff Gerstmann is Still Alive

I’m starting to get the music-writing bug again, but this is probably the worst possible time of year for that. Things at work get crazy twice a year in very different ways. The holiday release rush runs between September and Thanksgiving. It’s hectic, but in a way it’s under your own control, because it’s mostly about making sure the games arrive and then reviewing them quickly. If you want to stay up all night, you can. If you want to take on more assignments than you should and abandon your friends and families for a few months, you absolutely can. That’s, for the most part, how I’ve handled it.

The other busy time is the run-up to E3, which we’re right in the middle of right now. It’s less predictable than the first case, because it consists of a lot of pre-show events that spring up without quite as much notice as you’d like. On top of that, you’re trying to make sure you’ve got housing secured and doing a lot of logistical planning. It hasn’t been too bad this year, so far, but then, I’ve been mostly focusing on getting reviews done for the past few weeks.

This is usually how it all works. Things get busy and my mind starts to drift a bit. I start wanting to write songs and maybe cram a couple in here and there, around whatever madness springs up. I’m not sure what direction to go in with the music stuff right now. Part of me wants to do a lot of very filthy, very middling rap songs. Part of me wants to dive right into another batch of Midnight Brown stuff. I’ve been thinking about writing a lot of longer, instrumental tracks. Like those Nike running mixes or something, just a 45-minute mixtape or something. We’ve been so careful about not letting songs linger longer than three minutes or so that the thought of letting an instrumental go for more than 16 bars is kind of exciting. It’d probably also get me up on writing better, more interesting stuff, too. If you pay attention to the Midnight Brown tracks, you’ll notice that there usually isn’t much going on. Part of that’s deliberate in that I’m sort of writing the songs as if they were going to be played by a three-piece band. Part of it is that when we get going on a song, we get impatient and want to hear the finished product as soon as possible. Almost every recording session ends with me shrugging and saying “I think that’s done.”

…

After doing a bit of work-related travel recently, I’ve been bitten by some sort of travel bug. Mostly, I want to take a cross-country road trip and just kind of spend three weeks doing whatever comes naturally. I’d like to get back to Boston at some point, and I still keep telling myself that I’ll visit Virginia one of these days, too. I used to think that travel and tourism sounded like a huge waste of time. I’m not sure what changed. Actually, I think it’s the idea of rounding up a couple of friends and taking the country on as a team that makes it sound fun. You just need to find people that are the right mix of crazy and careful. Hopefully everyone’s schedules will line up at some point this summer and we can make it happen. Actually, I should probably take charge on that and start planning it out. Otherwise summer will be over before we know it.

…

Speaking of points, I now have 104,596 of them. That’s 57,690 more than Carrie has. It’s going to take more than some 6,000-point quick fix to help her now!

Spent all my credit card reward points (and about another $900 in cash) and picked up a new video camera. It’ll probably mostly get used at work, for instances where we need a smaller camera that an idiot like myself can use. I shot a bunch of stuff at Wrestlemania with it, just to sort of break it in. It’s a Sony HDR-XR520V and so far, it seems great. Definitely better than the $130 Polaroid video cameras I bought off Woot, but those cameras have now become, like, disposable. Maybe we’ll strap them to skateboards and roll them down a hill or something.

So, uh, since the people who might still be RSS’ing this blog are probably the only people who would care… probably going to shoot some sort of “points related” video with that camera in the near future and post it over on this giantbomb.com web site. You may have heard of it. It’s about video games and hamburgers and nudity and S-rank.

I don’t know if it’ll become a regular thing, because editorially, that entire site is like one big points report sort of thing for us. We’re a group of guys, saying what we mean about video games and having fun while doing so. Recording a video designed to be “frank discussion” becomes a little redundant at that point. But let’s see how it goes. If I can get some free time at home this week, I’ll try to at least get it recorded.

OK, here’s the latest and least-greatest from the wonderful world of Points!.

Some notes:

Since the recording of this, I received my PS2 SingStar mics and have played a little SingStar PS3. It seems fine, but the SingStore won’t seem to show until I break down and create a European PS3 account.

I was hoping to elaborate on the whole "snarkfest" thing in a more coherent and meaningful way, but didn’t. I’ll address that a little more in-depth in the future, as its something that’s been on my mind lately.

I went in intending for this to be around 30 minutes long, but didn’t want to rush it, so I didn’t really look at a clock. Thus, 70+ minutes. Those of you who have said this should just be an audio podcast are probably right, though there are no headbands when you’re listening to a podcast.

Yeah, I know, it’s the 1/15 video and today is 1/17. I’m still messing around with different video hosts. Turns out Vimeo is currently having some trouble with files over 400MB, so I had to re-render it and upload it a third time, blah blah blah. But I like three things about it:

A) The quality seems better than most video hosts.

B) Viewers don’t need to install a crazy plugin to watch it (unlike Stage6).

C) Anyone who wants to see it but can’t stream for one reason or another can download the original file. That means you should be able to watch it on a PS3 or 360, if that’s your thing.

Now if it just didn’t take eight hours or more just to upload and process one (large-ass) file…

Anyway, stylin’ video is below:

That’s the first auto-generated video thumbnail I’ve been happy with in some time. It just says “ooooooooooooh.” Anyway, if you have trouble streaming it here, kick it on over to my page on Vimeo and you could download it in divx format.

This one somehow got to be over an hour, which some of you have said isn’t an issue. Let me know if you watch the whole thing, and if not, how long you think these things should be. I’m still playing around with the format and the frequency of these.

One new thing you’ll notice is that I’ve collected some of the questions that have come in and answered them in the video. I’d like to do more of this in the future. I’ll probably install some question submission form here on the site, or maybe just post an e-mail address.

[ERRATA] I mention that Gaiares was the first 8-meg Genesis game. That, of course, is incorrect. It was Strider, a game I bought for $80 and beat the same day, feeling totally ripped off in the process.

Points! with Jeff Gerstmann (12/18/2007)

This is the first installment of Points!, a semi-regular video blog where I’ll talk about the Xbox 360 achievement points I’ve earned. Actually, that’s really only the start of it. From there it tends to spiral out to cover whatever the heck else comes out of my mouth while the camera is on.

I originally wanted to post this to YouTube, but I forgot they had a lame 10-minute limit. I thought about signing up for Vimeo or Revver or something, then figured I’d try MySpace. If you have any suggestions about video uploading services, lemme know!

This one mostly sticks to the original concept of talking about achievement points, just to provide a sort of jumping-off point. But my pick for Game of the Year is in here, too. Here’s a hint: it’s multiplatform, and you shoot dudes. What can I say? Great year for shooters.

[UPDATE] After a lot of recommendations, I decided to give Stage6 a shot. A higher-quality version of this video can be found here. Since it requires a download and installation before viewing, I doubt I’ll embed Stage6 videos or use it as a default format, but maybe I’ll just upload it to multiple locations when I finish it. I’ll just need to figure out why the aspect ratio got a bit off.