If you've read penny arcade (and even if you don't), then I'm sure you know about the big interview with Peter Moore over at 1up. As usual, the groupies are jumping all over Dan Hsu's crotch over what they consider a tough and hard hitting piece of journalism.
I call bullshit.
This is a typical fluff piece with a few "tough" questions that are either irrelevant or have been answered before. Hsu springs this clever little trap with his question about the backwards compatibility list, which results in the same answers from Moore that we've heard a hundred times over; the list was not a choice, and it was larger than any writer expected. Hsu's query along the lines of "at what point do you just tell your people to get Splinter Cell working now?" is much more valid, but it doesn't have the same punch alone as it does without the little pincer attack (and even as an undergrad CS major, I know that software emulation is easier said than done, so the question still isn't that good).
In regards to Hsu's graphical comparisons, he cites the jump from Playstation to Dreamcast as being huge, but omits a comparison of Playstation to PS2, or even Dreamcast to PS2. Launch era PS2 games were essentially cleaned up PS1 games with the exception of a few standouts (which is just what the 360 faces; a lot of crud with some real standouts from 1st party developers). And as for the Dreamcast, a little launch title named Soul Calibur managed to look as good as a PS2 launch title named Tekken Tag, despite being older. The PS2 was initally not a very huge leap in graphical quality. The only reasons I can think for Hsu omitting this point is that a) he knows it would disprove his point or b) he didn't do his homework like a journalist should, and neither of these options is very good. In the end, these "tough" questions didn't give us any new insight about the 360 or its problems.
As for the rest of the interview, we have queries like "would you sell Rare to Sony or Nintendo" (when Nintendo were the ones who sold them off) and "would you give something up for Miyamoto to join Microsoft?". It is typical interview fluff. Hsu is a man who put himself into a situation with the things he said in his blog about integrity in games journalism, and needed to somehow prove himself to the readers. So he does a typical interview where he masks some easy (and already answered) questions as powerful and hard hitting. He keeps his job, and the 1up bloggers can tell him "great job Shoe! This is why I subscribe to EGM" yet one more time
In any case, I don't really see this type of interview to be any sort of progress over the usual BS that we get. It will be interesting to see if he really does approach interviews with Sony and Nintendo in the same light, though even if he does I'm not sure if it will do much good. I'll reserve final judgement until them, but for now I'm afraid that Dan Hsu (or any other game writer for that matter) has done anything to change the state of his trade.
In other news, I enjoyed an article by David Rodruguez (a developer from High Voltage Software), in which he bemoans the industry's reliance on cutscenes and bad storytelling. I've flapped my gums about this issue many times before, but hearing it come from an actual developer is much more interesting.
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