Dan, Mary and Mike make a GOTY video

With Giant Bomb postponing their GOTY coverage until January I'm sure a lot of us were left with a big GOTY hole in our hearts. Fear not because Dan Ryckert, Mary Kish and Mike Mahardy took a little time out of their day jobs and recorded a 7 hour long Game of the Year video.. yikes. There is of course insightful industry commentary, and absolutely no fart noises to interrupt Mike. If you feel like listening to some cool folks talk games for 7 hours then I present to you the 2020 Game of the Year as presented by the Fire Escape crew (I don't know why they call themselves that) spanning 13 hard hitting categories - enjoy!

I am actually weirdly excited to listen to this.

Rather listen to these 3 than gb's goty. They seem to like games and still has a passion for them.

Oh wow, it's just exactly the Giant Bomb style too. I wish this was a podcast I could listen to in segments instead of a unedited 7.5 hour video, but I'll jump around to see the different categories over the next couple weeks.
It does not seem that FF7R got much love here which is too bad. I'm not much of a Square or FF7 fan in general, but that game really surprised me and it might be the most joy that I got from a game overall this year, and maybe more than most games in the last few years.

Though I am glad the great KRZ was recognized, one of my favorite games ever.

oof, this is great! i was a big fan of the prelim version they did a few months ago- so i'm into it. thanks for the heads up!

I love hearing cool people talk about games, so it's too bad that Dan is in this. KAPOWZA!

This might end up being more entertaining than GB's GOTY. Not that GB does it for entertainment, it's more of a, you're a fly in the room to how they've come to these decisions. Another interesting aspect is having a live chat during these as were given a poll when it came to the top 3 of each category and were able to vote for chat's "winner".

I need to watch more of this. Tuned in live for a couple categories and was surprised to see how very much like GB it was, with the editable list on screen for all to see, the last minute live additions, and the petty, self-contradictory arguments. My favorite part was Dan complaining about the humor juvenile humor in Fenyx Rising and then in the very next category having at least two different nominees that were exactly about juvenile humor.

I rage quit when they dumped Yakuza 7 off the top 10 list.

I'm glad this came out when it did and if anything, it just makes me more excited for Giant Bomb's GOTY stuff.

I found myself quiting after the second burp.

Burp is not funny.

Fart is not funny.

Nails on a chalkboard is not funny.

Now , I know what the poor guys at GB are putting up with behind the scenes.

@giant_gamer: Dan explains that people don’t like the smell of burps but they LOVE the sound! This is a perfectly normal explanation.

Working from home does that to people.

As someone who was their for the majority of this live, yeah this is worth a watch. If your missing on some of the classic GB format with long heated debates but all in good nature this has that in spades. It's long, but like that was kind of the point of the format haha.

Also @humanity clearly a typo in the thread title because if I recall it's Dan, Mary and Mark making the GOTY video.

I would watch this trio over any other gaming group, any day of the week.

These 3 with Jeff G and B, Vinny, Brad and Austin would be an ideal crew

FYI don't come into this thread just to dump on, disrespect, or insult others. There's a difference between criticism and disparagement.

that's a jackbox Tee K.O. layup if i've ever seen one.

Putting Nioh 2 on a list of bad games?

Philistines!

I think it's healthy for us all to get these emotions out before GB do their lists.

Am I buying Nioh 2 before this break is over? I bloody might, you know.

I'm 100% stealing this when I play with family tomorrow.

@humanity: yes some but not all people.

People consider different kind of things as funny but it is rare to see someone who agrees with with them all.

I might consider burp as manly but I've seen women that can wake-up a whole neighbourhood with the sound of their burp.

Whoa 7 hours?!

In the thumbnail for the video, it looks like Mary is ready to cry, which is also how I feel right before GotY talks start.

From the thumbnail, looks like Dan has gone full Letterman!

Exactly my thought. Gb minus all the rampant criticism, negativity and being extremely cynical about everything. Was so much funnier and much easier to watch than listening to Jeff being super negative about everything and everyone (except Ben sometimes) agreeing with him. The amount of positivity went down considerably when Dan left.

I'm sad that FF7R didn't get the love from them, but i loved how balanced their tone was throughout the whole thing, like none of them didn't care for it, but still recognized how well made it is.

Same goes for when they talked about Marvel movies, they had no interest in them, but still recognized how people get excited for them and wished they could be that level of excited, really liked how they handled negative points as they were very balanced without going down a whole tangent on it.

One things for sure: if you missed endlessly semantic arguments the past two years, Mike and Dan are here for you with their "Things We Forgot Came Out This Year" category (roughly 2:20 in and the 40 minutes afterward). The general discussion: does it matter if I knew something existed before it came out if I forgot I knew it existed or can't remember that I knew anything about it? What is the definition of memory loss? Have we truly forgotten something if we remember to make note of our having forgotten it?

I think Dan needs someone like Vinny/Abby/JeffG/JeffB/Drew calling him out to really be funny but I’m still psyched they did this.

Happy Holidays everybody!

This was a ton of fun! I also highly recommend all of MinnMax's Christmas/GOTY content. Both are filling a GOTY void for me this week.

Now that I'm at this point, I will say that if you're curious why it takes three people over two hours to pick ten best games of the year, it's almost entirely due to Dan not budging on pet projects for over an hour while Mary's clearly fading and Mike's making concessions left and right to move things along. I've just spent the past 45 minutes wishing Mary and Mike would go ahead and put the axe to Astro and THPS but Dan grunted like a labrador at the very insinuation earlier and they're letting him steamroll this whole thing now.

@nodima: classic Brad tactics right there. Dan learned well!

This feels like classic Giant Bomb. I really hope the GB crew considers going back to some of the things that made those discussions so much fun in the past.

Best GOTY discussion I’ve heard in years. FireEscape is legit, I look forward to seeing more from them in the future.

I'm so salty that Crapple won best Bugsnak over Bunger! I'm joking around. This was a tremendous stream that they did and was a fan of how that list turned out. Lots of fun discussions too. The fight Mike fought for Crucible to win most forgotten game only to lose because Dan never heard of it was legendary.

Very excited for this, going to save it for my commutes. As a paying customer and a key worker out there on the frontline, I feel insulted that GB can’t get their crap together and release a GOTY list from the comfort of their own home. Like do the thing I pay them my hard earned money to do?

@therealturk:

People will put these games on there because they suck at playing them. Nioh 2 is legit one of the best of the year. Also I respect Dan of course but Mike is someone have 0 time for. I ended up skinming this and skipping when he had his say.

A fantastic video with three of my favorite videogames-people-talke..rs..

It got a little cringe when Dan was attempting to explain how Last of Us 2 was
a new landmark in videogame storytelling but hey, Dan being Dan is why
he's fun to watch. It's like his "Sunshine is a master piece" angle.
I also felt bad for Mike when he was trying to boost KRZ
but clearly knew it would get zero traction. He sounded a little destroyed.

@geirr: Almost like when Mary meekly asked "you don't know what kombucha is Dan?"

Yeah, defending the story was a bit much. I half hoped someone would charge in and say, "Yeah, they justify it but in the most contrived ways imaginable."

Love that he deosn't know that. He was the only Gb-dude who didn't try to be such a know-it-all.

@nickm: They're literally doing that? They just decided to do it in January (which will likely be fairly quiet otherwise) instead of taking up the time in December where there were some big-name releases happening.

Anyway, I really enjoyed this video - my only real notable gripe is Mary's insistence that the Spelunky community didn't care about S2. Hades definitely ate its lunch on a grander scale, but the Spelunky community as a whole is absolutely in love with that game, it's unquestionably my GotY, and in fact it's the reason I've ended up not playing Hades until this week despite having been anticipating its full release since last year.

Nevertheless these three are great and I'm honestly glad to have more silly categories, that's the one thing I'd really like to see GB dive back into rather than getting too overly caught up in making sure they give every single game that came out its due in an overall list.

Edit: originally tagged wrong user.

@y2ken: Wait, I don't understand. I was just commenting on Dan's stream and posted some spoilers about some of the discussion points. I didn't say anything about when GB was doing GOTY which I know its in January.

Will say when GB gets their site top 10 posted next year, it'll be fun to compare the site's top ten to Dan/Mike/Mary's top ten and see which games were on one list and not on the other or seeing where mutually ranked games lined up on their lists.