Giant Bombcast Giant Bomb Game of the Year 2013: Day Three

@automatontribe: They are up. Right click on the podcast and select "update podcast." It's up to you to refresh the feed and see what the latest available episodes are.

@august: Oops, what I meant is that they don't show up on the iphone podcast app.

The only time Ashes Cricket 2013 will ever win a award.

Love the holiday intro music!

Oops! I Shit My Pants GOTY

I'm with Drew, I think it's totally worth taking into account the "debut" connotation to trim the list and make sense of the games as new games that are fresh on the scene. As much as The Last of Us is clearly a well executed game, it's in no way a "debut" to me. It's Naughty Dog making a well told story in the context of a post-apocalyptic with 3rd person shooting and stealth. I don't think that stands water compared to games like Gone Home, Gunpoint, Brothers, Divekick, Papers, Please, or Rogue Legacy where each was not only a fresh execution of something in video games but also has a back story that fits the spirit of the category. Gone Home is itself the debut of the Fullbright Company, Brothers for the reason described on the podcast, Gunpoint as Tom Francis' first game, Papers, Please coming from experiences traveling, and Divekick as an innovative design twist on fighting games from Adam Heart who himself has only been part of development with Divekick.

The Last of Us is a hell of a game but I think it's lame that it ends up being on this list at all, let alone the winner, just because the category happens to have been "best new IP" in the past. It's all semantics and all that but it's also largely from the fact that I think The Last of Us will get more than plenty mention and praise. But now is the time to celebrate all these titles that did great and new things for games and it just feels weird to give it to The Last of Us. That is all.

PS. Stanley Parable got robbed! Again!

Ashes cricket.. Lol.

On a side note, I really wish that they'd play BF4 now.. It _was_ a mess, but it really is essentially fixed now (for me on ps4 anyway and a lot more of the other players as well).. It just makes them seem a bit out of the loop when they talk about how it "is completely broken"... It was.. A few weeks back, but it's not anymore.

Still, great show.

There didn't seem to be a consensus on the meaning of the category until close to the end. Jeff introduced it as "Best new IP", but a lot of the argument seemed to be around "Best debut by a team/developer" or "Most innovative game". Patrick was arguing for Gunpoint in terms of Tom Francis' debut as a game developer pretty deep into the discussion.

As icky as "Best new IP" is, I think it would have led to a more focussed discussion.

I generally agree. I also think they realized they were painting themselves into a corner regarding the overall GOTY. Last of Us will now, by definiton, have to finish above those other 2 'best new games' or their logic is flawed. So they couldn't really omit it even if it was just the next game by a big successful developer.

They should switch the category up so they can reward whatever the 'spirit of the category ' it is they want to reward rather than force themselves to do one certain thing.

@cthomer5000: It's interesting that I think people saying had it been literally "best new IP" then it's completely valid to have it The Last of Us. Regardless I think the ambiguity and open-ness works in some ways but here it left it unfocused and made it seemingly run against itself.

In other words a few more conceptual passes should iron out the pitfalls or be more explicit in interpreting it one way or another. Just to play my own devil's advocate, I think it's also weird to say "give these games a chance" if they genuinely think the Last of Us is that good. Still I don't think that makes for as interesting a category as taking the "spirit" of the debut idea into account.

I don't understand the Cricket controversy. I watched that Quick Look. Sure it looked terrible, but it didn't look 'broken' to me. If it crashed over and over (cough) BF4 (cough), then I'd understand the recall.

I think Ashes Cricket deserved some recognition for generating one of the best quick looks this year.

If it's gonna end up The Last Of Us vs Zelda for final GOTY, that's a boring ass conversation for someone who has played neither, and doesn't even own the platforms those games are on. Too bad, I guess.

I can't believe Rogue Legacy beat out Gone Home. Rogue Legacy's cool and all, but it's still a sidescrolling action game with Rogue Like elements, something we've seen many times before. Gone Home is a game that feels new and creative in terms of storytelling.

I doubt last of us will be in the final every time that game has come up this year Jeff seems to be against the part where its a game

Apology of the year should be aliens colonial marines.

Xbox Fitness sucks!

1. They advertised it as doing Insanity and P90X for free with Xbox Gold, these Workout programs aren't new, they're onto like P90X 3 or whatever now and Insanity has 2 or 3 spin offs as well. So it wasn't a stretch to think we'd actually get them free for a year on Gold and Microsoft has paid money for it.

The truth however is you get 1 Insanity workout and 2 P90X workouts, now the whole program is 10-12 workouts for each of those and you need all of them to complete the 60 days. So what is the point in doing one or two of them? It's dumb and false advertising and you cannot even buy the rest, they're just not on there, basically they're a demo for you to buy to the DVD which they're only too happy to give you a link to, which suggests they wont be bringing the rest.

2. The only complete workouts are a couple for women, which you need to buy! You only get 3/4 workouts with them and then you have to buy the rest. There are no full worksouts on offer for men..

3. The tracking is lousy, it basically just promotes you to keep moving. You could be doing the move wrong and it doesn't care, I tried just waving my arms around and it was giving me 5 stars.. like wtf? Basically there is no direct feedback to what you're doing wrong, there is nothing, the tracking is basically an inaccurate gimmick that has no purpose.

4. Kinect cannot read your heart rate, I have a monitor of my own that gives a very accurate reading and Kinect 99% of the time just cannot pick up any heart rate. When and if it does for like 5 seconds, it's not even close... I don't know why it is there other than to give you false readings?

5. Even when you buy a workout from the very limited selection that is on there, you have to pay for Xbox Gold to use it, even though it's stored locally and you've paid for it! Basically what Xbox Fitness does is charges you to be able to only use your content in one place and then charges you extra to be able to use it.

If you do not have an Xbox One, do not buy one on the hope to get into this Fitness App.... IT IS CRAP! Buy the DVD instead or just torrent the damn thing.

Killzone: Shadow Fall should have made top 3 Launch games just for it's multiplayer alone. Especially considering that Battlefield 4 MP is broken. It's a great alternative for PS4 owners, who are frustrated with BF4 and bored of Call of Duty.

I'm going to say: 'So?' to this.

Having a fresh new idea versus doing something similar to what has been done before, doesn't automatically make you a better game.

If so, a lot of these games don't belong in this GOTY talk at all. There have been many good fresh new ideas this year. But we're still talking about The Last of Us, Infinite, GTA and so on. All stuff that's been done before.

New doesn't trump familiar just for the sake of what it is. Familiar games can still be better games. In this case I completely agree. I am not one of the blind Gone Home haters, I enjoyed the game. But I think the praise for that game is overstated. It wouldn't make my top 10 of this year even if I do an all-indies list. There have been many great games, whereas I thought Gone Home was just good.

Yep. They should just ask themselves "what do we want to reward in this category?" and then name it appropriately.

Most innovative debut?

Best debut by a new studio?

Most promising debut?

Basically, whatever can do all of the following: make it an interesting category, reward new IPs, possibly reward new/innovate gameplay mechanics/genres, possibly reward new studios, and ultimately not force their hand when debating overall GOTY.

Yeah I agree with this. I don't really care for a general "Best New Ip" category (which is basically what the "Best Debut" category is right now) since it's just like the console-specific categories in the past were in that it's basically preparation for the top ten deliberations since you already make it clear your feelings on what games are better than others ahead of time. A better category would be one that is more specific like "Most Innovative Game" since it just seems more interesting to debate and it also doesn't show their hand as much regarding their final deliberations. Though I guess they could also just have both a "Most Innovative Game" and a "Best New Ip" category. I just think it's important to have a category that focuses on those games offering unique experiences and a "Best New Ip" category doesn't quite get that done since you can still have situations where games with unique experiences get beaten by a game that executes on familiar territory very well. Not that it's wrong to prefer a game with great execution over originality but I feel that the more unique games aren't exactly getting the credit that they deserve in this "Best Debut" category.

http://blog.jeffgerstmann.net/post/71157984756/it-looks-like-goty-podcasts-2-and-3-havent-made#notes

@rorie

Yeah, but simply downloading the mp3 doesn't work either. It just comes up with the nonsensical failure message "Video can't be played, because the file is corrupt".

I'm not totally sure, but I think the PS4's cloud saving works almost identically to the way they were describing the X1. It always seems to upload stuff shortly after I turn the system off. Kind of dumb that they were holding this against the PS4, especially when they didn't actually know the answer for sure, but I suppose lack of research and informed opinions are par for the course at this point for the Bomb Squad.

Also, I'd pick local multiplayer over online any day of the week. Can't stand playing stuff online.

Jeff said that he thought it seemed to upload for him the same way as the Xbox One does or sometime at night at least, but wouldn't download.

Which is more or less true. It doesn't do it as well as the Xbox One. I still don't know when they exactly upload those savegames, but it sure as hell isn't immediately (as it should be), because I once didn't have my most recent save in the cloud when I was logged onto another machine. Also, it doesn't auto-download that stuff, which is weird. I run into the problem of booting games up, loading a savegame and then being like: '... did I just lose like 4 hours? Oh, right, forgot to download the save'. Exit the game, manually download, start the game up again... really, it's better than before on the PlayStation but it's not good. Xbox does it a lot better. I save my game, I shut the console off, I can load that game up on a console somewhere else immediately. Without effort.

Okay, I will totally concede that I have no idea about the difference between the two when it comes to downloading saves. I was only speaking of updating, which in my experience, has usually been less than an hour after I turn off the machine(at least for the most part). The only reason I have noticed this is that when I'm trying to upload footage to Facebook, and turn off the machine, due to my crappy Internet my progress is usually halted by a cloud save upload, forcing me to restart. Which is crappy in and of itself, but not necessarily what we're speaking about here.

How has noone in the entire Giant bomb staff played Path of exile?

That thing is fucking excellent and it isn't mentioned in any catagory anywhere

@garviell said:

Because there are only six of them and they can't play everything.

Path of Exile came up on Scoops and the Wolf with TotalBiscuit.

Yes i know, but they have played a lot of worse things.

It just seems strange for such a good game to slip under the radar. Its understandable but a bit disappointing. i'm sure at least some of them would love it.

The cloud is nothing new, been on the PC for years and no one cares tbh, should just be a feature at this point, not a system seller.

In fact just make your own PC, cheaper than getting a console and buying all your games for stupid prices.

Literally don't understand the love for papers please. Mechanically its a spot the difference game with very clunky and unintuitive mechanics. Where is this empathy coming from, maybe because I've never tried to emigrate? Patrick's argument that not enjoying the game is a testament to its quality is ridiculous, Brad wasn't so oppressed that he stopped, its because it was boring. The main menu music is awesome though.

"More people can use cloud saves than local multiplayer" - Drew

What? Who exactly are these mythological creatures that aren't game reviewers?

If you can go somewhere else to use your own saves on a different console, you can go somewhere else to play with someone on the same couch.

I don't want to speak for patrick, but based on my own experances. It might be because he enjoys being in other peoples shoes, same reason why he might like horrer movies.

He is just going for a diffrent emotional high when he plays games then when brad plays games.

Drew's muffled "pounds?" around 26:40 got me the best.