xbob42

This Quick Look's been stuck in the back of my head for over a decade. In my mind it was Trails in the Sky 1 or 2, because of that opening sewer section that looks pretty similar to one in Trails. I was never able to find this because I had no idea it wasn't Trails!

Would be nice if they ported Hexyz Force to something other than the PSP! Seems like a fun little RPG.

I understand what you mean, but I don't think anything those fellas did was to "do Jeff dirty." I can't speak for any of them, but my impression was always that it was just getting harder and harder to justify working there with how hard it was to just produce content. People would constantly complain about new content coming out so slowly and how lone Youtubers could far outstrip an entire team, even on "basic" videos like Quick Looks. Apparently there's a lot of stuff behind the scenes that makes "just recording content" a lot harder than it might otherwise seem.

So when it became clear that they had an opportunity to break off and try something new, they took it. Again, I speak for no one, I know nothing, but my impression based on how quiet Jeff was about them after they left is maybe it did cause some hard feelings. I'm having a hard time imagining it going any other way. But even if that were the case (and again, I have no idea!) I can't blame anyone. I can't blame Alex, Vinny and Brad for going somewhere where they can just make content, and if, IF Jeff felt done dirty, I wouldn't blame him at all either.

My silly dream scenario is that Jeff joins Nextlander and the boys can be together again... but that seems unlikely. Whatever Jeff chooses to do, I hope he does it with gusto and passion and I'll be happy to follow him the same way I've followed Patrick, Austin, Abby, Brad, Vinny, Alex, Dan, etc. I'd follow Ben if he had an online presence but it seemed like he was totally done. And I'll still follow the fine folks here at GB. I hope they can build the bomb even better!

Jesus, man. I can't believe it's already been 8 years. Goddammit.

Hoping the long absence is just Thanksgiving break and not Jan breaking my goddamn heart again like he did with Trails in the Sky!

Maybe another comment has covered this, but what is this revisionist bullshit at about 2 and a half hours where "Fallout 76 wasn't even that buggy"? Are you fucking KIDDING me?

I don't usually care too much about people being off about facts but this is absolutely untrue.

Sit your ass through this THREE HOUR video of *most* of the bugs encountered by Joseph Anderson in his single playthrough to review the game (this does not contain the review, it is ONLY bugs) and tell me it wasn't even that buggy, or that it was "online game" buggy. I played the game for a single hour at one point long after launch and had literally over a dozen major bugs, including shit like enemies getting health back over and over and dying randomly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6HdBplLmuU

Fallout 76 wasn't this normal launch that people put under a microscope, it was a busted piece of shit that wasn't beta tested properly and pretending it was anything else just lets publishers know that no matter how bad something is people will forget. This shit was atrocious, man.

Gotta admit. Watching Jan not use the table for that boss battle was a little painful. It's like... the enemy is very tall, and it's clear where it wants you to hit it (thanks to the lock on) and when you're jumping you clearly can't reach, so... gain some elevation?

But that's the danger of streaming, sometimes you just miss the obvious solution in your frustration when something is different than you were expecting. I do like how he said "use the table?" and then immediately tried to smack it, climbing on it was so far from his mind. Gave me a genuine laugh.

Hope you stick with it, Jan! Was a little bummed when Ben quit KH (Even though it was kind of a painful series, the "we all hate this game" shtick stops being entertaining quick) and even moreso when you decided to not continue Trails in the Sky. Would love it if you just made this a series going forward! But not if you actually hate it, of course. I want the hosts to be having fun in whatever they're playing too, not just me!

Oh I think the second one is best by far. First one is pretty boring because 90% of the game is soulless, overly quiet Disney worlds where nothing really happens, with little sprinkles of anime thrown in. The gameplay is stilted and bad and the game is actively unfun on higher difficulties.

Kingdom Hearts 2 on the other hand, while the story is ridiculous, the gameplay is some next-level shit that they still haven't matched. The game is one of the best action RPGs I've ever played on the highest difficulty with some of the most fun bosses I've ever fought in any game EVER.

Before replaying through the series before KH3 came out, I had memories of liking KH1 and disliking the start of KH2 but thinking the gameplay was fun. Replaying both on their highest difficulties gave me two polar opposite experiences. KH1 was one of the most unfun, frustrating messes I've had to slog through, while I was delighted by each new challenge in KH2. The rest of the games just kind of meld together into a big meh slog.

I dunno what they did when they made KH2's combat, but they need to figure out that magic again. Because they haven't even come close since.

I think Kingdom Hearts is a fun little series. It's not amazing, but it gets a lot more shit than it deserves. Yeah, story's dumb as shit and convoluted as hell, but that's part of the fun. Who cares? It's Final Fantasy x Disney, of course it's dumb.

I'd love to see the entire series played through. With Jeff forced to participate in every episode and take quizzes on the lore.

Still wondering why these guys are acting like ray tracing is some minor, ancillary feature. Yeah, it's taxing, but it massively improves lighting, shadows, and especially reflections, the latter of which we basically haven't had in games at all in years. Only recently did we start getting the utterly horrible screen-space reflections, which only look acceptable at certain angles and with certain materials (they're okay in large bodies of water I guess, since the water is supposed to be distorted so you don't notice their low resolution) and which are often at a drastically lower resolution and sometimes frame rate, on top of having awful artifacting such as reflecting objects close to the screen on distant surfaces, and an entire portion of the left and right side of the screen being entirely absent of reflections, creating an obvious and janky looking cutoff point.

Is it the most important thing right at this moment? Of course not, but it's also several hundred tiers above stuff like PhysX or TressFX, which Brad did acknowledge. It is definitely the Holy Grail in the long-term, but in the short-term it's a great way to massively improve the visual quality, realism and simple beauty of a lot of games.

Some games will benefit less than others, if you can get really good pre-baked stuff in static environments, you really won't notice much, but Control in particular had its entire atmosphere changed for me from my first playthrough on my 1080 Ti (no RTX support) vs when I finally got my hands on a 3080. Areas like the telephone room where you've got a separate reflection in each plane of glass, all showing the room, lighting and character accurately. That's kind of a big deal in a room entirely comprised of glass. But it also had more subtle effects, like seeing the light from a vending machine reflected as you walk by glass in a dark hall. Hell, the office windows basically go from being essentially invisible in the base game to actually impeding your vision, which I thought was fucking cool, because breaking the glass so I could see actually became sort of important, even though that's not an explicit "feature" of it.

And then in something like Watch Dogs Legion, despite being a very meh game, all the warped and twisted reflections from all the surfaces was really fun to toy with. The cars in the game are very shiny, so taking a spider-bot and running around seeing the reflection of it and the entirety of the environment in both the bumper (where it's squished and warped because of the fact that it's a small rounded piece of plastic) and on the doors and hood and such, all make it just fun to look at and mess with. Not a big deal on its own, but where it gets interesting in terms of actual gameplay is seeing enemies in reflections before you round corners, or noticing how light is projecting on a surface in a certain way, potentially warning you of some danger ahead.

While years from now we'll have a much broader use of raytracing rather than it being an optional feature to turn on, I think it already massively benefits the atmosphere of games and has so much potential for actual gameplay ramifications as well. Am I saying every single game needs to have you looking in mirrors or something to spot baddies? Of course not. But it effortlessly opens that up as a possibility without any work beyond "put a reflective surface here." And I think that's awesome.

I'm a little bummed the consoles can't do it very well, but I'm just as excited that they have it at all. That means it won't just be a niche, and surely a mid-gen refresh would open up some ray tracing power that'll be just as noticeable as the performance or other visual upgrades.

I think this game is awesome, dunno where this "forgettable B-game" narrative is coming from. It's like a more focused BotW with better combat and a slightly different focus. And that was one of my two bigger issues with BotW: one was that there were too many damn shrines and none of them felt rewarding since you knew the rewards before you did it, killing the feeling of mystery and exploration, the other was that the combat was so damn simple. There were a lot of cool things you could pull off because of the world simulation, but they were dependent on where you were a lot of the time and the random factors happening in the world at any given moment.

So far this game has had much more consistently rewarding exploration, with there being plenty of actual gear to find instead of just HP/stamina increases, and the combat feels so much better without having to pick up 80 different swords that break in two hits, but also because of the active abilities that let you really toss enemies around, air juggle, maneuver, etc.

The writing isn't amazing, but it's given me a few chuckles. The writing in BotW was almost nothing at all, and what little there wasn't exactly amazing, so I guess I like the writing here better because it at least feels alive, even if not exactly hilarious.

I dunno what B games these guys played growing up, but they sure as shit didn't look or play this well when I was little. It's just a fun ass little video game, and I've been waiting for Ubisoft to figure out they can make those instead of having everything be weighty and realistic for a while now. It's been so long since they've done a new Rayman, and Trackmania qualifies but nobody wants to play it because it's Trackmania.