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On 11/06/2018 at 11:39 PM, TychoCelchuuu said:

 

 

tag yourself, I was watching this live and my reaction was pretty identical to Alex's slow and despairing realization of the words coming out of Dan.

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Just finished the Giantbomb end of year deliberation, and I loved/hated Dan's doggedness at getting Red Dead Redemption 2 on most disappointing. He was completely gaming previous weaknesses on earlier years. Brad's irritation with it was a good counter point.

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I love Brad, but he drives me crazy at goty. He is the most stubborn of all of them by far and I find he ends up coming off as really closed-minded. Dan had a lot of good points about RDR2, the rest of the crew seemed on board, and getting Brad to budge on that added like an hour to the process, which even then he grumbled the whole way through the resolution. RDR2 is a good game. It also let down a lot of fans of RDR. Those are not incompatible statements. Brad comes off like kind of a jerk during that conversation.

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I'm glad that they changed the GOTY discussion format because now I can just listen to the first episodes where they discuss games they feel are worth discussing without going into the ranking, and the episode with the "lighter" categories, and skip the actual GOTY episode. My main issue is with Brad, as well. He becomes so indignant when other people's tastes and opinions do not align with his. Instead of making a serious argument he just decides that the they must be out of their minds.

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I haven't gotten to most disappointing yet (I'm about halfway through hottest mess) but hearing Brad's discussion of RDR thus far it does seem like he's being excessively argumentative.  Alex also seems to share his enthusiasm for the game but at least he's open minded enough to be willing to hear and acknowledge everyone else's opinions.

 

Also Alex calling Fallout 76 the French waiter of video games made me laugh entirely too hard.

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There's an interesting parallel with the conversation about RDR2 during the most disappointing category and the 2008 GOTY when Brad ends up criticizing GTAIV in a way that is echoed by Dan now. Jeff also posits some points for GTAIV that Brad uses for RDR2 (specifically Jeff says that if you have trouble driving the car in GTAIV you're "not doing it right" and that missions being punishing for breaking its boundaries isn't a big deal.) I found it kind of fascinating. Also the 2008 GOTY is way shorter so if it interests you at all to relisten it's not a big commitment.

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I'll check it out. I guess for me what I found compelling was what Sgt is talking about, the paradigm shift in how games like Rockstar's are viewed. I think Brad comes off as stubborn in that argument, sure, but he had already given a litany of reasons why he though RDR2 is great (I don't like it). Dan gave some good arguments too, that align with why I have never liked Rockstar open world games. I just thought he was being really cheeky but openly playing on previous strong-arming tactics to get certain games into the top 10 list and the like. Brad's venemous responses to that felt more like irritation at at the brazenness of Dan's schemes.

 

The conclusion also felt like, others (Abby in particular) were not that happy with the end result. Still it made for great listening on my long drunken holiday in Cambodia.

 

As a person whose top ten list looked like this:
https://gamecritics.com/aj-small/ajs-top-10-of-2018/

 

It was nice to see the mixture of games being more interesting this year.

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Abby was never going to be happy with the final outcome.  She's in a similar position to Austin and Patrick before her.  She favors the less mainstream games which just aren't going to make the final cut most of the time.  Not that the rest ignore these games but the number of "games that no one else has played but me" is probably higher with Abby than anyone else on the crew.

 

It's also why I dislike GOTY lists.  GOTY discussions are fine, great in fact, but lists are terrible.

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The individual GOTY lists are good. The GOTY podcasts are extremely not my thing though. I tried out the recap stuff they did this year, and it's better, but ultimately just a rehash of discussions I've already heard over the course of the year, so I gave up on that too.

 

I've been watching Mass Alex off and on, and it baffles me how unwilling he is to bring up the power wheel or use abilities in general. Seemed like he went through all of ME1 with just the pistol. Maybe with ME2 letting you bind more of them to buttons he will actually use them...

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14 hours ago, SecretAsianMan said:

Abby was never going to be happy with the final outcome.  She's in a similar position to Austin and Patrick before her.  She favors the less mainstream games which just aren't going to make the final cut most of the time.  Not that the rest ignore these games but the number of "games that no one else has played but me" is probably higher with Abby than anyone else on the crew.

 

It's also why I dislike GOTY lists.  GOTY discussions are fine, great in fact, but lists are terrible.

 

I was referring specifically to the discussion related to making RDR2 being 'most disappointing'

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On ‎1‎/‎31‎/‎2019 at 10:30 PM, twmac said:

 

I was referring specifically to the discussion related to making RDR2 being 'most disappointing'

 

I've just started that part and from what everyone has said about it so far I'm not sure if I should be dreading it or looking forward to it.

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I liked the point that RDR2 could win for Most Disappointing. Maybe the discussion was a little too busy, but I really appreciate someone making a big deal out of it.

 

I haven't even played any RDR games, but I'm glad that Dan pointed to the biggest, loudest, most expensive blockbuster of the year and said it felt like wasting time. I've definitely been fed up with Rockstar games since about 2010, and I was thinking people who work at games websites might be immune to that fatigue, so it's nice that they're not.

I do agree that I like Dan's snidely Wario persona, but it actually hindered his good discussion points in this cast and seemed to annoy Brad a bit, unfortunately.

 

I think Brad's point that "The game didn't get worse, what you want has changed!" is a great point and I'd guess he's probably right. RDR2 gave Dan a chance to put the controller down and re-calibrate what he ACTUALLY WANTS out of anticipated games. I would've appreciated the conversation staying there for a bit, because I definitely want very different things than the GTAs, Far Crys and Assassin's Creeds of yesteryear.

 

I wish the whole staff would've had the same revelation, but hey some people do wanna be cowboys and I can't fault em for that.

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7 hours ago, I_smell said:

I think Brad's point that "The game didn't get worse, what you want has changed!" is a great point and I'd guess he's probably right. RDR2 gave Dan a chance to put the controller down and re-calibrate what he ACTUALLY WANTS out of anticipated games. I would've appreciated the conversation staying there for a bit, because I definitely want very different things than the GTAs, Far Crys and Assassin's Creeds of yesteryear.

 

Beastcast listeners correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't Dan replay RDR just before RDR2 in anticipation of its release? I think this is part of what the disappointment is based on.

 

And yeah, I would've loved if they focused on expectations and the open-world genre a bit more to hash out what they felt about the game.

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15 hours ago, SgtWhistlebotom said:

 

Beastcast listeners correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't Dan replay RDR just before RDR2 in anticipation of its release? I think this is part of what the disappointment is based on.

 

I believe this was the case.  Either him or Abby.

 

I finally finished Most Disappointing.  I was surprised at how much I found myself agreeing with Dan (that just leaves a bad taste in my mouth).  I haven't played RDR2 and never plan to but I feel like I'd share his annoyances.  I'm rather like Jeff in that I don't have any fondness for RDR but having seen enough Rockstar gameplay I think Dan's got some good points.  I thought Brad was very reasonable at first but he definitely started to dig his heels in too much at the end (Alex as well to a degree), especially considering Dan managed to turn several people over to his side.  I totally agree with Jeff's sentiment that it made for a much more interesting discussion than if everyone just agreed from the start.  Look at the complete lack of discussion for Sea of Thieves.  Everyone pretty much agreed it was the winner from the beginning so it wasn't talked about at all.  Hearing them hash out RDR and Fallout 76 was way more entertaining.

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Good point about Sea of Thieves - as someone that actually enjoyed that game, it was sad to see it dismissed.

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