Game of the Year: Day 1

Dang mates, that intro music slaps!

Slaps.. Hurts.. somewhere in between

Death's DoOri was robbed

Intro so fucking fresh

great work, friends!

go knives out Jess, we love it!

that intro music give me Lisa the Painful vibes, in a good way?

Thanks y'all! Glad I was able to catch some of this live

Edit: Intro music does indeed slap HARD.

Also, letters can only be S, K, and A

Holy shit. Incredible quotes by Jeff G. Banger day 1 already and I'm not even halfway through it yet.

Great GOTY so far! Thanks everyone!

Oo knives are out already haha. Let me just say that Jan is a treasure and a wonderful part of the crew. I think his presence really helps tie everything together. Also, New Hexico and New Hectico made me laugh and I'm not exactly sure why. Jess also a great addition to the deliberations!

It certainly sounds like ya'll could do with some definition work at the beginning of (and then again midway through) each category. That seemed to help in recent years haha. I do think it'd be cool in moments of contention to allow the people who played more of the game to fully discuss their experiences. Especially if they are being positive IMO! These GOTY discussions are often so focused on nitpicking the negatives in games that it can be really refreshing to occasionally have moments of people simply talking at length about why they LIKE games.

But by that same token, those people have to not only explain their experiences but answer other people's questions. The Jeffs might have done a better job answering Jess's question about how Deathloop is a time loop, rather than just why they liked how it was designed. Both are important.

(FWIW I think Deathloop counts - even knowing the story, I'm not sure why it wouldn't count as in universe or out.. Sure, there's no explicit universe ending threat, but.. it's like the inverse of that normal setup in a couple ways. Same structure, different positions. I think it's clever.)

I'm sorry but the new intro music is absolutely cursed.

Lmao at the Jack Black talk.
I remember Carrie Gouskos talking about how she met Tim Schafer and mentioned that she didn't like Jeff Black, and kinda offended Tim, because he's a big fan of Jack.

The J-O Triumvirate is a different thing...

Please don't let this music be the music going forward. The original theme was great and this was a noise mess at the very best. Nothing against the artist, but this was hard to listen to. This is bad bad. This is bad enough to make me not want to listen to the first however many seconds to make sure I can get away from it.

Why does the audio pitch up and down randomly? Near the end, it gets incredibly loud and hurt my ears due to my earpods being in. It's half of the original theme but just a ton of gibberish noise surrounding it, too. The simplicity of the theme has been removed so we could get a punch of off-pitch slowed down chords and this just sounds bad.

Tenacious D was never funny. It was only chuckle worthy because it was riffing in a way that no one was at the time. Jack Black actually went on to be a really good comedic actor but this music has always sounded like the equivalent of someone wishing they were as funny as Spinal Tap thinks they are.

jan you a real one

Jess completely losing it when Bakalar said "(E) is big with eye exams"

Loved that moment

Loved Jess absolutely coming after Deathloop

@homogenic: The Majora's Mask fan comes out hard, and I really appreaciate it, despite having opinions that align more with Jan and the Jeffs of Deathloop's design.

This was a ton of fun to listen to. I wish more of the crew would've finished Deathloop cause initially I didn't get it and thought the praise was overblown. I forced myself to keep playing until it clicked and then I couldn't stop thinking about it when I wasn't playing until I solved it entirely. There's even sidequests in this timeloop game and I believe strongly its better than 12 minutes and the forgotten city. Keep up the good work y'all, these are the highlight of my weeknights

Does anyone happen to know what game Jeff G is describing at around the 39:00 mark ( "Captain ..." ), which Bakalar fell off of when playing it with his son? I can't quite find any of the names they cite while they talk about it and it isn't included in their list.

Appreciate any and all input.

@efman: That'd be Exo One, they played it on the Dec. 3 2021 edition of Unprofessional Fridays.

I feel like one part that would improve Best Music categories is to listen to more than 10-20 seconds of a song, it just becomes "which song gets to the drop quickest" at that point. That or pre-listen to select nominee tracks before the show, like you'd dip into a video game before discussing it.

It's kind of a shame no one on this cast seems to have played SMT 5, because there's some real good shit on that soundtrack.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvn58ARJCvM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6aAkP61Umv0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXgXHgnIFxc

I like that new intro music, and I feel it will grow on people. I am less a fan of the best letter and felt myself slowly dying inside.

@janman Any chance we can get a spotify playlist or bandcamp link list for the best music candidates?

Off to a great start this year, also shoutout to Jess for killing it in her first GOTY appearance

The best letter thing should never happen again. Shoutout to Jess, she made the best arguments during the categories that mattered. And shoutout to Jeff G, for completely shredding Jack Black's music career, even though I believe Psychonauts 2 should have been in the Top 3. And yes, The Jackal is a great movie, so is Day of the Jackal, the original film its based on.

Oh, yeah, I have to come down on the side of not liking the new music, at least what I heard so far.

I really liked Psychonauts 2, but the Jack Black song was one of the lowest moments of that game for me. Particularly with how characters spent the preceding hour or so talking about what an amazing singer that [character] was, and also that the song in its entirety was part of one of the E3 trailers for this game. In general, I don’t really remember a single track from Psychonauts 2 other than that one, but it was the other aspects of the game that stood out super positively.

At any rate, Best Music is the category I felt most strongly about this year, and the right game won.

Jatt Jorie, broke a thousand keyboards, never drew a dime.

Really enjoyed Day 1 of the deliberations. Even though I had to listen to an archive as I couldn't see the deliberations live. I can see Day 2 live though. Best Letter is a great dumb category. Really enjoyed the best Timeloop Discussion too with Jess going all in on many of those time loop games. And of course Chillest Game Brah and Best music were surprisingly competitive this year. Although Jan's speech about Back 4 Blood for Chillest game almost won me over haha. Also not gonna lie, pretty pleased with the ending results for Chillest Game and Best Music.

Big fan of the return of the weird categories, always my favourite aspect of GotY!

That's a hard pass from me dawg on the intro. I know they said it's a work in progress, but that just sounded like noise. Irritating, obnoxious noise. Hoping future iterations are less so.

Also glad the GOTY's are up, but did I just listen to a 15 minute discussion on the best letter? Come ooooooooooooon wtf.

Nice to see Chicory and Unpacking represented.

Lake would have been a great candidate for the "Chill Game" categeory btw.

Make the intro MORE of an unintelligible, grinded mess! I want it to get progressively more distorted into some hyperpop noisescape, to the point 100 Gecs wouldn't even touch it anymore.

Jess being overly aggressive about deahtloop almost gave me a panic attack...

I like that they started with Best Letter, because it set the tone of, "Hey, these are just people giving their opinions - so sit back and hold on". I'm hoping that will be helpul to 'Taking the piss' out of overly serious people over the next few days.

Can't believe Axiom Verge 2 didn't even get mentioned for best music.

As for PowerWash Simulator, they do acknowledge that you can have an auto-on (I believe right-mouse button), so I almost never have to click or hold the mouse button, and I never get hand cramping. And as for the the 99% speck of muck they can't find, you just have to hit TAB to have the dirt highlighted, and also you can pull up your list of things to wash for the job and clicking on that will highlight the item. At worst, you just have to crouch or get high to find the spot.

I feel like Jess is letting her disdain for deathloop cloud her judgement on if it’s a time loop or not. I feel a lot of her points were valid but it’s still a time loop game.

That J pick is biased as hell, the rest of these awards are clearly bullshit.

@csl316: The current GB crew is clearly in bed with "Big J". It really casts a black cloud over the whole GOTY affair for this year.

@madmatt213: They could've at least saved it towards the end, to at least maintain an illusion of legitimacy for a few days.

Pssh... More like "Jiant Jomb" aimirite?

I'd take the Halo soundtrack over most of what they love on the best music list since its not just electro garbage that they seem to always love in this site lol.

Well I'm the odd one out because I hate the new intro.

It sounds like the audio grabbed from a Mario Maker level.