Jar Time w/ Jeff: 04/10/2017

SQUAD

Im here

Kids? Eww!

Dang it, and I was just going to send Jeff a question a couple of days and clean spaced on doing it. Ah well, may as well do it now and hope it gets into the mix next time.

EDIT: I should say thanks to Jeff as well, just because I needed something to listen to while I work and this is just the ticket!

@hassun: The Kids Are Alright

You use minecraft as a example, but I say it goes back way before that, I put thousands of hours as a kid in to broadwar/Deablo 2. the evergreen game thing is not knew. The major difference is there are way more evergreen games.

I always find these videos a bit...jarring.

What's in the jar?

What is the alt history TV show set in the 80s that someone references in their question? Sounds interesting

Whoah! Surprise jar time. Always love Jeff talking about the site and answering questions.

How's the hiring process going Jeff?

You can tell Jeff had a particular website in mind when he was talking about the "opportunistic" nature of game websites branching into other kinds of material.

It's exactly what Gamespot has been doing over the past couple years.

Posting shit like the new Mummy trailer or a breakdown the latest Marvel trailer or all these top 10 lists about trash no one cares about. And if you wanna watch something you first have to watch a 30 second Destiny ad.

It's really a fuckin bummer what that site has turned into when only a few years ago it was easily my favorite site for videos. Everyone who cares about actually making something meaningful has jumped ship. I'm surprised Peter Brown is still there but all he really does is crank out reviews. I miss Feedbackula, House of Horrors, Reality Check and of course Danny's series like The Point and Random Encounter.

The UK Gamespot cew a few years back was just amazing, miss the work they all did together. Glad they're still doing things independently at leas.

@aesthetic_noise: The show is called HALT AND CATCH FIRE. It airs on AMC, but the first three seasons are available on Netflix (US at least, not sure about other regions). It's a great show, but it doesn't really get truly great until second season, which is when the gaming storyline kicks in. The first season was about making a PC to rival IBM, and was focused on the male characters and trying to be a 1980's Mad Men. Still worth watching all the way through, though.

It's kinda funny (pun not intended) that IGN pretty much went the opposite route - I remember in the early/mid 2000's when they used to have a different sections devoted to tech, movies, and (ugh) a Babes section.

The Crew is fairly active. They made some pretty big improvements to the handling and did a graphical pass over the game a long while ago. Its a great game at this point, way better than people give it credit for.

I got into Gamespot until a while after Jeff left. They had so many people there that I really liked. Chris Watters, Shaun McInnis, Johnny Chiodini, Mary Kish, Kevin Van Ord, Brenden Sinclair, Maxwell McGee, Tom Magrino, and of course Danny O'Dwyer. I even really liked hearing from Tom McShea and Caroline Petite when they were on the Hotspot/Gameplay podcasts (or Tom McShea's short-lived series Quoted For Truth. The episode Ryan Davis guests in is great). It's just gotten sadder and sadder as those people were either quitting or getting layed off. Now there's only 2 people I really like at Gamespot and pretty much all of their focus is about churning out as much content as possible. None of their stuff gets a lot of views so they compensate by just making more of it and expanding into what they now call "Gamespot Universe".

Ooh, new hire hype.

I should get around to applying for that GBEast video job.

In Giant Bomb's AMA a couple weeks ago Jeff said:

I have ideas about how I would build a news-focused product and what sort of people you'd need to run that and not just have it be a carbon copy of Kotaku or Polygon or any of the other sites out there hitting the news beat really hard, but... yeah. Not our focus right now, not really sure if the opportunity there is big enough for it to be worth our time.

And now he's saying they're going to be renaming the News tab. So it sounds like they're pretty deadset on pulling any focus they had on news for good. If that's the case, I'd really like to hear what Jeff's ideas are about how how he would "build a news-focused product and what sort of people you'd need to run that and not just have it be a carbon copy of Kotaku or Polygon or any of the other sites out there hitting the news beat really hard." Sounds like he's got something to say about that but is holding it back for some reason.

@xdeser2: RAFT

I love the thought that the kid across the street idolises Jeff almost as much as he does LeBron and just gets called out on his b-ball skills!

I think a big part of the reason people rebelled at DLC vs expansions is because expansions used to be actual beefy packages of content vs the tiny bitesized stuff that is in most DLC these days and especially back then. A great recent example is The Witcher 3 where they called their DLC expansions and were right to do so because those were some huge updates. Big new quests, large completely new areas, etc.

Remember Opposing Force and Blue Shift? Almost entire new single player campaigns.

I know I'd definitely take big proper additions, even if they take a while to make, over a bunch of tiny additions that don't amount to much of anything. I know I'm in the minority unfortunately.

Thought this was SQUAD Time with Jeff, i was wrong.

Jar time is best time

I use FluentU for learning Japanese. Ran into the same hiccup as Jeff with DuoLingo and decided to hunt for something else. FluentU is maybe the best language app I've ever found. Which is good, because it easily justifies its fairly steep per month subscription cost.

Very easy to hop in and out of and review words. You need 15 minutes tops to revise something on there every day. A bit longer when going through a new section.

@pebbleinspace: There are destinctive differences though. For instance, with every The Witcher 3 add-on coming out, there was a huge regular update rolled with it. Back in the 90's, expansion packs also featured updates to go along with the expansion, only with the expansion. Meaning you could not access the update without accessing the expension. Though often (at least as far as I know) most of these updates weren't feature related.

DLCs do seem rather disconnected to regular game updates though. "Here have this small/large/huge piece of content" is something that every kind of DLC could do and I don't think the quality of the The Witcher 3 add-ons would decrease if you label those "Expansion Packs" as "DLCs" instead. And remember, CD Projekt and CD Projekt RED are related so its most likely a marketing related regarding "back to the old school" stuff and not because "Expansion Pack" or "Add-On" fits better.

I go so far and say that Expansion Pack/Add-On/DLC are the exact same terms, the only difference are the costumer concious about it due to big budget marketing that shaped the video game landscapes, for better or for worse. To give an example, the "DLC" for Mount and Blade Warband dwarfes the regular unmodded game both in filesize and content. It dwarves The Witcher 3 with all its add-ons about 16 times in lengh also, I played Mount and Blade mods for thousands of hours overall since 2010 and never really "finished" any mod, so considering I know how the game plays I think its a fair estimation. That they officially released DLC of the lengh of giant mods in terms of lengh shows enough that Downloadable Content could mean anything.

I used to dislike the term DLC like the next guy, but if you think about it, its only tainted because its about publishers didcating which content is viable for the game to be profitable, because thats the world we live in. The term DLC is also easier to remember, which is one of the primary reasons it sticks for so long.

I say it every time these are posted, but it would be really nice if these could be posted as podcasts. There is literally nothing about this content that would require it to be a video.

@dr_monocle:

I'd say that in addition to Minecraft and "games as a service", mobile games and microtransactions(loot boxes and such) have been such a monstrous and continuing success that I don't see that sort of practice slowing down any time soon. It's been so big that it's bleeding into everything.

@pebbleinspace: there were also $20 map packs and those weren't so great but you bought them anyway to keep playing on your favorite server.

I also agree on this. This would play well as an audio podcast and the video will be around for those who prefer to avoid disembodied voices. I personally like the video but wouldn't mind the option.

On an unrelated note, we need to demand answers right now. @jeff, where is the jar?

Business talk with Jeff Gerstmann

Re: Are people still playing?

Because I'm wasting my life, I popped the Ridge Racer 7 (from Nov 2006) disc into my PS3 today. The online still works and there are people playing it...

Did someone at Namco just forget?

@kippers: Have you tried Memrise for learning Japanese?

If so how would you compare it? Interested in trying out FluentU

thanks Jeff!

Love me some Jar Time with Jeff. I never thought about it before, but is there an audio version of this? I'd love to listen at the gym.

Youths...

Thanks Jeff!

Yeah, others have pointed out the show I mentioned is called Halt and Catch Fire. I guess should have mentioned that, I just didn't want to sound like the "hey you gotta watch this show I'm into!" guy.

When I saw Quantum Link, I thought Jeff would answer a question about Link hopping between Zelda timelines.

Great answer, thanks Jeff! I could have worded it a little better but I was kind of high at the time :/

@kippers: I would recommend Human Japanese. There's a standard and an intermediate version on iOS (not sure if it's on anything else). I took Japanese in high school and didn't keep up with it, then I decided to finally visit Japan 10 years after I had graduated high school and wanted to brush up. The Human Japanese app really helped me and I think it would be great for new learners.

Sadly, learning a new language later in life is quite difficult, but learning katakana is something Jeff and others wanting a place to start could do. It doesn't require you to know Japanese, since the katakana syllabary tries to represent foreign words (foreign to Japan) using their language. Ramen, karaoke, toilet, game, and many more words can be read in Katakana without learning Japanese.

I guess pointing to Waypoint for the more thought out articles is out of the question as would of been good suggestion to some of these more thought out written peaces that there was a couple of questions on.

I'd kill for this to be a weekly thing. Also, really wouldn't mind seeing an audio version for these in the future!

Wait... zero mention of Persona 5 at the end? That's odd.

Pretty please add as an audio Podcast to the Premium RSS feed :)

Thanks for answering my question. Turns out the 'News' tab totally does what i was looking for. I just never thought to look at that tab because of the name.

I concur that an audio version posted to the Premium Feed would be great.