The dust is finally settled on Jeff Gerstmann and his cohorts who abandoned Gamespot after his departure.  Their new endeavor appears to be GiantBomb.com which will yet another Game News and Reviews site.

I’m really happy to see Gerstmann and crew back and can’t wait to see their new site evolve.

Linux has always been a solid platform for emulators, but not so hot for original games. With cheap, durable
laptops in the hands of many younger gamers, it seems like a good market for games. While the OLPC is targeted
in developing nations, some of them will end up in the hands of kids with deep pockets, and the Eee PC seem like
the perfect product for K-12 and college age students with it’s portability.

The downside for me as a parent is that there isn’t any educational titles available, so while I’m in the market for a durable laptop for my two younger kids, it’s hard to consider the current generation of linux laptops. My kids love to play games like Dora The Explorer on our current old laptop, so it’s a hard sell to get them to make the switch until publishers take notice and start releasing Linux titles.

A big question for publishers is piracy; can you create a Linux title that people will pay for as opposed to torrent? I personally think so, but I think it’s a challenge that many publishers won’t pursue.

• PS3 will finally get some traction this year after a good spring and summer. There are number of good titles that slipped into Spring and if all goes well for Sony, they’ll have more buzz in their favor over Microsoft in the console wars.
• Wii might overtake Microsoft and Sony in console sales (if they haven’t already), but they’ll lose the war big time on software sales especially for third party games. I think many Wii owners will be happy making it a Wii Sports player, and many more will simply have Nintendo player.
• By next winter we’ll here about a Wii HD in the works which will be backward compatible with the Wii but be a bit more powerful to support HDTVs.
• Grand Theft Auto 4 sales will be below predictions.
• A new PSP will be announced (but not released) that will support PS2 titles via download and have two analog sticks.

This is all complete speculation on my part and very likely dead wrong. It’s fun to speculate though!

It will be interesting to see how the industry evolves as we move forward. Review scores, in my view, can make me interested in a game, but it never has been a replacement for reading the reviews of people I trust. As podcasts have become more prevalent, I find my own buying decisions influenced more and more through online personalities I trust as opposed to publications and websites, and I wonder if we’ll see more super-reviewers that pop up in the future that have their own brand as opposed to the company they work for.

I’m old enough to remember when Siskel and Ebert started their movie review show on PBS and the impact it had on how I decided what movies to watch. Before then, I’d look at the advertisements in the local paper and see what reviewers quoted in the ad copy, but as I became more acquainted with their show and they became more personal to me, I started using the “two thumbs up” as a gold seal of approval for a show. It didn’t matter that Ebert worked for a Chicago paper; I could care less about his day job.

If anything, I think the Gerstmann firing became a bigger deal by the fact that there were so many video reviews he had done, as well as regular podcasts in which he took part. The rich media of audio and video made him more of a recognizable personality and so got the axe, a lot of gamers reacted very personally to it.

It will be interesting to see how things shake out. At the end of the day, there is no mistaking a bad game as a good one and games cost a lot of money to the average person, so no matter how much the system is gamed, people will find a new system to replace the old one if it doesn’t work out.

(Via GFWJeff’s Blog at 1Up.com)

The first something seemed amiss was on Tuesday evening when I listened to Gamespot’s HotSpot Podcast which is always on my weekly rotation of podcasts. What seemed odd was the missing voice of Jeff Gerstmann who is a regular voice on the show, and with no one mentioning his absense, it seemed like something was up. A few days later, the Internet was buzzing with rumors of Jeff being fired and walked out of the office over his review of Kane and Lynch, a mediocre first person shooter that got a 6.0 from Gerstmann (NOTE: I have not played the game). His video review was removed from the site (see the youtube version here). Since then, hell has broken.

It’s hard to determine rumor from fact but there are a few things about which I feel strongly.

1. I’m really sad to see Gerstmann go. I’ve always enjoyed his reviews and his regular appearance on the Gamespot podcast.
2. It’s a complete PR disaster for Gamespot.com during the busy season for gamers and game buyers. Cooler heads would have waited until after Christmas to fire a person of Gerstmann’s tenure and stature, but given the rumors, it seems pretty clear that the break up did not go smoothly and there was no graceful transition out
3. While the Internet has a short attention span, it also hard to change a meme once it’s been cast and I think gamespot will sadly become one of those sites people associate with negative images. It’s hard to shake a negative image once it’s been cast.
4. If someone higher up the food chain doesn’t get fired over this, there really is something wrong with CNET, Gamespot.com’s parent company. While the truth may lie somewhere in the middle and perhaps Gerstmann was warned over and over again over some internal policy, there is no doubt that it was mishandled and cost Gamespot far more money then any kind of severance package that would have smoothed things over. I’d say by late January of next year, we’ll see some new manager to replace the guy who handled this as declining page views start being recorded.

It will be interesting to see how it all works out over the coming months. If I were a competing site, I’d be hiring Gerstmann in a heartbeat.

The first copy I bought on a whim when the game originally came out, having loved the original Half Life to death. My PC wasn’t really up to the task at that point, and neither was I with all the work and family matters I need to attend to, so it sat in my office collecting dust. When I did find the time to start gaming again, I bought an my Xbox 360 and decided that I should really get the Half Life 2 XBox version and finally give it a go, but soon heard rumblings that Valve was going to create a new version so I decided to wait for a native 360 version. That version, the Orange Box, finally came out, and while it took years to start playing, I was hooked and couldn’t stop playing it once the wrapper came off the box.

Let me get my only gripe with the series out of the way right now because it’s just a minor thing but permeates all the products included in the bundle: the loading screens. The loading screens smacks of old technology with the way they freeze the game up for 5-10 seconds at a time with no warning. Even in Episode 2, you’ll be walking through a tunnel and the game will freeze for a moment until the a loading screen pops up for 5-10 seconds to load the next level. It’s a forgivable sin, but I hope they fix it for Episode 3 and beyond.

By not playing Half Life 2 until now, I got a truly great gaming experience from start to finish. Half Life 2, which starts out slow with it’s long water level, is an awesome game and holds up well despite the fact that it’s a couple of years old. Episode 1 extends that goodness and gives you more of the same. Episode 2 seems to have taken all the good bits from the original and Episode 1, and combined them to make a roller coaster ride of goodness. Portal I blogged about before, which is also stellar. At the end of the day, it was a marathon gaming experience but well worth the time it took and I never got tired of the experience.

At this point, I can’t wait for Episode 3 and I hope Valve does a similar experience next time bundling potentially Episode 3, Portal 2 (the two stories could potentially connect at some point), and a remake of Half Life 1 to make the graphics HD quality. That would be a truly awesome deal.

If you’re keeping track at home, that’s three copies. The fourth was another Orange Box for the PC which I’m going to use the Team Fortress 2 code and give the rest to my brother in law. 4 copies seems like a lot, but it seems like a great deal to me.

I bought my PSP on launch day and have always been a big fan of it.  I think it’s got some good games that I’ve enjoyed a lot, and given it’s screen size and quality, it does a great job as a video player.  My only gripe is the lack of a second analog stick which would have opened the door for some quality PS2 ports, and at this point, I’ve given up trying to play first person shooters on the platform.   Many people don’t like the idea of playing FPS’s on a handheld, but I’d play them all the time on a handheld if the controls were there.

It’s an under-rated handheld if you ask me, and while I prefer my DS for some things like puzzle style games, I prefer the PSP for it’s more powerful graphics and it’s ability to do other things besides gaming.

The idea is pretty simple. Each puzzle is a simple grid where each square can be turned on or off that you decipher based on a simple rule set. At the end of the puzzle, if you look hard enough, it forms a picture. There is a time limit to each game of 60 minutes but if you guess wrong, you’ll get penalyzed minutes which can be annoying if, like me, you don’t have full control of your stylus and accidently hit a square you weren’t intending.

The rules are simply a set of numbers for each row and column representing runs of dots. For instance, the grid size starts out 10 x10 and one row might have 7,2 next to it which means there will be 7 squares in a row on and 2 squares in a row on. With that knowledge, you would draw the first seven squares on, the next off, and then the last two on (i.e. 10 total squares). Just like Sudoku, you’ll need to be cognizant of the vertical and horizontal axis of each square to fully determine which run of dots goes where.

The game takes 5 minutes to learn with a decent tutorial to start you off (albeit I couldn’t figure out how to skip it and at points, it becomes a bit pendantic) and then you are off and running. The puzzles get harder and harder over time, as you’d expect, with the clues more difficult to figure out and the grid sizes getting bigger.

If you have plenty of time to waste, I can’t recommend this game enough.