Jeff Gerstmann is Still Alive

What is the proper length of time for a sober person to allow a drunk friend (actually, let’s say acquaintance) throw playful-but-still-too-hard punches at your shoulder and arm area before you snap and nail him in the gut a bit harder than you should?

My answer was probably around 45 seconds, but only because he caught my elbow.

Word up, blog!

Just wanted to answer a question or two. Yes, the Points! videos will continue. I’m not 100% sure where they’ll live, though. Maybe I’ll post them here and link to them from giantbomb.com, or maybe I’ll post them there and link to them from here. I’m not sure.

Noticed yesterday that my new Xbox 360 account name, GiantBombing, has risen to #1 on the 360voice.com charts, which is pretty cool. And here I was, worried that once I changed my name I would completely vanish off of lists like that…

Totally loving the town I’m working in now, even though it’s ultra-Marin-y in spots. That works out well and keeps me from losing my edge by giving me enough organic food stores to get angry at. On top of that, the town’s 7-11 has a wine section. Christ. Growing up around “wine country” has given me a very strong dislike for wine and wine culture. That probably also has something to do with my preference for cheap beer and fine malt liquors.

Starting work right as the weather got nice is working out perfect, as it’s a bit of a walk from where I park my car to the office. It’s been great.

Looks like my recently-purchased 750GB SATA drive is actually having issues, and that’s what’s been causing all my blue screens in Vista. I had been thinking it was an iTunes-related problem, because iTunes still doesn’t behave properly in Vista, but I’m attempting to copy my D drive (150GB of MP3s, to be specific) off to a USB drive and it’s died on me a couple of times now. Guess I’ll have to copy the files off in smaller chunks. It’s not marking any sectors as bad on a surface scan, so I’m not really sure what to do. Guess I’ll get everything off of it and try to RMA it.

Totally digging the AirPort Extreme I picked up. You can bypass its router functionality and let your ISP assign IPs to all of your devices. I have a range of static IPs from my ISP, so this is absolutely perfect for me. No more routing, no more hassles with forwarding port 133 to my desktop machine, none of that. Smooth sailing, at least until I get one or two more devices on my network and completely run out of IPs, anyway.

I’m installing Vista SP1 right now, and it’s about to reboot to finish up, so I should probably stop here. Keep reading giantbomb.com, we’re just getting started.

Looks like this is the first week of 2008 that matters for new game releases. Look at these winners:

Advance Wars: Days of Ruin (DS) - Dude, more Advance Wars. Duh. This one’s got online play, which is great, but that just makes me painfully aware that my DS doesn’t work with my wireless router and the last time I used one of those Nintendo-made dongles for DS Wi-Fi access, it butchered my PC’s network settings.

No More Heroes (Wii) - More crazy from the man that brought you Killer7, though apparently this game plays well on top of its crazy. You’ll probably want to read a review or two before jumping into this one, it’s probably not for everyone.

Burnout Paradise (360, PS3) - My feelings on this subject have already been well-documented. I’ll definitely get the 360 version, but since I’ve been meaning to buy a PS3 camera, too, I might end up going nuts and buying both versions.

There are a few other games out this week, too, but those are the big three that I’ll be all up ons.

Nintendo is also shipping something called Endless Ocean for the Wii. I’m not really sure what to make of it, other than to say that part of the features list makes it sound like an underwater Pokemon Snap, but with more underwater safari and less track. And, granted, less Pokemon, which is a huge turn off.

The Audiosurf beta weekend has come to an end. After sinking several hours into it, I know it’s something I’ll certainly purchase when it becomes available next month. The beta feels like it’s missing a few things, like maybe a few sound effects here and there to accompany your ship’s special moves (maybe some kind of electric hum when you use Ninja Mono’s widen ability, for example), but the beta’s extremely playable. Also, sometime on Saturday I started getting e-mails like these:

Audiosurf scoreboard alert - Dethroned!

You used to have the worldwide best score for: deadly electric by midnight brown

Now the Audiosurf player ‘Twitch*’ has beaten you. Get back in the game and reclaim the top spot!

View High Scores for deadly electric by midnight brown

That’s going to be the thing that makes Audiosurf so addicting. Hopefully the sanctity of the leaderboard can remain intact–with players providing their own music, some checks need to be in place to make sure people aren’t renaming longer, more score-friendly songs to cheat their way to the top.

I’m writing from the couch, where I’m laying down. With my phone. In the dark. In case it wasn’t all over the national news, there were some really heavy rain storms around the bay area. My power went out around 3PM or so and has been out ever since.

A couple friends of mine are playing Magic the Gathering by flashlight in the other room. I try to keep this a Magic-free home, because Magic is for jerks, but one’s flying home tomorrow.

My roommate Brendan and I are talking about making a break for it, leaving these guys here, and going to Taco Bell, because apparently only the east side of town is broken.

Or, to shorten this entry to two words: I’m bored.

[UPDATE] After finally giving up on trying to do anything exciting and going to sleep around 4:30AM, the power finally came on just before 5, waking everyone back up just long enough to turn off all the lights that were suddenly on and turn on the heat to stop the freezing. As I expected, I managed to pick up a cold during all this. So I’m pretty pumped about that.

While I’m not really into the way Matt Casamassina’s personal life has been dredged up onto the Internet today, it gets back to a lot of the issues of disclosure I mentioned when e-mailing back and forth with MTV’s Stephen Totilo. This episode gives you a tiny taste of what happens when people discover something that probably should have been made public in a more prominent way, on the organization’s terms, not on a media watchdog site.

By not having a satisfactory disclosure policy in place, Casamassina’s employers failed to protect him and have done his readers a disservice. But I don’t mean to single out IGN here, that’s really not the point. This could probably happen anywhere. As far as I know, none of the major gaming publications have an official, publicly-stated policy on disclosures regarding potential conflicts of interest.

“Potential” is the key word there. No one with any sense is claiming that Casamassina’s work is actually tainted. It’s easy to see that he’s a passionate guy that appears to really enjoy his work and takes great care when it comes to covering games. Plus, he and I seemed to share the same taste in sunglasses, if I remember correctly. Unfortunately for all involved, the appearance of impropriety is indistinguishable from actual impropriety when it comes to stuff like this.

So, dear reader, I bring it to you. Ultimately, it’s you who gets to speak out when you feel like you’re not getting the whole story. What would you do in this case? What do you want to know about the people and companies that bring you your game news? Where would you draw the line?

So, hello and welcome, I’m Jeff Gerstmann, this is my personal blog at jeffgerstmann.net. Because jeffgerstmann.com was taken… which is completely insane. Anyway, I’m mainly starting this site up to give people a centralized place to hear directly from me, as all these bits and pieces that have gotten out to game news sites via interviews and the blog on my MySpace account aren’t really the best way to communicate. So if you’re interested in what I plan to do from here, this is the place. I’ll also be sharing my thoughts on games and the business that surrounds them, perhaps with an occasional video or two.

To start with the #1 question that I’ve been getting asked, I’m not entirely sure what I’m going to do next just yet, and even if I was, I probably wouldn’t be ready to talk about it at the moment. I’ve spoken with a few interested parties and there are a lot of people out there with some cool-sounding ideas. I have a lot of ideas of my own, and I’ve been jotting them down as they come to me. But I’m not exactly rushing into anything, either. Just like girlfriends, getting a job while I’m on the rebound probably isn’t the greatest idea in the world, and I want to make sure I’ve weighed my options out carefully before acting.

I recently made an appearance on Tekzilla, a weekly online tech show put on by the good people over at Revision3. I had fun speaking with Neha Tiwari about some decidedly ghetto game-like peripherals, as well as the real stuff, like Nintendo’s Zapper and the Rock Band equipment. Speaking of which, my Rock Band guitar busted after a couple days of intense use. It no longer strums down, only up, making it a great bass controller, but an awful guitar controller. Sounds like the replacement process that EA is running has been pretty smooth for most people, but it’s still unfortunate that such an amazing game has been brought down a notch by faulty hardware.

But we can talk more about individual games later. For now, I just wanted to say thanks to everyone that’s written, thanks for all the touching tributes (both from my friends at GameSpot who I miss very much and from people who enjoyed what I did there), and that you probably haven’t seen the last of me.