Fame Douglas is... DOATEC was trying to... Look, let's just get to the video.
The Quick Look: Running time: 55:30, starring Jeff Gerstmann and Jason Oestreicher.
The first nine minutes is spent looking at and trying to figure out the vast amount of confusing and contradictory DLC packs. Then, it's on to the fighting! Jeff is player 1 and Jason player 2.
1st Round: Sarah v Tina on The Show
Jeff wins 2 - 1
2nd Round: Alpha-152 v Hitomi on Dead or Alive
Jeff wins 2 - 0
3rd Round: Raidou v Honoka on Fighting Entertainment
Jeff wins 2 - 1
4th Round: Christie v Sarah on Lorelei
Jeff wins 2 - 0
Jeff compares the sweat to the NBA launch game on 360, calling it "gnarly". A notification pops up to tell us that cigs66 has joined a party.
Last Round: Momiji v Marie Rose on a stage that I don't know the name of because Jason chose Random. It's the Show Time one with the tigers.
Jeff wins 2 - 0
Final Results: Jeff - 5, Jason - 0
Jeff jumps online to find a ranked match and there's some discussion of NAT settings and latency. Jeff talks about how this version on PS4 is the only version not busted right now and that the PC version will launch without online play. He gives up looking for a ranked match and goes to find a lobby match instead. This doesn't work out, either, and he is forced to reset the game.
A couple of combo challenges are shown before starting up Arcade mode. Then, it's on to the stupid, ridiculous Story mode which Jeff tries to explain to Jason.
Jason expresses his interest in the game and Jeff recommends getting the $40 pack instead of the $50 pack with the same, or perhaps less, content.
This is the most popular thing I've ever done online, I think, and all of the positive comments and encouragements really mean a lot. Thank you! I now know the meaning of "Like, comment and subscribe, it really helps a lot."
The Quick Look: Running time: 48:51, starring Dan Ryckert and Brad Shoemaker.
Dan mostly does side quests, like saving an old lady from a robbery, allowing him to explode his face, talking to a man masturbating into a box, and becoming the master of dancing twins using a faceless mask given to him by a ghost.
Brad discovers the reason he hates Majora's Mask is because the first time he played it, he was almost done with the first dungeon but wanted to stop playing and could only save by going back to the beginning of the game's three day timeline, so he just put the game in a drawer forever. In the new version, Dan explains, you can save at any owl statue.
Dan describes to Brad the rare nightmare he's had in recent years, in which he leaves his house to see that the planets are all way too big in the sky. It wasn't even that bad, apparently. Brad explains to Dan that it's impossible to use magical thinking to combat nightmares and that he's a meat-computer who can't escape cognition.
There's a discussion about what animals Dan and Brad would like to be. Brad says it would be cool to be a dog if he had a loving home. Dan says he's just happy being a normal human dude.
Dan spends a lot of the latter part of the video getting to a dungeon, but once he enters it, he doesn't get far into it before the video ends. Brad says he'd like to pick this up some time, but is afraid of playing it without the assistance of internet tips and walkthroughs. He also expresses interest in digging out his old cart to see where he got to the first time around.
The Unfinished: Running time: 32:47, Starring Alex Navarro and Vinny Caravella
Alex plays a single-player quick match at the third tier of difficulty against three bots. He explains most of what he's doing, but a lot of it he does without explaining what he's doing or why and there are a few concepts that go unexplained entirely, but he can be excused for not explaining every move fully while playing the game and Vinny does a good job of filling in some of the gaps. It seems like Alex fills out pretty much the whole tech tree, including the coveted Pleasure Dome, for which he fails to secure the Virtual Reality patent. Ultimately, his company is bought out by his eternal rival, Mr. Upgrade, and Alex nets a cool $3,000,000,000 from this transaction.
There's a discussion of Trading Places amidst the economic espionage of the game and Vinny talks about a thing he saw recently where the potentially confusing ending of the movie was explained.
Alex said the game looks neat and Vinny, inspired by the half-hour it takes to place a single game, suggests it's probably a good game to play in the morning with a cup of coffee and a newspaper.
A choose-your-own-adventure role-playing game in a collectable card game format with segmented 3D sections.
The Quick Look: Running time: 54:56, starring Vinny Caravella and Alex Navarro.
Having played up to the fifth level, or 'challenge', already, Vinny goes back to the third challenge in order to demonstrate how the game is played. He turns down the chance to arrange his Equipment and Encounter decks for this challenge, letting the computer choose his cards for him, but he does explain how the deck building works.
The game is turn-based in the fashion of a choose-your-own-adventure game, but the battles plays out in real time with direct control. Vinny compares the combat to Batman. There are also trap mazes that play out in the same fashion, forcing the player to roll past spikes, dodge other spikes and maneuver around more spikes.
There's a part where Vinny is offered the chance to buy something for half his food, which Alex said would be more worth it if he had more food, but then he'd be paying more food to get it, so I don't know how the math works out on that. Alex also often gets confused about what food is for, talking about it as if it were something to do with health when it's more akin to energy, even with Vinny's multiple explanations, and claims to see spiders crawling all over the card table. I never saw one spider in the video and Vinny makes no mention of them.
Vinny moves on to the fifth level, which is the furthest he's reached, and encounters more challenging play but has unlocked more cards to play with. He murders thieves, goblins and skeletons alike before escaping a circus freak show and defeating a rat king, but not the gross type of rat king. Alex compliments the game on its marriage of collectable card gameplay and direct action. Vinny says it's neat and he digs it. Groovy!
A story-heavy steampunk cover-based third-person shooter with lashings of quick time events.
The Quick Look: Running time: 41:04, Starring Jeff Gerstmann and Dan Ryckert.
As Jeff explains, this game is a single player story that you play and then you're done with. As such, all this Quick Look shows is different parts of the story. Jeff starts on a level from Chapter IV before moving onto a later level in Chapter V to avoid showing one of the game's two boss fights, which he described as two very similar quick time events.
There is a lot of discussion about the cinematic letterboxing and pace of the game as Jeff takes walk-and-talk-style strolls through the game world between short firefights and quick time events. A zeppelin shows up, which gives Dan the notion that he wants to be on one at some point, setting it as a life goal. Jeff confirms that he's never been on one as they don't exist anymore. Later, there's a sniper section where the player has to examine people's shoulders by waiting for them to be facing the right way. This turns into another firefight which is made easier by the fact that the sniper rifle is a one-hit kill no matter where you shoot your target.
Jeff expresses his disappointment at the length and pacing of the game, describing the story as potentially interesting up until the anticlimactic ending. He warns that unless you're an idle billionaire, the game is not worth the full price and instead recommends renting or waiting for a dramatic price drop.
The Quick Look: Running time: 24:53, Starring: Dan Ryckert and Jeff Gerstmann The video opens with a bit about 'clay' homophones; Klei, Clay. After that, Dan dives into showing off the gameplay, drawing lines to propel Kirby across the stage. This is the only means of controlling Kirby besides a special dash attack. Because of this, Dan spends the entire time playing looking at the Wii U gamepad. We don't get to see it, but we aren't missing anything because the lines all appear on the TV. Dan complains about how this causes the player to miss all the HDness of the graphics shown on the TV. Around the six minute mark, he says there's pretty much nothing more to show of the game.
He loads up a boss fight and quickly dies, allowing Jeff to help out as Waddle Dee, who "controls like a real damn video game character" with real controls for running and jumping and attacking. Jeff does most of the work beating the boss, allowing Dan to jump in for the final blow. They then move onto a tank level, which is a auto-side-scrolling shooter thing. Waddle Dee still controls like a real damn video game character.
Dan shows off some of the extras like a model gallery, music player and scrapbook with collectable pages, which Jeff calls cute. Finally, they try out a couple of challenge rooms, racing to collect treasure chests.
The Quick Look: Running time: 43:25, Starring: Alex Navarro and Vinny Caravella
Alex explains the backstory to the game (taking place in the Fallen London universe) while he walks Vinny through the beginnings of a new game; creating a character and setting up his ship for launch. He then proceeds to wander around aimlessly at the slowest speed, clicking through half-read dialogue options and complaining about the pace of the game. He gets confused about the combat system and how his weapons work before accidentally trading 12 supplies for 12 corpses looking for passage.
The music reminds Alex of Under Siege which he recently watched, which leads to a brief discussion of Under Siege and its sequel, Dark Territory (“Under Siege on a train“).
Eventually, Vinny calls for cannibalism, so Alex steers his ship around even more aimlessly than before, waiting for starvation to kick in. His character, Captain Beefheart, leads an investigation into the suspected cannibalism on board his ship before tiring of bat meat and leading the charge himself, attempting to pass off the flesh of his fellow zailor as a forgotten stash of food. Soon afterwards, the ship is sunk by a pirate ship.
Alex warns against the apparent speed of the gameplay, but praises the writing and lore while Vinny suggests the wiki for the game’s universe might prove entertaining.
A survival horror game from Russia starring Katrine, who must uncover a dark conspiracy.
The Quick Look: Running time of 30:50, starring Vinny Caravella and Alex Navarro.
Vinny’s three things to consider about this game:
1. Making games is hard.
2. Learning a second language is hard.
3. This game is $2.
Vinny decides to show off the game in English initially, loading a save before exploring what appears to be some kind of hospital and using the protagonist’s unique animations to dance. He picks up bullets and batteries wherever he finds them lying around on bedside cabinets or next to communal toilets. This is accompanied by poorly-translated commentary from the main character, with voice over. (“Batteries in such a hole? Well, I’ll do find a use for them.”) Vinny puzzles over why the voice actor, who seems to know better, agreed to record such stilted sentences. There are also a couple of graphic novel-style cutscenes with similar language, but in-game documents that are not provided with audio seem to contain better translations. Alex has fun trying to translate these back into somewhat human speech.
Vinny continues in this fashion, exploring corridors and shooting the many resilient night guards in his path, as well as some zombies, until he accidentally finishes the game. He then sets the language to the native Russian and Loads His Last Save. Vinny remarks that the voice actor sounds more confident in this tongue and encourages commenters to offer their own translations.
Alex provided my favorite quote from this video: “Nature’s greatest obstacle: The already-opened door.” (25:50)
Here's a new thing I might be doing if there's enough interest or if it works out well enough or if I have enough time and stick with it. Tell me what you think and suggest some names for this thing.
A pizza restaurant management simulation game on Steam.
The Quick Look: Running time of 27:06, starring Vinny Caravella and Alex Navarro.
Vinny starts a new game to show Alex the general gameplay (spreading toppings on pizza before delivering them) before jumping into his own save which is further along. In this save, he has upgraded to a nicer restaurant, has access to more unlocks, such as sandwiches and staff to order and order around, respectively, and is being presented with dilemmas of an economical and somewhat ethical nature.
Vinny works his lazy but skilled chef, Ron, to the bone while flipping over vehicles and giving away his money to shady politicians and the mafia until he reaches a point where he can no longer take out any more loans and is forced into game over bankruptcy.
Despite the game being glitchy and poorly made in general, Vinny expresses a positive outlook, but thinks it is not currently worth the $15 asking price. Alex says he thinks it would do well as a mobile game.
Somewhere around last week, Tubesynch came into existence. So, being one of the first people there, I made what has been requested for a long time: a chat room where Giant Bomb fans can watch Giant Bomb videos together non-stop. You can find it here.
But, I'm not making this post to advertise, just to clarify my uses for the room. Here are the guidelines I follow when choosing which videos to add to the queue:
No videos which are just talking for too long. This means no long-form interviews, morning show or site redesign stuff. Also, no Bombcast stuff. There's already a place for that. Videos taken around the office are okay, like Mailbags and unboxing videos. Short E3-style interviews are probably fine.
Single clips are good, but no highlight montages or Best Ofs. I want to keep a cohesive feel.
Cohesion also requires no single parts of a series. Game Room Quick Looks don't count, and having two parts to something is okay as long as the length is good. I don't want to get into marathon stuff just yet.
I have to queue everything up manually, so if anyone wants to help, that'd be great. I'm happy to appoint what Tubesynch calls Leaders to help manage the queue for when I'm not around. Right now, I'm accepting anyone whose username I recognise from the site, so if you want to help out, let me know your Tubesynch username on here and I'll let you know if I know you :P
Also, I'll let anyone site mods be mods for this chat, if they want. Here are the rules: Don't ruin chat. Being a jerk is fine, I think, just as long as you don't ruin chat for everyone else.
It's not usually busy, but there's always someone idling, so jump in and have fun. If you don't like what's on, look down the list and come back later. I'll turn on voteskip when I know it's working right. Like I said, Tubesynch is about a week old, so they're still working stuff out, too.
I think that's it! Let me know if you have any questions, suggestions or comments.
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