Last week, I told anyone who asked when our first round of coverage was going to be up that “It’ll be Wednesday at the earliest. I plan on sleeping from Saturday until Tuesday.”
I’ll bet they thought I was only kidding!
I don’t know how the hell people can do an interview at a convention at 3 o’clock in the afternoon, and then manage to have it edited and posted on their sites by 4:30 the same day. I can only assume that they have peons behind the scenes doing the grunt work for them, and the hardest part of their job ends after they stick a microphone in somebody’s face for fifteen minutes.
Unfortunately for me, I haven’t got any peons. I’m the one-man band.
For of all my insomnia-induced Red Bull swilling, and the week-long grind of running back and forth from one hotel to another trying to make my next appointment on time, the hardest part of my job is yet to come: Now I actually have to sit down and start writing all this stuff.
I’ve spent the past few days since returning home from San Francisco in a sleep-deprived fog. I crawled out of bed this morning and regained lucidity just long enough to discover that somehow, over the course of five days, I had managed to record nearly twenty hours of audio and take fifteen hundred photos.
I got some flak last year from other sites over having the audacity to post interviews I did at GDC a month after the fact (of course, snide remarks didn’t stop them from linking to said interviews anyway), and I can anticipate a repeat performance this time around.
But, the nice thing about covering an industry that works on development cycles approaching half a decade is that unless someone gives me some real scorchingly hot exclusive material (which no one ever does), what possible difference does it make whether I post an interview on the same day it was done or a week after the fact?
Those are my thoughts on the subject, at least. I suppose I could always just be lazy.
Anyway, on with the week in review.
“Seen anything interesting at the show?” is your standard-issue boilerplate conversation starter at conventions. I’m as jaded as they come, so normally I have to lie and mumble something about “Game X looks pretty good,” but not this year. This year I was actually genuinely impressed.
From the moment it was announced, OnLive was undoubtedly the talk of the show. Everyone I met had some very choice words about it, the most frequently used of which was “bullshit.”
I’m taking a more wait and see approach. It’s certainly an intriguing concept. If they can get it to work the way they say it will, it’s going to be huge. But, until I’ve actually got it in my hands and see it working with my own two eyes, I’m not going to get too worked up about it, one way or another.
The question I was having a real hard time answering, though, was “What are you looking forward to in terms of MMOs?”
Now, the kneejerk reaction to such a question is of course, “Well, [whatever the person who asked you's company is working on] looks great!” but I never gave it. Instead I tried to be as noncommittal as I could, because honestly, I haven’t seen enough of any upcoming MMO titles to have an informed opinion about them.
This also presents a problem for me in terms of producing content. I’m not much of a preview writer kind of guy–I still have a bad taste in my mouth from the WAR impressions piece–particularly not when my schedule didn’t permit me to get much, if any at all, hands-on time with the games I was covering this year. So, my reportage out of GDC is going to primarily consist of interviews… and there’s no shortage of them.
Interviews arranged at GDC but not yet completed:
And lastly, in a bit of a change of pace for me, I’ll be doing my first hardware review, of the Xeno networking card from Bigfoot Networks. I was somewhat dubious that you’d be able to see any performance increases in the non-twitch world of MMO gaming–the last thing I wanted to do was accept a review unit and then have to flatly say “It didn’t do jack for me.”
But, a conversation on the show floor put those concerns to rest. We shall see.
For now, I feel tired just typing out the names of the articles–and I still have to go transcribe them! Anyone want to be my peon? The pay isn’t great (zero), but you get to set your own hours and work from home!
<crickets>
……No?
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