The cast has improved signifcantly with all the restructuring. It still has major problems that make listening to full episodes a chore.
The news segments are great, and the game reviews can be quite good, depending on the reviewer.
Everything outside of that is terrible. Most of the cast is aggressively unfunny, and their small talk is excruciating (unless you're like them, I guess).
Minotti is a bright spot. He's a good speaker, he's a Real Gamer, and he's an excellent critic. His reviews are informative and reasonable even when he dislikes a game or even its whole genre. You can tell he is a real professional and takes games seriously.
Grubb covers the news well, but his reviews are pretty shallow and often based purely on the opening hour(s) of the game. When he actually plays a game before reviewing it, which is rare, he's pretty good. He does have some rhetorical crutches he falls back on way too frequently, which does get irritating.
Dan can be a great critic and a thoughtful conversationalist, but he has so little structure around him here that he's mostly just an annoying imp who adds nothing. If he had an actual boss, he'd be great at this. He doesn't, so he's not. His role is just to be a kid who never grew up while everyone else acts like he's eccentric instead of pathetic.
Bakalar shouldn't be on the show. He adds literally nothing. He's a boring guy, he barely plays games, and he thinks about them even less. You'd fall asleep if you sat next to him at a wedding, there is no reason he should be on any entertainment broadcast. Every word he speaks on mic is dead air.
Jan seems like a nice guy, but he also adds very little. His voice is monotone, his humor is atrocious, and he is an amateur critic at best. I know he's grandfathered in, and everyone likes him as a person, but he's not good at the job of speaking about games on a microphone.
The worst of the cast is Shawn. This guy does not enunciate at all. He speaks like a toddler. Listening to him speak makes me want to tear my own skin off. Worst of all, he's one of the very few actual gamers on the show, so he talks a LOT, frequently as the only reviewer for a given game. Look, if he was just your friend or your coworker and he spoke that way, who cares. But this is an audio broadcast. The whole job is talking, and he can't talk. This is not an exaggeration. He sounds drunk. It is unlistenable. I had to stop listening to the Game Mess podcast because he was on it so much, now he's ruining this show, too. Either get him a speech therapist, or get him off the show.
There's another low energy, middle-aged white guy on the show. I don't know his name. I'm not sure if he has one. He's obviously only here because half the cast doesn't even like video games all that much, so they need someone who actually plays games to hang around. I wouldn't care all that much about him, but the cast is already crowded, so it does look a little weird to add someone who could be a clone of most of the other cast members. (I do know he works on the site, I'm talking about why he's on the podcast.)
When the show is focused on games and gaming news, it's good-to-great. Unsuprisingly, the quality of each conversation is directly related to how knowledgable the cast is on the topic. When they discuss a game they don't care about, or a story they didn't bother to read up on, the conversation is horrible, practically an insult to the listeners. When they actually care (which is rare), they are as good as anyone.
