When Gamespot Editorial Director Jeff Gerstmann was abruptly fired under controversial circumstances late last year, it set off a sort of domino effect. In the wake of the scandal, Gamespot staffers Ryan Davis, Brad Shoemaker and Vinny Caravella all decided to leave the venerable site to start a new project with Gerstmann: a project called Giant Bomb. A skeleton of the site has been up since March, but the project really got going Monday with an overhaul that mixes user-created, wiki-style pages with editorial reviews, videos and podcasts from the four-man ex-Gamespot crew.
We talked to Giant Bomb co-founder Ryan Davis about his thoughts on the new site and his departure from Gamespot, and game journalism in general. Some excerpts from our conversation (be sure to click the "Continue" link for the full interview):
On Gerstmann-gate and the state of game journalism "Obviously we still have lots of friends and a ton of history there [at CNET], but we're so focused on the good stuff we're doing now. ... [Gerstmann-gate] certainly helped get our names in people's mouths in certain circles. ... Before [Gerstmann-gate] even happened, I felt like people needed to be more skeptical about what they read, with the massive influx of news-blogs giving little distinction between rumor and fact.
"We're not in the business of reporting news, but as far as the review process goes, we're being very open about a review being that person's perspective. We don't use fancy math to come to our reviews, we just go with what the reviewer feels the game merits. I think when a review has to represent an entire organization's perspective on a game, that's where you can run into trouble. Also, for what it's worth, I've never considered myself a 'game journalist.' I think they exist, but I'm a reviewer and a commentator more than anything."
GamesIndustry.biz is reporting that Future's news portal Next-Gen.biz will be re-branded as the online version of the prestigious British magazine Edge on Monday, just in time for E3. There's no word on whether the change will affect the site's editorial focus, but Future spokesman Will Guyatt told GI.biz that the newly branded site will "do what Edge has done for year's in print, but online." Great news for those of us who love the magazine's thoughtful content but don't want to shell out the big bucks to import a subscription.
Next-Gen has been reprinting selected Edge magazine articles online since last May, and the magazine's previous web address currently redirects to Next-Gen's site. The move represents the re-death of the Next Generation brand, which was originally put out to pasture with the closing of the well-respected American magazine in 2001. On the plus side, when someone says "next-gen" from now on, we won't have to parse whether they mean the adjective or the web site. That was getting confusing!
As big of a kick as we get out of mods and hacks that make our favorite games more fun or accessible, we have to admit that we have a special place in our hearts for mods like the ones we're talking about today, mods that stand on the precipice of madness, laugh into the face of the torrential downpour of skepticism and dare man or God to find some purpose for their very existence.
Why would you want to play Mike Tyson's Punch-Out! with the GameCube bongo drums? You wouldn't, that's why. So why even take the time to do it instead of putting your time to more fruitful pursuits? Because it was there, of course. Because it was there.
Old hardware doesn't die ... it just gets hacked. As documented in the above video, Jeff Ledger has pieced together a clever little collection of chips and wires to bring vaguely Wii remote style interaction to the Commodore 64.
Perhaps it should be called Wii-ffle Ball, since he's taken a wiffle bat, attached an accelerometer to it, and created an interface that lets the C64 read the sensor's output as a button press. When the bat is swung fast enough, it triggers the switch and, in this case, tells Street Sports Baseball to "swing away."
It's not often (in fact it's never) that you see a game tagline line this: "Make music with a disc of 510 067 420 km² = the Earth." But that's what Oterp, a hombrew PSP app by Antonin Fourneau does.
Oterp uses the PSP GPS add-on to track your relative position on the planet and alters music in real time based on your movements. Its developer has also hard-coded numerous "collection" spots around the globe into the software. Travelling to these locations will unlock new music and effects, similar to unlocking characters via GPS in the Japanese release of Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops. Sounds pretty cool, huh? More videos of it in action can be found at the Oterp site.
Our first thought upon seeing this very cool hack was "that's awesome." Our second thought was "do you have to blow on it to make it work?"
BenHeck.com forum member "darkeru" created this inventive new take on a home made NES portable, which manages to squeeze all of the 8-bit dynamo's guts into a 4.1" by 5.5" space ... with a backlit LCD display. We just had a third thought: what happens when you connect it to this portable NES?
The inventiveness of the homebrew scene never ceases to amaze us. Take for instance the above video. What you see in it is, in fact, GoldenEye 007 for Nintendo 64 running on a Wii with the "Homebrew Channel" installed.
The poster of the video states that he was able to get the game ROM working with the emulator used by the Virtual Console version of Sin & Punishment. He gives no details on how he managed the feat, mentioning only that the game works "for the most part" with occasional slowdown and a broken borked save system.
Hopefully Nintendo will see this video and, rather than simply order it pulled offline, realize just how much people really want a proper Virtual Console release of the game.
IT security firm Sophos reports that someone has been messing around with the official US PlayStation website. "Messing around" as in fitting its SingStar and God of War pages with fake ads that tried to make (and may have succeeded in making) visitors believe their computers were riddled with viruses.
Phobos says that the bogus pop-ups prompted those who saw them to purchase what turned out to be equally bogus anti-virus software. The "scareware" has since been exterminated by Sony's IT jockeys, but we can only wonder how many hapless gamers were drawn into the hacker's insidious ... web of lies before it was too late.
If you've been waiting for someone to hold your hand through the Wii homebrew process, the folks at WiiHD have created the perfect guide for you, complete with step-by-step instructions, a downloadable starter kit with everything you need, and a video (embedded after the break) that shows you the process from installation, all the way to a trial version of Quake I. It doesn't get much easier than this.
An added security feature for those worried about account theft, Blizzard is introducing an Authenticator at this weekend's Worldwide Invitational (WWI) in Paris. The Authenticator is a piece of hardware (we're guessing USB-related) has a button you press whenever you start World of Warcraft that must be inputted to log in.
The purpose of the dongle is to prevent keyloggers and other instances of account theft. We doubt it's the big suprise, but it's certainly good news for those worried about security. More information can be found via the FAQ.
It's about time. Less that five days after Nintendo released the Twilight Hack killer known as Wii menu update 3.3, the folks at HackMii have released their previously tested workaround, giving new life to the homebrew community. We can only assume the next menu update that tries to thwart the hack will be itself thwarted in record time.
[Via Engadget; thanks to everyone who sent this in!]
Nintendo's anti-Twilight Hack hack (also known as Wii menu update 3.3) has already been, erm, hacked. Coders at the HackMii blog have figured out the code used to essentially block the homebrew community and found a way past it. While the fix hasn't been released yet, it's only a matter of time. Note to Nintendo: As with Sony's PSP, you can only do so much.
Nintendo Wii Fanboy's code monkey extraordinaire, Mike Sylvester, stuns us again. His latest Revolutionary column is a step-by-step process of turning the Wii balance board and Wii wheel into a racing simulator, with the aid of GlovePIE and a PC version of Need for Speed ProStreet. Feel free to try this at home.
Got an extra DS lying around? We're betting more than a few of you do. If you need some suggestions as to what you can do with your extra two (or four or eight) screens, our friends at DS Fanboy have you covered. From homebrew to charity to even sandwiches, check it out.
