Book of Unwritten Tales is stellar. Bless you Vinny for continuing to beat that drum! Also. good shoutout to the remake of King's Quest. Christopher Lloyd and Wallace Shawn are both excellent in it.
I really wish Brad would take a second to look at some of the other games that have come out since Tie Fighter before dismissing them outright. I know Ace Combat hasn't had the greatest track record in recent years, but I jumped into it for the first time with AC7 and it blew me away.
Pretty much everything Brad described as things he liked about Tie Fighter, I would say AC7 does far better. And unlike, say, Freespace 2 (which is one of my favourite games of all time) it's relatively easy to get into, and ISN'T padded out by endless dogfights or a lot of patrol or escort missions. It's a tight 10-15 hour campaign and I loved every minute of it.
Also, as Austin Walker would say, the soundtrack fucking SLAPS!
At last! I've been looking forward to this ever since finding out about this game and its long, windy road through development hell. No disrespect to the individuals who I'm sure worked very hard on it, but boy, they made some choices.
The hell was with that Halo discussion, lol. Vinny just trying his hardest to remember random details from the lore while Mike goes on one tangent after another... Gah! What was the thing that was ham-fisted about Reach?? I need to know!
Watching this makes me wish The Last of Us 2 had some sort of co-op mode, and that they didn't drop the surprisingly awesome PvP from the first game. There was something about that multiplayer that really encouraged good teamwork and use of stealth even among randos without voice chat, without ever feeling overly punishing when someone else on your team fucks up.
I wish I could stay positive about this, but man. This was a gut punch.
In some ways it wasn't surprising, and I don't fault him one bit for chasing his dreams. But so much of what I saw as iconic pieces of content on the site over the past few years have been tied to Dan in one way or another. And between the GOTY stuff, and the feeling of lethargy on the site in general (GBW never really felt like it fully recovered after Dan left)... I don't know.
Sorry to be a bummer on here. Times have been rough and this was just icing on top. For what it's worth Vinny's sendoff here was brilliant. Could not have said it better. You're one of a kind, Dan.
One really good thing that came out of this GOTY is that since so many people got upset that Dan seemingly forgot he'd played Ace Combat 7, I had to go back and finally check it out. Just finished it last night, and man that game is something else.
If this had been a different year and someone other than Dan had played it, it would have made for some good talk in Best Moments, as well as an obvious contender for Best Music. That chorus drop near the end. Oh my.
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