clagnaught

With Hades, a complete run is maybe 45 minutes (although you can get that down to 30 minutes pretty easily once you get better). There is enough short and long term goals that you could do a run, tick off some progress towards getting an upgrade or learning more about a story, and be done for the day. The returning home aspect also has a nice cool down affect. By the time I talk to everybody, I will be ready for another run when I felt like I was done for the day.

Some of the other roguelikes don’t nail this aspect or aren’t as good about making you want to keep going. I will definitely give Hades a try.

YouTube for free stuff and the Apple TV app for premium content or if I’m going through a specific show. Podcasts I almost always just listen to the podcast.

I don’t really use the website itself that much anymore. Typically will have it on my phone for checking out what’s hitting the site or to see what’s going on in the forums (like this!). Basically none of the livestreams fit in with my schedule now, so I’m rarely in chat seeing something live these days. So by that point, the archives is already up and I’m watching it on my TV.

Having DualSense-esque controllers in VR would be amazing. Probably the most annoying part of the Move controllers was charging them. I don’t think I had anything with that uses that port anymore and was a hassle charging two of them.

By the time that headset comes out, the original PS VR will probably be 5 to 6 years old. I know it’s marketing spin to call it a “next-gen” headset, but there’s been noticeable improvements in VR over that period of time. Hopefully there’s a huge improvement with the next headset.

There are enough comeback stories with games that people can turn something around, although Anthem seems too little too late. I'm sure there is somebody out there excited for a return to Anthem, but how big is that demographic? When they do bring it back, will it be for that same environment? The same suits? The same story? How much are they realistically going to change with this?

All of those reasons aside, I can't help but compare it to Destiny and other successful live service games. Destiny and a few others like Warframe and The Division have been trucking along for years now. EA's sole mission is probably not to go after that Destiny money, but they are competing against a game that is regularly getting new content and a lot of backlog for new players. And while Destiny has hit rough patches, there is an expansion or a new season to address some of those complaints. Games like Destiny have been out longer and have had more support than Anthem, so how appealing is resurrecting an old game going to be for people?

Final Fantasy XIV shows that miracles can happen, but it seems like most games have a year to turn things around. And to your point, Final Fantasy XIV also had the benefit of being A) a Final Fantasy, and B) the sequel to Final Fantasy XI. Even if they massively rework / remake Anthem--which it doesn't seem like they are--I don't know who will care. It was a lukewarm / badly received game in 2019, and the only thing I think really changed is that now it's 2 years older. They should probably cut their loses.

The closest I’ve come is dealing with an anime that had the cringe knob turned up too high and having to power through to get out of that sub-plot. The biggest one is probably Sword Art Online. There’s no elegant way to phrase it, so let’s just say it’s stuff involving the female leads.

If it’s a show I actively don’t like I’ll stop watching it. Same if it is too boring, I’ll bail early as opposed to giving it a chance. My watchlist for anime, movies, and general TV shows is so long I don’t think it’s worth spending the time.

I haven’t had any issues with mine.

Had like 60 seconds when I thought something was up with my controller, but it was due to my it having low battery once. (I can’t remember what it was, but there was an error message that wasn’t “Hey, your battery is low” when I started up the console one time) UI issues aside, I love that thing.

I went from nothing to minimally more than nothing with it. There was definite improvement and the scaling difficult helped a lot with that. If this was the traditional Easy, Medium, Hard, Expert like in Rock Band or Guitar Hero this game would not work.

What kind of killed it for me was the basics of owning a guitar. When my first set of strings broke, I didn’t know how to replace them. When I took it into Guitar Center and the guy handed it back to me to see if I was satisfied, I didn’t know how to, so the guy just jammed on it himself to see if everything was still good.

It’s really cool, but it fell apart after about a month or so due to the logistics being lost on me. I think if you had an external source, like if you took lessons or knew somebody who could play, and used Rocksmith to help practicing solo, I think that would work better. But with the pandemic and all that, that’s probably a decent way to mess around with it given the circumstances.

Nicely done! These are great.

7 / Like A Dragon was my second game I completed and thought it was a good next step. I did start playing Judgment but life happened and I never finished it, so that is a solid option from the 8 or so hours I saw of it.

If you’re wanting more Kiryu, I would probably just go to Kiwami. With Kiwami 1 and 2 and the HD collection on PlayStation, there’s a good way to jump into that entire story, but also not sure why you would skip a game (outside of one game just being weak compared to the others). My next step in my Yakuza journey is probably Kiwami.

Overall I thought this was a good GOTY.

The GOTY podcasts has been a ritual for the past seven years or so, and I have used previous deliberations in the past for stuff like road trips. I have a vivid memory of finishing up the 2011 GOTY discussion as I was driving across the country. It is a hard sell to listen to 3+ hour long podcasts for five days in a row (if you were trying to listen to them as they went along), but that is still my favorite GOTY content. The past few years were not my favorite--I recall 2017 getting heated more than usual, and I did not care for the 2018 and 2019 recap. This year felt like a return to form, even with everybody being remote. It was good focusing on just the awards again and to go back to 10 categories. The days of having 16-20 categories are probably gone now, unless they bring back frivolous things like "Best Sky Game", but there were still a lot of good discussions with the topics we had. In comparison, 2019 felt like a 15 hour long Bombcast, and then a few hours of some kind of generic categories, and then Outer Wilds winning it easily. This year felt like right balance of everything.

The skits were fun from what I've seen (at least the year gaming died and the year the studio closed had some fun bits), but I'm not really missing them either.

I do miss the group videos. There was so much good stuff from the Giant ROM stuff to Hitsmas to Mario Party Party 11. I had to look back over the Holiday Spectacular videos on the site, because I couldn't remember if there was anything. It looks like the only one was Giant Bomb Feud? I get not wanting to be working on this stuff for two weeks or dealing with living in hotels / away from your family during that time, but it felt like something was lacking. Even if there were separate East and West videos (like if Hitsmas was done by one studio) filmed after people went back home, that would have been nice.

The top 10 lists are nice, but there's also so many of them. I never have the time to read through all of the guest lists, let alone the community ones.