Giant Bomb Bomb-All

Per the This Day in History Feed, this was mutherf*cking Rogue goddam Warrior QL day. Classic.

SpacePPoliceman wrote:

Per the This Day in History Feed, this was mutherf*cking Rogue goddam Warrior QL day. Classic.

Das vedanya, Female Doggo.

Why is the GB Roku app so bad? The one for the Fire Stick is great, but the Roku one sucks. Seems like it's been in some kind of approval limbo for years, and nobody's actually supporting it, so it just kind of sits there, being awful.

The beta one or the one in the Roku store? I think the beta app UI is bad, but at least it works

The beta one. A single giant row of thumbnails for most recent at the top, then a grid of categories, and no recently watched or anything. It's functional, just no good to use.

This is an incredibly dire year for GOTY content. What a disappointment.

Where are all the skits?
Where is Hitsmas?
Where are the deliberations?

I can't even fathom being bored enough to spend 2.5 hours watching Jeff, even though I love the dude, rank WWE 2k20 faces.

I’m enjoying it! I love the format they carried over from last year. More discussion and less pointless arguments. Three days of fun discussion and review followed by 2 days of arguments. They had the same format from 2010 to 2017. Glad they switched it up.

I’m disappointed that there aren’t more group videos. Through 4 days there’s only been 1. I know that they only had 1 week together instead of the usual 2 weeks and almost that entire time was taken up by the podcasts.

Enjoying the small personal videos quite a bit, though. They’re short, humorous, and charming. Even enjoying Jeff’s 2.5 hour WWE face rant. 45 minutes in and looking forward to giggling some more later tonight.

Jeff’s 2.5 hour WWE face rant.

Holy sh*t, I just added that to my watchlist yesterday without even checking the length. I'm excited to get to watch it sometime, oh, maybe mid March or something, seeing as my podcast queue is over 30 hours long right now thanks to year end content from the likes of Giant Bomb, Waypoint, and Comedy Bang Bang.

r013nt0 wrote:

This is an incredibly dire year for GOTY content. What a disappointment.

Where are all the skits?
Where is Hitsmas?
Where are the deliberations?

I can't even fathom being bored enough to spend 2.5 hours watching Jeff, even though I love the dude, rank WWE 2k20 faces.

I miss Hitsmas as well, or any GB Hitman content, really. They all fell off of it this year, it seems. Jeff cited the loss of the episodic model as a reason that the game faded away for him. I hope Hitman 3 goes back to that model.

For all the sh*t I give Dan Rykert, god damn if he and I don't describe game plots in the same exact way.

Ask me wtf happened in FC New Dawn or Wolfenstein New Blood and you would get that same insane word salad.

Ok I'm a bit over six months behind, but I gotta say, give me that gigafly 10000%. The person didn't make it sound nearly bad enough to take *ever being bothered by f*cking flies in your life* instead.

r013nt0 wrote:

This is an incredibly dire year for GOTY content. What a disappointment.

Where are all the skits?
Where is Hitsmas?
Where are the deliberations?

Deliberations are still in the podcast feed, and video is now present.

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/yNOUEGJ.jpg)

https://twitter.com/DanRyckert/statu...

Dan's leaving GB.

Happy trails, you goofy bastard!

I know there will be much rejoicing over this by some, but I'm sad to see him go. There were times when I found Dan's schtick tiresome, but there were things I enjoyed and appreciated about his presence as well. I liked Danswers, I liked the Metal Gear Scanlon series. I enjoyed any time he was displaying enthusiasm for something in a healthy way, and I liked watching him grow and shed some of his dismissiveness and performative ignorance (not that there wasn't still enough of that around to find him annoying and frustrating at times). Curious to see what he's up to next. If it's wrestling-related, well, I guess I won't follow it!

I am also very excited to see who they hire next. A certain Austin Walker is no longer full-time employed by anyone!!! But I assume that's not happening. I hope they find someone who has interests and perspectives not already covered in abundance by the current staff. My choice would be Gita Jackson, I think she'd be a great fit. Make it happen, universe.

Mary Kish!

mrlogical wrote:

Curious to see what he's up to next. If it's wrestling-related, well, I guess I won't follow it!

https://www.mandatory.com/wrestlezon...

It's wrestling-related.

I'm on the outside of that culture as well so I won't be following, but I'm happy for him as he's so passionate about it.

Austin stepped back from full time employment specifically to give himself time to do creative pursuits, and continues be a part of Waypoint with the time he does want to give to games criticism, so don't expect anything there.

Gita Jackson or Mary Kish would both be excellent choices, but I wouldn't be too surprised if they followed their more recent pattern and looked for people who are unknown (or barely known) who have voices that deserve the a bigger platform. Not that either Jackson or Kish don't deserve the spot, but their current positions are giving them decent reach already.

He always said he would never leave the industry but that’s too good of an opportunity to pass up.

The cynical side of me says "good riddance", since I feel like Dan brought a lot of stupidity to the site that ground a lot of conversations to a halt, and he reveled in being a dumb idiot.

The younger/non-cynical side of me says that Dan brought unfettered optimism and a childlike view of gaming that a lot of us have forgotten, and it might be hard to replace that at GB.

Best of luck in the wrestling world, Dan.

maverickz wrote:

Mary Kish!

I wish. She grooves really well with them. At least she did in the past.

I don't know Gita.

Sad to see Dan go. Hope he does well.

Gita Jackson is currently a writer for Kotaku, and while I'm not a frequent reader of the site, I was deeply impressed by her unique and interesting perspective on gaming for the year and a half or so that she cohosted a podcast with Patrick Klepek before they both got their current jobs. As mrlogical said, she has a voice and a worldview that's very different from anyone currently on the Giant Bomb staff, but at the same time she has a personality that would mix very well with what people enjoy about Giant Bomb, and would work especially well with the east coast crew.

Incidentally, I highly recommend the Match 3 podcast if it's still possible to get the archives of it, especially if you enjoy what the Waypoint folks do with their podcasts (you can see that Patrick brought a lot of the things he learned making Match 3 to the Waypoint world when he got hired there). While it was somewhat topical, I think a great deal of the conversation that was had would still be relevant and interesting even four or five years later (however long it's been).

Yeah, Match 3 was where I found Gita too. She's also mentioned being a Giant Bomb fan, and I could easily imagine someone working at Kotaku viewing Giant Bomb as a much more stable job at the moment. And she's already in NY. Hire Gita you cowards!

I wonder if any of the semi-recently-departed Game Informer staff might end up in the mix, too. I remember hearing some of those people pop up on podcasts in the month or so around those layoffs, and, though I can't say any of them formed strong impressions in my brain, I remember having generally positive feelings about all of those people I saw.

Austin was such a great pick when they announced him--I knew who he was, had read a little of his stuff, had watched a few streams he'd been on, had been following him on Twitter for a few months, but was by no means intimately following his stuff, he was just one of dozens of people whose name or face I'd see occasionally with interesting criticism. I don't think he had occurred to me as a potential hire, but when I saw he was the pick it was like oh, duh, perfect. I'm definitely up for being surprised!

Edit: nm.

Seems like something Dan would love to do, so good on him. But, yes, I don't regard this as a particularly big loss. While many certainly found him entertaining, I very rarely did, and his extremely limited tastes, perspectives, and loudness made him more of an irritant and hindrance for me. There's a moment during the GotY stuff that sort of sums him up perfectly: they start talking about Death Stranding, and both Jeff and Brad admonish him to "use your words" and "c'mon, you've been doing this for over a decade," but then he contributes very little to the actual discussion. His content ideas were almost exclusively "Make someone else play this old game I insist is a masterpiece," and when those were saved, it was due to the other person. I'm not particularly glad he's leaving, he wasn't killing the site or anything, but like I said, no big loss.

I'd love for them to bring on Gita Jackson--she likes story-heavy adventure games, Vinny, Alex, and Austin playing them were great, and they were something they straight up could not do with Dan.

Hideo Kojima's Death Comedy Strand
@alex_navarro
also, congrats Dan on making Giant Bomb trend at the absolute worst f*cking time. just astounding timing.
10:56 AM · Jan 3, 2020·TweetDeck

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On a serious note, I'm going to miss him. He had a ton of infectious energy and unpredictability which manifested itself in some great series (Metal Gear Scanlon, Demo Derby, Steal My Sunshine, GTA Crime Crew), and some misses, but I like that he kept taking big swings.

Vinny wrote a note on the site that was more... measured that I had expected.

Vinny's goodbye note

As someone who has read/written a lot of those corporate goodbye notes, the subtext was interesting.

I never miss Dan when he isn't on an episode and I doubt I will miss him now.

That said, good luck to him! It's great when people have an opportunity to move closer to what they truly want.

Gita has said in the past that she’s flattered so many people want her at GB but loves working at Kotaku. GN also doesn’t provide much of a written or political platform for her to utilize. If she wants to shift, then fantastic.

I grew to really like Dan over the last few years. He still annoyed me at times but it was interesting watching a guy be forced to finally grow up. He also brought a healthy energy to some segments. I’ll miss This Is The Run most.

Maybe they’ll revisit Beast in the East since Dan disliked liked playing that series. This also explains why they never got around to playing Shenmue 2. Excited to see who they bring on next.

Dan inexplicably likes Shenmue, though. It's the one curveball he had.

Dan has a podcast called Panning the Stream with his wife that's a pretty good outlet for his particular brand of goofiness that doesn't give him nearly as much opportunity to get obnoxious with it. It helps that they've got actually good on-air chemistry, not a foregone conclusion with marrieds. She's patient and indulgent with him without letting him run all over her, and their obvious warmth and affection for one another comes through.

I still reach for the "skip 30" button any time the words "wrestling" or "Metal Gear" come out of his mouth, but that's not quite as often as you'd think.