Giant Bombcast E3 2012 Day Three

Muhahahhaaaaaaa! Me firrrrrrst!

Time Belt!

Hell yeah. The only one I missed and it's got a stacked lineup.

Say it with me now:

"AS I LIVE AND BREATH!"

I made a highlight of the moment Drew threw a cup at Jeff's head:

http://www.twitch.tv/giantbomb/b/320786168

FRANKIE! Shit, all those Halo 4 devs.

I met that guy from Hello Games at the first PAX East. Super nice and seemed genuinely excited to be making games. Glad Giant Bomb got behind Joe Danger.

@DonkeyKong said:

I made a highlight of the moment Drew threw a cup at Jeff's head:

http://www.twitch.tv/giantbomb/b/320786168

Brilliant!

I don't think the audio version could possibly convey the awesomeness of what Drew Scanlon did near the end...

Bravo, Drew.

OOOOOHHH YEAH!!

@AssInAss said:

@DonkeyKong said:

I made a highlight of the moment Drew threw a cup at Jeff's head:

http://www.twitch.tv/giantbomb/b/320786168

Brilliant!

Oh my god I cannot belive I missed that!

Pope's impression of Justin wins E3.

@DonkeyKong said:

I made a highlight of the moment Drew threw a cup at Jeff's head:

http://www.twitch.tv/giantbomb/b/320786168

HEY MALKOVICH, THINK FAST!

more bombcast more more more more !!!

Why did Drew hit Jeff in the head again?

OhMerGherd!

The guest lineups for all these E3 Bombcast this year were amazing.

There's some great sound capture for "breathing heavily into mic" for a good while in this.

DOESN'T MATTER, still awesome.

Oh! So THAT''S what a hot steaming cup of STFU looks like!

@Phatmac: Jeff was making terrible pun about Wonderbook. "I wonder where all the people went". Drew followed up by throwing an empty water bottle at Jeff.

Christ, another 3+ hours? How am I supposed to get any work done?

TIME BELT

@AngelN7 said:

@AssInAss said:

@DonkeyKong said:

I made a highlight of the moment Drew threw a cup at Jeff's head:

http://www.twitch.tv/giantbomb/b/320786168

Brilliant!

Oh my god I cannot belive I missed that!

And that was E3.

"I WONDER where all the people went? Huh?"

DOINK

Big thanks to the GB guys for all this free entertainment. And I used to think Ryan was a real microphone nazi ("get on that mic!!!!"), but man, people are really scared to speak into a mic.

The list of Patrick mispronunciations continues to grow unabated: "dossy-airs"

This podcast is absolutely fucking incredible. The whole Dance Central talk made me lose 30% of moisture in my body through various means.

I laughed so hard at Pope's "impression" that I almost puked. Seriously.

Greg Miller...WHY??? So many people in the games industry and you bring in Greg Miller.

@kishinfoulux said:

Greg Miller...WHY??? So many people in the games industry and you bring in Greg Miller.

Agreed. I read that and immediately skipped ahead.

These E3 casts seem to get better year after year.

Do yourself a favor and skip the first set of guests.The 38 Studio guys were so boring, but the people who came in after they left were the best.

man, those 343 guys seem totally nice, but also sound incredibly boring. I guess David Ellis lost all his fire once he lost his weight.

year of the time bow

You had me at John Drake (despite being mentioned almost dead last)

I love the return of the Sherlock Holmes E3 stories

I found the everybody can write too few can program comment really funny. Everybody thinks they can write. Story and dialogue is the worst thing about games. Mostly the worst thing about movies and television too. Shit even books suck now.

@Liquidus: Greg has a lot of energy but I think he's a pretty awesome guy actually.

Steve Winwood is the best of mid 80's easy listening and I won't cotton to any disparagement on the man!

@GERALTITUDE said:

I found the everybody can write too few can program comment really funny. Everybody thinks they can write. Story and dialogue is the worst thing about games. Mostly the worst thing about movies and television too. Shit even books suck now.

As a writer, who spends a lot of time with writer peers, and who witnesses a lot of writing from non-writers, I agree completely. Writing isn't easy. It involves a constant tearing down, building up, reworking, re-writing, thinking, researching, etc. It takes a lot of work to write. There's a reason so few people come into writing books and succeed with the first book the try at. And when I say succeed, I mean even finishing a manuscript.

I fucking hate a lot of the writing in games. From shitty dialogue (something I like to focus on, to rather positive effect on those who read my stuff), to characters that do stupid things that no one with half a brain would ever do, to just cheesy, lame, uninteresting stories.

Anyone can spend a few weeks learning to program at a basic level. The only difference between that and writing is that everyone is generally required to learn to write at school. And even after years of that, most can't write for shit. Hell, I've been writing since I was about 8 years old and I'm still not amazing.

The problem with good writing is it isn't a technical thing. It requires some really particular things from the writer, and there are plenty of people out there that just couldn't get past a technical proficiency.

Programming is a bit different. It's not much easier to become, say, the new John Carmack as a programmer than the new Tolkien as a writer, but it's much easier to program a good game than to write a good book just because programming just bottoms out at a purely technical level a bit further up than writing, in my opinion. Ultimately, a great writer and a great programmer are both about as likely to come about as the other. But for the every-man, I'd say programming is easier to get past the basic technical level than writing.

I'm not saying programming is easy, because it's not. Especially at the more complex level. But it is inherently more technical and as a result, the barrier to entry to higher tiers is a bit further along the path.

Bring on the hate.

@MordeaniisChaos: Well, they didn't say write WELL, which I think was the unstated point, but maybe not.

Re: Sim City griefing...I was surprised over the course of these discussions the obvious solution to that wasn't brought up or asked about.

Someone (or even everyone) can TRY and make a shitty neighboring city to grief you, but I'd think the designers could easily circumvent it by making citizens a relatively limited regional resource (immigration from the larger world or birth rates being indirectly under player control). I mean if Old Detroit, Mega City One, and Gotham are the neighboring cities, why not move to Metropolis?

@MordeaniisChaos said:

@GERALTITUDE said:

I found the everybody can write too few can program comment really funny. Everybody thinks they can write. Story and dialogue is the worst thing about games. Mostly the worst thing about movies and television too. Shit even books suck now.

As a writer, who spends a lot of time with writer peers, and who witnesses a lot of writing from non-writers, I agree completely. Writing isn't easy. It involves a constant tearing down, building up, reworking, re-writing, thinking, researching, etc. It takes a lot of work to write. There's a reason so few people come into writing books and succeed with the first book the try at. And when I say succeed, I mean even finishing a manuscript.

I fucking hate a lot of the writing in games. From shitty dialogue (something I like to focus on, to rather positive effect on those who read my stuff), to characters that do stupid things that no one with half a brain would ever do, to just cheesy, lame, uninteresting stories.

Anyone can spend a few weeks learning to program at a basic level. The only difference between that and writing is that everyone is generally required to learn to write at school. And even after years of that, most can't write for shit. Hell, I've been writing since I was about 8 years old and I'm still not amazing.

The problem with good writing is it isn't a technical thing. It requires some really particular things from the writer, and there are plenty of people out there that just couldn't get past a technical proficiency.

Programming is a bit different. It's not much easier to become, say, the new John Carmack as a programmer than the new Tolkien as a writer, but it's much easier to program a good game than to write a good book just because programming just bottoms out at a purely technical level a bit further up than writing, in my opinion. Ultimately, a great writer and a great programmer are both about as likely to come about as the other. But for the every-man, I'd say programming is easier to get past the basic technical level than writing.

I'm not saying programming is easy, because it's not. Especially at the more complex level. But it is inherently more technical and as a result, the barrier to entry to higher tiers is a bit further along the path.

Bring on the hate.

This is very true and these are great points. I'd like to add that while writing requires both a technical skill set as well as a natural gift (as art always does... you can force yourself to learn to become decent at it, but to become great at it, you have to have that song in you) and you need to have a desire to tell stories. Not just to write, but to use writing as a means of producing a coherent whole from your vision or from your ideas with your writing partners. And, something many beginning writers perhaps don't always realize or want to belive: it takes maturity. It takes life experience. It takes lots and lots of practice, and by that I don't mean getting a degree in creative writing or practicing for a couple of years. Sure, there are exceptions, there have been exceptional writers who have produced amazing novels and whatnot in their twenties, but usually it takes longer. When people start to get too old to be rock stars, they are probably still too young to be great authors.

@Ihmishylje: Yeah, life experience (not even writing experience, but beyond that as well) is incredibly important. Especially in creating good, complex, believable characters. The more people you interact with and study, the better, surprisingly enough, you get at writing your own characters.

@UncleBenny said:

man, those 343 guys seem totally nice, but also sound incredibly boring. I guess David Ellis lost all his fire once he lost his weight.

They had been showing off their game for days on end, if I had to guess they had a real rough time at the show. It's something Frankie has talked about in the past on the Bungie podcast. If your the guys on the team going to E3, you come out exhausted and wiped out. I don't imagine they had much energy for being exciting. And Frankie O'Conner is fantastic, usually, on podcasts. The greatest loss the Bungie Podcast ever suffered!

@MordeaniisChaos: Actually, Frank sounded like a pretty interesting character, but I mostly made the comment upon my memory of David Ellis when he was in EGM who just love to stir shit up. Yeah, they are probably too tired to really get some shit stirred that night.

drake was shitfaced

@Ihmishylje said:

@MordeaniisChaos said:

@GERALTITUDE said:

I found the everybody can write too few can program comment really funny. Everybody thinks they can write.

YES!!! Everybody thinks they can write. That's the joke. i am not sure by your guys responses that you "got the joke". That was not a genuine fact statement they made. Obviously no studio on earth would hire writers, or go out of their way and hire a Marvel Comics writer to write their game if they really believed "anybody can write". The point of the story, that made the story FUNNY, (it wasn't meant to slander writers or belittle good writers), was that when the tech guys at 343 babble tech babble about changes and new stuff, the average Joe Blow won't say anything because they have no idea what he is saying. The writers job on the other hand is HARDER because every Joe Blow thinks they can write and so will comment and bitch when the writer takes risks or changes something. The sarcastic comment actually was implying a writers job can be a pain in the ass. :)