Waiting for the other Hsu to drop: 1up interviews Peter Moore

You know, if a journalist is going to be so hard-hitting, and is complaining so much, then why doesn't he set himself out to do a better job. Do you see what I'm saying? People can say whatever the heck they please, but the true test is putting it into action. I feel that some journalists think they're answers are always the right answers.

I thought it was a good read, it'll make me read 1Up more often.

We need game journalists to ask 'real questions.'

"Speaking to Peter Moore, Dan Hsu proverbially assaults Microsoft's figurehead with some aggressive questioning,"

Is there a link between Shoe's verbal assault and some ancient proverb?

I'd think you meant "verbally assaults" but I'm afraid there is something I'm missing here.

Apoklypse - indeed you are correct. When writing it, I meant to write "proverbially goes for a headshot on Peter Moore" or something along those lines, but my brain switched gears somewhere between typing, eating a Triscuit, and messing around with iTunes (for the record: Minus the Bear owns your soul). Fixed, thanks.

As someone that isn't a fanboy of any system, I found this to be a fair and decent interview. Good job Dan.

Personally I would have asked some harder questions.

It looks pretty clear-cut to me that Mr. Hsu is trying to be the "bad-boy of gaming journalism" and get the "cool factor" vote from all the drooling idiots who don't know any better.

His recent editorial and his subsequent interview style is so manufactured that it now seems like someone should do a 'hard hitting' interview on his 'product' - and see how he likes it.

I liked the hard hitting style of the interview and hope he does the same with Nintendo and Sony,I am tired of these watered down 'polite' interviews as they say nothing but the same old cliche junk.

True systems don't always show what the system has to offer day one but Dreamcast blew our socks off day one and was a gigantic leap forward,360 didn't do that and so many of the games don't look that much better and I am willing to bet Xbox one could do visuals darn close to some of those games made for Xbox 360 launch day if developers ever actually tried to tap into the machine and while PS2 was the least powerful of the three a few games actually pushed the machine to it's near limit..yes Xbox had some very nice looking games but nothing like RE4 and that was made for GCN and while GCN had a heck of a powerful console Xbox can do so much more but was never quite pushed to it's limit.

Also while launch systems do have some bugs to fix, 360 seems to have a sure hell of alot from overheating issues to crashes to sratching discs to older games like splinter cell crashing the system....sounding like Microsoft Software.

Don't get me wrong I want a 360 eventually as well as a PS3 and Revolution though I am looking forward to Revolution more than the other two.

I won't even get into deep how it upsets me Xbox for such a machine with great promise had too short of a life..heh not even a full 5 years..just 4 and love how sony in sticking with their consoles a extra few years.


All in all I don't think EGM/1up had something against Xbox 360 after all they were hyping this thing and dedicating almost full issues to it.
I think he brought REAL journalism back in that interview..daring to ask questions most would try and avoid and write something we have not seen and would see a hundred more times almost everywhere else.

Umm personally, I thought the interview was CRAP. Nothing on it that we all already know or can find the answer somewhere. Honestly, it's like taking questions from a FAQ forum found on Xbox.com. Why not ask about the HD-DVD add-on and how it will work, why the decision to include it, or not to include it in the first place, etc? I thought it was not a very professional interview, especially from EGM.

Ross-
I'm just glad to see I wasn't missing a joke... I always miss the joke!

On the other hand, I would give you my soul, that Minus the Bear owns for a triscuit. Triscuits are yum-yum-yum deliciouso.

Im a 360 fanboy and I didnt think that there was anything wrong with this interview. I get tired of reading interviews where the interviewer just spoon feeds the subject questions. I admire the fact that Shoe is putting is money where is mouth is and actually asking the Moore hard questions, rather than just bitching about problems(percieved or real) on the internet. I personally dont have a problem with the graphics on most of the 360 games, but a lot of people do, so ask the question. The 360 makes a lot of noise and a lot of people dont like that, so ask the question. Barbie Horse Adventure sucks, ask a question about why its included and other games arent.

Well, taking this so-called "hard-hitting" approach is almost an excuse for not coming up with new questions, in my opinion. It's easier to come up with stupid questions than it is to come up with more respectful ones.

It's good to see a publication not employ its usual role as mouth-piece for the industry. I think the questions could have used more tact, but I think that Peter Moore is enough of a representative to respond appropriately to each criticism. Lets just hope that this biting style of journalism isn't soley focused on one company.

I can't wait for the Ken Kutaragi interview!

Calling NBA 2K6 not a big jump in graphics is just ignorant. From a zoomed out jpg on a website, of course it won't look like a huge difference. If you play the game on a nice HDTV and you can really see the Next Gen(TM) detail in the player models, uniform animation and courts.

The interview didn't seem it was hard hitting to get to the facts. It was hard hitting just to be self promoting saying "Hey look at me. I can insult the head of a game company. I'm not a lapdog video game journalist"
Congratulations. It worked.
And to the people who continually bring up the overheating problems and scratched discs, please give it a rest. Those problems aren't problems because almost no one experienced it.
If you think the XBox could have done PGR3, then you're mistaken. And thank you for revealing that no coder has pushed the XBox to its limit. Yeah, I'm sure developers just said, "You know what. I'm just going to hold back because I want the XBox 360 to succeed."
Yeah.

"There's nothing wrong with a journalist being hard-hitting"

In fact, that is a journalist's JOB. Journalists are supposed to get facts, not ask questions designed to elicit boilerplate PR responses. That's what the (Gamespot-affiliated) News.com interview with Nintendo did yesterday - every question in that interview was a blatant setup for a canned answer. That's not journalism, but it's what almost every interviewer does these days.

Asking real questions that are on everybody's mind, and that try to get to the truth, are what journalists are *supposed* to do. If that's what Dan Hsu is doing (and like any good blog commenter, I'm commenting before I read the article), then more power to him. The only thing he needs to be careful of is that he uses the same standards for everybody... though remember, kids, being a journalist doesn't mean being "fair and balanced", it means telling the truth. Some companies do deserve heavier press treatment than others. (I wouldn't expect a journalist to ask the same sorts of questions of Microsoft as they'd ask of Infinium Labs, for example.)

Well I'm off to read the interview now.

Lol, 'gotta love Hsu's "editorial against the game industry".... EGM regularly wraps thier magazine in fake "covers" that are actually ad's for upcoming games (games that they are SUPPOSED to be giving an unbiased review of). The only thing I hate worse than a sellout is a hypocrite......

Egm is the most unbiased and the ONLY credible mag out there.If you dont believe me. .......just ask Shoe.


They never use any and every chance to call xbox a halo adaptor, and still do fluff pecies on Nintendo every time Gamecube loses another thrid party devoloper or the Gamecube is in the crapper.

Has anyone noticed how much of the retro is reserved for nintendo and nes? Whenever they mention a sega system its it usaualy as an example of failure describing the xbox.

They also do fluff interveiws with celbrity models that have never played a game before. But they ripp Van disel a new ass in an interview. Whats the matter shoe? your boyfriend call you Van in bed that night?

What's so hard about asking those questions? The hard part is getting an interview with Peter Moore. Hsu doesn't deserve any notable credit, he's merely relaying the many xbox 360 gripes left by gamers on video game message boards. Im sure 90% of the Joystiq commenters are knowledgeable enough about the 360's shortcommings to come up with questions like that.

YES ,, finally someone asked them some questions with teeth,, MS is a big company that has done plenty of launces of different products, they screwed up ,, and this issues is you cant get anyone to actually say it too them and wait for a response,,

Xbox360 is glitchy at best .. and the whole idea of "put it out. patch it later" is BS, I dont want to buy a game system that has to put out service patches every week, thats why I dont play games on the Comp, everytime they update something , something else breaks.

They will only begin to get their shit together after a rival puts some competition on the martket, and by then I might have enough money to afford one of these,

I thought it was entertaining... though I'm a pretty big detractor of Microsoft's console efforts thus far so I probably would.

Do you think Peter Moore knew he was walking into the trap question about backward compatibility? I thought that was pretty clever.

Good questions from Shoe.

Great responses from Peter (who is incredibly media saavy to begin with).

why do you guy complain because he's asking valid questions.. wouldnt you like to know why 360 isnt fully B/C or why they had such a limited launch? why shouldnt ms get some tough questions?

if you are a fan of the 1up show then you know that both sides of this interview have a great amount of respect for one another and Peter is half-joking about the re-review.

I think what he's really upset about is EGM's review format.

I want to see him ask the same questions of Sony.

But we know that wont happen because the Industry has Sony's *#@* in their mouths

i completely enjoyed the interview. it's about time a video game journalist stopped just talking tough ('new video game journalism' anyone?) and actually asked hard, uncomfortable questions.

it's not like barbara walters talked to monica lewinsky about the weather. or just told her how nice her purse was.

they dig. make the subject fidgetty. jar them out of their marketing rhetoric.

good stuff. shoe gets mad props. both for this interview and previously calling out the industry without naming names -- despite the pressure.

m3mnoch.

Good interview, but normally I don't read articles from 1up because they suckle on PS2's long duck dong.

First off, thanks to those that actually read both the interview and my reply. My purpose for writing the review was fully based on the way it was conducted and 3 main points:

1) Shu's claim that the leap in visuals isn't there.

He claimed that NFS:MW and King Kong weren't updated visually when both of those games had massive overhauls in graphics.

2) The lead-in to the BC quesion.

As i said in my response - BC is a good question to ask, the problem for me is the fact that rather than running articles about WHY those games aren't BC and educating gamers on the subject, they bash him. It's like the old phrase "Don't shoot the messenger"

3) The Shigeru Miyamoto question.

That part had NO relevance to the interview.


I don't have a problem with journalists asking hard-hitting questions. Thing is, most worthy journalists that ask those questions try to EDUCATE the public. How many people here have seen 1UP (or any other gaming site for that matter) post an article as to why the BC emulation takes so long?

If they were trying to educate the public on things they didn't know, they would've been better served by posting something educational directly following that article...

Am I right?

This is a good article to tell if you are a fanboy or not. If you got really upset, you are an x-box fanboy, if you thought peter moore got what he deserved and sucks, you are probably a PS/Nintendo fanboy. I thought the article was alright.

Microsoft is in a tough position right now, they came out with a product that was only moderately better than the X-box. It's more a state of technology than a reflection of Microsoft. Graphics cards and processors haven't made a huge jump in the last 4 years. I remember back to the jump from NES to the sega genesis, and the graphics blew everyone away.

The the Playstation 1 came out and everyone was blown away again. Follow that up with the Dreamcast and you saw the huge graphics jump again. But during this whole time you saw computers making the same leaps in power. Now computer games are starting to level out (my top of the line PC from 1 year ago has dropped 30 dollars in price in a year, If I had bought it 10 years ago, it would have drop 50% in price in 12 months).

Ok, long essay, but basically I think we are never going to see giant technological leaps in video games for a while. The PS3 will be slightly better than the PS2, the X-Box 2 is slightly better than the X-box 1 and the Nintendo 6 will be slightly better than the Nintendo 5.

Microsoft is just feeling the brunt of the backlash because they were the first to come out with this generation.

Hsu is just trying to get some attention because most people have come to understand that EGM has gone down in quality big time in past years. That stupid editorial he wrote in his magazine about other magazines being corrupt was simply some little writeup to say "um..::cough:: we're not doing anything wrong over here...erm..look over at Gamepro they um, get help from gaming companies!" as they stuff free gaming swag in their pockets.

Hehe, I like it when Peter "Zen of Gaming" Moore gets grilled.

I think the interview wasn't bad, and it was more "hard hitting" (harder hitting?) than most interviews, but the problem was that Moore had the answer for most questions. Except for the backwards compatability. Moore just dogded that saying he doesn't understand the tech behind that. I think the next logical question from Hsu should have been why wasn't it more of a priortity considering Nintendo's virtual console and PS3's (planned) support for most PS2 and PS1 games. (Though I understand those were announced pretty late in the 360's development.)

Overall, it was ok, but it still ended with a page of softball questions.

To me, that HardOCP story "Behind the Infinium Phantom" was REAL game journalism.

Link: http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=NTEyLDE

Journalists should never be afraid of naming names if they know they are right.

If someone has enough time and energy to really care about hard hitting questions asked of a Microsoft representative in regards to video games...they're not playing video games! I've got so many unplayed games sitting at home it's silly. The new generation will be years old before I have the need for more games and by then the console's roles will be evident. I play every day and as always I have a blast, but with games requiring 10 to 40+ hours each to complete, I'm struggling to keep up.

Personally, I'm not burnt out on games and have little spare time to dig deep enough into the industry for the purpose of contemplating the answers of a microsoft employee.

These hard hitting articles must interest people who don't have full time jobs or children or perhaps just skim through games and are in denial about a their casual approach to their games.

I'll read the game reviews and stuff like Joystiq once in a while but unless someone is jobless and living in their parent's basement, Dan Hsu doing "60 Minutes" style game journalism is for people who care more about gaming culture than getting their games finished.

This is an example of a gaming publication contemplating its navel after their Christmas rush.