|
|
Monday, May 23, 2005
It's a post-Reggie world, people. | I was watching some of GameSpot Live's E3 coverage today and most of it was pretty impressive. The only thing I really didn't like were the random booth tours. Somehow those things annoy me; I'm more interested in the clean and specific presentations of games. I'm really not interested to hear some random show-goer's opinion.
One thing that stood out in my mind was the interview with Reggie Fils-Aime. Apparently it was supposed to be a roundtable discussion, with Sony and Microsoft PR people. But they chickened out at the last minute, leaving Reggie all by himself. I can understand why, too; Reggie does his job well. Although he's obviously a PR person, he doesn't have that annoying "PR gloss" that you see in a lot of company reps. He even randomly suggested that they get questions from passers-by. For a highly-organized PR person, you can imagine that this would be a little intimidating; you never know what people will throw at you. Certainly, he's likely to face tougher questions from random show-goers than GameSpot itself (and he did). But he handled them all extremely well.
By comparison, some of the PR people from Microsoft and EA are nauseating. The woman who was talking about The Sims 2 for handhelds had this highly-annoying pleasantness about her. You could have flung a brick and her and she'd say "You know what, that's a really fun game and I think it was a totally great idea, but it'd be really sweet if we could focus on talking about The Sims 2 for handhelds! Yeah, right on!" Ew. These people don't even seem to try to pretend not to be fake, lol.
I also felt that Aonuma was impressive. He seems like a satisfying person to interview, because he gives the interviewer what they want without going into too much detail. It comes across as though he's saying quite a lot and he provides a lot of interesting reflection on the question, yet he is still extremely careful about providing too much detail. Perhaps I might normally find that annoying, but I actually find it refreshing. Sure, we may not get all the information we want, but at least we get some really interesting developer insight. I mean, it's better than a "I really can't talk about that right now, sorry" type comment.
Anyway, I took a photo of my DS and Electroplankton earlier for you to look at. It's a pretty awful picture, but hey, it's what you do with a borrowed camera that is low on batteries.
It seems increasingly likely that Electroplankton will hit western shores. If so, here's hoping that they don't change the name, or add different and "more hip" instruments. This game has so much charm. The fact that it's so typically Japanese (in the quirky and weird sense) makes it very endearing. And the instrument samples are really suitable for all ages. Definitely something all of you should purchase, if it comes to your shores.
Speaking of E3, you can look forward to very in-depth coverage from the folks over at N-Sider. Those of you who follow our site know that we always provide the most detailed coverage on Nintendo's demos. This year will be no different. You may remember that with The Wind Waker, we even provided extensive diagrams and information about the controller mapping and stuff. You can expect similar stuff for Twilight Princess this year and more, to boot. I believe we have a few juicy developer interviews to publish as well, so you can look forward to that.
I've been assigned to Electroplankton and since I actually own the title, I'm assuming that my piece will probably go up first. The other E3-related stuff will follow. Usually we get our in-depth game-specific stuff out in June. It definitely comes out later than all the other sites, but as you know, the quality is unrivalled.
I'm thinking I should post more gaming-related things here in future. I have a lot of great discussions about games with some of you and there never seems to be a shortage of topics to cover.
Oh, before I go...I have a bit of a technical question. If I have a microphone plugged into the mic socket on my PC and I have headphones in the speaker socket, is it possible to listen to the recording I'm making?
I have discovered that I can record sound samples directly from the Nintendo DS (which will be really useful for Electroplankton). However, while I record I can't listen to the samples I'm making. This makes it very random and difficult to know what's going on. So if anyone knows how I can record and listen at the same time, that'd be very helpful.
|
Comments
(9)
« Home |
|
