The Community Spotlight - 12/12/2014 (GOTY 2014 Part II)

Hello and welcome to the latest edition of the Giant Bomb Community Spotlight, and I am happy to be your host this week! The community is still buzzing about Game of the Year stuff. In case you were wondering Giant Bomb has recorded their Game of the Year video content, and selected their "pick" last Monday. Dan also tweeted a rather self-explanatory Mario Party related image recently. Woo hoo? The other bit of major housekeeping comes from CBSi, which is looking to employ a new senior UX-UI Designer for both Giant Bomb AND Gamespot! If you are interested in apply check out the position over here. With that let's get on with the latest edition of the Community Spotlight!

Game of the Year 2014 Stuff

As with last week, please if you have not yet submitted your list of games to the Community Game of the Year Voting thread, do so when you can and join the effort to crown a GB community GOTY!

Blogs

• Giant Bomb's Must Watch Videos of the Year 2014 (By: @goranp)
• jakob187's 2014 Game of the Year: The Nemesis System from Shadow of Mordor (By: @jakob187)
• Fobwashed's Games of 2014 (By: @fobwashed)
• The 2014 "I Think I Played Ten Games This Year" Awards, Day Four: Broken Age (By: @hunkadunkasaurus)
• Go! Go! GOTY! ~Day Twelve~ (Dreaming Sarah) (By: @mento)

Lists

• GOTY 2014 (By: @tandyq)
• GOTY 2014 (By: @amlabella)
• GOTY 2014 (By: @nickieroonie)
• GOTY 2014 (By: @claybrez)
• GOTY 2014 (By: @j_unit2008)
• GOTY 2014 (By: @james_hayward)
• GOTY 2014 (By: @blackout62)
• Best of 2014 (By: @draugen)
• Top 10 Games of 2014 (By: @jaypb08)
• Top 10? Of 2014 (By: @yesiamaduck)
• Mortuss's Top Ten GOTY 2014 (By: @mortuss_zero)
• Games of Video in the Year 2014 CE (By: @brodehouse)
• Relentless Best Music of the Year (By: @relentlessknight)

Clip of the Week

While it is not entirely related to Giant Bomb, user @pepsiman has completed a massive undertaking that is worth mentioning this week. Pepsiman went ahead and provided Japanese subtitles to a recent edition of Danny O'Dwyer's The Point. Not only that but he went ahead and posted the video to Nico Nico, thus initiating the "Irish Invasion!"

Community Activities

• Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft Community Tournament Organization & Planning Thread - Vote and Discuss How what the Next Tournament is Like Here!
• The 3rd Annual GB Anime Poll for Duders - Vote for the Anime of the Year (But NOT Kill la Kill) - Over Here!
• The Crew Online Community Hookup Thread - Play the Crew with Fellow Giant Bomb Users By Heading Over Here!

Wonderful Wikis

First and foremost a special thanks goes to Ralph Baer who recently passed away. Thank you for creating the spark that paved the way for the games that we enjoy today. We all mourn your passing.

• Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker
• The Crew
• Ralph Baer

Best of Blogs

Let's all give LCom a warm round of applause for making a match three game featuring Jeff on a whim! Such projects are never easy, and always worth commending. Ford_Dent on the other hand uses Destiny and the Orion launch to discuss the future of space in video games. MikeLemmer unfortunately tells his tale as to why the community behind League of Legends ruined the game for him. ArbitraryWater is back to his old tricks, and by that I mean he's playing an old game like Resident Evil 0 rather than playing recent releases. SuperMike6 discusses how Super Mario 3D World successfully exploits nostalgia to its benefit, whereas VincentAvatar finally decided to knock the community favorite Persona 4 from his gaming backlog. FLStyle has an update on what people can expect from the Capcom Cup as well as his early impressions about Tekken 7 and SF V. N7 pontificated on the best possible game that could come out of Metal Gear Online, meanwhile GrantHeaslip shares his "assorted" thoughts on Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker. Yummylee explains why he thinks Far Cry 4 feature one of the more fully developed open worlds this year. Finally thatpinguino is still talking about Final Fantasy including a postmortem on his FF8 speed run, and blzzzrrttt has another "December Rush" blog!

• New Game - Jeff Penguinn's Cartridge Stacking Professional (By: @lcom)
• Let's Talk About SPACE (By: @ford_dent)
• Driven Away by LoL's Players (By: @mikelemmer)
• I Play Old Games, Which are Likely a Wonderful Use of Time and Money (By: @arbitrarywater)
• Ah, the Games of Our Youth: Super Mario 3D World (By: @supermike6)
• The Backlog, Entry 16: Persona 4 (By: @vincentavatar)
• Capcom Cup Preview (Dec 13) Live From PLUS Street Fighter V Trailer Analysis (No OTGs?) & News! (By: @flstyle)
• The Ideal Metal Gear Online (We're Gonna Need a Bigger Blog Edition) (By: @n7)
• A Sandbox to be Remembered! (By: @yummylee)
• Assorted Thoughts on Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker HD Edition (By: @grantheaslip)
• The December Rush: Week 2 (By: @blzzzrrttt)
• FF8 Speed Run Postmortem (By: @thatpinguino)
• Deep Look: Chocobo Racing- Fan Service That Is Totally OK (By: @thatpinguino)

Fantastic Forums

We have community discussion threads for recent releases such as The Crew, The Talos Principle, and Mount & Blade. All of these are open to owners of those games, and those who are curious to learn more about them. We also have a thread where users are free to discuss the games that they most would like to see localized for their country.

• Games you Wish Would Get Localized in Your Country? (By: @turtlebird95)
• Mount & Blade Warband: Viking Conquest Discussion Thread (By: @onarum)
• The Talos Principle Discussion Thread (By: @assinass)
• The Crew Discussion Thread (By: @DrSwank)

Lovable Lists

DevourerOfTime challenged himself to construct a gender balanced roster for Street Fighter V based on the pre-existing characters from the entire franchise. Comment how you think he did.

• What If Scenario: Street Fighter V & a Gender Balanced Roster (By: @devoureroftime)

Useful User Reviews

• @shivoa's review of Killzone: Shadow Fall
• @lordgodalming's review of Unholy Heights

This has reminded me I should watch The Point more often. Danny's video stuff is really good - I wish he was part of GB just so I'd see his content more easily!

What is that freaky Kroll Show logo?

Okay, dropping you a link to my list (which honestly probably should have been a blog, because of it's length, so if possible maybe bill it both ways or something?).

Thinking about the top spot on my list also made me write a review about Divinity (weirdly enough there doesn't seem to be any other user review for that game yet), which everyone can read here.

I wrote a crazy long review for Dragon Age: Inquisition! Which is likely not going to get read because A) it's a user-review and B) it's crazy long!

I would have tried to pepper in more images to help break it up a little, however with Giant Bomb being Giant Bomb it seems images are broken.

My GOTY 2014 list!

Here is my GOTY list

Thank you kindly for featuring me on here as always, Pie-san. It always means a lot to have my dumb fan translation endeavors supported on here, even if there are all of like five other Japanese speakers here. :D!

The NicoNico response to Danny's video has been really, really good. Hopefully I'll find time to translate their comments this week because that video did generate some good discussion about violence and censorship in the context of games.

Here's my game of the year thang.

Congrats everyone! Awesome spotlight ZB.

Here's my list!

http://www.giantbomb.com/profile/l33t_haxor/lists/best-games-of-2014/92615/

I got my weekly video up. This time it is on the Witcher 2 and the battle that made me switch the darn thing to easy.

I wrote about my experience making my first video game and how it impacted me.

I decided to do something a bit more ambitious for GOTY this year. Over the course of the year I've been compiling data of what games I've played and when. I haven't gone through and charted that data yet but you can see it raw here. Eventually I'll write up a blog about it. I decide to do this because in other GOTYs I noticed a lot people (myself included) focus on games that came out late in the year rather and forget about games.

Finally got around to making my GotY list for this year.

Might write something up on Talos Principle later, but I have a tendency to be lazy and still need to sort my thoughts on that game.

I didn't make a GotY list yet, but I did make a Soundtrack of the Year list!

Also, the third week of my December rush thing is up! Here it is!

Yo, @zombiepie, I wrote a blog this week, if you missed it. http://www.giantbomb.com/profile/mooseymcman/blog/i-finally-played-a-dragon-age-game/108522/ Well, I wrote it today, so you probably missed it.

Alrighty I have down for next week:

@l33t_haxor@pufferfiz@d_w@sgtsphynx@blzzzrrttt@mooseymcman@sessh@yummylee@yummylee@thiago123@thatpinguino@jthomeslice@epr_prime@mento@ford_dent@sessh@arbitrarywater@jazz@themanwithnoplan@sarumarine@natedagr811@freezyfrog@grantheaslip@49th@ht101@cornbredx

Great work everyone! You will have something on the next edition of the Giant Bomb Community Spotlight! Unless you wish you to abstain.

The latest edition of the Community Spotlight can be found here.