Not complaining, but curious how a site with supposedly 9 core staff cand only get together a 3 person podcast? For the record I am in favour of the lineup changing every week, which I know a lot of people aren't too onboard with.
When Bakalar launched into his Africa by Toto story, I did have the thought "Wow, this is a really long anecdote for Jeff to launch into before Jan has introduced whoever the 4th person is on the podcast. ...Oh wait, I see. Jan+Grubb+Bakalar is everybody this week." I can live with a 3-person podcast, but it does feel a little slim.
As for the 9 core staff, it seems like Jan/Bakalar/Grubb is the core Bombcast crew. As for the others:
I assume Jess/Jason are on if they're not too busy with other production work. This week I assume they were either busy or not at work on Bombcast day.
Rorie is on basically never, his role isn't really on-camera and he has other responsibilities.
Whatever working arrangement they have with Ryckert, it doesn't include him being on the Bombcast ever, except during that one all-email Bombcast they pre-recorded in December.
I think it was an exaggeration to ever say Tam and Lucy are "joining" the GB staff. Maybe that's true on some internal org chart of Gamespot and GB, but from an audience perspective they don't seem like full GB staff. Nothing against their GB work, it's good, but it's a minor part of the site, and I don't see them on much of the "primary" GB content. They're not on the Bombcast except when Tam wanted to talk about the Elden Ring review, nor are they on the video game videos/streams each week. They're specifically helping co-host Games Mess Morning, they co-host JJBA with Bakalar, and they run The Very Online Show (and maybe they're on the Voice Mail Dump Truck about once a month). JJBA and The Very Online Show take frequent hiatuses. Some weeks, their only appearance on the site is an hour on Games Mess Mornings. It seems like Tam & Lucy don't have the bandwidth to be involved on much GB content, so at best they feel like GB "contributing editors" or something. It's hard for me to consider them GB staffers at this point, when seemingly 80-95% of their weekly work time is more on the Gamespot side of things.
I don’t doubt that this game is bad. The general gaming community buzz, both critics and players, seems middling-to-negative.
But I still feel like Grubb didn’t illustrate *why* very well in this Quick Look. I’ll give him the bee-cat-frog quest, which A) made no sense, and B) was just boring and movement-based and worse than most activities I can think of in Golf Story.
Everything else shown in this QL seemed similar to Golf Story? Grubb seemed eager to complain about any detail, but from what I saw: you blindly walk around talking to daft NPCs with arbitrary quest tasks, sometimes you shoot a golf ball at a flying object for money. That’s what I remember most of my time with Golf Story being as well (eventually every 40-60 minutes you would play a proper round of golf, which I’d assume comes eventually in this game as well). Pity the game takes so long to introduce the other sports, though presumably that “kick pine cone at fence” quest was the soccer intro.
I’m still not going to buy it because it’s rare to see players be so widely unhappy with an indie game you’d expect to be a charming trifle, but based on this QL specifically I don’t really get the fuss. Granted, Grubb felt burned by losing his save progress and wasn’t about to do some 10-hour deep dive on a game he didn’t enjoy and isn’t assigned to review.
@hibbitybibbard: Look man, previous GotY lists are not sacrosanct. The community shits on some of those top 10s to this day, so if anything, I think actual site staff are more than qualified to also disagree.
Also without naming names, there are some top 10s from previous years that are wildly biased towards certain more stubborn staff members getting their way. Or obviously very good games get omitted entirely because a staff member knows they’ll have to fight tooth and nail to even get their #1 anywhere on the list, so they barely find the energy to advocate for their #2 or #3. It just got messy as the staff got larger and larger.
Also “the classic GB GotY format” was already being retired while Gerstmann and Nextlander folks were still at GB. They were clearly getting tired of the arguments and negativity and were trying to rework GotY even in 2020 and 2021. So again, fine by me if current staff want to acknowledge the problems of the old format. Not saying Eurovision voting machine is the answer, but they’re welcome to keep experimenting with the format as far as I’m concerned.
GB GotY isn’t the Ten Commandments. It can change, and I have no problem with staff saying the final list of previous years took a few wrong turns.
@deadstar: According to the Community Spotlight on the forums, the staff top 10s are going up on the site from Dec. 26th-30th. A little confusing to not just post it all in the same week, but I guess they wanted to do the podcasts live instead of recording them and holding them for a couple weeks.
The communication around 2022 GotY has been a little chaotic/unclear, but I gather there has been some behind the scenes stuff that changed a bunch of GotY plans.
@muttonbandit: Unobtainium is a real term, but the way Avatar uses it is still very dumb. Unobtainium is more like a figure of speech for whatever material would be ideal (but practically impossible to get in sufficient quantity) for a given situation, whereas in Avatar it’s literally some new element/ore found in massive abundance on the planet in the movie. Surely the material would just be given a proper name once it is no longer theoretical, so watching every single character continue to call it “unobtainium” reads as super dumb to me.
@missashley: fwiw the only way I can explain it is they made a slightly more active clicker game, where you get the satisfaction of gradually mowing down thousands of zombies and also the satisfaction of putting together a “build” of upgrades that eventually feels like you’re doing disgusting DPS.
You have to be the sort of person who enjoys watching the numbers go up.
Also I think a big part of it leaving a good impression is that the developer is pretty much an unknown and the game is like $3. Like absolutely the whole enterprise has the vibe of a 360-era Xbox Live Indie Game made on a shoestring budget that should not cost the consumer more than $5 USD.
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