Giant Bombcast 655: X Gon' Confirm It For Ya

Genshin Impact censors words that China doesn’t like.

That cover image makes me happy.

The most ovation in a podcast

@permanentsigh: China don't care (for certain words).

@bladeofcreation: This is the appropriate response :)

Jeff saying that a bunch of people sitting around lying to each other feels like D&D makes me think that he's only ever experienced that game with a bunch of assholes who get way too serious about it.

Gatekeepers fucking suck.

I haven't listened to the podcast yet... did EVH get discussed pre-death on this one? I feel like this isn't the first time a celebrity has immediately died after a Bombcast discussion... or am I imagining things here?

did they add something new to the intro song?

Man I've done so many cross country flights for my company and never have gotten a meal. Is it just cuz they cheaped out on delta? Also yeah crazy on the EVH stuff.

@permanentsigh said:

I mean, yes, but also this isn't really, like, a surprise. The dev is based out of Shanghai. They don't even have the choice of whether or not to capitulate to the demands from the Chinese government to censor this stuff, or of releasing a "Chinese-only" version of the game. It's fine to be mad about that censorship as a government policy in general, but the only thing this dev can be pinned for is "being Chinese"

@gameroulette: No. They came back from a break with the news of Eddie Van Halen's passing.

You could totally call for resupply in the Tie Fighter games. You pretty much had to if you wanted to take out the capital ships on certain missions depending on your loadout. No clue how it's handled in this new game but it felt fairly simmy since you had to come to a complete halt and wait for a friendly transport to dock and feed you more missiles and bombs. Except for the part where you could totally cheese it and continue to fire your munitions while still docked and it wouldn't interrupt the resupply.

i think the X & O situation just shows that Sony realizes that they're mostly catering to a global market and that the japanese market is an important chunk of it, but not the main chunk. Things have changed quite a bit between the PS1 and the PS5, most of their current users don't subscribe to the idea that X is a negative symbol and O is a positive one. They can either stubbornly be in their 'we're a Japanese company damnit' corner or admit that they're selling a global product in a global marketplace.

Happy to see this intro!

@bladeofcreation: OMG that was perfect!

The difficulty with different VR systems interoperating is that most of the meaningful innovation that's occurred since the days of Palmer's duct tape prototype is not in the hardware but rather the software runtime environment that interfaces between the application and the hardware. The runtime environment handles the frame buffer initialization, timing, compositing, reprojection, etc which reduces perceived latency and compensates for erratic performance.

For me the concerning part of Oculus leaving the dedicated PCVR market is that they're unlikely to further invest in R&D that's specific to the Oculus PC runtime if it wouldn't also be feasible to run on the Quest SoC. IIRC, I recall Carmack stating that the performance footprint of their PC runtime compositor by itself would utilize 100% of their mobile SoC resources, mandating that the mobile flavor of their runtime be very pared down.

Regarding the Quest<->PC via wifi, It's good to keep in mind that while Jeff's experience falls within his tolerance levels, that may not be the case for others and presumably Oculus/Facebook have some harder statistical basis for what is or isn't satisfactory for their market. A big selling point of the Quest is to avoid "your mileage may vary" circumstances as much as possible, so allowing things like sideloading and wifi-tethering feels more like an obfuscated concession to appease the niche enthusiast community.

@asylumrunner: To be fair. Americans censor stuff...they don't like. Were just self-righteous about it. We hardly ever like taboo subjects mostly coming from our puritan upbringing of how this country was originally founded on. We are ok with violence to an extent but put a nipple in it and NO NO NO....well for women that is...Men are A-ok. so on so on...some of the stuff we censor or clutch purles at is looked at strangely in other countries. Look at the reaction to the KIDS movie years ago and see the reaction to recent stuff with the same taboo tone...vs other countries. Overall we all have our "thing" and its unfair to hate on china without first looking at our own nose. The game is good...and that's that. - Paid for by china....Just kidding...

@topcyclist: Well I think there is a stark difference between American censorship of nudity and violence in mainstream TV and Chinas government mandate to not recognize certain words, people or nations under the threat of jail or worse. That said, in this situation it really is hard to fault the developer for having to comply with these "standards" that are strictly placed over them. As far as I know it's a fantastical game and the words are only censored in social chat? I didn't even know there was chat. Either way, their hand was pretty much forced.

I got a laugh out of Brad, when after Jeff was describing his hoops for running Oculus Quest 2 on PC he said "I have a Windows Mixed Reallity, you just described what VR is to me" dont' get me wrong I like my headset for what it is, but all of that sounded very familiar.

Sorry Brad but this podcast title and your 'execute' suggestion make no sense. The PlayStation button is called "Cross", not "X".

Making Cross the mandatory 'confirm' button is dumb btw.

I finished Bastion for the first time last night. I tried playing it a few years ago right after finishing and loving Transistor, but burned out on the combat like halfway through. It's like $3 on the Switch right now, so I figured I'd give it another shot.

The combat isn't bad, but it definitely feels a little stiff/clunky compared to modern indie games that do a similar top-down/isometric, dodge roll, mix of melee/ranged 360-degree pseudo twin stick combat. It actually reminds me of the action portions of another old game I'm playing for the first time, Alan Wake. They're completely functional, the mechanics sound solid on paper, but even with new weapons/abilities being introduced at a steady clip, they ultimately become the thing that keeps interrupting you while you're enjoying the other more impressive aspects of these games. There are a few scenarios that are just flat-out not fun to play.

It still looks beautiful and the voice acting holds up perfectly, but I sure stumbled my way through a lot of the combat encounters and got stuck on a particularly long one near the end that was frustrating as hell.

The Hades combat initially put me off due to the similarities with Bastion, but I'll probably give it a shot once Risk of Rain 2 gives up its place as rogue-lite that's consuming my life.

@bladeofcreation: yeah, gatekeepers is the worst. Don’t know about D&D, but in my hobby ( indie scene) elitist are the ducking worse

@jeff: Maybe dont live stream using skype unless you wanna get DDoS'ed a lot, unless it has changed recently Skype was rotten for DDoS attacks not that long ago to the point where streamers were pointing it at AWS just to have a barrier.

Knock knock, open up the door, it's real. With the non stop exclusives and the gamepass deals...

I LOVE THE COOKING TIPS.

Ben is looking more and more like Joe Spinell and I am here for it.

I played 100+ runs of Hades while it was in early access, and most of those were from the first year of early access. Back around the time I started playing it you unlocked heat from defeating the bone hydra, because that's how long the game was at the time. And heat also worked quite different, it has changed a lot since then. Eventually Elysium was added, which I don't think I ever cleared.
I also started to unlock titan's blood in early access.

When I loaded up the save after the 1.0 release, both heat and the ability to modify weapons with titan's blood was already unlocked, which kind of made it feel like cheating. The game is balanced differently now, so having those things unlocked before even going past the third world felt so wrong that I decide to erase that save file and start over.

I think I've done about 30 runs since then, and I've clear Elysium once. I thought I was going to play it so much more now when it's out, but I've instead kept myself occupied with retroachievements instead. I hope to get through Hades before the end of the year though. I want to be able to know most of it before listening to the GOTY deliberations.

My college roommate taught me to use italian dressing to get the last little bit of marinara sauce out of the jar.

Maybe a part of it, but IIRC, Jeff has noted why he never got into D&D in the past because there is alot of preparation that goes into it and even as a player you have to remember alot of rules & concepts to keep it going. In fairness to him I get it, trying to create character sheets, finding out what character build you want to have, going through multiple books/PDFs, and then try to RP out a character that may not sync with your view takes quite alot of work that doesn't look fun to others. Even I as someone who plays alot of TTRPGs do find that process laborious at times.

New show idea:

"Is this as good as I remember: game name goes here "

At least one other person enjoyed your joke.

That person was me.

Speaking of Spider-Man, @benpack has some big J. Jonah Jameson energy at 2:08:46 when the topic of the new Chromecast comes up.

It makes sense for a button labeled circle to be confirm, but they put it in the wrong position, as Ben said, confirm (and jump) are much more natural on the bottom button. Sony just put the symbols in the wrong place to start with.

Like Jeff, I do not like Among Us or any of those "social engineering" type tabletop games. I suck at lying, and don't find it fun to try and lie. A game centered around that is not for me. I'm glad I'm not alone it that, because it sure feels like I am sometimes with how much that game blew up. Even most of my friends are into it. Although I do like D&D and play it weekly, so maybe I'm just weird.

I tried to get into Bastion twice (years apart), and fell off both times. I got farther in the second time, but still didn't finish it. Everyone seems really into Supergiant games, so I wish I could be as well. But something there simply doesn't click for me.

If you guys want a high-quality, spon-on remake of the Windows 95 startup stinger, there's one on Soundcloud:

https://soundcloud.com/getyoursnackon/win95-startup

He also provides the FL project file if you want to render it as a lossless WAV too. (His identity isn't laid out on Soundcloud but I did some cyber-sleuthing and suspect he's the Grammy-winning music producer Tom Norris.)

Ben got that 70's car salesman look down pat!

I started playing Genshin Impact recently and it does leave a very good first impression. Yes, the game's design is BOTW, so much so, I'm surprised Nintendo didn't send the developers a cease and desist warning about the game. However, it does a lot of other things that actually make it superior to BOTW and Nintendo should really take notes. For example: you can switch between many characters, I believe you can use 8 in total, but the first 4 are introduced during the first chapter of the game. There is no excuse for the sequel to BOTW, to only have Link do all the gameplay with Zelda tagging along when she easily can be a playable character, using the triforce of wisdom as her magic power.

I just finished the 3 opening towers and was told I had to gain adventure levels to unlock the next main chapter in the story. I'll see if the nickel and dime tactics begin here.

@asphyxiate: This rules. Guessing you can't download the project without a Splice account? (Not that I have anything that can open the project anyway.)

Idk man, this Spiderman thing is basically like if Sony just slung a deep fake Andrew Garfield's face over top of Toby in Spiderman 1-3 movies.

@slaughts:Part of me wants to try to get him to play a modern, rules-lite, improv heavy TTRPG like a Powered-by-the-Apocalypse game but also I can't imagine anyone who is friends with Austin Walker hasn't already had this conversation 1000 times.

This is one of the many reasons why D&D being such a crushing, monolithic majority of the TTRPG market sucks, is that things that are very much custom to D&D become traits of the entire medium, both in terms of the perception of the audience and in other games following market trends.

Ok, now we're calling everything "gotcha". On some show or other brand asked for clarification and I can't remember what was said but I don't think it helped. What it *sounds* like is a game that gets you to give it more money, but it's thrown around so much I have no idea if that's what people mean. Halp.

Brad, gaming over WiFi has gotten quite good. As Jeff mentioned, it basically matches wired nowadays, unless your network is super dirty. I'm over here living in the future. Playing games locally and wired is nasty business, I say.

perfection.

@tdous: They're saying 'gacha'. As in 'gachapon', which are those japanese toy capsule thingies. Your guess is fairly accurate - it's basically referring to games that spit out loot/rewards in exchange for currency (sometimes real money, sometimes not).

Surprise, Jeff doesn't feel strongly about something he doesn't care about :P.

SUS!

I'm kind of surprised that folks like Jeff and Dan that have a taste for professional wrestling and an aptitude for character improvisation are resistant to tabletop RPGs, especially in the context of the few times GB has made content from it. In Dan's case it seemed like he was viewing it through the lens of a video game where your goal is to win, as opposed to playing a character in a collaborative way -- he wanted to be an Ultimate Warrior when he really should have been a Ted DiBiase.

That said, I feel like Among Us and the meta built on lying and manipulation over VOIP is an entirely different ball of wax. It's something that I can tolerate watching in small portions, but would have absolutely zero interest in participating in. Those sorts of social interactions seem to trigger the same part of my brain that gets annoyed by Survivor-style reality TV.