Jeff Gerstmann is Still Alive

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.