Yeah I miss them too. The closest thing GB does to them now is the "GB Plays" streams. The only GB-adjacent group that I can think of that does classic style quick looks is Noclip (Danny O'Dwyer, etc.), who on occasion do them on the "Noclip Crew" YouTube channel (though it's been a long time since they did one too. I just looked and the last one was Balatro earlier this year).
Nextlander, Gerstmann, etc. mostly do like 2-3 hour streams of games rather than quick look length things now.
I still go back and watch old ones because the format really worked for me and my brain. I know people say "well you can find so many clips of people playing any game you're curious about now!" but they tend to be longer plays, where the 30ish minutes of a quick look (that "ish" of course sometimes expanding to like, 2 hours) with commentary gave a decent, uh, "fast view" we'll call it of a game. And more than that it helped me keep track of new games and releases. I don't have any idea what the fuck is going on or coming out now.
It's surprising how much that format was a preferred way to ingest games for me, and how much I'm feeling its loss now. When the one-year anniversary of the last one came around I watched it and also went back to watch the first one and it really made me think a lot about the history of this site and my history with it and where we are now, y'know?
The great thing about the Quick looks was that they would often start somewhere in the middle of the game where they would genuinely get to show some gameplay while generally avoiding spoilers. The problem I have with a lot of streams nowadays is that they'll just start the game from the beginning and then it's like 2 hours of tutorials and world building and by the time the game is actually starting to open up, the stream is over. But of course it's a lot easier to do it like that because you don't have to do any set-up for the game before recording.
I can't tell if I miss Quick Looks or just the era of Giant Bomb in which they occurred, where everyone was together in one room. I definitely like the more curated content vs the streams but what I really miss is the vibe and the way people played off one another back then.
I also think that big games back then were more conducive to Quick Looks because they tended to be shorter and more focused. It's much harder to showcase a liveservice game than something like Mirror's Edge.
There are a lot of things about Giant Bomb that I miss, but I've accepted that those things were part of an era and will likely never return. Clearly, the cast has no intention of doing the office thing anymore, since the fear of Covid has long passed, even though it's still possible to get it like the Flu, and many people are mingling like they were before the pandemic. The fact is, many of the original cast have moved on, and the ones remaining on the site have lives where they can no longer just put everything aside and meet up to do a weekly thing, unless it's online, which is what we are seeing with Blight Club and so on.
Giant Bomb was something special in its prime, but all good things eventually come to an end.
Honestly, the only thing that's come close to old GB for me in the last few years for video game content in terms of vibe for me is the video game stuff Friends at the Table (Austin's RPG podcast) has been doing. They've been doing a lot of streaming the last year or so (less so the last few weeks because they're busy with their next big pair of campaigns for their podcast) and the tone and vibe has reminded me more of old GB than anything else GB related in years. They did a multiplayer Stardew Valley series that reminded me a lot of the pandemic Minecraft streams or Brad and Vinny's Astroneer streams.
Of course, there's also the factor that all the FatT people have known each other for many years and have that deeper level of understanding of their senses of humour so they play off each other really well in everything they do.
A good starting point is probably this stream Austin did of Final Fantasy XI. Other people join in about 10 minutes in and they talk about games a bunch. It very much has a GB east Playdate vibe to it where one person has a game they want to showcase and tell the others about.
A fun aside is that Austin still does a lot of GB video quirks almost a decade away from working here. He sometimes starts streams by doing the GB video intro "I'm [name]" then pausing waiting for the other person to introduce themselves before beginning talking more but because nobody else knows that intro thing, he has to catch himself and keep talking.
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