Tony_M
4081
Download the Jostiq podcast labelled “Joystiq Podtacular - E3 2011 Day 0” and skip to 21:30 to hear their impersonation of a board meeting with Peter Molyneux. Classic.
Tony
Just started on this, thanks! I miss the pseudo-16 bit theme from Active Time Babble, but one episode in, so far so good.
Unprofessional of him to keep on it long past the point that he was going to communicate anything new to anybody, and he wasn’t exactly going the extra mile to understand where Microsoft was coming from with all these regulations. As with most of his exchanges with other people, the whole episode left me more sympathetic to Microsoft than to him.
Frankly, it wasn’t the smartest move in the universe for the GB guys to put him in a room with a bunch of dudes from Microsoft. This is not entirely surprising behavior from either of them. Microsoft doesn’t make rules about the marketplace just to make rules, because that would be dumb as hell - there’s going to be a reason behind all of them, and it’s probably going to be a boring one (i.e. consumers wigged the fuck out when a game without the proper allotment of points in it happened, or people think your dumbass arty non-interactive introduction makes lots and lots of dudes think that their machine is broken because when they push the buttons that are supposed to do stuff nothing happens). A game designer who’s made his entire career out of doing weird shit (you know, in that one game that he made) and generally acts like an auteur is interested in complaining about how much of a hassle it is to deal with the realities of a marketplace that recognizes how stupid consumers actually are. It would have been better to have them on different nights from one another. If Blow really wants to wrestle with the Microsoft guys, the proper venue is GDC, probably with more developers and publishers in the room to chime in; not an after hours drinking adventure.
At least we haven’t gotten more sloshed Leigh Alexander. Yet. I haven’t listened to the four hours and change lump I pulled yesterday.
Does GiantBomb ever post the video of their live streams up on the site? I’d love to be watching these, but some of us have to be at work at 9AM :(
They are all archived on JustinTV.
Oh. Well isn’t that convenient.
Thanks :)
Jazar
4087
I think it was a much worse move putting Microsoft guys in the room when they’re going to discuss E3 impressions. It really limits what you want to say when representatives are right there defending every point with PR talk. Without Blow at least being brutally honest it would’ve been a complete waste of time.
Well yeah, there is that. I thought the best “impressions” were offered after all of the people with something to show were shuffled off in the third hour. Might have been better not to pull in the Microsoft guys at all, or to do it in a different context than, “So - what do you think of the stuff at E3?”
Giantbomb’s E3 podcasts are always like that. They are slumming with the industry while getting drunk. Sometimes some interesting things come out but most of the time it is just for fun.
Quaro
4090
I’m only halfway through, but Day 1 of Giant Bomb E3 is great. Love the Naughty Dog / Double Fine / Jaffe conversations about the design process in their studios. Naughty Dog and Double Fine sound like awesome places to work.
I think that was the perfect venue to let gamers understand why creativity and innovation(I mean real innovation, not marketing speak that beats the word into the ground until it means nothing) is being stifled on XBox. Each time Blow brought something up, it was about something different.
And if dumbass consumers are returning games because opening cutscenes are a bit long and they don’t have the patience to wait them out(a fact which I have a hard time believing/understanding), then shame on Microsoft for being loyal to them instead of the rest of us who gladly sacrifice a little bit of consumerability for creativity.
I will absolutely drop a game if its opening hours are a slog through cut scenes and long periods of limited actual game play. Not because I don’t have “patience”, but because that’s not what I want from games, and any game that decides it wants me to watch it rather than play it for the first few hours is probably not going to engage me afterward. I’ve got limited time to play games, and I chose to spend that time playing. I’ve got Netflix for watching cut scenes.
Which, of course, is why you are not the head of a successful multinational corporation. Microsoft doesn’t get the privilege of telling people who call the help desk to piss up a rope when they think their machine is broken, no matter how stupid they are, because the first time you do that you get written up in one publication or another as being monumentally consumer unfriendly. Because you are. Microsoft puts in these various ridiculous release requirements in order to reduce the overall cost to operate their storefront and to make the experience more pleasant on the whole for everybody, and the people who get into that system benefit from those efforts. And they’re STILL not adequate, if reports I’ve heard of Daggerdale are any indication, but that’s the nature of things. During their next quality assessment or whatever it is they have for the rules, I’m sure that somebody higher on the arcade approval ladder will have a new rule or three for catching the stuff that supposedly didn’t work with that title, so that they don’t have the same experience in the future.
You don’t have enough money in your bank account to make up for the losses incurred by driving off the people you don’t want to service, even if you wanted to spend it all here. If the procedures pay for themselves in the reductions they present in consumer problems, everybody benefits (even you, because it makes the Arcade a more lucrative place to put a game), and if they don’t, then competing services will quickly come up with a more efficient way to implement quality controls that are just as effective and much less cumbersome. If Blow thinks that the XBLA standards are too much of a pain in the ass, I would encourage him to develop for the platform he likes better, but he’s dramatically under-thinking the whole situation if he believes that the hassles he has to go through to get into XBLA aren’t put there for reasonable purposes.
She didn’t show last night either. Tonight’s her last chance for a threepeat.
Must’ve read this thread because Jason rather pointedly, and repeatedly identified himself on the second Jumping the Shark E3 episode. Made me feel rather sheepish. Bummed we have to wait for Sunday for the third one.
I just think that the “Bombcast” at the “Bomb Haus” is not the best place for a very inside baseball discussion on TCRs. I will give Jonathan Blow props for at least sounding sane and not drunk, unlike other past e3 bombcast participants have been.
JM1
4096
Just wanted to say a big thank you to the Jumping The Shark guys and gal for keeping sane during the worst train delay I’ve ever experienced. It was a 20 minute journey… I got through both E3 podcasts before my battery died. I still had 3 more hours of torture to go :(
Great episodes. Very amusing and genuinely informative.
I hear what you’re saying, Brian. I still think MS is not looking at the long term picture because as their process does make it more consumable, they may be eroding the player base that is clever enough to realize that games which have long, opening cutscenes are not defective.
You can’t make everybody happy and MS has decided that the former is their priority. In my opinion, when I look at the stable of XBLA games, I find them far more cookie cutter than original.
That something like Minecraft is being ported to Xbox is very surprising in itself. And if it had to get its start on Xbox, I go all in to say that it would’ve never gotten beyond the pitch.
Adree
4098
I disagree, I’m finding all the inside baseball stuff fucking fascinating. The Day One podcast was just great, I’d pay money every month to get a weekly podcast ala the initial version of the Adam Carolla podcast where you’d get a nice meaty hourlong+ discussion by game industry people.
Yeah. I may be biased by being in the industry, but it’s not like there’s a whole lot of places where that kind of discussion EVER happens (Here, that other forum, drunk at GDC). Honestly Jonathan blow complaining about a thing that other people dislike but don’t talk about publicly is good for games as a whole. I have no way of evaluating the entertainment value of it to an outsider though.
The discussion between Jonathan Blow and the MS guys was my favorite part of the podcast. It didn’t feel like an inquisition and the MS guys handled it all pretty well.
I think Blow had some good points. “We found this a pain” isn’t a great excuse from the MS guys, but it isn’t a terrible one either. These large systems of rules can get weighty and unwieldy very quickly. It makes me wonder if something like the starting interface from Flower would have been approved by MS.
