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Liking it in general. 4 thoughts after messing with it for a bit:

1) This is a fair bit more involved than the other two, but I've been mentioning it periodically for awhile now. I use qlcrew.com for my primary interactions with the site for over a year now, and it's mostly because I like the community-added features. Timestamps, user voting, tagging which staff members are in what videos and filtering based on who you want (e.g. show me all the videos Vinny and Ryan did together). I know that's a lot of work, but it would be using the power of the community to at least submit those things (and you could, with the guy's permission, scrape all of the current data I suppose). This is the #1 thing I want from the site that it's been missing for years and it honestly results in me using a different site to consume your content.

2) Related to the previous one, marking videos as watched and being able to filter those out entirely so they don't even appear on the site while I have that setting active. I've been slowly making my way through old content and I don't even want to see a faded thumbnail or anything if I don't want to. Like if I've only been watching UPF since, say, 2017 and mark those as watched, I'd like to click some UI "hide watched" button and then have the the most recent one on the UPF page to be whichever one is the most recent unwatched UPF.

3) The podcast overlay that comes up (title, description, watch later, download, etc.) has this vertical line that... I don't know why it's there, but it looks awful IMO.

4) When I mouse over something at the top (say, "Videos") and the submenu appears, there's this weird dead area between the "Videos" button and the relevant menu that appears below it. That is, if I mouse down to the submenu immediately, it's fine, but if I move it more slowly (or happen to stop my mouse in the perfect position), the submenu disappears. I've poorly marked it below, hopefully I'm describing it correctly, but basically right at the boundry it doesn't think I'm mousing over either the menu button or the submenu, so the submenu disappears. I've seen this on other sites and it may seem very minor but it drives me crazy.

I'll agree to that!

@mikachops: Sorry, but both of your comments seemed very hostile and dismissive, and considering some of the accusations of sexism I've seen flying in the conversations on here, in the comments on the Best Game video, on the GB subreddit, etc., phrases such as "seedy motives" and "fucking gross" and mentioning "both sides" (which is a politically-charged phrase after Charlottesville IMO), it really seemed like the implication is that at the very least my opinion is borne out of mean-spirited sexism. I really don't feel like that's an unfair interpretation in context, but I also have little interest in arguing about this further, so I'll drop it as well.

(For the record, that verbatim quote has been repeated in multiple other places and I didn't personally hunt it down, although I did watch the timestamp it was taken from to confirm that it was an actual quote and not a fabrication. As I said, my issues personally go beyond repeated phrasing and word choice.)

@akrid: That's fair. It mainly bothers me in the context of the subsequent Nier discussion, and because I always feel like someone in the deliberations gets really pigheaded and other equally passionate-yet-quiet members get walked over even though the feel of the room seems to be in their favor. Others have been guilty of this in the past. I also personally found it annoying considering the VN genre discussions seemed to be completely ignorant and nonsensical, and involved unfairly dogging on a genre none of them know anything about.

@francium34: Yeah, there were multiple good ME:A clips in the most recent Best of Giant Bomb video showcasing both bugs and terrible line reads.

I know, and I acknowledged that in my prior comment, which was met with another snide and dismissive comment accusing me of "playing the 'both sides' game". I personally thought Giant Bomb was better than that, and thankfully most of the other discourse around this has been better.

I suppose. It just seems like the "Worst Game" category is always weird, poorly made games they played as a joke like Ekranoplans. I thought ME:A had solid combat, the first ME vehicle that I didn't hate, solid art design/technical graphics/performance, a quick and solid mining minigame (considering how annoying this was in some past ME games), and most of the writing seemed fine. It was mostly some key dialog from specific characters (PeeBee's a big offender, from what I remember) that makes the writing seem completely awful. I also had the benefit of playing version 1.10 or whatever, but I'll admit that video from the GB review was... really something to behold.

@deathpooky: I agree with the ME:A thing. Andromeda was a complete disaster on release, but based on past versions of the category, Bubsy probably should have won. I played through ME:A over Thanksgiving break and... I wouldn't call it great, but it was fine. Even in the context of their own opinions though, it sounded like Brad kept making a "Most Disappointing" argument instead of a "Worst Game" argument.

@mikachops: Don't worry, I never expected much outside of disingenuous assumptions in the form of a snide subtweet. I posted a much longer comment earlier that goes beyond "repeated phrases" that you may understandably disagree with, but "you're just a sexist alt-right troll" or whatever you're trying to imply with these comments is amazingly petty and shows a complete lack of good faith.

@mikachops said:

There have been some pretty harsh or downright mean comments outside of this site (YouTube comments in particular, surprise surprise), but I feel that a lot of the comments here have been more than fair. I find some of the incredibly unfair and seemingly sanctimonious comments implying certain things about people's "motives" equally telling, personally.

@thebluebomb: As a follow up, here's a direct quote from one part of the 16 hour long Dream Daddy segment:

"I think Dream Daddy is very good. I am not a dating sim person, I know that the writing is not for everyone, it's a very particular style. But I think it is very good. I think it's very funny, I think it's effective in what it does. I think they all feel like real people, I don't think they feel like caricatures in any way. I think there's a lot of heart in that game. Uhm, I think there's a lot of beautiful moments in that game. I also just enjoyed playing it, I think it's an incredibly pleasant game to play, I think it's a lot of fun, I think it's really engaging, I think there are a lot of cool things you can do in it... like there are deaths in that game, which I think is like so silly and weird and fun and like there's a weird secret cult ending in that game. And like I think that stuff is very fun and cool and pushes the genre in a fun cool way. And I also just think it's good, I think the writing is really phenomenal"

This statement is way longer than it needs to be, and is chock full of meaningless filler that was also repeated endlessly before and after this statement was made.

I've liked Abby in their video features and the Beastcast, but man... other people without journalism backgrounds have been in deliberations in the past, and they've generally done a fine job of waiting and deferring until they have a good point to make or a good question to ask. It would have stood out way less if she also didn't feel like one of the most dominating voices in the room, and if she also didn't feel like she was one of the most negative people in the room about certain other games.

I'm going to repeat a totally too long comment I made elsewhere, because I see some people talking about how people getting their passion picks into the top 10 isn't particularly new. While that's true...

1) 2017 is commonly agreed to be one of the strongest years for video games, so there's way less room for these types of passion filibusters. They've talked repeatedly for years about how years are uneven in terms of competition (for example, the year that Shadow of War won GOTY), and they definitely all seem to agree about how strong 2017 was.

2) All of those had WAY more solid arguments IMO. Abby repeated herself a ton during certain arguments, and unfortunately many of the lines being repeated were very vague statements like "I like it, it's fun, it's cohesive." More egregiously, the repeated claims that it's very unique or fresh for the genre while simultaneously admitting that she never plays games in the genre. I can strongly tell you that, while Dream Daddy is fairly well-written, it is most certainly not as amazingly fresh or particularly well-written for the genre as repeatedly implied.

Game Grumps released a westernized game (read: palatable to people like the GB staff, who understandably shy away from the genre) that got a bunch of social media attention due to the people that developed/published it. This means Abby ends up playing a game from a genre she admits to basically never touching. Nobody on staff knows anything about VNs, so she hypes it up a lot and nobody is equipped to call her out. It's like being in an alternate reality where FPS games are super niche, and someone's hyping up CoD: WWII for redefining the FPS genre without anyone really knowing enough about it to argue otherwise. She basically pushes the game by disingenuously bad mouthing a genre none of them (including her) know anything about, which is disappointing and unfair.

I honestly think she was way more interested in "winning" than convincing or arguing. It's one of those scenarios where someone refuses to give an inch when defending/supporting something. They shoot down any counter argument, no matter how small, regardless of whether or not it makes sense. Someone mentioned that one of Dream Daddy's competitors was "unique" or "fresh" in a genre, and she just impulsively claims that "yeah but DD is totally those things also" without actually knowing whether or not that's true.

And it made it that much more frustrating when she later repeatedly tried to marginalize and downplay Nier's writing and themes (which had much broader support) as being less original despite having not experienced most of it. She's right to bring up the barrier of entry that kept her from wanting to experience all of Nier (even if I and others didn't experience that), and she's right to bring up the world design and combat (although I also didn't hate the combat). She's even right to bring up some aspects of 2B's sexualization (although I wish someone would have mentioned Adam and Eve, who are two sexy, topless, completely ripped dudes in Nier). However, there's a difference between criticizing a game for being off-putting in a way that prevents you from seeing all of the story, and criticizing the game's story itself when you missed very large, important swaths of it. Other duders were willing to accept her (false, IMO) claims about Dream Daddy's unique and genre-defying writing, but she seemed completely unwilling to accept their claims about Nier's writing.

I also think people confuse her having more passion for her game than other people with the volume of conversation about it. They had to repeatedly talk about it more than the others because it was an obvious weak point prime for being cut -- while their little votes are non-binding, it's telling that Dream Daddy was dead last in their feeler vote to see where everyone stood. Abby talked a lot during these deliberations, and I feel like people who are willing to speak up more end up having people believe (incorrectly) that they're more passionate about something than someone who tends to be more quiet during the discussions. Those conversations seemed to starve out the conversation about some other games that other staff members seemed very passionate about, and it ultimately just felt like people wanting to give up and move on because it was obvious very early on that she was never going to give the "I've said my piece" line and back away.

That said, I eagerly await someone dismissively, falsely claiming I'm mad about something dumb like a list of video games -- I just like to type. I don't care as much about the final list, but those conversations did push me to the edge of skipping large swaths of what's normally my favorite category. I like listening to the arguments themselves, so the disappointing thing was more the quality and specifics of the arguments, rather than the end result. There's a difference between disagreeing with the conclusions of an argument, and feeling that the argument and rhetoric itself were flawed and uneven. It's a good reason I was fine with Invisible Inc. making it -- Austin did an excellent job making the case for it. And no, Abby isn't the first one to make terrible arguments in a GOTY podcast (hell, some of Dan's arguments against Dream Daddy were very poorly phrased and probably hurt his case), but I personally felt that it was one of the more protracted and egregious ones.