xbob42

I have beaten this game numerous times on Steam without a single gamepad issue, ever. Never even heard of people having gamepad issues. Never tried it with KB/M since games like this tend to be designed around the speed you can move with a controller to begin with.

Glitches are abound on every version, however. I know there was one "bug" where near the end of the game, if using mouse and keyboard, Isaac would jump fine to the first thing you needed him to jump to, but after that for some reason you're supposed to hold shift to jump to the next one, so people wasted a lot of time thinking it was broken. I guess it kind of was, but only because of the weird controls.

Jeff appears to fix the audio about 40 minutes in. So much better. Even with headphones I was having trouble.

Just got around to starting this and all I can imagine is those zombies near the beginning breaking down the fence yelling "I NEED A HAIRCUT!" and "LET MY PEOPLE GO-LF!"

I wish I liked FF7R's combat anywhere near as much as Ben seems to. It's definitely a step above the mediocre action combat Square normally puts out, but even the "fun" characters like Tifa are largely mashing the Square button until you're allowed to use other abilities. I'd take it a million times over compared to the abysmal combat of 15, but I'm hardly dying to get into more battles or anything. I think it actually might've been pretty fun as a co-op experience where each person controls a character, although with how often the party is forcibly switched up that could be annoying.

Huh. I don't think I've once tried to actually hit things with melee items or throwables in Alyx. Never came to my mind, I guess. I get that Gordon's well known for his crowbar and all, but melee in VR is generally finnicky and unfun, and pretty dangerous to your furniture/family. It would've been neat if there was more stuff to do with the random junk, and maybe there is (I'm not through the game yet) but for me it was all about it being a really fun, actual game in VR, that looks absolutely phenomenal and plays buttery smooth. The shooting is some top-tier shit. And I dunno what game Jeff played, but the physics are like a THOUSAND times better than anything in Source 1. If you actually spend time messing around with physics objects, like, say, chairs, and putting them on other objects, the physics "hitboxes," or bounding boxes or whatever, are super accurate.

So a chair is not just a physics cube with a chair model inside, the legs will go through things and get caught on things, they'll hold the chair up if you position it on another item, it's actually super cool and I hope the game uses some of that at some point, because it's fucking neat. The physics, despite what Jeff said, are WAYYYY less "jittery" than Half-Life 2 or anything, I haven't seen a single object jiggling around or dealing damage, though I'm sure it can happen. One of the first things I did when I opened it up was chucked some items on top of each other, they land with some actual weight and don't all bounce around like balloons or low gravity. The physics are on an entirely different level than what I'm used to, and they're fast and responsive to boot, rather than slow and floaty or janky.

It's true that largely the game does what other "games" have done in VR, but... I don't think Half-Life has ever really blown me away to begin with, I guess. Half-Life 2 introduced physics, which was neat, but was largely just some super simple puzzles and the gravity gun, which was like a normal gun but slower and clunkier. Most of the titles that use the best parts of Alyx were glorified tech demos, so it's nice seeing a great package of great ideas in a full-fledged, real game, rather than what feels like a college project.

I'm also sort of wondering if taking weeks to make very little progress in the game and getting really hung up on something the game doesn't have (melee combat) is really protracting the issue. Chapter 3 is very, VERY early on. Obviously I'm writing this as newer podcasts are out, but I find it fun to leave comments as I hear something, rather than come back with future context.

I'm really curious as to what part of Artifact's business model that Ben found "terrible." In a world where every digital CCG is a money pit cesspool like Hearthstone and Magic, having an actual TCG where you can just, y'know... buy the cards you want and sell/trade the ones you don't, all for a few bucks instead of hundreds of dollars, it seemed like a no-brainer.

Then the internet decided that was bad... because the game was also $20? I don't get it. I bought the game, immediately made more money back in Steam credit than I spent on it, and still had the cards I wanted. It was awesome. My problems with Artifact had to do with the absolutely absurd RNG, not the fact that was the first fully functional digital TCG I'd ever played.

I am the opposite of Business Dave. When I want an Uber or a Lyft, it is to get me from A to B, I do not want to have a conversation, I am not your friend, I don't care what you do, and I don't expect or want you to care what I do. Dunno why everyone thinks everyone else needs to be their personal chat buddy based on proximity alone.

Huh. First time I'd heard of anyone getting dry eyes from playing VR. Looking it up, it does seem to be a known problem for some people and it looks like it's because... some people who play VR blink a lot less? The fact that that's even a thing is incredibly interesting to me. It sounds so obvious that I wouldn't even consider it but it makes sense with how much more engaged you can get in VR and how much spatial awareness matters. Your specific issue might be different but that's what I've seen from others. Crazy how new tech can produce new issues like this.

You know, for a bunch of guys who play video games for a living, there sure seem to be massive gaps in their collective knowledge. That Silent Hill conversation was... incredibly vague. "Y'know, as someone who never played these games, I'd sure like it if they were way different than the thing I never played."

Y'don't gotta play everything, but it'd be nice if there were more people on staff who could maybe fill these holes? Some of my favorite content over the past several years has been Spookin' With Scoops and Six Crazy Frights, despite them both being pretty surface-level, cursory glances at random horror titles. I mean, I guess they all like Dead Space/Resident Evil to some extent, but there's so much more!

You know, the Shadow Hearts segment is interesting to me because it seems to hold true to how Giant Bomb seems to feel about Quick Looks/UPFs they do. They think if they're not in combat, that it's boring. I imagine the reason the demo of that JRPG didn't start off with you in combat is because JRPG fans don't really come to JRPGs just to check out the sick ass combat, you want to get a feel for the characters, world, music, etc. I get that that in and of itself isn't unique to JRPGs, but the fact that combat is kind of only of middling importance is.

As a JRPG fan myself (and as someone who never got to play Shadow Hearts) I was very interested in seeing what the story had to offer just from this video, so in that sense I think it's a very good demo for its target audience. And then you've got the ridiculous intro to capture the attention of the people who will be disappointed they're not shooting people with Mariachi flamethrowers.

And just like with Giant Bomb Quick Looks, I don't need to see constant combat or action to be entertained! Some of the funniest shit you guys do is responding to dumb story stuff. I dunno, didn't really come here to level some super mild critique or anything, I was just thinking about this as I watched it. I am always down for more Demo Derby!