The Community Spotlight - 07/16/2016

Hello and welcome to the latest edition of the Giant Bomb Community Spotlight and I, @zombiepie, am once again honored to be your host this week. It has certainly been an "interesting" week both in and out of Giant Bomb, but aside from the madness is another week of great community participation. With the 2016 EVO Championship Series dominating the weekend, the community's competitive spirit was at an all-time high! But first, let's review the few bits of site-related housekeeping worth discussing:

• User @joe_mccallister located Kraig Kujawa's Return Fire review for 3DO Magazine that Dave Lang mentioned on the Bombcast from last week.
• According to Jeff on Twitter, Gang Beasts has finally been DETHRONED as Giant Bomb's Top Wiki Page!
• Has the text editor failed on you while you were attempting to publish a post or blog? Fill out a bug report by clicking the link.

Clip(s) of the Week

Giant Bomb Animated (Kinda) - In the Mouth of Madden-ness (By: @samcb)

samcb is back with a new episode of his "Animated Bombcast" video feature, and this week he animated the hilarious, classic discussion about monetizing PSN.

Gamespot’s E3 2005 Documentary - Electric Showdown (By: @wwfundertaker)

Giant Bomb user wwfundertaker was recently perusing his hard drive and incidentally relocated “The GameSpot Report” for E3 2005! Enjoy the nostalgia!

Austin Walker at Giant Bomb Tribute Video (By: @blackblade500)

blackblade500 compiled his favorite Giant Bomb Austin Walker moments while he was at Giant Bomb. Enjoy all 22 minutes of this well-edited masterpiece!

Giant Bomb Unprofessional Fridays - Roundabout (7/15/16) (By: Dan Evanson)

Also on YouTube, Dan Evanson created a Roundabout video featuring UPF's Double Dragon "Scrub League."

Giant Bomb Galleria

Giant Bomb Caricatures (By: @bigfaec)

User bigfaec is a caricature artist, and shares a handful of warm-up sketches that he created that feature the Giant Bomb staff.

Gallery

Community Activities

Return of Giant Bomb Discord Game Day Tournament(By: @nikral)

The Giant Bomb Community Discord Group is planning on hosting a new tournament! This one is for Rocket League!

Videoball Private Match Thread (By: @yungwilliam)

We now have a cross platform Private Match Thread for Videoball! Make Dave Lang happy and join it NOW!

Best of Blogs

My First Day Of Pokémon Go (By: @lastbesthope)

LastBestHope chronicled the first 24 hours he spent with Pokémon Go, and as you might expect it included walking.

Metroid and Me, Part 4: Lone Star (By: @majormitch)

MajorMitch comments on world design on the latest episode of his Metroid retrospective, and how it continues to draw him in.

Understanding The Beauty Of Grand Theft Auto V, And Games In General (By: @armaan8014)

armaan8014 shares his greater appreciation for GTA V, as well as what continues to draw him into Los Santos.

Convo Interruptus: How Oxenfree Breaks New Ground for Dialog in Games & Edutainment Evolved: Thoughts on 1979 Revolution (By: @darth_navster)

Darth_Navster extrapolates why he believes Oxenfree features a dialogue system the entire industry should embrace or at least learn from. Darth_Navster also pontificated upon the educational potential, and historical value, of 1979 Revolution.

Bucolicaholic: A Greenhorn's Guide to Stardew Valley's Appeal & Sunday Summaries 10/07/2016: Tales of Xillia(By: @mento)

Giant Bomb moderator Mento endeavored to "discover" the appeal of Stardew Valley, so see if you agree with his theories. Mento also continued to trudge along with the Giant Bomb wiki as well as Tales of Xillia.

A Personal Video Game Retrospective (1986- 2015) 2015-2016(By: @riostarwind)

riostarwind ends his retrospective blog series on the years of gaming he has lived through with a look at 2016, as well as his final takeaways from his series.

The First Half of 2016: The Best Time to be Playing Video Games (By: @cav829)

Cav829 annotates his personal top ten game highlights from the first half of 2016 on his latest blog.

Pokemon Go Is Capturing Hearts Despite It's Many Issues (By: @lordbarvis)

LordBarvis attempted to discover what individual aspect of Pokemon Go makes it so appealing to general audiences.

A Classtrospective: A Minor Final Fantasy XIV Heavensward Thing (By: @meestero)

MeesterO returned to Final Fantasy XIV, and uses his latest blog to discuss the "misunderstood" Machinist class.

Playing Gone Home After Firewatch [Spoilers For Both] (By: @bigsocrates)

BigSocrates comments on his disappointing impressions of Gone Home after playing Firewatch on his latest blog.

Join the Discussion

Fighting Games General EX Plus α - Evolution 2016 Streaming In GB-Fight-Club (By: @starvinggamer)

If you have been enjoying EVO 2016 feel free to join our community discussion for the event and share what you think have been the highlights from it.

Overwatch's Newest Character, Ana, Discussion Thread (By: @darth_navster)

What's your gut reaction to Overwatch's newest character, Ana? Healing people with sniper rifles seems weird to me (Stand-in editor Sparky_Buzzsaw here: If it's weird to ZombiePie, then it's pretty damn weird in general. Seriously, the man puts ketchup in his rice. Uh, carry on).

Videoball Discussion Thread (By: @patfeerick)

What are your early impressions and thoughts pertaining to Videoball? Share your thoughts about this small slice of the "Lang Zone."

How Do You Think The Last Guardian Will Turn Out? (By: @ntm)

Based on everything you know thus far how do you think The Last Guardian will shape up? Discuss your bet and/or prediction with other users.

Super Nintendo Classic Edition - What Games Would You Want? (By: @skinky)

With the announcement of the NES Classic Edition what would you like to see included in a SNES version? Share and discuss your list of games over here.

Hitman Elusive Target Discussion Thread [July 15th Update]

How have you fared regarding the latest Elusive Target for Hitman? Share your tips, tricks, and impressions with other participants.

Which Team Did You Pick in Pokémon Go? [Poll and Discussion Thread]

So which team did you end up going with in Pokémon Go? Share and vainly attempt to discuss why it WASN'T based on your favorite color.

Lovable Lists

White Whales(By: @sloppydetective)

Check out SloppyDetective's list of his most shameful gaming "White Whales" that he truly plans on playing soon.

MrGarland's Top 10 Games Of All Time (By: @mrgarland)

MrGarland finally took the time to list his ten favorite games of all tine which are near and dear to his heart.

Tales of Tiers (By: @mento)

After completing Tales of Xillia Mento went ahead and "ranked" all of the playable characters from the "Tales of" franchise from best to worst using a highly scientific tier system.

Useful User Reviews

• @extintor highlights why "inconsistent" is the best word to describe The Technomancer on his review.
• @stordoff's review of Anarcute discusses how it's the most fun he's had with French civil unrest in a video game
• @thefakepsychic shares why he found Tokyo Mirage Sessions ♯FE to be an unapologetically weird, but fantastic video game

• @thefakepsychic's review of Mirror's Edge Catalyst extrapolates why he found the game to be one step forward, but also two steps back.

Wonderful Wikis

Both of our wiki pages today fall into the same category of being game pages that received a wonderful amount of tender loving care that transformed them into great informational tools! I'm going to hazard a guess that you haven't even heard about both.

• Deranged Rabbits
• GanGan GanChan

Come watch Evo with us!

http://www.giantbomb.com/gb-fight-club/

That E3 05' video is a must watch.

Sweet, I made the Community Spotlight :D

That Austin supercut just reminds me of why I'll always stick with this site.

Thanks for the shout-out!

The GameSpot at E3 documentary was already available on YouTube since 2013, but it's always nice to have extra backups online!

It would be cool if the GB crew could watch a bit of that on a Game Tapes or on an UPF and have Jeff and Brad talk about it.

The Giant Bomb animated video is another great one, the caricatures are fantastic and that Best Of Austin is a good introduction video for people who want to know how funny GBeast's work is.

Funny, Greg Kasavin says Giantbombs are gonna drop in the E3 video. Seems kinda prophetic now. And damn I miss Ryan Davis so much :(

I always laugh at that stupid roundabout meme. It's still so good! ha ha

I laughed out loud multiple times at the animated Bombcast video. Well-done @samcb. Somewhere I have a DVD of the other Gamespot E3 doc "Stupid Pants Operation". I should dig that up and upload it.

Anyway, I wrote up a review of the Uncharted novel tie-in The Fourth Labyrinth by Christopher Golden (spoiler alert: it's not very good).

Thanks for the shoutout. I'm glad so many people have fun watching these weird little videos I make in Premiere in my spare time.

My first pre-release/embargoed review! Thanks for the mention, @zombiepie

It's oddly daunting reviewing a game before any other reviews are out - before I've generally known that I'm agreeing with the majority, or disagreeing for specific reasons, which makes putting a score on a game relatively painless. With Anarcute, I kept hesitating, even though I knew what score I thought it deserved. I don't think I committed to it until minutes before the end of the embargo.

Thanks for the shoutout, really appreciate it!

Roundabout meme...still hilarious.

@stordoff: that's a tough part of reviewing - you never know if you're going to be the one ass that scored it a 9 when the majority of people put it at a 4. I used to wrestle with that a bit but started to think more about if I truly feel this is what the game is then I've got to commit to it. If it feels like a 3 - it's a 3, if it's not quite a 4, it's a 3. You really have to just stand by your gut, and it's terrifying. Good example for me is Shadwen - not a great game but I enjoyed my time with it and what it did on a pretty basic level. I scored that a 4 while the consensus fell around a 3/5. Doesn't sound too bad but when you blow it out to a 80/100 vs a 60/100 the picture looks a bit different. I stand by it though - I thought it was a good game with a few hiccups here and there but the overall mechanics and play were enjoyable.

Anyway - long story short - you have to turn off that targeting computer and just send those torpedoes home. That's what will get people to interact and read, and see "why did you score it like that" - which is part of the job of your review, to get the point across as to why this is the way it is.

@joe_mccallister: Thanks. I ended up sticking with my gut feeling on Anarcute, it was just weird actually committing that to paper (despite not usually caring too much about the score - the review text is far more important). Oddly enough, I wasn't worried about the review text - I was more than happy to go with that and not worry about how other people felt about the game. People are weird :p

Already had that moment (albeit the other way around). I gave Zero Time Dilemma 2/5 (post release, but before I'd looked at any other reviews/coverage), then discovered the consensus was somewhere around 4/5 (first review I read after posting mine gave it 9.5/10). I stand by that score though (if it was a standalone game it may rank higher, but as a sequel to VLR it falls completely flat), so not really sure why I hesitated on Anarcute.

Congrats everyone! The wiki pages look great.

Lots of good stuff to check out this week. I espcially like the videos and the well done wiki edits. After reading about GanGan GanChan it sounds like a neat little game I should check out. Thanks for mentioning my blog too. Took most of the year but my retrospective is finally over.