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- I can understand the frustration some folks have with Patrick Klepek. He's awful...internetty, for lack of a better word: he single-mindedly champions the types of games that are internet darlings (your Fire Emblem: Awakenings, your Earthbounds, your Virtue's Last Rewards) and is quick to blame whatever calamity is befalling the industry this week on its failure to focus all its attention on those titles and those titles alone. It's difficult to integrate this sort of individual into a productive conversation. He spun out of the Bombcast into a lot of solo stuff, and I think that's more his milieu. He does cover games that don't usually attract attention from the other Giant Bomb staff members, so he has a place, but I don't think it's on the Bombcast.
(Bonus problem that's not his fault: He does have good points to make in group discussions on occasion, but whenever he launches into them, Jeff Gerstmann shuts him down.)
- Dan Ryckert is like that apocryphal friend from high school or college who ten years down the road at the reunion still has stories about doing all the crazy & dangerous stuff involving alcohol and stupid stunts his crowd did when they were teenagers, except he's still doing it now, and at first it's kind of funny, but after a while, you start to have genuine concern for him. I stopped watching Game Informer's playthrough of the bizarrely stilted survival horror title Overblood because he was finding things funny that were, to me, really kind of offensive (really egregious fat jokes etc.), and while I understand now that he's a good guy at heart who doesn't mean anything and doesn't really know any better...it's kind of time for him to know better by now. I do share other people's marvel at how he's kept himself alive for three decades.
- That said, Ryckert is very charming and, on occasion, sharp. (He's so sharp in certain contexts that it makes his complete lapses elsewhere even more inexplicable.)
- I understand Vinny Caravella had to leave the main podcast for family reasons, but I miss his genial, sideways style of humor. I'm glad he still has a steady output of videos, though. I was initially skeptical about him teaming up with Alex Navarro for Quick Looks, but Navarro seems to be an excellent straight man for him.
- I can really see the influence Giant Bomb has on the Let's Play community & current videogame fandom on the whole. Keith & Kyle of the increasingly passive-aggressive Silent Hill LPs are practically trying to run Giant Bomb Boston, with the chiptune intros/outros for their podcasts and their cribbing from Gerstmann's odd opinions on, say, Yoshi's Island or the Genesis soundchip as gospel, or at least conventional wisdom, and the whole "hey our listeners should send us free stuff" thing. Which - getting away from Keith & Kyle for a minute - is really inexcusable for Giant Bomb, considering that they make enough to live in the San Francisco area. That's more than can be said for 99% of their audience.
- I didn't think that there were actual people who were mad at Nintendo for "betraying the core fanbase," but I was listening to a Bombcast made shortly after the Wii U launch, and holy Jesus. I know that it's a tired and usually ridiculous accusation that game reviewers & writers are just looking to hate certain games/consoles/companies for personal reasons, but man, oh, man, did the group have it out for Nintendo for their huge, horrible betrayal of daring to attempt to expand their customer base with the Wii. It was surprisingly juvenile in a "console war on the GameFAQs forums" way.
- I don't listen to any Giant Bomb shows that have guests ever since I watched this video that was ostensibly about Caravella attempting to play through Simon's Quest but was taken over by this discount James Spader fellow who used his airtime to shill aggressively for his company's Kickstarter. (His company, incidentally, was the same one that made gazillions off of Rock Band, which must be one of the companies least in need of Kickstarting ever.) I do think that Giant Bomb gets a little too cozy with the PR people and executives from various game companies; I'm not saying they're intentionally compromised, but I do think they on occasion let their guests steer the proceedings too much to their own agendas just by dint of their being friends. Judging from the comments (always a dangerous venture, I know), many people in the audience don't seem to know that they're being marketed to, greeting the PR guests like they're old friends, and while, yeah, the PR guys can be entertaining (if near-always obnoxious), you gotta remember that they are here to sell you stuff. The audience follows Giant Bomb's lead so religiously on these matters that I wish the guys were a little more prudent here.
That said: the Bombcast is indispensible on long drives, one of the best resources for sensible talk about gaming from people who aren't single-mindedly obsessed with gaming and bring a broader perspective to the conversation, and while everyone's linked it by now, this is still pretty great.
.
(Bonus problem that's not his fault: He does have good points to make in group discussions on occasion, but whenever he launches into them, Jeff Gerstmann shuts him down.)
- Dan Ryckert is like that apocryphal friend from high school or college who ten years down the road at the reunion still has stories about doing all the crazy & dangerous stuff involving alcohol and stupid stunts his crowd did when they were teenagers, except he's still doing it now, and at first it's kind of funny, but after a while, you start to have genuine concern for him. I stopped watching Game Informer's playthrough of the bizarrely stilted survival horror title Overblood because he was finding things funny that were, to me, really kind of offensive (really egregious fat jokes etc.), and while I understand now that he's a good guy at heart who doesn't mean anything and doesn't really know any better...it's kind of time for him to know better by now. I do share other people's marvel at how he's kept himself alive for three decades.
- That said, Ryckert is very charming and, on occasion, sharp. (He's so sharp in certain contexts that it makes his complete lapses elsewhere even more inexplicable.)
- I understand Vinny Caravella had to leave the main podcast for family reasons, but I miss his genial, sideways style of humor. I'm glad he still has a steady output of videos, though. I was initially skeptical about him teaming up with Alex Navarro for Quick Looks, but Navarro seems to be an excellent straight man for him.
- I can really see the influence Giant Bomb has on the Let's Play community & current videogame fandom on the whole. Keith & Kyle of the increasingly passive-aggressive Silent Hill LPs are practically trying to run Giant Bomb Boston, with the chiptune intros/outros for their podcasts and their cribbing from Gerstmann's odd opinions on, say, Yoshi's Island or the Genesis soundchip as gospel, or at least conventional wisdom, and the whole "hey our listeners should send us free stuff" thing. Which - getting away from Keith & Kyle for a minute - is really inexcusable for Giant Bomb, considering that they make enough to live in the San Francisco area. That's more than can be said for 99% of their audience.
- I didn't think that there were actual people who were mad at Nintendo for "betraying the core fanbase," but I was listening to a Bombcast made shortly after the Wii U launch, and holy Jesus. I know that it's a tired and usually ridiculous accusation that game reviewers & writers are just looking to hate certain games/consoles/companies for personal reasons, but man, oh, man, did the group have it out for Nintendo for their huge, horrible betrayal of daring to attempt to expand their customer base with the Wii. It was surprisingly juvenile in a "console war on the GameFAQs forums" way.
- I don't listen to any Giant Bomb shows that have guests ever since I watched this video that was ostensibly about Caravella attempting to play through Simon's Quest but was taken over by this discount James Spader fellow who used his airtime to shill aggressively for his company's Kickstarter. (His company, incidentally, was the same one that made gazillions off of Rock Band, which must be one of the companies least in need of Kickstarting ever.) I do think that Giant Bomb gets a little too cozy with the PR people and executives from various game companies; I'm not saying they're intentionally compromised, but I do think they on occasion let their guests steer the proceedings too much to their own agendas just by dint of their being friends. Judging from the comments (always a dangerous venture, I know), many people in the audience don't seem to know that they're being marketed to, greeting the PR guests like they're old friends, and while, yeah, the PR guys can be entertaining (if near-always obnoxious), you gotta remember that they are here to sell you stuff. The audience follows Giant Bomb's lead so religiously on these matters that I wish the guys were a little more prudent here.
That said: the Bombcast is indispensible on long drives, one of the best resources for sensible talk about gaming from people who aren't single-mindedly obsessed with gaming and bring a broader perspective to the conversation, and while everyone's linked it by now, this is still pretty great.
.
