My name is Steven Santana, 30, Las Vegas. Icon inspired by Lemony Snicket
Dirty Laundry: Easy Allies and Last Stand Media
What was originally supposed to be breaking down the recent online drama between Easy Allies and Last Stand Media has devolved into me scouring Twitter and forums to try and nail down what it is that makes Colin Moriarty such a lightning rod for arguments online.
Originally I was attracted to this recent collaboration due to being a former fan of both Easy Allies, made up of former staff of the website GameTrailers, and Colin Moriarty, from his Podcast Beyond and early Kinda Funny days. I use the term former more strongly in regards to Colin as while I was a fan for a long time I eventually grew tired of his shit. I had already begun to wobble on my commitment to Kinda Funny by March 2017, the same month he made his infamous tweet that led to his ousting at the company, was also the release of The Legend of Zelda: The Breath of the Wild. In an episode of the Gamescast the quality of the game and games media’s response to it became a subject and Colin had some really out there takes that I detailed in a post at the time. He was shortly afterwards pushed out and started his own Patreon and rarely appeared on my feed mainly when people were dunking on whatever opinion got traction and passed around in screenshots or quote-tweets.
This most recent drama was due to a guest spot on a recent Easy Allies podcast called Frame Trap with guest Dustin Furman of Last Stand Media. The episode is business as usual with nothing outlandish going on. The next day Easy Allies community manager Gabby Montoute posts on the Easy Allies discord this message,
Hi guys, just wanted to quickly address the latest episode of Frame Trap. To first explain our thought process: Brad & Dustin are friends and Dustin is a fan of ours, so Brad wanted to have him on FrameTrap. We unfortunately did not think it through beyond that & that is entirely our fault. Please understand, Brad has known and trusted Dustin for many years, but we hear your concerns and will take more time to discuss & vet new guests before bringing them on. We sincerely apologize for any and all drama this has caused. Thank you so much for understanding and please feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions or comments!
This seemingly was posted due to individuals reaching out to members of Easy Allies to voice their displeasure that they would associate with someone from Last Stand Media, namely due to its ownership by Colin. A follow up was added afterwards
Guys, read the apology before you jump to any conclusions. No one is apologizing for being friends with Dustin, but there is unfortunately some inherent messiness (to put it lightly) when it comes to LSM that we would rather avoid than participate in. It was a mistake, but let’s all please be mature about this. If you want to discuss it again, feel free to message me, but any bad faith conversation about it in this Discord is over.
Additionally Daniel Bloodworth would pin his comment on the episode on YouTube
I want to offer my deepest apologies to everyone for my failures regarding this week’s Frame Trap and its aftermath. I tried to address some people’s questions in our Discord about bringing Dustin Furman onto Frame Trap, and unintentionally made Brad and Dustin look bad in the process. I failed to properly account for potential reactions, and I failed by rushing out a statement which has harmed one of our guests and biggest fans. There are few things that hurt me as deeply as knowing that I’ve hurt others. And it’s my own mistakes that have led to this absolute turmoil for Dustin, Brad, Gabby, our staff, and our community. This is my responsibility, and I’m sorry. -Daniel Bloodworth
That same day Washington Post reporter and Last Stand Media contributor Gene Park would join the ResetEra thread for Easy Allies defending the reputation of Last Stand Media.
I really want to push back on the idea that LSM, a company I contribute to, is any kind of political show or holds any kind of political or ideological stance. It does not and it is not. My employer, The Washington Post, would not have greenlit my involvement if Last Stand Media was in any way a show about strong political viewpoints. The leadership vetted it. It simply isn’t. Social issues are rarely discussed, and if they are, they’re addressed with some nuance, and Colin has always been very careful in stating his own inherent bias and ignorance on certain issues. However lightly social or political issues are addressed, it is a centrist approach, which is largely aligned with how mainstream media orgs like The Post operates. Literally all the content is about games, the business of games, the culture of games. I would not have gotten involved if that was not the case. But it is. It’s just a gaming media platform. To say otherwise is simply inaccurate and based on hearsay and memes.
Gene’s posts eventually led to a (1) month ban due to, “Dismissive commentary around banned source and transphobia.” Last Stand Media would post on October 23 a tweet stating, ““We’ll see about that.” with a photo where a sign states, “Warning Poaching is Strictly Forbidden. Violators will be prosecuted.” stirring speculation on its meaning in regards to the situation between themselves and Easy Allies, namely on if Bradley Ellis would be jumping ship from Easy Allies to Last Stand Media as a result. That same day Last Stand Media would upload the episode Is the Skinsuit Complete? | Sacred Symbols, Episode 277 with timestamp “0:52:24 - The Easy Allies Situation.” During this segment Colin goes off on Easy Allies and his prior conversations with Brandon Jones which he misinterprets as ending by being thrown under the bus. Brandon Jones’ video and posts online at the time were non-committal and bore no condemnation or judgment towards Colin and were simply him becoming wary of the reputation Colin had accrued for himself online. Colin is just so thin-skinned that any pause to contemplate whether there is merit behind why a portion of your audience is saying, “maybe don’t work with this guy,” is equivalent to “being thrown under the bus.” I also find it humorous that Colin felt the need to send a strongly worded email about how the two were done and would never work together again.
Easy Allies should have handled the situation better. To suddenly denounce the guest you had on shows that no vetting was done beforehand, or the word of Bradley Ellis was held as verification enough. If the latter, to suddenly turn becomes a critique of Brad’s judgment. All of their wording has been vague-posting, meaning you leave everything to speculation and the matter would have been passed over in a short time had it just remained unaddressed. Let the segments of your audience that find Dustin’s guest appearance vilifying to move on, to peter back and forth between condemnation and apologizing just makes into the mess it is today. According to Dustin he is no longer welcome on Easy Allies’ channel and Brad is not allowed to go on Last Stand Media content going forward.
You can’t please anyone, and Easy Allies needs to be smarter about who they are aiming to please. It is often said to ignore a vocal minority, and it might have ended up being the best course of action for Easy Allies. Listening to Brandon’s old Cup of Jones, the one in which he “throws Colin under the bus”, it is clearly apparent that he is desperate to appease all the voices that are coming through the channel’s various platforms: Twitter, their forums, comments, and emails. Appeasing one group means angering a separate one, and teeter-tottering back and forth between them all will eventually shake all the leaves off your tree, namely your Patreon subscriber base. Colin echoes, more harshly, the attitude that dominated the former Easy Allies subreddit in that the company is failing and on a downward spiral that can’t be sustained, and I doubt this recent controversy has helped at all as the terminally online are the ones more likely to be giving you money on Patreon than the casual observer on YouTube who will likely never follow Dustin to his home channel and watch Colin’s rant.
Combing through Colin’s tweets (something I don’t recommend but the fruits of which are listed on my timeline at the bottom of this post) is a confirmation that not much has changed. He has always loved the term “echochamber” and frequently lacks the self awareness that this is what he cultivates for himself. Colin consistently states he loves being challenged and disagreed with but always antagonistically responds to criticism and frequently only engages with the most offensive and weakest responses to his stances on Twitter. His favorite is to pick a random Twitter user who makes claims of racism, sexism, transphobia, etc towards him and then asks for the specific instances and says he’s made plenty of pro-[social issue here] arguments in videos online.
He loves to bring on people such as Filip Miucin, Vince Ingenito, and Kara Lynne not so much as to do any sort of questioning but instead to just let them talk unopposed. Miucin plagiarized throughout his career and is met with weak opposition to his claims. Ingenito who was the subject of a sexual harassment investigation within IGN that was so mishandled it led to the entire staff walking out in protest when it was revealed but was unjustly “excommunicated” by the industry. Colin would write in June 2023 about Vince, “He has one of the greatest critical minds in the history of games media and it’s unfair that audiences have been robbed of him for so long. I’m proud that Last Stand is giving him a place to speak. He’ll return.” Kara Lynne who was fired from Limited Run Games after a campaign by an admitted internet bully discovered a tweet by Lynne pushing forward the myth that perverts would benefit more from transgender bathroom laws than anyone else. This is a problem I have with the same softball journalism employed by the bane of Colin’s existence, games media. He literally opens the episode with Miucin by saying, “You don’t hear very much from me. I’ll let Filip speak for himself, tell his story to you, and take from it what you will.” Where is the pushback? Where is the spine to confront someone over lies and instead just let them say their side with no inspection? It drives me crazy. People hail him as a “real journalist” because he brings people on and “just lets them speak.” as if that’s journalism. This is the same man who recommended the book Elements of Journalism by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel as essential reading for anyone wanting to do journalism but seemingly has not learned any of the lessons taught within its text. No journalist would let an interview subject just put forward their narrative with no attempt at verification or skepticism questioning.
Colin really hates games media, not for the reasons I criticize games media, but instead seemingly just because they’re all out to get him, save for the individuals who still engage with him online, they’re okay. Waypoint writes about how Horizon Zero Dawn devs responded to accusations of appropriating imagery and cultural elements from native american tribes and he calls it outrage culture. Kotaku, Polygon, and Waypoint “pedal almost entirely in outrage.” Games media’s real diversity problem isn’t in the color of your skin but instead one of ideologies. Games media is adversarial to game developers, publishers, and PR so of course those same institutions should be adversarial to games media. An article from GameSpot explaining how bra sizes work in response to people freaking out over Tifa’s bust in Final Fantasy VII Remake is mocked as why games media is dying. Games media needs to be dispassionate because they are purposefully ignoring that PAX West dropped my panel and won’t refund my fans who are now boycotting the convention in response. “Who do enthusiast outlets write for? It sure doesn’t seem like they write for any of us [the REAL gamers].” Game reviewers who play on easy mode don’t actually like video games (despite the average gamer never actually even finishing a majority of games they play).
Another obsession of Colin is to give the appearance of being a gracious host who just wants to debate people in the common interest of knowledge and progress. He tried to bait Bob Mackey into coming out to see him in person to debate about Bob’s accusations of Colin’s political leanings and actions while working at IGN. He frequently talks about how he would love to have people who disagree with him on his show, as if that would lead to anything other than two people talking at each other with Colin’s fans heralding his great victory and the opposition’s cringe loss. Most recently he responded to his friend David Jaffe, himself posting in response to Jeff Grubb screen posting a tweet of Jaffe’s and was offensive because Grubb didn’t “tag” Jaffe(?), “The types of people that do this will never, ever sit and talk to you, just like they won’t with me. They’re scared. I’d be scared to defend my positions, too, if I spent years flailing around an echochamber. Thankfully, iron sharpens iron and you and I have no such issues. <3”
As I mentioned before, Colin really loves to play the victim. He was able to leverage his Kinda Funny ousting into a very successful Patreon, one whose membership outnumbers the likes of Nextlander, NoClip, Game Makers Toolkit, Jeff Gerstmann, Kinda Funny’s individual patreons, and Retronauts (among many others you can find on the Game Biz sheet I try to keep up to date). He talks about building this successful Patreon despite “Virtually no games PR or publisher goodwill.” though also would tout in 2018 that, “They gave me God of War early, too. Don’t let the games media echochamber fool you. Every publisher I’ve approached has been more than happy to (and often eager to) work with me.” Something changed in 2019 as that same company that gave him Detroit: Become Human and God of War early would blacklist his outlet. “PlayStation has blacklisted Sacred Symbols for reasons entirely unknown, so we won’t be getting anything from them moving forward.” Probably the most perfect example of pity party Moriarty comes in this response, “Hundreds? Try thousands. [of people attacking him online] Hit pieces written about me in renowned publications [I’m unable to find anything other than the usual summary of events news stories from the time of his exit]. Thrown away by people I knew for years and treated with respect [This at least checks out from his perspective of events]. Blacklisted [only by Sony as far as his statements have shown]. Defamed and lied about. Intentionally misrepresented [This is likely just the usual twitter posting being referenced]. No. He will never experience 1% of what I did. It’s fine. I lived.” It’s quite melodramatic. Colin can cry in his dollar bills though, as he’s tweeted already, he has become much more successful than he ever was before, transforming his tears into financial compensation and playing on people’s apparent need to adulate him with praise.
Lastly, Colin made a big deal of him leaving the GOP in 2016 after Trump’s nomination, as if being a proud Republican for his lifetime prior bore no consequence simply because he was “socially liberal” during it. His words on there needing to be more diversity of ideas within games media reads as naive in terms of how leftists and liberals are as divided and argumentative amongst themselves as he believes they should be, they just lack a Republican review giving the latest Mario a 9/10. Nobody wanting to debate him nowadays is mostly due to a degradation of tolerance for people who are stymying progress, especially as we grow ever nearer to climate disaster, as the rich hoard more and more wealth as costs go up and wages stay as they are. We’re tired of this shit and don’t have the patience for those who want to present the insidious mask of thoughtful discussion between those who want us dead and those who are dying. As Austin Walker wonderfully put it in Febraury 2017, “While you encourage me to debate a brick wall, I’ll be busy trying to keep it from fucking falling on my head.”
Tracking this stuff is exhausting, and I can see why I didn’t really do much with the “Dirty Laundry” series after the first handful of episodes in 2015. There is no shortage of drama, but actually tracking down solid information takes too much time for too little reward. Colin’s fans will read these same tweets and think they’re examples of his strong convictions and character and is correct in his assertions because he’s just so smart. Those like me will find renewed annoyance at his continual whining and bad take posting while he profits and those who actually are the, “greatest critical minds in the history of games media” continue to do so part time and scrape by on Patreon. Shit sucks! Fuck him!
Colin Moriarty: wrote guides and posted them on GameFAQs throughout the 2000s, started guide writing for IGN in 2003, was hired in 2007, jumped from guide writing to editorial in 2009, left IGN to co-found Kinda Funny in January 2015, is ousted from Kinda Funny in March 2017, creates Colin’s Last Stand on Patreon that same month, January 2021 rebrands as Last Stand Media, continues to work there to this day.
December 13, 2012: Colin Moriarty “I love being challenged, I love people disagreeing with me, giving me a different view. Living in an echochamber must be a lonely existence.” [source]
June 29, 2015: Colin Moriarty “Here’s my argument: the Confederate flag is a symbol of racism created by traitors to their country. Pretty simple.” [source]
March 3, 2017: Colin Moriarty “Was his response "I wrote a game about a woman fighting robot dinosaurs, why is everything cause for faux outrage?” That’d be a good answer.” In response to a Waypoint article about the appropriation of native american imagery for the groups within Horizon Zero Dawn. [source]
March 8, 2017: Colin Moriarty “Ah. Peace and quiet. #ADayWithoutAWoman” [source] this quickly led to his departure from Kinda Funny.
September 26, 2017: Colin Moriarty “Asian Americans blow the entire White Supremacy/Racism bit to smithereens. Expect the fringe left to chase ‘em hard over the next few years. Compared to whites, Asian Americans are better educated, make more money, live in more affluent areas, and live longers. Where’s the racism?!” [source]
Also, “To reiterate: If @bobservo wants to have a productive debate, I will fly him to LA, put him up, and donate $2,000 to a charity he chooses.” [source]
October 9, 2017: Colin Moriarty “All of those people are welcome to come record an episode with me should they ever find themselves in LA. Would love to host them.” This is in response to someone on Twitter saying he should have Austin Walker, Patrick Klepek, Danielle Riendeau, Gita Jackson, and Zoe Quinn on his show [source]
November 22, 2017: Brandon Jones responds positively [source] to Colin Moriarty’s invitation [source] to be on his show, there was some pushback for and against this. [source]
November 29, 2017: Colin Moriarty “The illustrious @TrailerJones joined me for this week’s CLS: Fireside Chats! We chat about Easy Allies and Patreon, and open up about our time at GameTrailers/IGN, the good ‘ol days at Kinda Funny, and the storm surrounding this podcast happening at all. https://patreon.com/posts/15613489“ [source]
December 3, 2017: Brandon Jones “Last week my words were upsetting to some. I worried anything else I said might make things worse. I’ve been doing a lot of reading and thinking lately, but not a lot of talking, and that’s rightfully frustrated people I care about in the EZA community. ⅛” [source]
December 5, 2017: Brandon Jones posts a Cup of Jones on Easy Allies patreon, some bit of it includes comments on Colin’s situation. [Colin later cites this as an example of not liking Brandon]
April 11, 2018: Colin Moriarty “Games media has a diversity problem, but it’s not the one ably written about here. Can you name a single conservative or libertarian writer working at any mainstream games outlet? Just one. I’d like diversity of thought and ideas. Skin deep is just that. https://eurogamer.net/articles/2018-04-11-why-the-games-media-has-a-diversity-problem-this-website-especially. I love and respect IGN for a lot of reasons, but this reason may be paramount: When they brought me on as a freelancer in 2002 (and full time in 2007), they knew damn well I was a passionate, political conservative, and they embraced it. They never tried to shut me up, ever. I’d love to see some of these outlets hire a Trump voter. Hire an evangelical. Hire a libertarian. Hire a social conservative. These people also play and love games. Millions of them. We’re so focused on gender and skin color that we’ve forgotten about, y'know… the mind.” [source]
November 8, 2018: Colin Moriarty “My favorite game of 2018 is STILL Detroit: Become Human. I bid you good day.” [source]
May 10, 2019: Colin Moriarty “I said it during Kingdom Come: Deliverance, and I’ll say it again: Game devs, publishers, and PR have nothing to lose by being adversarial to a games media that is perpetually adversarial to them. Right or wrong, it’s certainly tactically sound.” [source]
May 24, 2019: Colin Moriarty “There’s no doubt that YouTube is an Outrage Fest, but websites like Kotaku, Polygon, and Waypoint pedal almost entirely in outrage. No one would care about Kotaku (at all) if not for Jason S. It’s safer to call out the YouTubers destroying his media circle than honestly assess.” [source]
June 21, 2019: Colin Moriarty “It’s almost impossible to believe that old guard games media is dying. [photo of a GameSpot article ‘We Need to Talk About How Bra Sizes Work’” [source]
August 1, 2019: Colin’s Last Stand posts: Introducing CLS’ First Full-Time Employee: Dustin Furman [source]
August 3, 2019: Colin Moriarty “The lack of coverage is proof, above all else, that games media isn’t dispassionate. If you don’t have a dispassionate media, why even have a media at all? The lack of coverage doesn’t hurt Chris and I. It hurts our ripped-off fans, who the media also doesn’t care about.” [source]
September 22, 2019: Colin Moriarty “It’s their prerogative not to invite us! It’s no big deal. We’ll continue to cover everything thoroughly and fairly regardless of the way publisher PR treats Sacred Symbols. We have more than 50,000 people that rely on us, and we’ll always do our best for y’all regardless. <3” [source]
Colin Moriarty “Nah. PR (and CMs/marketers) hold the cards in this regard. We’ll continue to keep the lines of communication open with all publishers and they can work with us if they want. Our show will continue to grow and prosper with or without 'em, and we’re happy to buy the games we need.”
October 17, 2019: Colin Moriarty “We’ve been asked a ton, so: No, @ChrisRGun and I don’t have Death Stranding. PlayStation has blacklisted Sacred Symbols for reasons entirely unknown, so we won’t be getting anything from them moving forward. We’re happy to buy any game and treat it fairly, so it’s no biggie. <3” [source]
November 8, 2019: Colin Moriarty “This week’s all-new episode of Sacred Symbols+ is dedicated to the decaying mainstream games media. In the wake of Deadspin’s self-destruction, it’s worth asking: Who do enthusiast outlets write for? It sure doesn’t seem like they write for any of us.” [source]
February 13, 2020: Colin Moriarty “This is the perfect encapsulation of intersectionality’s complete failure. Trans women can be accepted as women. That’s great. But they were born men in male bodies, and they’re destroying biological women in sports. It’s not fair, and it shouldn’t be controversial to say so.” [source]
February 20, 2020: Colin Moriarty “With all due respect, Mr. Bloomberg, your debate performance last night was arguably the worst I’ve ever seen. Trump would absolutely eat you alive. I think you should step aside and let one of your better-equipped competitors take it from here. Fund 'em, if you like! My 2¢.” Directly responding to Mike Bloomberg’s tweet [source]
March 8, 2020: Colin Moriarty “Hundreds? Try thousands. Hit pieces written about me in renowned publications. Thrown away by people I knew for years and treated with respect. Blacklisted. Defamed and lied about. Intentionally misrepresented. No. He will never experience 1% of what I did. It’s fine. I lived.” [source]
March 24, 2020: Lillymo Games Inc publishes Twin Breaker: A Sacred Symbols Adventure on PlayStation Vita and PlayStation 4 with ports later on Xbox One and Nintendo Switch.
May 30, 2020: Colin Moriarty “If you watch the interview (which I suggest), MLK talks extensively about the immoral and intolerable racism the black community faced (and which the community still faces). But he never condoned violence. And he knew it wasn’t a useful tool. Peace is the most potent weapon.” [source]
June 2, 2020: Colin Moriarty “I absolutely loved what he had to say, top to bottom. Understanding the results of systemic racism. Holding people to account that perpetrate violence against blacks. Reinforcing your own home instead of burning it down. Planning. Responding. Organizing. Voting. It was perfect.” In response to someone mentioning Killer Mike’s speech. [source]
June 3, 2020: Colin Moriarty “We built this with:✅ Virtually no mainstream games industry support. ✅ Virtually no games PR or publisher goodwill. ✅ Persistent defamation and misrepresentation by games media and their acolytes. But the people have spoken. Thank you so much for that. <3“ [source]
This is seemingly in direct contradiction with an earlier tweet from May 24, 2018: Colin Moriarty “They gave me God of War early, too. Don’t let the games media echochamber fool you. Every publisher I’ve approached has been more than happy to (and often eager to) work with me.” [source]
June 29, 2020: Colin Moriarty “Colin’s Last Stand has acquired 49% of @LillymoGames, and I will be its Chief Creative Officer and Lead Writer moving forward. Also: Side Quest will now be a tandem operation between @DustinCanFly and @G27Status Plus: Other things in a letter from me! https://patreon.com/posts/38682170“ [source]
September 1, 2021: Colin Moriarty “I think we can all agree that Kotaku has somehow, some way assembled the Anti-All-Star Team of Games Media.” [source]
September 25, 2021: Colin Moriarty “The types of people that do this will never, ever sit and talk to you, just like they won’t with me. They’re scared. I’d be scared to defend my positions, too, if I spent years flailing around an echochamber. Thankfully, iron sharpens iron and you and I have no such issues. <3” Response to David Jaffe posting a Jeff Grubb video featuring a Jaffe screen grab and being blocked by Grubb. [source]
July 14, 2021: Colin Moriarty “If you can’t or won’t beat games on anything harder than Easy — and you’re reviewing them from that perspective and not from the perspective of the average player — then your criticism is worthless. Seek out critics who actually like video games. It’s all getting a little trite.” [source] [this in response to Natalie @heartimecia saying she only plays games for reviews on easy after Xbox posted a tweet saying beating a game on easy is still beating the game. Souls-likes, difficulty, accessibility, etc etc etc]
July 19, 2021: Colin Moriarty “The very games media that limply tossed itself head-first into Palestine/Israel (and otherwise goes out of its way to shove every sort of fringe political view down everyone’s throat) seems awfully mum about communist China-aligned entities slowly gobbling up our industry.” [source]
January 4, 2022: Sacred Symbols+, Episode 152: The Excommunication of Vince Ingenito [This is the same Vince Ingenito who was laid off by IGN in March 2017, Kallie Plagge came out and shared that Ingenito sexually harassed herself and another female staff member and felt HR’s response was irresponsible. This led to a walk out by IGN staff until management put out a response addressing it. [source]]
April 26, 2022: Gene Park “had a very quick, pleasant chat with Colin about the trajectory of my career and my life. “games media being in its death throes” is colin’s view on it but i do talk about how all aspects of media are slowly being overtaken by a creator-led revolution of coverage and distributing information. folks, try not to fight with the journalists in my mentions. i understand their concerns and why they might be upset about this. but as i say in the interview, i see this as Colin giving ME a platform. his audience includes many of my own followers, people who are good. many of you haven’t followed my career closely but during my career as an audience engagement editor, i found much success in talking to audiences with an antagonistic view of the press. on reddit, i talked with fervent Trump supporters who HATE us all the time. even in Hawaii, i held in person meetings with groups of people who have every reason to hate the media. this is just how i’ve always operated, but it’s something i passionately care about. this isn’t about “validation” it’s about reaching out to audiences.” [source [end of thread post]]
January 25, 2023: Last Stand Media has Kara Lynne on their Sacred Symbols+ podcast, she was fired from Limited Run Games after Twitter user Purple Tinker [source] [someone who in June 2020 posted a five page apology for being an internet bully within the brony fandom of which they were a founder of bronycon] found an old tweet [archived version] where Lynne said, “If you think the # of trans crying about using a bathroom is higher than the perves using the excuse, you are what is wrong with this world.” as well as following various conservative people on Twitter.
April 29, 2023: Colin Moriarty “Waypoint’s collapse is the most recent reminder that games media is largely finished. But it’s important the void fills with passionate, knowledgeable people who care about games. Not people who didn’t know there would be a third Horizon. Sacred Symbols x Defining Duke is live.” [source]
May 16, 2023: Last Stand Media launches Punching Up: A Nintendo Podcast [we need to talk about co opting that term] and also announce Gene Park as a regular member.
June 28, 2023: Colin Moriarty “It was awesome having Vince on the show to talk deeply about games. He has one of the greatest critical minds in the history of games media and it’s unfair that audiences have been robbed of him for so long. I’m proud that Last Stand is giving him a place to speak. He’ll return.“ [source]
October 12, 2023: Easy Allies YouTube uploads Everything Going Crazy - Frame Trap Episode 195 with Bradley Ellis, Daniel Bloodworth, Michael Huber, Michael Damiani, and guest Dustin Furman of Last Stand Media.
October 13, 2023: Easy Allies staff member Gabby posts in their Discord, “Hi guys, just wanted to quickly address the latest episode of Frame Trap. To first explain our thought process: Brad & Dustin are friends and Dustin is a fan of ours, so Brad wanted to have him on FrameTrap. We unfortunately did not think it through beyond that & that is entirely our fault. Please understand, Brad has known and trusted Dustin for many years, but we hear your concerns and will take more time to discuss & vet new guests before bringing them on. We sincerely apologize for any and all drama this has caused. Thank you so much for understanding and please feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions or comments!
…
Guys, read the apology before you jump to any conclusions. No one is apologizing for being friends with Dustin, but there is unfortunately some inherent messiness (to put it lightly) when it comes to LSM that we would rather avoid than participate in. It was a mistake, but let’s all please be mature about this. If you want to discuss it again, feel free to message me, but any bad faith conversation about it in this Discord is over.“ [source]
October 15, 2023: Pinned comment on Everything Going Crazy - Frame Trap Episode 195: I want to offer my deepest apologies to everyone for my failures regarding this week’s Frame Trap and its aftermath. I tried to address some people’s questions in our Discord about bringing Dustin Furman onto Frame Trap, and unintentionally made Brad and Dustin look bad in the process. I failed to properly account for potential reactions, and I failed by rushing out a statement which has harmed one of our guests and biggest fans. There are few things that hurt me as deeply as knowing that I’ve hurt others. And it’s my own mistakes that have led to this absolute turmoil for Dustin, Brad, Gabby, our staff, and our community. This is my responsibility, and I’m sorry. -Daniel Bloodworth
October 15-16, 2023: Gene Park joins ResetEra thread on Easy Allies to talk about Last Stand Media (Gene Park has been banned from ResetEra for “ User Banned (1 Month): Dismissive commentary around banned source and transphobia”) [source]
October 23, 2023: Last Stand Media Twitter posts “We’ll see about that.” with a photo where a sign states, “Warning Poaching is Strictly Forbidden. Violators will be prosecuted.” [source]
Within Ace Combat 04: Shattered Skies are two parallel narratives. One is a man recalling the memories of his time as a child during a war. This war is the one that you participate in during missions as Mobius 1, the call sign for the player character, and follows their ascension to becoming a legendary icon over the course of that conflict.
Missions are your general arcade flight simulation kind of tackling varied objectives to rack up high scores, combating air and land targets, picking your aircraft and armament as you proceed along the linear progression of the game’s campaign. In between missions will occasionally be interludes, allowing the player to view the recollections of someone who was a child during these same concurrent periods. These are presented with still images, with voiceover by the adult child and greatly moving pieces of music. The first interlude, “Prelude”, is scored by the composition “La Catedral” by Paraguayan guitarist and composer Agustín Barrios Mangoré (1885-1944) and generally considered one of his greatest compositions. This piece introduces the overall mood of these interludes, and the game proper, as a melancholic reflection on what is later described as a “meaningless war.” It is the first, and most recurring, of the three tracks composed by Barrios that appear in Ace Combat 04: Shattered Skies.
The emotional crux of this prelude is the death of the child’s family, the result of a plane crashing to earth after being shot by an invading army. The only identifying factor for the killer was a yellow 13 on the tail of the plane that circled around to confirm the kill. The death of the child’s family is dramatic, and at the same time so casual. These are the facts of war: civilians who aren’t involved suffer no matter their allegiance or status. Throughout the interludes the child has to grapple with the fact that the new family he has found, a group of ace pilots, are the ones responsible for his loss. This is revealed in another interlude featuring a piece from Agustín Barrios named “Session.“ This piece is played diegetically by the lead pilot of Yellow Squadron, whom the child joins on his harmonica after it is revealed that this pilot is Yellow 13, and the song is one the child’s father played at the end of each day, connecting them not only through death but also in life.
The child’s complex feelings are the basis for all the interludes. He hates Yellow 13 for being responsible for the death of his family, but also finds himself loving this same man for offering protection and warmth during an occupation. The child feels obligated to support the resistance within his town, but also follows the Yellow Squadron after they are routed. He grows to admire Yellow 13 for his moral character, but continues to imagine their eventual confrontation over his family’s death. When Yellow 13 discovers the barkeep’s daughter is responsible for recent sabotage, the child yells, “Get out of our town, you fascist pig!” It is the last time we see them speak to each other. Yellow 13 lets the two go, unable to turn in these children, and similarly feeling a mixture of both love and hate towards those he watched over reveal their resentment towards him and what he represented.
These complex feelings can also be felt by myself for this game, and the series as a whole, as one that actively engages with and benefits imperial industries. By licensing real world models from various manufacturers, and rendering them in lavish detail, Ace Combat projects these airplanes as noble creatures fighting for the benefit of mankind which is far from the reality. As Autumn Wright wrote of the series, “But we also can’t, we mustn’t, separate a games fiction from its own politics of creation. To do so would be to betray the story, the artistry, the work.”
There is a shared fascination with how planes, specifically fighter planes, can be objects of such beauty but also of such violence by many artists. Hayao Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises is about Jiro Horikoshi, an engineer whose desire to create aircraft was subsumed by Japan during World War II and led to him helping develop planes that caused much destruction over the course of that war. His film has been the subject of much analysis and debate over interpretations of its message in regards to Horikoshi and their contributions to the war machine. As someone who grew up both day dreaming and sometimes even lucid dreaming about being able to fly myself, I have a fascination with the freedom granted by flight, especially that of fighter pilots with their speed and maneuverability that easily outpace any private aircraft. I also find myself fiercely opposed to instances such as the recent Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019) casually integrating something as awful as white phosphorus into its plaything multiplayer mode. I criticize Call of Duty’s obsession with rendering their guns in the most “real” style, I should do the same for Ace Combat and its rendering of aircraft built to kill. Most of my reluctance to condemn this series’ participation in propaganda, despite atrocitiesconstantlycommitted by military aircraft, is due to the smaller mindshare it has compared to Activision’s preeminent shooter. Ace Combat has never been as commercially successful or influential as Call of Duty. Nonetheless it has the same responsibility towards what it is presenting. Project Aces was able to produce an entire fictional world and history for players to inhabit. I think they can also produce fictional planes to further separate themselves from promoting war machines and benefiting their manufacturers. Though it will cost them the World of Tanks obsessive crowd, it would be worthwhile to see a line drawn not only by the series’ themes but also by its rendering of aircraft.
It doesn’t help that as the series progressed, it lost the subdued tone that is found here in Shattered Skies. Future entries would increase the superweapon scale and stretch the reality further. Belka, a country found nowhere within this entry, would become such a boogeyman for the series that they have become a meme within the community for its frequent employment as the “true antagonist” in games such as Ace Combat 5: The Unsung War, Ace Combat Zero: The Belkan War, and the latest Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown. In that latest installment, the dissonance between the arcade-style flight sim and serious war storytelling becomes much more prominent and harder to buy into as compared to Shattered Skies. As Ben Sailer writes of Skies Unknown, “But the unintentional sub-text of its design decisions undermines its sense of escapism its otherwise throwaway plot tries to create, breaking its own sense of illusion by failing to stick within a consistent narrative universe.” Reviewing Ace Combat Infinity, a multiplayer-focused entry taking place on Earth as opposed to the “Strangereal” conjured for Shattered Skies, Nick Capozzoli writes, “But Ace Combat once chased its Top Gun guitars with Agustin Barrios Mangore. It interlaced vignettes about the personal lives of rival squadrons in among its screeching dogfights. Those old games were idealistic and enthusiastic (occasionally embarrassingly so), full of operatic flourishes and moments of pathos that few video games can claim–let alone ones about planes. These were games that knew that when engagements take place over the span of miles, between pilots who never see each other’s face, it’s the little personal touches that keep the whole affair from feeling like a training exercise. The melancholy cutscenes. The frantic radio chatter. The call signs and emblems and the way enemies sauntered onto the field of battle like WWE wrestlers…that was what made Ace Combat human.”
Yellow 13 crosses over the parallel line of the child and into the missions of Mobius 1, connecting player and child even if secondhand. First Yellow 13 appears as an invincible foe that forces you to retreat. You later strike back, wounding through the downing of Yellow 4, someone the player knows was dear to Yellow 13. It’s a moment of victory, in that you have shown Yellow Squadron is mortal, but also at great personal cost to an opponent you have empathy for. This complex feeling the child has is now shared by you, the player. The penultimate mission sees you coming up against Yellow Squadron for the final time, destroying them all, Yellow 13 included. All that remains of him is a handkerchief that floats back to the earth, buried by the child. The interludes end with the narrator revealing that all of these reflections have been from a letter written to you, the player as Mobius 1. By writing, and speaking, these words he continues to keep Yellow 13’s memory alive, just as Yellow 13 confided in the child about Yellow 4 after her death to keep her memory alive.
“I know it must have brought him unexpected joy to have an opponent like you, at the end of that meaningless war. At least that’s what I want to believe. Only you… the pilot who shot him down, can confirm this. And so I write to you.”
It was overwhelming to realize that all of these interludes being retold by the grown child have been intermixing with your own characters’ recollections of their participation in that war, coming to better understand those that they fought and humanizing what would otherwise be another number on your long kill list. This reveal worked not only for players at the time of release, as noted by IGN “The ending would be criminal to give away, but it has a very neat O. Henry sort of twist to it, capping off a surprisingly effective bittersweet memoir.” (Smith) But it also worked for contemporary players as well, such as YouTube channels alter ego, Salokin, and oboeshoesgames, who all comment on the way the story touched them in their reviews. “…all culminating in a triumphant ending for Mobius 1 and ISAF, but a somewhat bittersweet ending for the narrator as he recollects on past events to the fighter pilot.” (McCoy)
The penultimate mission that ends with the death of Yellow Squadron also reveals the motivation behind the war, as Farbanti, the capital of Erusia, the opposition, was not protected from the falling meteors described in the introduction. Stonehenge, a series of cannons constructed to protect the mainland from the meteors, had Farbanti within the very edge of its range, and so the city, and country, suffered. As you fly around the capital you view the sunken portion of the city and the crater (a recurring geographical feature throughout multiple missions) that was the cause of such destruction. Erusia’s war was one of revenge, but to what purpose? It makes sense to take Stonehenge and turn it against its creators, the ones who either through ignorance or purpose excluded Farbanti from its umbrella. Erusia struck out and locations such as the child’s town, San Salvacion, places that had no real participation in their wounding but who benefitted where Erusia did not, suffered under the boot of occupation. What was accomplished by this war? Flying over Farbanti and destroying the last remnants of their armed forces, it does not fill me with the same feeling of victory as the sixth mission, “Invincible Fleet,” which ends with the allied radio joining together to sing the “USEA National Anthem (Hymn Of Liberty)”. Instead it is a feeling of, “What are we doing?”
Mobius 1, the callsign for the player character, is a silent protagonist, a trope often clung to by games attempting to avoid the difficulties of player character writing. A character controlled by the player provides a unique challenge for developers, who often side-step by having the player-character be an empty vessel such as within Half-Life 2, Dead Space, and The Legend of Zelda. Unlike in those games, Mobius 1 isn’t being addressed directly in conversation by any other character, and so more easily skirts around it. I find it also works here in favor of the game as there is no personality to inhibit Mobius 1 from becoming a legendary icon by the game’s end. This game’s sequel, Ace Combat 5: The Unsung War, has your collective squad ascend to a similar status of godhood. Though your character in that game is given prompts to respond to your wingmen (and wingwoman), it is largely their burden to contemplate and engage in what it means to become an icon for your country, especially once betrayed by that country. Shattered Skies, by comparison, is a lonely affair. One in which the player is given the space to reflect on the effect they are having on morale on both sides, never being distracted by a scripted monologue or by one-sided conversations from allies.
Throughout the progression of missions radio chatter from ally and enemy alike begin to recognize your prowess and reputation as a fighter pilot, to the inspiration of the soldiers below you and the fear of the enemies around you. It all culminates in the finale, in which an extremist group of surviving Erusian officers have secured an experimental superweapon and are planning on launching it against any and all of their enemies. This mission is introduced by the track “Rex Tremandae” attributed to Keiki Kobayashi and followed by the main mission track “Megalith (Agnus Dei)” attributed to Tetsukazu Nakanishi. “Agnus Dei” is traditionally in Catholicism the name of music that accompanies prayers to the Lamb of God. Its use here is representative of the collective prayers of the USEA nation for Mobius 1 to succeed in their current mission, insinuating they have ascended from being just another individual to something much more. Even without that context, it is a track that ascends above all the others for its choir vocals and imbues your final mission with a much grander scale and risk than any previous one, and is a fitting end cap.
I have attempted to write about Ace Combat 04: Shattered Skies multiple times since I first played it so many years ago, but I do not believe I will ever be able to communicate how hard it hits me every time I replay it. Here I sit, twenty-two years after its release and I’m still finding new insights into how it affects me. Tracks from Agustin Barrios bring a warmth and longing to the interludes in a way no other composer could. Despite having sold over two million copies, discussion about this game is lacking. All those who have played it find it affecting like so few games are, especially one that falls under the arcade flight simulator genre. For how it continues to touch me to this day and for continuing to be a source of new script, Ace Combat 04: Shattered Skies is Literature.
For some time now I have had the idea to approach writing about games in a way more akin to literary theory. Video game “reviews” come from a history of games as consumer technology, where technical performance was prized above all. A game had to be “fun” to be worthwhile, and the price-per-hour ratio was ever present. As the medium grew older, and the question of “are games art?” became more a topic of conversation, things finally started to shift, though has reached a rut for some time now.
Games writing and discourse is stuck in a circular cycle of rephrasing, rehashing, and relitigating the same subjects and topics seemingly every few months online in social websites such as Twitter or in forums and on podcasts. The largest games media outlets performing reviews rarely cite each other or any other writing in their own works, and the culture at large is worse for it. Obviously there will be no Council of Nicaea in which games media can come and put together a canon of thought and ideas, but I think a different intent behind games writing can hopefully push the conversation forwards even if by an inch.
There are many writers doing this work and have been doing so for a long time. During my research into 2009 for a different project I’ve found the “Brainysphere,” an informal collection of video game bloggers who were talking and writing about games distinctively different from your G4, Rooster Teeth, IGN, or Giant Bomb. While these blogs may have died down in favor of the YouTube “video essay,” you can still scrape Critical Distance’s weekly roundups for new blogs. Most attention is on YouTube, and while I do enjoy throwing on a random hour long video talking about Patapon and Planescape: Torment, they more often than not fall into the trap of recapping the plot beat by beat and continuing to adapt the breakdown box of graphics, sound, gameplay, etc, that was so often the basis of game magazines and online outlets.
The breakdown box is gone, yet you can still find it within the structure of the text of a review when it hard pivots into suddenly talking about the music or multiplayer. My hope is to approach each subject as a piece of literature, a piece of art that has thematic value that rises above so many others, that holds multiple possible interpretations of its text and its expressive qualities, the kind I find myself thinking about and returning to time and time again. Not just what we refer to as “narrative” but mechanical systems of interaction and restrictions.
Everything and anything can be literature, it is up to the people that read and write about it that make it Literature. To me, one of the approaches to literature I find most fulfilling is under post-structuralism that comes from Barthes’ analysis of Balzac’s Sarassin in S/Z (1970) and explained by Terry Eagleton in Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983):
“The most intriguing texts for criticism are not those which can be read, but those which are ‘writable’ (scriptible) – texts which encourage the critic to carve them up, transpose them into different discourses, produce his or her semi-arbitrary play of meaning at the work itself.”
A video game like Disco Elysium is literature to me due to its ability to evoke and imprint an emotion, a feeling of place, of people, of history, of sound and speech and lines of dialogue that summoned laughter and sadness. In it are reflections of our own world and it adds its own ideas and innovative mechanics to the genre it occupies. It has created a large base of dedicated artists who add onto its presence their own varied contributions via interpretations and conversations.
A video game like Ace Combat 04: Shattered Skies is also literature to me, due to its execution of the trope of the silent protagonist, of the player occupying that space of both viewer and participant so unique to games, how it leverages that position for its emotional ending. For its own sights and sounds that are so deeply imprinted in my mind. It may occupy a significantly smaller space in the culture comparatively, but that does not make it any less a work of literary significance in my mind.
This series is my attempt at performing readings of these texts, and not just games too, to show that they are writable and literary. Due to my lack of study underneath any formal literature critique program this is less about form than intent. I’ve already somewhat tried this in my replaying essays and videos but hope to make it a more formal statement under this series and keep the word count a bit lower than the comprehensive replaying essays tend to run.
I still have a lot of love for the written word. My cover sheet for a never used application to Giant Bomb was based around the argument that there was still a lot of value behind text writing, and most all videos I have created begin as text-focused works. If anything this will just be another umbrella of an idea under which will rest multiple unfinished drafts, though I’ve grown more accepting of that as time has gone on.
“‘Mass culture is not the inevitable product of ‘industrial’ society, but the offspring of a particular form of industrialism which organizes production for profit rather than for use, which concerns itself with what will sell rather than with what is valuable.”
-Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983)
I don’t have as long a history with Giant Bomb as I do IGN or Kinda Funny but the love and enjoyment from when I was a fan is definitely equal to those two. I have strong memories of listening to the Giant Bomb Game of the Year discussions in 2014 while pushing shopping carts around outside the Wal-Mart I worked at. I was a premium subscriber from June 2016 until I let it expire in March 2022. About a year ago I sat down to try and narrow down what my personal “golden age” of Giant Bomb was by counting the various shows or highlights put out in each year, this narrowed it down to the 2017-2019 period as being the strongest. Drew Scanlon’s departure was softened by the hiring of Abby Russell and Ben Pack, later joined by Jan Ochoa. Abby and Ben’s later departure, the COVID pandemic making in-person recordings no longer possible, and the later departures of Vinny Caravella, Alex Navarro, and Brad Shoemaker pretty much killed any and all enthusiasm I had for the site. Jeff Gerstmann’s firing (still such a strange warped reflection of his firing from GameSpot due to external ad-pressure which led to founding Giant Bomb, now being fired from that website) didn’t help any interest that may have remained, especially given the site’s response following his sudden departure.
Watching and listening to the current Giant Bomb for these past two weeks has been the most disappointing experience of this series so far. Kinda Funny may not have very strong critical bones, and I can’t say Giant Bomb really does either, both are more to provide entertainment than thoughtful critiques, but only one of them ever provided any laughs: Kinda Funny. I know some of this has to do with finding Dan Ryckert more obnoxious than funny, but also just the overall content I watched (34 videos checking over my YouTube history) wasn’t very fun to watch along with.
When discussing Kinda Funny I mentioned their adherence to enthusiast press talk of excitement and positivity above all else, and while I don’t think that is true of Giant Bomb, I did find their critical talk similarly lacking. Most of it I can attribute to the shadow Dan Ryckert casts over the site. Dan loves wrestling, and specifically loves reenacting the role of the “heel” from wrestling in his work life, a term referring to someone who plays the bad guy who is supposed to make the audience and other cast members mad at them for their behavior. Dan finds this funny, I find it obnoxious. At least during his previous employment at Giant Bomb he had Jeff Gerstmann, Vinny Caravella, and his fellow GameInformer coworker turned Giant Bomb staff Jason Oestreicher to somewhat counter his heel tendencies. All of them are gone now and it shows. During the Giant Bombcast 808 Dan explains why he didn’t like Red Dead Redemption 2 or The Lord of the Rings around 1:42:37, and it was at an early point in my watching that I began to question whether or not I really wanted to continue. It isn’t that I disagree with the opinion being expressed, that either can be/is “boring,” but it is the way this thought is explained that irritates me. This feeling is expressed by others as well. This has always been an issue with people when watching Dan, as I remember my wife never liked him once he started showing up in Giant Bomb east videos with Abby. To me, I’ve always found his critical thought skills severely lacking, and am still surprised he was a writer at GameInformer and for several years and was contributing his voice to the greater critical volume.
Blight Club is their “playing through a bad game” show, but since bad games are so different from bad movies, especially given the time required and the lack of any editing on the backend (which is completely understandable from a production standpoint), it never reaches the sort of fever pitch of RedLetterMedia’s Best of the Worst series revolving around watching bad movies together. I also just don’t find the concept of dressing up in cheap halloween costumes that amusing. Additionally, they’re never together; they’re always on video calls with each other, something which really killed a lot of game coverage/channels for me when COVID hit. No more Business Dave Top 10’s on UPF as everyone was working from home now. This has led to some hijinks, such as Dan using layers to replay video during livestreams to the bewilderment of the participants. Again, the specter of his character casts a shadow that makes it something I find mildly amusing instead of laugh out loud funny. Zoom/Discord video chat recordings just do not have the same energy as being in the room together. It is unfortunate because I do support remote work but there is just something magical lost when you transition from doing UPF in the same room together to doing it over a video chat service. This is primarily why I never kept up with Nextlander despite consisting of the Giant Bomb members I’ve followed the longest, and would likely kill Jeff Gerstmann’s channel for me if he ever ends up expanding beyond being a solo show.
The Bombcast continues to be their general gaming podcast of “whatcha been playing?+news+reader emails”, Voicemail Dumptruck is an extension of reader emails in voicemail form. Quick Looks remain a varying-in-length playthrough of recent releases. Unprofessional Fridays are still mostly a grab bag of cooperative games to play together. Game Mess Mornings is the newest show to me, but is basically a version of Kinda Funny Games Daily, itself a version of many familiar morning shows viewed everywhere that runs through the news, now with commentary from Jeff Grubb and a guest. Demo Derby returned recently though with Dan at the wheel it went about as well as I thought it would, that is: he called Final Fantasy X [ten] “Final Fantasy X [x]” and called Final Fantasy X-2 “Final Fantasy Twelve” to annoy Mike Minotti and beat it into the ground by the end of the demo.
In addition to the standard shows they also have Mortal Kombat playthroughs, and miscellaneous streams such as F-Zero 99 and Counter Strike 2. Checking the video feed from even just a year ago and I was wishing I had done this then instead of now as my perspective would probably be much more popular. They had these shows plus Albummer and Arcade Pit. Two years ago they didn’t have Arcade Pit but did have Bak 2 Skool, VoidBurgers Hot Takeouts, and the Very Online Show. Not only was the video feed more varied but the community was more populated. Comparing the most commented video for the last couple of weeks in September from 2013-2023 paints a pretty bad picture.
Essentially the trend has been ever downwards for the community participation on the site. I previously used comment counts to gauge the audience size of IGN versus GameSpot, and here on Giant Bomb comments on their main site are even more valuable due to their premium subscription. Prior to June 2022 when all premium shows were made free and premium subscription was changed to give you behind the scenes stuff and discord access (though knowing how discord works for large communities this is not a benefit for all but the terminally online), premium would get you exclusive shows like Unprofessional Fridays (where the crew would each bring a game of their choosing to play and show off for the others or for entertainment), Metal Gear Scanlon, Playdates, Game Tapes, Demo Derby, Mario Party Party, and many more. It is important to note in the chart above that prior to the change, five of the nine top commented videos were premium videos, meaning you also needed a subscription in order to comment.
A lot of Giant Bomb’s best content was on these premium shows, but now with premium no longer having any exclusive content, at least none that appear on the site’s premium feed, there doesn’t appear to be much draw to give them money. This conduit of funding was previously what set Giant Bomb apart from most other games media sites before the advent of Patreon, as their fan’s directly helped fund them meaning they could rely on more than just click-through rates to earn them money. Nowadays, with dwindling community engagement, I’m not so sure they have solid footing, especially given the ownership changes and layoffs. CBS sold off Gamespot, Giant Bomb, and CNET to Red Ventures in September 2020. Red Ventures then turned around and sold off everyone but CNET to Fandom in October 2022. Despite promises to keep things as they were, Fandom laid off around 40-50 people in January 2023, including Jess O’Brien and Jason Oestreicher of Giant Bomb.
Other signs of diminished community are that qlcrew has essentially stopped updating its member tags, instead pretty much serving as an RSS feed for the new content but still remains a great filter for older content based on timestamps and tags. Best of Giant Bomb stopped uploading in mid-2021 and has returned for monthly installments for the back half of 2022 and only three videos for 2023 as of this writing. The subreddit is clogged with posts from Jeff Gerstmann and Nextlander, speculation about potential drama and collaboration between those two new channels, and the usual doom-posting about the site you often find on dedicated subreddits. Some of that doom is warranted, however, not only by the comment metrics but also the YouTube views. Out of IGN, GameSpot, Kinda Funny, and Kinda Funny Games for the past four weeks of uploads (discluding trailers), Giant Bomb is at the bottom with an average of 6.68k and GameSpot surprisingly at the top with 257k average view, mostly thanks to their “ALL Fatalities - Mortal Kombat 1 4K Gameplay” video hitting 5.7 million views. Kinda Funny with 12.65k average, nearly twice as many as Giant Bomb, is the second-to-last ranking.
I’m just not sure what you can do with Giant Bomb at this point. I’m sure the backlog of premium content doesn’t help with server costs, and with a low view count on YouTube and a guaranteed lower premium subscriber base than ever before I’m just not sure how long you can expect them around, especially given how much they rely on outside staff to help pump up the staff count and variety on their content. It’s sad to see how far the site has fallen. Despite my complaints I think Dan Ryckert is a capable production lead, some of the shows he created for old Giant Bomb were among the best (Burgle my Bananas and Mario Party Party), and I don’t have any ill will or blame for the individuals currently working there. It just is sad to be so disappointed returning to a channel that was once so beloved, and to see that this sentiment appears to be the prevailing one amongst the, admittedly, minority of online forum posters.
Collection of images stitched together from multiple screenshots. All 4K or bigger. Feel free to message me if there are other areas you’d like to see panoramas of.
Another illustration for Hyper Light Drifter but its a watercolor this time ! I did it for the french speedrun marathon SPEEDONS. Check it this weekend on twitch !
ALT
ALT