Giant Bomb Bomb-All

I was more bothered by their discussion and conclusion that Dragon Age 2 was the most disappointing game of 2011. Only one of them have played it at all (Vinny) and he was telling them it wasn't that bad. Everybody else threw out ideas from other critics and a lot of actual misinformation.

Blind_Evil wrote:

I was more bothered by their discussion and conclusion that Dragon Age 2 was the most disappointing game of 2011. Only one of them have played it at all (Vinny) and he was telling them it wasn't that bad. Everybody else threw out ideas from other critics and a lot of actual misinformation.

I actually agreed with their conclusion though, based on how they defined the disappointment. I loved DA1, had very high expectations of 2 but it was a big let down. Although the presentation was improved, overall I found it a disappointing sequel and rushed (far too much repetition of areas, etc).

Assuming they do a DA3 I'll likely give it a shot, but it isn't the lock that DA2 was following my experience with the first game.

I think we're getting too far into the "Games" territory for this section of the forum, but I think DA2 improved things outside of just the presentation. The narrative was tighter, more personal, and more original. The game-world took a big hit, and it wasn't as magical the second time (it never is).

Overall, I just felt grossed out by the idea that one guy that did play the game was overthrown by four that did not.

Fair point. I still (heart) Giant Bomb.

Absolutely. It's the only editorial site I really read anymore, aside from the forum posts here.

I'm now a premium member. Feels good man.

boogle wrote:

I'm now a premium member. Feels good man.

Welcome! Pick up a jar and enjoy.

Yeah, I'm on the tail end of the SR3 / Skyrim discussion. Not happy with how it's been handled, personally.

Speedhuntr wrote:
boogle wrote:

I'm now a premium member. Feels good man.

Welcome! Pick up a jar and enjoy.

I love the jar segments so much! Jeff gets all weird and introspective. Yeah, go watch the archives of the premium videos if you have time boogle.

As far as Saints Row v. Skyrim goes, I think the clinch point was that while both represent a refinement of a formula-- an excellent one in both cases-- Skyrim's radiant storytelling system represents a much larger innovation over its predecessors than anything (non-cosmetic) that SR3 does over other urban crime open-world games. Granted, I haven't played enough Saints Row myself to be able to fairly judge (although I liked what I played and intend to play more), but if SR3 has a similar game-changing feature, no one on the podcast mentioned it.

I think my biggest problem in listening to the discussion was the stuff surrounding which game needed to be dropped to form the final Top 10, specifically LA Noire and Mortal Kombat. For as much talk as there was, they barely even mentioned the fact that LA Noire's central gameplay conceit, the interrogation system, was flat broken. Now, if the people defending that game wanted to say that they liked what was good about it so much that they were willing to overlook its problems, that's fine. No game on the list was perfect, and there's nothing wrong with loving a flawed game. But to hold it up as one of the best games of the year, especially considering how granular the discussion got about other things and how many other (let's face it, better) games had already been cut for much thinner reasons two hours earlier, and not even address such a crippling flaw in the core gameplay, strikes me as a tad myopic.

Ditto Mortal Kombat (which didn't make the cut for other reasons), when not once did anyone mention the terrible difficulty spikes in the story mode that happen when the game forces you to fight two characters at once, an incredibly difficult feat that the fighting engine is clearly not designed for and which the game does an utterly inadequate job of preparing you for. I mean, the story mode seemed to be the main reason that the game was in contention in the first place, and yet the vast majority of it is locked behind these incredibly cheap, unbalanced, and frustrating 2-on-1 fights that large portions of the audience simply won't have the patience to work through. They could have taken that same gameplay idea of pitting you against two computer dudes and shunted it off into a side mode and it would've been fine. Again: if what they liked about the game was so good they were willing to forgive that, then great, fine. But to not even mention it is just silly.

I had no idea LA Noire was considered broken at all... I should read that article, I guess. Just skimming, I see it says that the interrogation always feels artificial. I take issue with using such a universal on a subjective matter, to begin with.

And I think you're overestimating how many people quit on MK due to a couple hard fights. Fighting game fans are of the nuttiest caliber. They did mention that you have to cheese Shao Khan at the end, which was harder than the Goro-Kintaro fight for my money. I would have knocked Rayman off for MK if I were in the room.

I'd draw a distinction between "hard" fights (par for the course in fighting games) and "unfair" fights like the 2-on-1 nonsense in Mortal Kombat. It doesn't reward skill or strategy; it's hard for the sake of hard. I think you've also got to take into account that MK is relatively casual as fighting series go, and that the story mode is the one that should appeal to the broadest audience. Anyone should be able to pick up the game and experience the story on the easiest difficulty. If you want weird, wacky, off-the-wall, sometimes-broken fights, well, that's what side modes like the challenge tower are for.

I'd encourage you to read the L.A. Noire article. It explains the problems I had with the game far better than I could do myself. In summary: there's a fundamental disconnect between what I'm telling Phelps to do, and what he actually does in-game. I pick "doubt," which the game has explained to me as, "I doubt that the suspect/witness/whatever is telling the whole truth, but don't have any hard evidence to back that up, so I would like to press them for more information," and more often than not, the game interprets that as, "I would like to angrily accuse the suspect/witness/whatever of being an evil child rapist for no reason." Before long the game devolves into either me, the player, playing a guessing game as to what the developer wants me to do, like completing a poorly-written high school multiple-choice test, pretending that Phelps is a psychopath off his meds and watching the game play out like an unintentionally funny movie (which I'm assuming was not Team Bondi's intent), or GameFAQsing the right choices. None of these are fun to me.

It's not just that the systems feel artificial: every video game is going to feel artificial at times, to a greater or lesser extent. It's that the game's central system simply does not function as it should. It's as though, in Skyrim, the "interact with NPC" button sometimes accepted a quest from the character and sometimes punched them in the face and there was no reliable way to tell which would happen until you tried it.

And again: Team Bondi was doing things that no one has ever done before when they made LA Noire, and that deserves consideration. If they'd weighed that against the game's flaws and ultimately put the game in the exact same spot on the list, I could get behind that. I'd disagree personally, but how much weight to put on what aspects of the game is a pretty subjective thing. But I really didn't get the feeling that they took those complaints into account at all.

My own top 10 list closely matched the GB list so it's not a huge surprise to me that I was satisfied with their choices. I am a lot happier with the top 10 list though. I think it creates a more interesting discussion when all platforms are represented in one huge topic instead of talking about PC, console and handheld games separately.

Also, their summary videos were hilarious and awkward. Loved them

Grubber788 wrote:

I think it creates a more interesting discussion when all platforms are represented in one huge topic instead of talking about PC, console and handheld games separately.

I agree. Especially nowadays when multiplatform releases are the rule, not the exception.

Funny thing is tha they actually air their deliberations. Considering how many websites and magazines poop out Best Of articles this time of year I appreciate that.

I finished the deliberations yesterday. Despite their epic length, I always make a point to listen to them because it's some of the best, propellerhead gaming discussion you'll hear all year. While I don't hate on Brad in general the way a lot of other people do, I think he was very wrong about Skyrim versus Saints Row The Third. It's a fine game and I'm enjoying it but it does nothing at all that isn't iterative versus Bethesda's previous efforts. Given how Todd Howard blatantly lied to the fans about it being on a new engine and the continued disrespect Bethesda has shown their customers by releasing it with major problems and then breaking them further with patches, I'm still not even sure it should be a contender in the first place. I put it on my GWJ list and I kind of regret doing so. SR3 was iterative in many ways too but it embraced the insanity angle so much versus the other games that it's revolutionary in that way. It was my game of the year because it was just such a refreshing breath of fresh air in the sea of super serious, brown and gray formulaic sequels that have made up 2011. Also, while Mortal Kombat's presentation of story mode was very cool, even remotely considering it great because of the story as they were is insane. It was shown to us cool but it's still one of the dumbest game fiction's ever made.

I haven't started on the deliberations yet, though I will this week. I enjoy them too, but I've been putting them off because Brad's been fellating Bethesda ever since Skyrim came out. He felllated Blizzard last year with Starcraft and he's been doing it again with Bethesda and Skyrim.

Skyrim landed at 11 or 12 on my list. Even though I put a ton of time into it I found many more games more interesting and worthwhile than Skyrim. The lack of meaning in your character's actions is my sticking point with that game. Oh, and, yeah, the "new engine" thing was such bs. It seemed like bs in the trailers, but it only took 5 minutes in the game to show you that it truly was bs.

Anyway, moving on until after I listed to the discussion. I'm glad they put them up.

If people think SR3 is anything more than iteration due to its insanity, I can't help but suspect they did not play or remember enough of SR2's insanity. They cranked it from nine to eleven, I feel.

Blind_Evil wrote:

If people think SR3 is anything more than iteration due to its insanity, I can't help but suspect they did not play or remember enough of SR2's insanity. They cranked it from nine to eleven, I feel.

I think the best thing they did was made a more cohesive game and then cranked that up to 11.

garion333 wrote:
Blind_Evil wrote:

If people think SR3 is anything more than iteration due to its insanity, I can't help but suspect they did not play or remember enough of SR2's insanity. They cranked it from nine to eleven, I feel.

I think the best thing they did was made a more cohesive game and then cranked that up to 11.

More cohesive how? The narrative? I haven't finished the game yet (I'm just after the deckers.die mission) because my co-op partner is a slackass, but this game feels just as disjointed as SR2 to me. I'm still asking myself "Wait, why are we doing this?" during the intro scene to half the missions.

SR3 is hitting the same nerve that Gears 3 and Assassin's Creed: Revelations have recently: iteration fatigue. Skyrim feels like they took something with a load of wasted potential (Oblivion), fixed it, glossed it, and made it way more playable. That to me is a bigger step forward than taking something great, and making something similarly great then adding a VTOL.

I have been playing more of SR3 since the last time I posted and I'm having an absolute blast. It's absolutely one of the best games of this year and absolutely deserves to be high on the list of anyone who's played it.

That said, it's an iterative improvement over what came before it. Full stop. I don't see how one can hold that against Skyrim any more or less than against SR3. If anything, it should be held against SR3 more because there are plenty of companies still cranking out urban sandbox games (if not with quite the same degree of insanity), whereas Bethesda is pretty much the only company making single-player open-world fantasy RPGs of anywhere near the scope of an Elder Scrolls.

I like Skryim more than SR3 because the setting and aesthetic resonate more with me. That's an entirely subjective distinction and someone could say the exact same thing in reverse and I wouldn't be able to tell them they're wrong.

As far as sheer busted-ass open-world jank, they seem to be about equal. That's based on my own personal experience on the 360 version of Skyrim and the PC version of SR3.

My gut-level reaction is that Skyrim is a more ambitious and fully-realized open world with a much broader scope than SR3, but I still haven't played enough SR3 to say that unequivocally, so if there's anyone out there who's played a whole mess of both of them and would care to contradict me, I would not be inclined to argue the point.

Parallax, I can't say that you're wrong that Bethesda was full of absolute BS when they talked all their mess about a brand-new engine, but I also fail to see how that's a point against the game itself as opposed to against Bethesda's promotion of it, which are two separate topics.

And that's all I have to say about that.

hbi2k wrote:

Parallax, I can't say that you're wrong that Bethesda was full of absolute BS when they talked all their mess about a brand-new engine, but I also fail to see how that's a point against the game itself as opposed to against Bethesda's promotion of it, which are two separate topics.

I think it's a point against the game itself because that tech is very old (the version of GameBryo they're using is from 2006) and it's the reason why the animations are still stiff, the melee combat sucks and where most of the jank in these games come from. A lot of the problems all these Bethesda games have are tech related and from the perspective of someone who likes Skyrim a lot but clearly not as much as many others, I would have loved to see how much better it could have been with a proper new engine, plus not crapping the PC version out as an afterthought as usual. I think when a developer promises something about a title that turns out to have been BS (i.e. what Peter Molyneux regularly gets grilled for), it can be considered a strike against the title because it was expectations that were set and not met. That's just me though.

Hey Whiskey Media users, so I bought a years worth of premium with that sale, what does this get me that I will use?

boogle wrote:

Hey Whiskey Media users, so I bought a years worth of premium with that sale, what does this get me that I will use?

It's mainly just extra video content. You also get higher quality video.

iaintgotnopants wrote:
boogle wrote:

Hey Whiskey Media users, so I bought a years worth of premium with that sale, what does this get me that I will use?

It's mainly just extra video content. You also get higher quality video.

And you're able to download it all.

Access to all their archived work has been content enough to pay for itself. I never have time to watch an entire Live show but I can always come back to the archive now.

boogle wrote:

Hey Whiskey Media users, so I bought a years worth of premium with that sale, what does this get me that I will use?

Check this out. (Premium Members' hub)

I cannot recommend Jeff's Jar videos strongly enough. This was the first, I believe.

I watched part of that first video one of those videos and thought it bordered on pretentious. Entirely too long for me, so I turned it off and haven't watched since.

Watching one of the other videos it seems less rambly and more about the questions. Whatever I watched was more or less Jeff livecasting his random thoughts.

His random thoughts are great though!

I guess YMMV on the Jar stuff. For me, you don't get enough long-form insights via podcast because there are so many people tossing around ideas. This remedies the situation. And is super awkward. I dunno, I just dig it.

Parallax Abstraction wrote:

I think it's a point against the game itself because that tech is very old (the version of GameBryo they're using is from 2006) and it's the reason why the animations are still stiff, the melee combat sucks and where most of the jank in these games come from. A lot of the problems all these Bethesda games have are tech related and from the perspective of someone who likes Skyrim a lot but clearly not as much as many others, I would have loved to see how much better it could have been with a proper new engine....

No argument here, although I'd say the improvements to the melee combat system this time around move it out of the "sucks" category (where it firmly was in Oblivion and Morrowind). An Elder Scrolls game on a new engine with less jank is high on my list of "stuff to wish for when I find that genie."

I really don't see Skyrim as being significantly jankier than other comparable open-world titles, though. Perfect? No. Room for improvement? Yes, absolutely. But sad as it may be to say, it's hardly on a different level than the industry standard for such things, at least in its particular subgenre.

Or maybe that's my perspective coming to it not long after New Vegas, which WAS significantly more busted than its contemporaries.