Giant Bombcast Giant Bomb

I like this crew and their dynamic together, but there is no one on this earth I want to listen to for 2.5 hours. With a show that long it’s inevitable that half will be filler and rambling. Give me a tight 30mins or 1hr focused on the game content and I’ll be back for sure.

Jeff Grubb is the least objectionable host at this point. He does a fine job summarizing and contextualizing the news of the week. He is often insightful and funny. He’s also very insecure and will change his opinion on a dime if anyone nearby has a different opinion, which makes his opinions basically meaningless. He’s also sadly infected the GB crew with his favorite overused joke(s) — that liking anything makes someone a “pervert,” that anything out of the ordinary is a “freak,” that “horny” is a synonym for “I like this,” etc. It’s just a rhetorical crutch at this point, the GB equivalent of “Git ‘R Done”, and the GB crew overuses it to a really egregious degree. I cannot overstate how often this one joke is made, it’s unbelievable.

Jan is a terrible host with zero charisma, and he has sadly been humored by others so long he thinks he is funny and cool. He is neither. He is also quite bad at discussing video games. He relies entirely on annoying Twitter-isms to flesh out his atrocious personality. He’s just a bland, down-the-middle nerd, with a genuinely shocking lack of interesting thoughts or things to say. He has zero vocabulary for talking about video games in an interesting way. Without his aggressively overused verbal crutches he wouldn’t be able to fill 30 seconds of airtime.

I’m also highly skeptical of his skills as a producer, as every Giant Bomb stream has been riddled with egregious tech issues for years at this point. The video content they produce is far worse than any comparable outlet, and often worse than much smaller outlets.

Bakalar does not belong on a gaming podcast, as he doesn’t like games. He’s just a guy who happens to be around. He doesn’t know anything about the games themselves or the industry, beyond what he half-remembers from the period when he actually tried. He plays about 3 games total, including one (CoD) that he has to constantly reiterate that he thinks is dumb and bad and only for stupid people.

As for the rest of the rotating GB crew, Lucy is great, no complaints. Tam is the sleepiest man in games media and should never be allowed on any entertainment broadcast, ever. Mike Minotti is cool, actually knowledgeable and insightful about games. One of the few who can talk about games he dislikes in a responsible way. Dan still has his one thing, pretending to be dumb, asking if eggs are a vegetable or whatever.

Overall, this crew stinks and the show is a slog these days. Their personalities are bad and their gaming discussions do not compare well to other outlets. This is a low effort podcast by unfunny, uninteresting people and there are far better options. End of manifesto.

Giant Bomb no longer exists, and "they" insist on deleting Ryan and Jeff's legacy. The actual bombcast episodes exist on the internet. Download them and preserve it for posterity.