Giant Bombcast 713: Pokémon BDSM

Videos are still encoding!

Alternative Names for this week's episode were:

• Different Bad
• Looted Valor
• One Tolerance Policy

Mmmm gotta catch ‘em all

The one Ive been waiting for! Thanks, crew.

Put Freakazoid in it.

I can't wait for the animated version of this

Why does everyone on Giant Bomb pronounce "aesthetic" as "ass-tet-ic" ?

@charaznablecustom: The funny thing about the english language and regional accents..

Booster CREWWWWWW!

@voidburger, as I type this I'm coming out the other side of my Moderna booster. Fortunately no barfs for me, just a general feeling of flu-ishness. Mostly gone after sleeping HARD for several hours.

But it's better than the alternative! Get yer jabs, people!

Completely agree with Jan about BDSP difficulty, I have never played competitive pokemon and do not grind at all and the game is completely without challenge or tension. Exp share completely ruined the game for me. I played Pokemon Yellow and Red as an 8 year old, the challenge was part of the fun then - removing it completely has made Pokemon substantially worse as a series.

Oh yeah, the New York/New Jersey and California regional accent.

@brazzle: I agree that Pokemon has become too easy and thus fairly boring, but not sure if mindlessly grinding levels for hours and hours is the correct solution for that problem. There has to be a better way to make a RPG challenging that doesn't include level grind.

Also the much bigger problem with Pokemon is that they've been making the same game since the first one and haven't figured out how to change it up in a meaningful way. Yes they've added new features, but the basic progression, story and even the Pokemon are pretty much the same in every game only changing in appearance.

I feel like this series really needs a reboot similar to Zelda.

To not have "a positive K/D ratio" you need to have un-killed the enemy or, have un-died.

I guess math is hard.

I'll take the Halo story over many other games story lol. That universe is interesting and many of those books are surprisingly good.

Can the “you can keep your job” jokes stop? Cringe joke.

There are some great pokemon romhacks that make the gamer much tougher - I am really liking Renegade Platinum

I won Pokémon Sword pretty much by using Grookey and his evolutions. I skipped the Wild Areas after a while (kinda ugly!) and still had no problem. Occasionally I would have him learn a weird spell for funsies.

@beggary: Oh man, so now Ryu AND Grookey are wizards? This is a lot to process.

The sad cover trend would have happened eventually without the Mad World GoW trailer because there's no scenario that exists where the Logan trailer didn't have the Johnny Cash Hurt cover to kick start it off.

A lot of sassy assholes in the comment section huh?

@rawrz: yeah, I've always found the story of most of the games at least enjoyable. Though 4 was a decent course correction, but did find 5 not great.

I feel like people missed the sad cowboy cover of Wang Chung from Wasteland 3, and its a real shame because that game rules

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7KWG2AsmE4&ab_channel=Kingfish

I think jess is great but she's awfully unashamed about being a theatre kid, which frankly I can't abide

@julmajuuhan: I've always thought the simplest way would be to make the game battles more like the Anime. Same number of Pokemon allowed from each trainer in a battle (so no more 6 vs. 2 gym battles!) and no healing items in battles. Those two changes alone would make the games way more fun. I love the Pokémon games, but they just feel like a waste of time now.

Basically most games pushed to 2022 will get delayed again. Many to the holiday season. And I agree, the Halo storyline is very forgettable. It's interesting while you're playing it, but once you turn off the game, none of it sticks. Destiny's overall storyline is more memorable. it also helps that the game has tons of lore you can read that you collect, if you care.

@entireties: I've actually never been involved in a play in my whole life lol

The halo talk was very disappointing, its clearly a lot more than just nonsense or fluff, sure in the bungie era you can just skim past it and let it be a game about shooting aliens whereas in the 343 era its way more in your face and forced at times. I appreciate Jeff G acknowledging that the books provide another layer to it at the very least. I really dont see how anyone can just disregard it so quickly and casually as if its nothing.

I found the Kojima and Silent Hill discussion odd considering that P.T./Silent Hills existed at one point. I don't know how actually involved Kojima was with P.T., and who knows if Silent Hills would've actually been any good, but it doesn't seem that crazy for Silent Hill or even Konami fans to clamor for a Kojima-led Silent Hill when he did produce something related to the series with his name on it that people really liked. It seems weirdly reductive to chock it all up to Konami fans wanting Kojima on any of their properties or to attribute it to the creative bankruptcy of fandoms. (Not to say those aren't factors, though.) I do agree with Jess though that it's not going to happen.

Also, I get the Halo story discussion. I've always enjoyed the series' story, but I've fallen off the books over the years (not sure if that's a good thing or not). To be fair, the series does have characters besides Master Chief and Cortana, but most of them (besides the Arbiter, who you played as in Halo 2) were dead by the end of the first trilogy, and the new characters introduced in 4 and 5 haven't really shown up at all in the Halo Infinite marketing, so it seems like they're really focusing on Master Chief and Cortana. I'm hoping some of those characters do show up in some fashion in Halo Infinite, particularly the Arbiter.

Don't actually brush your teeth after throwing up. The acid softens the tooth enamel and then the brushing wears pretty hard on your teeth. (Same goes for brushing after orange juice btw).

But yeah rinse well because you don't want to walk around with stomach acid on your teeth and vomit breath

Yes thank you. I came down here to say this. Rinse your mouth, wait a half hour or longer before brushing. A lot of foods are very acidic and should not be immediately preceding a brush.

Also, Noodle got cancelled? Can someone explain? I've been in love with that fat pug for years.

We always have our Thanksgiving meal at like 4:30-5:30. It's not weird! But it is supremely fucked up that your friend gave you no details, or not even like a warning "hey this is starting where are you" text. I would still be pissed about that, for sure.

Felt a bit strange that they didn't mention GBEast did a playthrough of Phantasmagoria 2... Oh god, that was 5 years ago already?!

If you're worried about getting "burned out" on a band/artist's music on the way to the concert, then maybe you shouldn't be going to that concert. Sounds like you don't actually enjoy the band/artist that much.

1500 employees signed a petition for Kotick to leave.

Outsiders: huh.. Seems like it's for the better if Kotick leaves.

Insiders: huh.. Seems like we need to hire a bunch of new fresh faced employees, the current ones have gone bad and forgotten that the great man Kotick has brought great fortunes to this company.

Jeff memorably threatened to kill his Persona 4 Endurance Run assistant after a mishap involving bufu back in 2009.

Have any of them actually played the GTA remasters? Some of the AI upscaling is unfortunate but I had really good, problem-free experience with them. This happened with 2077 too, I played at launch and didn't experience anything broken. This really seems like opinions informed by trending twitter posts and the same several images that get passed around.