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I only just started listening to Giant Bomb, who is this Dave Lang they keep mentioning? Is he an industry person or a friend or an inside joke or what?

 

CEO of Iron Galaxy, friend, and butt of jokes.

 

EDIT: Thanks top post. I'm just starting into the GOTY stuff. I am rarely satisfied with the list they come up with, but the podcasts are genuinely one of the best sources for me to figure out what games I should be making an effort to check out as they are often a lot more verbose in their talking about games for GOTY than the regular podcast.

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MGS being GOTY would have been unconscionable. Overlooking all the social issues that game has for its pure technical gameplay has always been what Giant Bomb is about, and I'm glad they managed to buck that for at least one year.

 

I think it's my personal GOTY. The gameplay of that thing is just so utterly perfect that I can completely ignore all the rest. The story doesn't bother me as much as most people anyway. It's MGS...it's always been crazy.

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Didn't they mention that you can completely ignore the online stuff? I'm selfish and worried about my eventual play through X months/years from now

 

Yes, you can choose to never connect online, but this hobbles you by reducing the number of squads you can send out on timed missions, as well as hurts your max personnel size which directly influences researching new guns and abilities. Also, if you connect online even once it starts spamming you with tutorial messages to build your online FOB that I don't think you can make go away.

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I haven't paid very close attention to this. What did they change wrt online play that made things worse?

 

Pay to Win mechanics. Specifically, you can invade people's FOBs and actively undermine them, but for Real Money you can buy insurance that cancels any losses you would take. There's other stuff too, but that mechanic in multiplayer that actively detracts from the single player whether you're bought in on the concept or not is real bad.

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The game launched with the FOB invasion stuff, but the amount that you could lose was fairly minor, and you could always not sign-in and then be immune to invasions (or rather just never get the report that they happened.) What they changed is that a percentage of your resources are now stored on the FOB and aren't always available. Which means as soon as you go offline, you have maybe 1/10th of your actual resources available to build with. For a while there, you couldn't even sell stuff that was on your FOB, so jeeps and stuff that were out there were effectively worthless. No only that, but it's possible to spend your main base into the negative, then disconnect from the online before the resources transfer from the FOB, and be stuck in the negative. For other resources, this is an annoyance, for money however morale instantly tanks and people start leaving your base. On top of all of that, server stability and maintenance downtimes mean that it's not always your choice to go offline, so you can't even plan ahead for it in those instances.

 

Oh, and you can pay 10 dollars to make yourself immune to invasion losses for a month.

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Not that this excuses Konami's pay to win shenanigans, but with the PC version you could just run offline and use Cheat Engine if you feel like you're being artificially gated.

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True, but then you risk being banned if you ever connect online by accident. Now that they're making money on that stuff, they have reason to actually take action on such reports.

 

Then again, being banned might be a blessing if it's for Metal Gear only.

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Man, still not gone online with the Xbox One version - and I wasn't planning to.

 

Dewar - if I never went online and I don't care about getting all the weapons (only a few rocket launchers and Sniper Rifles are likely to be important to me) and all the other rubbish I can still complete the game right?

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I listened to all the GOTY discussions, and man, while I really like Brad, him an I have the least overlap in taste compared to the rest of the crew. I found myself getting irritated by him because I think he's got a lot of good things to say, but that motherfucker hates Splatoon!

 

I'd really like to see (hear) Austin on Idle Thumbs (or Idle Weekend, which is far more likely considering the location). 

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Yeah. Other than being pretty pleased when he bullied everyone into accepting Skyrim for game of the year back when that happened, GotY is pretty much "get irritated by Brad" season for me. I can't place my finger on what exactly it is about his particular belligerence versus everyone else's (is he just the most stubborn?), but it winds me up.

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I like Brad! His tastes often overlap with mine. I find Brad's argument style lacks articulation and emphasizes repetition, and that makes it difficult to stomach listening to it for very long. Doubly so if you disagree with his stance.

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I find it hilarious how Jeff will let the bottom half of the list go, let people win those fights, but will fight to the death to keep his favourite games at the top. 

 

For me, I just get sad that Brad hates the games I love. He really dug into Splatoon and Mario Maker, which are just such joyful experiences. But hey, different tastes and all. 

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Man, still not gone online with the Xbox One version - and I wasn't planning to.

 

Dewar - if I never went online and I don't care about getting all the weapons (only a few rocket launchers and Sniper Rifles are likely to be important to me) and all the other rubbish I can still complete the game right?

 

Yes. Getting the higher level snipers and rocket launchers are likely to be a problem, but I found them game breaking anyway and started doing missions OSP (on-site procurement.)

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There are times when Dan's simplicity (in basically every facet) drives me up a wall, but I find it so refreshing during GOTY. He doesn't seem interested in politicking at all, doesn't take it personally when something he likes gets knocked off, and when he does dig his heels in it results in Donkey Kong Tropical Freeze more than filibustering over why a game only he likes simply MUST be on this list.

 

GOTY wouldn't be interesting if it was all Dans, but I think his approach cuts through a lot of bullshit.

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I find it hilarious how Jeff will let the bottom half of the list go, let people win those fights, but will fight to the death to keep his favourite games at the top. 

 

For me, I just get sad that Brad hates the games I love. He really dug into Splatoon and Mario Maker, which are just such joyful experiences. But hey, different tastes and all. 

 

Does he really hate those games? I recall several times everybody said that every game on the list was great, they were just nitpicking about the order. He dug into Mario Maker a bit, but he also praised the level creation tools a bunch. Has he insulted Splatoon elsewhere? All I noticed on the GOTY casts was that he said that other games should go higher than it on the list.

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I'm glad idle games are finally getting their due in GOTY awards.

 

(that said I don't think Time Clickers is the best one, it just has one mechanic that makes it more relatable to people who aren't into idle games (shooting))

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I find it hilarious how Jeff will let the bottom half of the list go, let people win those fights, but will fight to the death to keep his favourite games at the top. 

 

For me, I just get sad that Brad hates the games I love. He really dug into Splatoon and Mario Maker, which are just such joyful experiences. But hey, different tastes and all. 

Listening to Jeff on the GOTY cast this year kind of felt like watching a chess grandmaster. You have no idea how they "won" but you can't shake the impression that everything that came up to that point was way more deliberate than you realized.

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Does he really hate those games? I recall several times everybody said that every game on the list was great, they were just nitpicking about the order. He dug into Mario Maker a bit, but he also praised the level creation tools a bunch. Has he insulted Splatoon elsewhere? All I noticed on the GOTY casts was that he said that other games should go higher than it on the list.

 

No of course not, I'm exaggerating. 

 

Listening to Jeff on the GOTY cast this year kind of felt like watching a chess grandmaster. You have no idea how they "won" but you can't shake the impression that everything that came up to that point was way more deliberate than you realized.

 

Ha yep. It was great. 

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What irks me about Brad is that, once in a while, he will articulate his position well and you can see he's a really clever guy who's able to give real insight into the games he likes/hates, but most of the time he seems too lazy to bother articulating things properly. 

 

That being said, I think Austin Walker might be my favourite person in the world. The reaction video to Dan eating Taco Bell is where I came to that conclusion. He's at Jeff levels of comedic acting.

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I really want Taco Bell. I've not had it in ages, and there's actually one in Manchester. I just feel dirty going into one of those mall food courts. 

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I really want Taco Bell. I've not had it in ages, and there's actually one in Manchester. I just feel dirty going into one of those mall food courts. 

 

I get the chicken quesadilla there when I need something quick in the middle of the city. It's actually not bad.

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Oh I like Taco Bell. I just dislike the smell of grease, disinfectant and teenagers that comes with a mall food court. 

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Listening to the latest Ryckert family odyssey podcast, it's funny as ever, but I'm really starting to feel quite sad for Paul. A bunch of individual things he says are incredibly frustrating, but overall they all reflect what seems to me to be a pretty tragic life, and a mindset that serves only to compound that.

He also exhibits a lot of the worst traits of nerd fandom. He doesn't carry the overt prejudices that can entail, but he's far too concerned with how other people interact with the objects of his passion, and how that measures up to his own ideas of authenticity, which is based largely on obsessiveness. I get where that kind of impulse comes from, and I'm sure there is a certain amount of self-kidding and bandwagon-hopping when stuff like the World Cup comes around, but if that stuff seriously bothers you there's probably something up with your relationship with your interests.

Maybe that's too harsh. It's good to be passionate about things. I just think this obsession with others' engagement probably comes from a bad place.

I suppose he's on his way to becoming an archetypal bitter old man.

Dan, on the other hand, seems to be getting better about having some perspective about other people, which is encouraging.

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