In the first Bombcast of 2013, Jeff mentioned watching some of British comedian Chris Morris' Jam , which was based on Morris' original radio show Blue Jam . I love Blue Jam, and I thought it would be something special to dig up for our fiftieth episode. Here's the blurb: Blue Jam is a nightmare that seems to have no end. The series was the brainchild of subversive British comedian Chris Morris...
Hey! It's time for another Bombcast best-of. Here's the blurb: The Giant Bombcast is a gaming podcast, but the games aren't really important. Jeff and Ryan lament the state of franchise pizza restaurants in Petaluma. Vinny develops an interest in ham radio and becomes a father. Brad needs a new bed. Patrick does jukebox trolling at a bar. Above all that, Jeff tunes into clandestine radio broadc...
Hey friends—we here at This Year , where we produce best-ofs for podcasts like the Giant Bombcast , Idle Thumbs , and other fine programs, think you might enjoy this best-of for Loveline, in which we have selected the best calls from July, August, and September 2001. Loveline is a sexual health and relationship advice show that's been on air since 1983. It's always been hosted by Dr. Drew, but...
So, we've been working on the best-ofs for the Bombcast archive for most of this year , and now we've finally caught up! This best-of for the show's 2010 year fills in the gap, so now we've essentially done a complete Bombcast highlight reel. For those who don't know or haven't heard any of our stuff before, we basically produce best-of highlight shows for podcasts/radio shows. We've done 1UP Y...
It's another This Year release! This time it's for the last year of GFW Radio. GFW Radio was as brilliant as ever in its final days. The show persisted despite major upheaval at the 1UP offices, including the cancellation of the Games for Windows Magazine, the publication with which GFW Radio was ostensibly linked. But rather than dither at the changes about them, the cast continued to provide...
It's another This Year release! This time we're covering a comedy show, The Penn Jillette Radio Show. You probably know Penn Jillette from Penn & Teller and from the duo's superb television series Bullshit! (The Mother Teresa episode is my favorite.) Penn also hosted a radio show from his house from January 2006 to March 2007. It was a great show—it's now been rebooted as Penn's Sunday School —...
We at This Year produce podcast best-ofs. We cover a lot of different podcast genres, and one of those genres is gaming podcasts. And we return today to the Giant Bombcast. Previously we've done best-ofs for the 2008 and 2011 year of the Bombcast, and this best-of slots right in between those. Ryan, Jeff, Vinny and Brad have stories to tell as they sample Swedish candy and Canadian sodas. Jeff...
We at This Year produce podcast best-ofs. We cover a lot of different podcast genres; I guess we're best known here for our best-ofs of gaming podcasts like the Giant Bombcast and GFW Radio and Idle Thumbs, and recently GameSpot's The HotSpot with the gang before they founded Giant Bomb , but we also cover a lot of comedy podcasts, as well as science shows and culture and politics and all that...
This was supposed to be out next month, but in light of recent events we thought we'd push it out early. You may recall earlier this month we opened up voting for listeners to choose their favorite HotSpot moments -- The HotSpot, of course, a gaming podcast featuring some of our GameSpot/Giant Bomb favorites, including Ryan, Vinny, Jeff, Brad, Carrie, Rich, Bob, and Alex. It ran from 2005 to 20...
Time for another This Year! We'll continue with one of our most popular runs, GFW Radio. No other gaming podcast managed to balance humor and aimless banter with serious discussion about the state of the industry and the state of the games press as well as GFW Radio did. Ostensibly a show about computer games, GFW Radio never pigeonholed itself in that niche, instead becoming a program that flo...
UPDATE: Voting is now closed. Thanks to everyone who voted. The show will be released in April. Last year we asked you to vote for your top forty 1UP Yours moments . Now we're turning to another marquee gaming podcast—The HotSpot, specifically for the period between '05 and '07. I posted about this a month or so ago . We've opened the voting now, and it'll close in a week, on the 7th of March....
Two weeks ago we covered the debut year of the Giant Bombcast . We generally try to mix up genres so that there isn't too much focus on gaming shows or on comedy shows or on culture shows. As it happens we're turning now to comedy to cover January, February, and March in the life of Loveline from the year 2001. Some of you guys might remember the old Loveline, when it was hosted by Adam Carolla...
A month ago we covered the 2011 Bombcast annal, and it seems appropriate to go back to where it all started. Here, then, are the very best moments from the 2008 Bombcasts. It actually started out that year as the Arrow Pointing Down podcast, and we begin with that before transitioning into the format that is beloved to so many of us today. This highlights show is just over three hours long. Dow...
We at the This Year Collection podcast museum are interested in putting together a Top 40 The HotSpot moments voted on by you, the fans of that podcast. As you may recall, early last year we released best-of compilations for the 2005 , 2006 , and 2007 years of The HotSpot, and soon we'd like you to vote on your favorite moments in sequential order. (Those who have stuck with us for some time wi...
Idle Thumbs! There's talk that it was a pretty good podcast. We at This Year produce best-of shows for the greatest podcasts out there, and it was time to cover this fine gaming podcast. Here's a link to our RSS feed , our original blog post , and a direct link to the MP3 file (6 hours/144MB) . Idle Thumbs casts its pod into your face with hilarious talk about video gaming. Of Idle Thumbs, IGN....
After tackling best-ofs for 1UP Yours, it's time to take on another 1UP Network podcast -- GFW Radio. I think we largely take it as self-evident that GFW Radio is one of the greatest podcasts produced, regardless of genre, and certainly one of the best gaming podcasts. Here's Jeff Green, Shawn Elliott, Darren Gladstone, and Ryan Scott in all their glory. This show is a little bit shorter than o...
We're back. It's fitting that our tenth episode puts the cap on the 1UP Yours saga. This Year has previously made best-of shows for the 2006 and 2007 years of 1UP Yours. Now it's time for the final year. Here's Garnett Lee. Here's Shane Bettenhausen. Here's Shawn Elliott, John Davison, Andrew Pfister, and Bryan Intihar. Here's the entire 1UP network with its best and brightest. Here's, for many...
We be back, this time with more Adam Carolla. I almost died laughing getting this episode out, which would have been unpleasant. Fortunately, of course, it didn't happen. And here we are. This one is seventeen hours long, which is somewhat lengthy, but totally worth it. Why? Well, this episode contains perhaps the best April Fools prank of all time. I don't want to spoil it, and I won't, but I...
It’s time for another ride on the train! (To steal a familiar allegory.) This time we’re touching on an awesome podcast that may or may not be familiar to Giant Bomb users. If not, it’s an awesome chance to introduce these guys to you. Too Beautiful to Live is an extremely popular comedy show out of Seattle. It’s frequently compared to Seinfeld, mostly because it touches on topics that have to...
This Year is back and packing a huge, huge gift. Our previous gaming podcast recaps – The HotSpot 2005 , 2006 , and 2007 , and 1UP Yours 2006 – have topped well over 2,000 downloads each. The recaps for The Adam Carolla Show – January and February 2006 – haven’t done too shabbily either. But of all those, our episode for 1UP Yours was far and away the most popular. It’s hardly a chore to surmis...
It's time for another podcast recap, and a little departure from gaming after our latest recaps for 1UP Yours and The HotSpot . I was happy to see that many listeners picked up The Adam Carolla Show after our release for the first month . We got a ton of feedback along the lines of, 'I didn't know about Adam before this, thank you for putting this together.' Very happy to see that, as I persona...
We've hit the first year of The HotSpot , the second year of The HotSpot , as well as the first year of 1UP Yours and the first month of The Adam Carolla Show . Now it's time to visit the third year of The HotSpot, and the last year featuring Jeff Gerstmann, Rich Gallup, and Ryan, Alex, and Vinny at GameSpot. I've always found it difficult to pick between the three years of The HotSpot, but if...
We're back with a non-gaming recap! You may know us from our recaps of The HotSpot (2005) , The HotSpot (2006) , and 1UP Yours (2006) . This time we're covering the first month of the original Adam Carolla Show, which began in 2006 as a morning radio show. I guess most people associate morning radio with not entertaining commentators and idiotic stunts and not funny bits, but Adam Carolla's sho...
Many of you -- over 600 individuals, to be exact -- have heard the two previous recaps I've done, of The HotSpot (2005) and The HotSpot (2006) , the latter a stifling eight hours long. Now we're back, again, with the first year of 1UP Yours. 1UP Yours stars many, many famous faces we adore today. It provided solid competition to The HotSpot, and while it may not have led the pack on comedy, it...
Some of you may recall a recap/highlights episode we did for the debut year of The HotSpot (2005). In case you missed out, the Giant Bomb thread is here , and the download can be found here . We're back for the year of 2006 now! Except where as the 2005 episode was 2.5 hours long, this one is over eight hours long. That's a big podcast, and it's more than enough Rich/Bob/Jeff/Carrie/Alex/Brad g...
I have not completed Tomb Raider: Underworld. I grew too frustrated with it. I was not having a good time. Moreover, there was one major glitch I encountered that broke the game for me. Naturally, this experience has colored any opinion I have about the game. If you do not think it is right for someone to write about or review a game they have not completed, then you should not read the followi...
I did not finish V.I.P. It’s on the Game Boy Advance. It’s a very bad game. It’s slow, it has terrible control, and, quite frankly, it’s not worth my time. Take from that what you will, dear reader, because I know that some do not like it when a person talks critically about games that he has not completed. For what it’s worth, though, I think I’ve experienced enough in order to be able to talk...
There is a subset of video games that are rarely played and ignored one or two years after their release. These games have no notable story, and are frequently iterated upon. Sports games and racing games lead this subset. Few would ignore the release of Gran Turismo 5, favoring to go back and play Gran Turismo 2. There’s no notable reason to do so, after all: Polyphony Digital is essentially r...
As it's not feasible to dump a list of these at the bottom of each new post, here's an index of all the games I've blogged about so far. Tomb Raider: Underworld - I am surprised at how broken this game is (09-14-2010) V.I.P. - This is one of the worst games I have ever played in my life (09-11-2010) Need for Speed Underground 2 - It came out in 2004, and it's one of the best racing games ever m...
I finished Black in just under four hours. All in all, this does not serve as a fair commentary on the game’s length. What I feel I must admit is that I have previously cleared Black many, many times -- not so many as to be uncountable, but enough times to where I’ve stopped bothering counting. I know enemy patterns and I know all the surprises. You can glean from this that I am not the most im...
I cannot criticize old games in a vacuum. That is, I cannot play a game from five, ten, fifteen, twenty, or twenty-five years ago without looking at it from a modern perspective. When writing a summary of my thoughts on any given game, then, I am judging the game from a modern standpoint: how does this game hold up today, and is it playable today? Has it aged terribly, or has it aged well? I ha...
There are some games that are just bad. There are some games that are offensive. There are some games that should have been good, but disappoint because something went terribly, terribly wrong during the proceedings. Pursuit Force: Extreme Justice is all of those three things. You shouldn’t buy Extreme Justice and you shouldn’t play Extreme Justice, because it’s a waste of your time and it’s a...
Here is a list of games I will be playing (for my quasi-review/breakdown thing that I do) in the immediate future. I've refrained from putting too many sequels on there. For example, I intend to play most of the Castlevania games, but I'll start with Circle of the Moon because it's one of my favorites. (According to the internet I have bad taste in Castlevania games. Nevertheless.) There are ma...
When playing through Half-Life 2: Episode One in the past I had always perceived it as a game that is mostly an extension of Half-Life 2. That’s not to say that it’s bad and that’s not to say that it’s good; rather, instead of a shift up or a shift down, it’s a shift sideways. After playing through it once more I feel justified in holding that view. Episode One is in a very strange realm for me...
Here's a list of things that I think are pretty good. The list will be updated on a daily basis. Some of the following aren't on Giant Bomb, otherwise I would have made a Giant Bomb list. Note that I don't mean anything by the numerical order; the numbers are arbitrary. Uncharted: Drake's Fortune Crystal Pepsi Half-Life 2 USB flash drives where were you on the night that your conscience caught...
Make this hella blog post hella less daunting and download the magazine-style PDF (1.6MB) I'm setting out on a journey to play through some hella old games (five years old or more) and see how they hold up. Do they hold up at all? Are they still worth playing? This is a very condensed version of the PDF, which you can find here . I ran a little long this week. We' ll keep it to a thousand words...
Weekend Confirmed 06-25-2010 (5/5) Garnett Lee (H), Brian Leahy, Jeff Cannata 2:11:14 One thing is clear after listening to Shacknews’ comparatively “humble” coverage of E3 -- simply put; in terms of pure analysis, Garnett Lee’s team does the best job. If one was looking for an accurate, intelligent, adroit breakdown of E3 2010 it would be wrong to not point at Weekend Confirmed’s two episodes,...
Are sequels necessary?
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It's a common thing, unfortunately - our expectations are built up and then games just don't meet up to them.
Click on the above "MGS as FPS" banner to access all previous MGS as FPS posts. Session #2 saw me playing more of the game, with weapons that could be customized and would be more friendly to the first-person shooter experience. I'll be carrying out a "liveblog" of sorts on my Twitter account. You can find me at @mgscholar . All MGS as FPS-related tweets will be hashtagged #mgsasfps. Click here...
Just a quick word before the blog entry proper: I'm undergoing an initiative to play through the entirety of Metal Gear Solid 4 as a first-person shooter - not because it was meant to be played that way, but because it is in fact possible to do so. (Or I assume it will be - perhaps I'll discover differently as I progress further through the game.) Because, after all, who needs Modern Warfare 2...
In some ways, Metal Gear Solid 4 was the last straw for me when it comes to story in games. I can pinpoint exactly when I stopped caring about the story in the game. It was in the colnclusive cutscene of Act 3 - a half hour ordeal, five minutes of which consists of soldiers rolling up and readying their firearms, and another five minutes which consists of Big Mama deciding whether or not to thr...
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I think a multi-platform Metal Gear is an excellent idea. But apparently there are some people who do not. Here's what they think in response to the latest episode of the Kojima Productions Report podcast . I particularly like the "XBOX360 is a dead console!!!". Oh, and the guy that wrote a poem. Word. 1 / SOLD BY MICROSOFT $$$ / June 2, 2009 3:59 AM TRAITORS TRAITORS TRAITORS TRAITORS TRAITORS...
On the heels of the teaser sites and advertisements published by Konami and Kojima Productions comes another rumor out of a Twitter account: apparently, Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots will be coming to the XBOX360 in the means of a port named "Metal Gear Solid 4 + Oxide" (or some derivative of that). The 'tip' comes from a Twitter account by the name of Game Fork , an account on which...
November 24, 2009. That is a day that every Metal Gear fan will mark down in their diaries for years to come. For that is the day that Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty , that great game we all love, and the best game in the Metal Gear series, will be destroyed forever. Former James Bond novelist Raymond Benson novelized the first Metal Gear Solid . It was of average quality. The writing was...
On the premiere episode of 1UP.com's new flagship podcast, the age old debate has been revived again: will Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots be ported to the XBOX 360? The answer: nobody cares. But for the sake of discussion, here's an excerpt. SAM KENNEDY: ...don't you think Metal Gear Solid 4 is going to come out for 360 at some point? JOHN DAVISION: Yeah. Of course. SAM KENNEDY: They’...