i hope the Beast Crew do a commentary track over this video once their mission is done
Same here. I knew Vinny et al. were making it look harder than it is (due to lack of experience), but Manley just made it look effortless. On a related note, in his follow-up video, you see him aerobraking his way to Kerbin - the same way Austin stumbled on in the last episode.
Came here to see @drewbert 's take on the madness and discovered this is a cross-coast podcast. I'm now considering listening to older episodes. I swear if this website makes me appreciate wrestling on top of everything else*, I'm cancelling my premium membership (and/or resubscribing for the next ten years :p )
* Persona, Metal Gear, Life is Strange, Until Dawn, Contradiction are all things I wouldn't have found (or had tried and dismissed in the case of Metal Gear and Life is Strange) but for GB's coverage
Austin's segment made me really want to see We Talk Over/Demo Derby style videos of the GB staff looking at old GB videos (or GBEast commenting on GBWest).
I think this is the first day where I've had a major disagreement with @austin_walker on one of the games he picked (still not sold on Undertale but I can see the appeal at least). I played Three Fourths Home (Extended Edition on XB1) and really didn't like it, despite having played and enjoyed other visual novels. The game has a great style to it, but the narrative, which as a VN is clearly a major element, was poor IMO.
The game goes on for too long for the story it is trying to demonstrate, and nothing really actually happens - it's more of a window into the lives and troubles of the characters, which when done well can still be really interesting, but for me in this game just completely flat. There is very little emotion or personality in the writing, and the characters could easily be talking about a third party - none of the dialogue felt personal, or gave me a reason to care about the characters.
Reading Austin's GameSpot review, he praises the "complex, nuanced characters", which is true up to a point, but the characters also felt fairly generic (I may miss remember, but I don't recall the mother and father characters being named at any point). I actually wonder if that is deliberate, and that's the main reason I dislike it but Austin doesn't - I wonder if you're expected the fill the gaps or shape the story based on your own familial experiences, which is something I rarely find myself doing whilst playing a game.
Really, it's a shame I don't like it more, as the general atmosphere from the visuals and sounds is really good, and there is a definitely a tension to the conversation that unfolds. It's just a tension that I couldn't find a way to enjoy, and I was losing interest about 15 minutes in (main story takes an hour or so to get through).
@based: It's such a big game, with such wierd bugs, that everyone's experience will be different. I loved the game on XB1 [1], but definitely ran into more bugs than I would put up with in virtually any other game. Few examples:
Frame rate in areas of Boston are BAD. Most of the game is fine (not spotless), but I avoided the main built-up area of Boston unless I needed to go there for a quest. The frame rate was consistently low enough that it was terrible to play [2]
Multiple crashes back to the Xbox dash when loading a new area. Can't really recall how many times it happened, but it was frequent enough that I was quicksaving before opening a door or fast-travelling.
Settlement happyness requirements are arcane at best - Going for the Benevolent Leader achievement appeared to be only possible through shear luck or a complete idiotic settlement design (multiple level three Clinics, and just standing around/sleeping for literally in-game months as the meter slowly grinds its way to 100. Travelling away would make the game forget about some of the beds, tanking the happyness meter)
Generally jankiness and bad AI actor behaviour. Clipping issues are par for the course, in certain areas (e.g. USS Constitution) your companion will repeat the same line over and over again (the example given is a quest area, so Bethesda would expect you to spent a reasonable amount of time there), and your companions, whilst well written, can be an endless source of fustration. The main example I had was whilst disarming a sequence of laser tripwires, Nick V. decided to stroll past me and trigger the next one along - turrets are activated, and I lost about 20 minutes of progress.
It's not a bad game by any means, but IMO that is in spite of the major technical issues with the game.
[1] Its more FO3 essentially, which is fine IMO. Main story isn't great, but the world is well realised and the companion characters are fantastic (FWIW, I never had/used a companion in FO3 - I somehow didn't realise it was an option until near the end of the game and DLCs)
[2] I had no way to measure, but I played Dirt2 on a laptop that maxed out at about 20 fps in a 640x480 window. These areas of Boston felt worse than that.
However. Placing Fallout 4 above Witcher is just incorrect. These are both games that are essentially in the same genre. So it's not like saying "Hey I don't like these types of games," which is defensible.
Being in the same genre is only a small part of comparing the games IMO, especially as this is a personal GotY list. Other elements, such as setting, also play a large role in determining if you like a game or not. I'd say that, for example, Skyrim and Fallout 3 are much closer to being the same genre than Fallout 4 and The Witcher 3. However, I instantly loved FO3 (beat the game in about 40 hours, over the course of about a week), but I've start Skyrim a couple of time and just can't really get into it - the setting just doesn't interest me as much.
I feel like someone set out to make a Japanese Sleeping Dogs, and somewhere along the line accidentally dropped it into a blender with a bunch of SEGA IPs. This game looks insane in the best possible way (Yakuza 4 is currently downloading on my PS3)
Edit: Austin going "Oh, pilers!" gleefully is probably one of the best bits of this QL
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