Game of the Year: Day 1

I agree, not a fan of the new intro. Nothing against the creator but it just sounds like a noise mess to me.

Sure, remix the original theme tune (no need to cuz its awesome), but the weird pitching stuff towards the end is no bueno.

IMO if you actually play through Deathloop the "hand holding" makes sense. Having such a strong opinion without having played the game is kind of weird.

Halo Infinite menu music is best song of the century

Loop Hero numero uno.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTvFdXlXvoE&list=PLvF_T-YzBE7jwiFhAxz5mzyTMCQPmaotq&index=23

Really enjoyed the Jack Black discussion. I think he gives a good performance in Psychonauts 2, but that song does feel very rote in terms of his musical work/persona. Not terrible, perhaps, but very much what you would expect from a psych-rock pastiche featuring Jack Black.

Why does Jeff G look like a Romulan?

I am cracking up at Jess cracking up over the letter E talk

people saying the intro is noise haven't listened to noise music i have a 50 minute song of exclusively feedback and white noise and glitches and mumbled distorted reverby vocals and it fuckin rules

dang, Vektroid making intro music for GB? that's awesome

New GB intro song sounds all right. Its one of those type of songs where I don't dig it 100% right away but also something I gradually like more over time.

New music is ok.

The jazz GoTY music is the best giant bomb arrangement though. Sad to see it go.

Intro music is SO GOOD

The new theme sounds like someone trying to make intentionally bad music. And succeeding. Spectacularly.

The new theme is that deal from the last decade of not getting the right "noise" for the scenario out of equipment where that was hard decades ago, but taking devices that easily make good sounds and intentionally fuck it up and Frankenstein them together.

That shit is like walking a tightrope. Most people can walk a straight line but this when you get dangerous (harsh tones), its easier to fuck up, as we've seen here.

Apologies for rant.

As someone who studied musicology a long time ago, I just want to say that leitmotiv is a German term (roughly pronounced lightmoteev), associated most strongly with the operatic works of classical composer Richard Wagner.

One can argue about whether the ratchet and clank melody is actually a leitmotiv or simply a (recurring) theme. Usually a leitmotiv is very strongly linked to a specific narrative element (associating it with 'ratchet and clank the video game' would be too broad in that sense, but I'm insinuating here, so apologies if the association was more specific), and if you want to be really purist about it, it should not just recur during a narrative, but also meaningfully change and develop, and add meaning to a narrative sequence that can't be gleaned from the (spoken) words and visuals alone.

In addition, you can argue about what one considers to be short. In music, a motif is about as short as a musical idea can get; still recognizable, but not a phrase with a clear beginning and an end. It's more like a word, with the individual notes as the letters. It doesn't even have to be melodic, it can also be a rhythmic figure or a harmonic progression. The problem with the leitmotiv is that it refers to the motif, but it is often considered a phrase, and a phrase can technically be a theme/melody. However, the idea behind a leitmotif is that it transforms, develops and is combined with other leitmotifs, which is more difficult to do with a full melody, and many of the leitmotivs used in classical music are somewhere between a motif and a very short phrase in size. So it is a bit unclear how long a leitmotiv can actually be.

Given all that, the ratchet and clank melody just sounds like a theme to me, like the Marvel theme or the main theme of Star Wars. That said, it all depends on how far you want to take the idea of a leitmotiv. There are certainly less rigorous definitions out there. But to me, the most important aspect is that a leitmotiv is clearly linked to a specific character, object, idea or location, it's not just a recurring theme.

End rant.

I really liked Jess's point about how closely aligned relaxing and tedious tasks are and how subjective the concept of a chill game is. For me, clearing a map in a Ubisoft game is relaxing, while cleaning up or ordering stuff in a virtual space is tedious, but I can totally see how for some people that'd be the other way around (or neither, or both). And I also don't care if there's a story that makes me feel things. For me, that doesn't take away from the chilling part of the game at all.

Cool cast!

God Jess is so defensive, antagonistic and contrarian. Hard to watch tbh

I get it, I know what it's like to be around a bunch of dudes, it can be tough... but like read the room?

Why are you talking over everyone with condescending voices and mocking things that other people like so hard? All because you felt personally attacked because Jeff didn't like the story of Unpacking?

It'd be really nice for more women to be hired at GB so I don't have to feel bad about finding the one woman so irritating and rude

Sadly no one on the crew has been anywhere close to FFXIV. There are some amazing tracks in that expansion.

I just want to know who was calling for new intro music? It’s perfect the way it is..

No love for Spelunky2???? 🙁

Jess is a bit overbearing for me but I guess GB needs that?

I’ll say that she’s growing on me especially after watching Run for the Hills which was fantastic!

Thanks !!

I miss the opening track, but I get why they changed it. Agree to disagree.

You chose a pretty good username for someone with this opinion, ol' stinker

@voidburger: lol shit now I'm embarrassed. Definitely have to remember to log off before being unnecessarily catty with strangers on the internet.

Apologies for going in so hard, at least it seems like I'm the tiny minority and everyone else appreciated the debate.

I always find heated GOTY discussions to be stressful and find it hard to watch when people cut each other off or don't give room for each other to speak. Just never seems worth it even if what you're saying is true, but what do I know.

Pls feel free to change my username to ol'douchebag or ol'whinybaby or something, or maybe ol'ashamed

That new intro is terrible. Sounds completely out of tune.

To me Forgotten City is the ideal loop game because in each loop you learn more about the world, what's going on and about the people. But not only that, it's structured in a way that you can experience the direct results of your actions. You have clear goals and each completion of that goal seemlessly opens up other clear goals that can be tackled in a fairly open-ended way.

Everyone has a problem that needs to be solved and by having a character go out and help people solves those problems allows you to further interact with them in a completely different way and are able to learn more about them.

Each loop you peel off another layer of the onion and it was super satisfying. The ending landing or not has no barring on it being a timeloop game and I think talking about the overall story and whatnot kind of misses the point of this category. I can have a weak ending but still be the best loop game, you know?

As someone who got stuck way too often in Outer Wilds, I agree that Deathloop was too handholdy (for me). I thought I was going to have to figure out who to kill and when, and maybe there'd be a few different ways to do it so it wasn't too hard, but it's like "nope, do it this way!" I'd rather it have let you track the different ways to kill people in a game UI and let you see your own pattern or something. A less intense Obra Dinn style of puzzling.

It's definitely a loop game and it's a game I enjoyed, but yeah. I fall somewhere between those 2 games when it comes to puzzle solving, which is maybe Forgotten City but i haven't gotten around to playing it yet.

just gonna say it .. loop hero robbed of top 3 for music .... that said damn it was a good year for that category

Except maybe the narrative (don't what they were thinking there), Deathloop screams like a game that didn't know what it was gonna be for a long time. You could tell Arkane had the basic pieces early on and stewed on how to put them together in different ways.

Where Arkane landed was on the side of making it make sense to more players and mutating it into this weird thing that isn't really a timeloop puzzle nor a straightforward shooter. For the gaming audience at large that came at it expecting a shooter, they got a novel (if still obtuse) introduction to Arkane games. But the moment you want it to be more, it kinda falls apart.

Really enjoying the new Giantbomb PS1 intro soundtrack

Damn. A year I'm not going to be able to listen to right away as there were a couple games I actually wanted to play. Infinite and 12 Minutes, both of which MAY be discussed (especially one being a time loop game).

Yeah, the new intro is horrendously awful. Guess I'm skipping forward through that from now on. Not only is the prospect of having to hear that from now on not good, but we also miss out on the jazzy GOTY version they normally play. Although I just went back and checked, we also didn't get the jazz version last year, either. Lame. It's funny, though: most people comment on the "random noise" at the end, but I actually think that's the best-sounding part of it. It's the only part that sounds like it could be an actual song, and not like a dying Speak & Spell. But I want to stress that calling it the best part is far from a compliment - it's still awful.

Holy shit, I didn't realize that three of them literally have J O initials until Jan mentioned it. That's insane. "E is big with eye exams" was a legitimately good joke. I guess even Bakalar can hit one once in a blue moon.

I'll agree that Deathloop's time loop mechanics end up being lackluster, but arguing that it's somehow not a time loop game is simply wrong. Bit surprising that everyone else said they more or less liked it that way though - this is the only GOTY podcast I've listened to where that's the case. Pretty much everyone else thinks it's disappointing that there's only one critical path. Although in Jeff G's case it sounds like he likes it that way because it means he doesn't have to actually think while playing it, lol.

Also, I don't get why they kept saying Loop Hero is not a time loop game - the first sentence of its synopsis on Steam says "The Lich has thrown the world into a timeless loop." Timeless still involves time.

I happened to rewatch School of Rock for the first time in like 15+ years a few months ago, and I still like it, but it's actually kind of fucked up if you put it under any kind of scrutiny. Jack Black's character impersonates someone and ruins at least one semester of those children's education, and gets zero punishment for it. Also he's kind of a selfish jerk who only happened to instill a few decent lessons into the kids by complete chance.

Why was so much time wasted trying to decide whether deathloop, a game that takes place over a set of repeating days (like some sort of loop in time), was a time loop game or not? I got so frustrated I skipped the rest of the podcast.

Leitmotif is a German term ;)

I'm so happy Jess and Jan are in these deliberations especially, I love the whole crew but I appreciate the takes/preferences they bring to the table. I realize that's probably because they more closely represent my own backgrounds/feelings but still, I'm glad to hear discussions expanding instead of becoming repetitive

Man.. that intro music is a miss for me, folks. Wait. I think I get it now. It feels like the Giant Bomb theme remixed but then passed through a filter known as "CyberMania94.exe".

Other than that, I am so glad Jess and Jan are in on these deliberations (Silent Hill-Heads let's fucking gooooo). I appreciated Jess going the FUCK in on Deathloop too because I've bounced off it a few times now and it's things like the UI, the specific bits she mentioned that keep pushing me away from it.

The Best Letter bit was solid, enjoyed the riffs and goofs.

@colemanfrancis: I’m basically at this point too. It’s so frustrating listening to someone who hated and barely played the game talk about the intricacies of its mechanics in which they have no clue about. And yes the game is literally about learning to break out of a time loop in which you loop through multiple times to learn everything thus a time loop.

Passion is fine but you need to have played a decent amount of the game to argue that hard about it and have people respect your opinion.

Also on the point of the intro music, I get what it’s going for but it’s a bit too much like noise and I’d hope it doesn’t replace the old song entirely.

Way too much filter knob action.

Jack Black's weirdest role is in I Still Know What You Did Last Summer. Just horrible. I like Jack Black just fine, but this was hard to watch even when the movie came out.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0130018/mediaviewer/rm2206948096/

It's too bad more of the crew didn't play enough Returnal. I feel there should have been more resistance to dismissing it from Best Time Loop.

But overall, great deliberations.

Really hate to complain, but difficult to understand liking the new intro song.