Giant Bombcast 706: Key Lad

As per usual, videos will take a hot second to encode.

Alternative titles were:

• Name and Shame
• Beef with Beef
• EROTIC VIOLENCE
• Fancy Hamburger
• Don't Put Weird Stuff in the Toilet

B-Mails!

Lads lads lads

It is done. Now lay Sakurai to rest.

DELI LIFE

The changed to the controls in the HD releases of Kingdom Hearts improved it quite a lot. The game has issues but I enjoy it apart from some annoying bosses. Story-wise it's basically an excuse to beat up Disney villains and it does that properly, with the villains being front and center. KH2 has better gameplay but shifted focus towards its own convoluted lore and has rather few Disney bosses. The rest of the games even more so. So the first game is the only one where the Disney stuff doesn't just feel like set dressing which makes it an unique beast.

Anyone else not able to cast (Android) to their TV anymore? The icon on the video is gone. UPFs won't cast when they are live and haven't for me for a while but I also don't have the option besides casting my whole screen now.

Any help appreciated.

Oh, I guess that picture during the second break wasn't a fluke after all, huh?

:p

Yeahhhh more Ben

Danny is wrong about PES.

I(and most PES players) have really enjoyed playing PES through the PS4 lifecycle. I will summarise how we ended up at the efootball2022 mess. At the end of PES 2020 Konami announced they would not do any development to next years game and instead focus on the next generation of PES. PES2021 was an update of the PY game with a refreshed my clubs(Ultimate team) and a few kit updates etc. During the development of the next gen game, Konomi's mobile game continued to increase in its popularity. It is very popular! As a result they decided to focus their resources on the mobile game, as they felt they could continue to own the mobile game market, and would continue to struggle to compete with EA in the console market. The result is us PES fans being misinformed, and receiving an incomplete and buggy game.As Danny touched on what made us love the PES series is the feel of the game, it is much more satisfying then playing FIFA. So it is very sad that they made us wait two years for this.

I don't get why Ubisoft even bothered adding the first two hours to FC6, or any of the "serious" story beats at all. They are completely disconnected from everything else, so why not just lean into the ridiculousness the whole way?

I love how everyone was expecting Jeff G to completely dump on FC6, only for him to say he liked the game. Hilarious. Especially when you consider how negative the Quick Look was.

I like this return version of Ben, where he isn't trying too hard to be funny. If he got his job back, then good for him. It looks like the break he took away for the gaming industry did him some good. And it seems like Jeff has made him one of the News guys he was talking about on his last Garage Talk.

So is Ben back again or is this just a temporary thing? I've been missing him, so it's great news to hear if he's back!

Bakalar... $1,200 is not an expensive wristwatch

There's a good YT video, from a guy who does a series on these places, about the mall Jeff B mentions in the video. It has had a long, rough history.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NESqtSQGhhE

@janman:
idk how much you care about the Kingdom Hearts lore, but not too long ago we got
to the Union Cross finale and -- BABY XEHANORT! Ahh!! And so many revelations!
Two years ago I knew nothing of KH. Then I got tired of seeing people in this community
shit on it and decided to play everything KH to make up my own mind;
and man.. it's good, but also bad, but also so very good.

Ugh.. and now I can feel the sting of the KH fans. Waiting, forevermore, for something more.

Dear crazy Norse man. You can freeze extra chili and stews in large ziplocs and reheat then in hot water later. No need to feed good leftovers to the toilet.

Not to be confused with Episode 695: KeyBoy.

Aha, that e-mail from the Norse person seriously struck a nerve for me. If you're gonna cook in bulk, just freeze the portion that you know you won't get to before it's spoiled, and re-heat it later. Otherwise, you're literally just wasting more food in your attempt to not waste food >.<

RIP Netrunner

My choice of a N64 b-game for Nintendo Online is Body Harvest, which was the proto-GTA3 from Rockstar (DMA Design at the time) before they had even made GTA2.

Having replayed the GBA Castlevanias on WiiU a few years ago, Circle of the Moon was definitely the weakest one for me. It had a lot of empty corridors with the same enemy pasted over and over again problem, and the different Card combos you could do to change elements or switch weapons weren't that fun or effective over just going straight whip either.

The worst part of it was definitely the run upgrade though. You got the ability to run almost immediately, meaning it was required for platforming almost the entire game, but you had to start it by double tapping a direction, forcing you to double tap a direction all the time and, I think, every time you turned around. If they could change that run to be automatic that would've probably helped a ton, or even if the walking speed was good enough to platform with.

Those issues aside it's still a alright "one of those".

Someone please make that movie poster. lol

Really cool when Ben basically called anyone that is Republican a white supremacist. So glad I pay a membership to listen to trash talk like that.

Hey GB Crew. Turok 1 and 2 is on the Switch. This is the second time this has been a topic, where you seem a bit out of the loop.

Why do people who are gamers, for lack of a better term, feel the need to invent conspiracies regarding developers and their income? Things like 60 dollar price tag being too low or game pass not being profitable. It's not game developers saying stuff like this, it's the people who play them. Why would established and successful game developers accept game pass deals if they weren't profitable?

@schnoo: I think there is some business precedent within the music industry that subscription services (Spotify, etc.) don’t necessarily pay the creators an amount of money proportionate to the actual hundreds of thousands or millions of people that experience the music.

So I imagine some people assume other subscription services similarly underpay creators and get preemptively mad about it. But yeah, it sounds like the lump sum payouts that devs get to be on PlayStation Plus or Gamepass are actually reasonable a lot of the time, from the scattered reports.

If Ben and Dan stick around for more stuff I'll probably renew my premium after all...

I do love having Ben back on the Bombcast, even if it's temporary. It's been really nice.

Ben makes the bombcast better

Bucharest is one crazy place

Jan "Deli Gang Tats" Ochoa

The Smash roster is ass.

Jeff G makes a running with a hatchet joke and nobody blinks? GB is fucking dead. Wtf

@nautica250: agree 100%. Tone of this site has changed so much over the past few years.

Martin Freeman as Danny O' Dwyer

too hot to handle

Ya’ll are crazy. Everyone on the podcasts have been saying similar things about Republicans and worst for years. This pearl clutching is pretty pathetic.

Having Ben back on has been so good, return to form for the Bombcast.

It's really great to have Ben back, he brings an energy and perspective that has really been missing. Hope he sticks around.

@bisonhero: Gamepass also differs from Spotify in that it's still in it's early phase. A bunch of people are not yet in the system so there's a clear reason for companies like Microsoft to throw a bunch of money to a wide array of studio's that make quality that can pull all kinds of gamers into the system. We don't know what happens once / if these subscription services become the dominant way people get access to games in a similar fashion as happened to the music industry. Will smalltime studio's still be able to find an audience outside of it, or will they have to take any deal that is offered to them because it's the sole financially viable route left to take?

That's also what irks me slightly when the crew says stuff like 'It seems like it's working out for everyone.' The people being asked about it are the ones in the system at this time. Naturally Microsoft is not going to skimp out on meager contracts while they're trying to make gamepass a huge success. They need to pull customers in by offering amazing games right now; You can't be stingy at that point, you need these games so you need an enthusiastic 'yes!' from the studio's you offer it to. Those gamedevs get to choose for stability, instead of having to hope that their game hits the jackpot and makes a ton of sales through it's own gamepages. It's a clear win for everyone in the system right now, but the question remains whether people still retain a taste for buying new games on their own in the future for the games outside of the subscription system.

Will it go the way of music where only a small amount of companies take the majority of the money from the works on their own and then pay the creators a portion of their revenue? At that point, all the leverage is on the large company's side and they'll no longer have to make their deals as enticing as they have to do in the competitive landscape that we're in right now. Spotify doesn't have to, because they know that if you want to be a serious musician, you have to be on there. They got the eyeballs.

And what would happen to the smaller studio's that are not backed by the Annapurna's and Devolvers of the world? Will they get to be part of these services for a reasonable cut or will they be denied in the name of curation and now have to sell their small-time game in an industry where most customers don't look and pay for individual games any longer but rather open the game-faucet of the subscription service, without the friction of having to make a purchasing decision before playtime?

I get that this is mostly me looking into a glass ball and guesstimating the future, and naturally no one is making business decisions based on the potential future health of an industry for new entrants, so it all makes sense and is good for the actors involved right now. But it feels pretty inevitable to me that there will come a time where gamesubs are not seen as a blessing for small-time devs any longer. I am mostly a glass half-empty kind of guy though. Maybe a sizeable amount of people cling onto their gamestores and are willing to keep buying individual games despite the existance of great value package deals. Shoutout to those that keep rebuying Skyrim just to have it :)

Not even Ben and Jan combined can save this podcast from the worst, most misinformed discourse surrounding Kingdom Hearts and Smash Bros. I've heard this year.

The voice mails are such a waste of time. They were fine on the aftershow because that was just a messing around type deal, but they add no value to a podcast that already has considerable length to it. But I'm sure I'm in the minority with that opinion.

Shocked, shocked that no one suggested Michael C. Hall for Drew. Either him or whoever is the Blinking White Guy meme would've been a great fit.

@nautica250: Yea it's pretty sick huh? I'm also glad Ben can point out that people that accept and use white supremist rhetoric to win elections, even if they say they don't endorse it, are really actually white supremacists! Some people don't get that and act like literally every republican politician, and quite a few dems, are actually racist as hell!