Giant Bombcast 641: Hey, Throw Your Molotovs!

Noice

Nooiiccee

Damn, man. I was just watching GI's preview of Cyberpunk last night and thinking how McNamara was one of the "originals" as it were.

I wish them all the best, but somehow I just can't see that outlet surviving without him. That guy kind of was Game Informer

Andy spent years being more behind the scenes, but in recent times he's been running the GI Show so he's been out there more than ever. It's gonna be strange without him, but sounds like he's looking forward to the change so I hope he does more awesome things next.

Mask talk on pre-show

Jeff out here roasting fools "it's the john wick of video games, weird" and just zero acknowledgement it lol

Did Bran say what difficulty they played TLOU2 on?

Any time stamps on the Last of Us talk ?

Jan made it sound like he adjusted the difficulty from time to time, he definitely messed with some of the accessibility options throughout the game (mainly high contrast mode).

I think a few weeks ago Brad said he went with Hard and Jeff sort of made fun of him for always doing that with Naughty Dog games and coming to regret it, with Brad countering that he was actually pretty bored by the original The Last of Us and walked away for several months before reading about how tense the harder difficulties could be and winding up really enjoying how the gameplay felt like an extension of the story rather than a rough sketch of a stealth game tacked onto a TV show.

Ben's Evo journey sounds really cool and an excellent addition to GB's SUMMER OF GAMING content. Look forward to seeing him perform. Hope you guys keep us informed on where to catch the actual match(es).

Checked out the Xbox X startup sound and don't agree with Jeff. This sounds like generic movie logo or threatre sound system logo. It lacks the warmth and charm of PS1 & 2 startups. I miss the days when Brian Eno and Ryuichi Sakamoto (Dreamcast startup is the best!) were contracted for this stuff. Get PC Music involved!

Jan is just dropping The Last of Us 2 spoilers left and right without warning. Would have been nice to have some warning Jan.

@bored_and_agitated: Maybe not the best idea to link to a product on store that also sells nazi shit (edit: sorry, that came across snarkier than I intended, you probably just didn't know. But just a heads-up, that store also sells nazi shit.)

@haneybd87: As somebody who played the game I thought he was very tasteful. I would not have pictured what he was talking about if I hadn't already seen it, and if I had heard him allude to what he did before getting to those parts I would have forgotten about them they were so vague.

Of the two he specifically mentioned from the pod, they foreshadow one of them in the first hour of the game and use the camera with that character in similar ways elsewhere in the game so I don't think the spectacle of it can truly be conveyed without seeing it for yourself. The other, you get a pretty good idea of what's going to happen there like 15 minutes before you even arrive based on dialogue and context clues.

@bluelander: whelp! Deleted comment. Hadn’t gone through their inventory just came across that patch. I collect patches and it’s rough knowing when some of these people are selling stuff that’s a dog whistle or something.

Thanks for the heads up

The conversation about actually using consumables is something I thought about recently when playing Sekiro. The soulsborne genre (though I hesitate to call Sekiro a part of that) has that feeling that nothing is permanent/infinite, so players (or at least I) tend to hold on to consumables and rely on the one thing they infinitely have, i.e. their swords. But actually using them makes the difficulty of those games MUCH more manageable, especially in the case of Sekiro.

Honestly, the whole "Sekiro needed an easy mode" conversation probably wouldn't have happened, or at least wouldn't have been as big, if it convinced players to use their spirit emblems much more liberally.

@nodima: As someone who has not played it yet I think Jan was sufficiently vague. My big take away was that Naughty Dog will make you do something you probably won't like to progress, but I played TLOU so that isn't much of a spoiler.

@bored_and_agitated: ✌️

I thought the jazz patch was funny but did not look at the rest... yikes. Wait do I need to get rid of my jazz cups now . ✌️

@nodima: Well it was spoilery enough that now I won’t be surprised by a few things.

@giese333: I don’t think it’s all racist. Like the Nagatoro sticker, she’s just a character from a recent manga that weebs like. The bad stores I’ve found are like 50% memes/anime stuff/gun stuff and 50% “obviously racist/Rhodesia references/nationalist junk”

It just becomes a problem of buying from and thus supporting someone who’s willing to sell rotten stuff. Most patch shops are one man operations but it’s still rotten.

@zoofame: you’re so right on that dynamic missing from the west coast recently. It’s definitely always highlighted when he does cross-coast content and can riff with Vinny at least.

Talking about Bloodborne being a gateway drug for Jan or not, I think you guys should give a real shot to Salt and Sanctuary. Especially Jeff

RIP Carl Reiner

@haneybd87: This game moves at such a glacial pace that I'd be genuinely jealous of your capacity to remember things from the first 20 minutes of a 3 hour podcast by the time you experience them for yourself.

Then again, I'm also the sort of person that will see Tom Cruise hanging off a plane in a trailer, think to myself, "well, I've got to see that goddamn thing for myself," and still be completely caught off guard when it's actually happening on the big screen even though it's most of the reason I'm there, so I'm firmly in the camp that minor knowledge of certain events in entertainment can't ever fully be ruined.

Thinking about it another way - if you'd already read the Game of Thrones books, were certain scenes any less effective for you at creating tension and excitement as a viewer? I can't name anyone in my personal circle that felt that way. My sister and mother were huge fans of the Harry Potter books, and they still host watch nights to get together and watch the movies every so often despite knowing them beat by beat both as novels and films.

Anyway, I don't mean to say you're wrong for feeling spoiled if you feel that way, and I hope you don't cling to those spoilers as you go about your day to day. I also hope they fade from your memory as I imagine they do for most people as they spend hours at a time trundling through desk drawers and crawling through tall grass to evade clickers and you can just let yourself sink back into the flow of the game.

Penguin Adventure on MSX was one of my favourite games as a kid. Great soundtrack too. Probably my most-played game until I got a PC. Still the best thing Kojima was ever involved in making IMHO.

@nodima: Well, one of the spoilers was in regards to the turn that makes people think this game is so violent. I wasn’t looking forward to that moment necessarily but I would have liked it to be a surprise. But now I know what it is. I was also spoiled on a big early game event months ago by a random comment so I knew that was coming and it would have hit me harder had I not known. It’s just such a bummer that this game I’ve been looking forward to keeps getting spoiled again and again. I should just shut myself off from the whole world, including podcasts, it seems.

Haven't played tlou2 yet, but tlou is 100% better, more fun, etc on the harder difficulty, that's real. I would hope they heard this feedback from people, since it was widespread, and ran with it.

Jeff always the contrarian.

Eh I am always wary of this sort of advice and would generally advise people to just try normal first. I remember for years hearing that Gears should actually be played on the hard difficulty to be enjoyed and I always did that, but when Gears 4 rolled around and I once again started the game on the harder setting it just felt like a slog. Enemies were bullet sponges and your guys felt very squishy. Every encounter tended to drag out in length so I dropped it back down to normal and had a good time.

Generally I actually very rarely see any benefits from ratcheting up the difficulty setting in single player games. If it's a complete cakewalk then sure I'll bump it, but in the case of TLOU2 I'm playing on what is considered "normal" and it's plenty fun. I'm never swimming in ammo, but I'm also not constantly scrounging just to have 2 bullets in a gun. I guess if the enemies played by the same rules I would be more inclined, but if the game is limiting my ammo and asking me to fend off 8 enemies that infinitely reload then whats the point. I would like it if for instance the enemies actually ran out of their supplies as well and then shifted tactics to try and overwhelm me with melee attacks.

It's different for everyone but I just wanted to chime in since I do see a lot of this "always play on hard" sentiment going around.

Star Citizen is running on Lumberyard, it looks real nice. Some crytek is still bouncing around in there I think, at least I see it popping on the console in-game.

Checking out other things running it, I came across Everywhere. I would like to build a rocket boy! :O

Deadhaus Sonata could be cool as well.

Checking in from TERF Island (the UK), its pure uncut culture war every day over here

brad mentioned if he is going to review the last of us 2 or not ?

@thisisdell: How so? I usually agree with Jeff.

I think the only good things about TLoU 1 were the story, art, and the shooting. Otherwise that game is pretty boring, and based on that I'm not interested in a sequel.

When does TLOU2 conversation start/end? Wanting to try and avoid some spoilers/discussion.

@maxxcanti: LOL if the story, art and the shooting were the only good things then it sounds like a pretty great game to me

I’m gonna throw more molotovs, thanks guys

@humanity: I'm usually with you but for a very few games. ME3 is another.

To me, the TLOU2 is a great game in all aspects, which means the story too. I'm with Jan, a lot of the opinions online about this game have nothing to do with the actual game and more to do with someone's personal beliefs involving certain subject matters. The review bombing on websites like Metacritic was just disgusting, and you can clearly tell that most people leaving 0's didn't even play the game. But fortunately, it didn't seem to hurt Naughty Dogs bottomline at all, because the game became the highest selling exclusive in Playstation history during its first weeks. Here's looking forward to TLOU3 during the PS5 cycle.

I miss the intro music.

That talk about item hoarding makes me really appreciate Doom Eternal. I used the BFG and I used the Crucible, often times because the arenas were so demanding and punishing that I felt justified in pulling out the literal Big Gun. Coming around on a second and third playthrough and not needing to use those room- and enemy-clearing items is also an incredible feeling of personal progression.

Rooting for you Ben at EVO! Looking forward to which FGC guests he'll have on his series (maybe Dave Lang?)

Also eagerly anticipating Brad and Jan's discussion of Pokémon Unite.

@nodima: Thanks. I’m playing part 2 on Moderate with pulse detection for enemies and items turned on and having a blast. I don’t mind that’s it’s not very difficult - that’s what I prefer for a first playthru.

With TLOUR I played on Normal first then did a hard playthru straight after and really enjoyed each one. Until RE2make it was favorite TPS campaign on PS4.

@humanity: The gotta play it on Hard stuff comes from a very small but vocal minority. Only 6.6% of TLOUR players beat the game on Hard.

FYI: Brad is right, use your stuff in LoU2. I surprised it isn’t common knowledge, but the games “loot” isn’t fixed. I don’t know what is going on in the back end, but you can’t screw yourself over completely..

@wlleiotl: “pure uncut culture war” is a perfect turn of phrase. Here in the Freedom Country, we take that hard shit directly to our veins.

The Last of Us 2 TLOU2 conversation ends at 23:01.

I added the name like that for searches.

Having beaten TLOU2 a couple of days ago, my main takeaway is that I have no idea why people are acting like this game's violence and themes are a million times worse than TLOU1. It seemed like the conversation surrounding this game on release was about how disgusting and controversial some of the violence was.

Nothing in 2 seemed "worse" than the stuff that happens in 1. Both games are incredibly gorey and have awful things happen to the characters. Hell, in TLOU1 (spoilers for TLOU1) Joel watches his daughter be gunned down and die in his arms. A man is forced to kill her brother and then commits suicide on screen due to grief. Ellie is captured by a group of cannibals led by a pedophile. And then you've got the gore and violence found throughout the normal gameplay.