2023: Day 1

"How's the running around?" Was Vinny in the Nier Automata Quick Look originally. So good.

some good picks on here even if there was a weirdly mellow vibe to the cuts

I saw it mentioned in the Youtube comments for today's show of all places someone mention "Lae'zel erasure" regarding best debut and I 100% agree. As much as I think Astarion and Karlach both are fantastic characters, Lae'zel is the most interesting character in Baldur's Gate 3 and is an incredibly well-written character if looked at from an academic point of view rather than a meme-ish way like they did. She has potential character growth that very few characters in games do and transforms one of several quite different ways throughout the game depending on what choices you make.

Without getting into any spoilers beyond the first hour or two of the game, basically early on if you talk to Lae'zel it's revealed that she's a product of and fiercely loyal to an extremely insular militaristic totalitarian dictatorship regime that imposes strict control of information and treats everything the leader says as law. In broad strokes, her story explores the implications of someone being removed from that environment and ending up somewhere else completely different. I'm probably underselling it but it's a very well done story. It's a side story that's better than the main plot of many games.

@ben_h: yeah i kinda agree , she really was a great character , if your just friends ignoring the romance angle i think she had the biggest growth vs astarion and shadowhearts stories are abuse ,manipulation, and trama and overcoming those depending on routes you take ... they were my main party throughout the game , so i can't speak too much to everyone else .

They didn't bring up Estevez in the AW character discussion, but may have been a conflict of interest

Love listening to you guys, and am really looking forward to this series of episodes, and for this reason I'm asking please please please no spoilers for the rest of these... there are sooooo many games I've got on my backlog, listening to this so far I've had the "Rusty" moment in Armored Core 6 spoiled, and then a bit later when talking about Alan Wake 2 someone (Dan?) said that there have always been spoilers in the GOTY discussions, which I can kinda understand, but you guys manage to talk about games all year round without spoiling them. Figure I'm not the only one who hasn't played every great game that's come out this year, am sure a lot of people won't want to be making the choice of not listening to this for fear of having stuff spoiled.

Wonder if Dan knows that Solid Snake and Iroquois Plisken are the same guy...

@alfmouse: I mean, it's true that GOTY talks always had spoilers. It's how they're able to make full discussions behind their thoughts on a game so that their case can be made as to why it should be considered for the top 10 and such.

@alfmouse: game of the year always has spoilers, don’t watch if you want to avoid spoilers or skip sections as necessary. At least they didn’t say Silk was their new favorite character but they could’ve 🤷🏻‍♀️

There's an entire month left in the year, this is earrrrly :/

Very much looking forward to these, though I'll probably hold them for Christmas week when I'm on holiday (and have had the chance to finish more of these games).

Would be really helpful to have time codes for this stuff, wasn't logged in when I played it last time I guess (would also just really appreciate time codes in podcast show notes)

Hot Take: I don't like the movement in Spider Man. It's really good, but because it's so good, whenever it doesn't work the way I want it to, it's all that more frustrating.

Also, not hot take: shoving is best.