Bombin' the A.M. With Scoops and the Wolf: 02/21/2014

Awooooooo!

Is anyone else having an issue with Bombing in the AM and Dumptruck podcasts not populating in their RSS feed? For some reason I've stopped getting them.

I will check into this.

Thanks, Patrick! Might be an issue on my end because my phone's been weird lately, but all my other feeds are working (including the regular Bombcast).

I love this show. Very relaxing way to eat my lunch. Thanks Patrick and Alex.

Drugs

I'd love to see a drugs and Alex stream...

I wish I got up early enough to watch these live. Oh well!

NaissanceE is great, if you're into first person platforming, foreboding atmosphere, and jawdropping level design. I'm glad it wasn't just the Dear Esther/Gone Home type of exploration because those can be a bit simple and it's nice to have a challenge along with some great art (see: Zeno Clash 2).

"Going Down" has one of the most magnificent level structures in a game ever.

As a note to that plot point from ACIV that you guys were both bothered by, while playing ACIV, I researched the pirates I traveled with as I was playing the game. Within that window of time in real life, the pirate you talked about did, in fact, commandeer a ship, but by the time Edward rejoins his crew, historically, that pirate's crew had muntiny'd on him. That's probably why it wasn't in-game. It was just a nod to the history of that person.

Dude, high-waisted jeans are coming back. Like, full-on, up to the belly-button mom jeans.

If something that fuckin' stupid can come back, then there's no reason that something that made as many people happy as Rock Band can't come back someday - regardless of where it comes from, regardless of what it's called. Things change, hope springs eternal, etc.

So, if you don't believe that band-based rhythm games can ever come back, I'm basically calling you a nihilist.

...Yep.

The main thing I find strange about the whole journalism discussion is that I've never thought of journalism that way, at least primarily. While a story helping bad situations or otherwise shining a spotlight on things that need correcting could be good outcomes, I've always thought that journalists are there, first and foremost, to provide their readers with truthful information they want, within whatever ethical boundaries they have.

The possible fact that Bioshock Infinite was having trouble, that financial issues may have been occurring that could affect the studio long term, that the studio had high turnover, and that Ken Levine is a terrible boss - all of that might not be helpful to the studio, to the game, or to the employees to have out in the open. But it's still news and something lots of people would want to read.

That a journalist would stop and say "is it going to help the game or the company or the people to report this" is one of the reasons I think you had the snarky comment regarding only putting forward companies' PR lines. That's almost the opposite of the adversarial relationship you'd want from journalist. In any other industry finding out that a company was hemorrhaging money and struggling to put out a flagship product would be huge news that no journalist would hesitate to report, even if it hurt the company.

If you're missing Metroidvania's so much, why hasn't anyone over there given Valdis Story a shot?

The pilot episode of TWD is still easily my favorite episode, it's been downhill since...yet i continue to hate watch it.

Outland was the shizzzz

I am all for Shawn Elliot showing up on this web show, just as I am all for Cara Ellison coming back.

I love @alex's coy nature in regards to drugs. Isn't this the same dude what said on a Bombcast "I have done more drugs and had more sex in the past year than I have in my entire life"? Something to that effect, anyway.

@deathpooky: The problems occurs when the line is blurred between "reporting a breaking story" and "spreading a groundless rumor". For example, can you imagine what would happen if some games journalist came out with a story of "Irrational Games is in Trouble! Studio may shut down!" followed by a mass exodus of investors, and hysterical speculation in the media? What if Ken Levine later came out and said, "Yes, we had a moment of crisis, but we resolved it and everything would be proceeding smoothly -- but the panic caused our financiers to abandon us and now we have to shut down anyway"?

I have asked the developers of Outland on Twitter if the game would ever come to PC. They deferred to Ubisoft, saying it was their call, and so the trail ran cold.

I think it might just be one of those games that is doomed to having been released in a weird time where the PC got no respect and the console games were the hotness. So it will never be out on PC and will just get ignored over time.

I'm not saying we need more reports with anonymous sources that turn out to be bullshit axe grinding. That's where reporting truthful information comes in. You don't report baseless rumors, but if you hear a serious piece of information like "Irrational hemorrhaging money and will need to sell insane amounts for the studio to justify the costs," then you do reporting and see if you can back the rumor up. If you're confident it's a reliable report, then you report it, even if it might hurt Irrational for that information to get out. The impact on the studio or the individuals shouldn't really be a factor, as long as you're confident in the story.

The fact that a story as big as Irrational shutting down came as a surprise to most of us, but had lots of journalists going "I've heard rumors for years that might happen" is just strange.

I think that's the heart of the issue -- lots of journalists heard rumors that "things might possibly be going bad at Irrational", but -- from what I've personally read -- no one knew the scope. Certainly there wasn't much indication that the studio was in critical meltdown because SOMEONE would have said so, anonymously or otherwise (and, the internet being what it is, social media would have gone into a frenzy).

Yeah, if that many journalists can mutter 'Hmm, I might have heard something about that...' you'd think one person might say it out loud, have others go 'I heard that too,' then people would actually look into it. That's some ass-backwards investigative journalism, but given how little of that there really is in the world of video game news, it'd be better than nothing.

Maybe I'm crazy, but what is there to spoil in the Last of Us: Left Behind?

Played the whole thing but I don't remember any twists or new plot elements, just some interesting sequences I wasn't expecting.

I'm curious to hear Patricks impressions of Danganronpa. Moreso, I'd love to see Jeff and Vinny do a quick look of it.

Outland is so good. SO GOOD.

Going to get Outland now after watching the Quick Look and hearing it mentioned here. Not sure how I missed it before.

No awooo at the end. How am I supposed to know what show I'm watching?

I hope you guys discuss Cara's journey as a patreon-fueled Games Journalist Hobo on Monday's show.

Shawn Elliott is my new number one for who GB should hire. He's incredible and I miss him on the media side. Oh and I fucking love to watch him livestream breaking shit!

You want a good Rambo game? Play Turok on 360 or Ps3.

Really don't understand suggesting Deep Down needed to clarify why the main character is male when you made assumptions about the game including customization. Games keep secrets about the story all the time, so just because it looked like other games doesn't mean they need to be attacked as if they maliciously forgot a gender setting.

I feel the sexism stuff is getting too reactionary and many journalist would attack Uncharted for forcing you to play as a man if you thought the game looked like another game that had gender options.

I'll agree that the articles calling it sexist are going overboard but I don't think it's crazy for people to question why a game wouldn't include a female option for a character creator, considering pretty much all games with character creators have one along with numerous other options. Now granted, most people were under the impression that there was a character creator (which doesn't seem to be the case as of now) but that isn't too crazy of a thing to assume considering it's gonna be this free to play multiplayer thing and there's so many things we still don't know about this game. It'll be interesting to see how a single character will work for this game, considering it's a multiplayer thing, but hopefully they do something interesting with it.

@deathpooky: I agree almost completely with your overall point. However, I think one of the reasons you don't see reporting on troubled studios, and what may or may not have been happening behind the scenes at Irrational, is the lack of people who are willing to come forward and talk about it on the record. I have to re read the article, but this is what I took from her point about who benefits from that kind of reporting. It was more along the lines of the article would be mostly speculation, and repeating rumors, since nobody was willing to speak on the record. If you can't hold your sources accountable, it almost falls on the side of tabloid journalism, which probably does good for nobody.

I think it would be fascinating to have a journalist embedded at one of these studios working on a game. And then report on what they see from inside, day to day.

Bioshock Infinite ended up being one of my favorite games last year, which took me by surprise. I played through twice the first week it came out, and I started another play through last night. But it is also apparent that the game could've been better.

I have a feeling that Infinite could have come out a year earlier, if Levine had somebody there to keep him focused on an earlier iteration. I'm sure the game would've been different from what was ultimately released, but I'm not convinced it would have been worse. In a weird way the game that was released feels rushed in some of the ways the narrative comes together, and in how the game plays out altogether. Ken has some great ideas, but instead of changing Infinite to try to fit everything he thinks would be great, it may have been better to shelve some of them for next time, in favor of locking down the game to give more time to make a cohesive vision come to life.

I really think Ken Levine needs somebody at his level, working along side (somebody he has a mutual respect with ideally) to keep him in check, and to not allow these broad sweeping changes to occur late in development, without damn good reason.

Apologies for the wall of text, but I guess this has been on my mind a lot lately.

Considering how much time and effort it would require to put in a whole separate gender I don't really find it all that surprising they limited their options especially if that studio has a lower budget - something we don't know. A lot of people seem to forget that making a playable female character class isn't just swapping some color palettes anymore. I suppose Demon's Souls is a good example of how to do it in a cheap way, where none of the armor aside from a few gender-specific sets has any differentiation whether it's worn by male or female. In which case it begs the question "does the option even matter at this point" if your characters looks identical either way.

Once again I can't help but feel Patrick is sort of contradicting himself in a few ways. It's hard to tell when a developer saying "fuck it this is how we roll" is a positive or a negative anymore. In this case a studio stating that they did something because, quite frankly, thats what they wanted to do is seen as some sort of negative response, where they need to justify their design decisions to the consumer base. In other situations we've seen the same sort of behaviour receive praise.

Ultimately I agree in that a lot of these articles and reactionary outrage directly related to sexism in gaming is getting out of hand. At this point it's not raising awareness anymore but reaching a state of paranoid hysteria where we dissect and analyze every last turn of phrase in order to speculate on hypothetical intentions of the developer - all in relation to video games no less. I don't know if the gaming world was some disgusting cesspool 10-15 years ago, but it didn't seem to have any of these issues and everyone just had fun.

@hadoken: Me too. Really need to check out Outland now.

Valdis Story looks cool too! http://www.valdisstory.com/

"Naissonsense"

I loved this game but that Freudian slip was hilarious.

You're right, Patrick, Jim Sterling's video of NaissanceE was pretty funny. He loses patience so quickly. NaissanceE reminds me a lot of Q.U.B.E.

Also, has Patrick ever managed to stop watching a TV show? It seems like he always just keeps watching shows that he admits he is kinda bored of, and plays stuff on the 3DS or Vita or Wii U gamepad while watching it. I'm guessing he watches a lot of these shows with his wife, because if there's one thing I've learned, women seem to keep watching shows whether they like them or not. They still need to watch it to keep up with all the "watercooler"/Facebook talk surrounding the show and how bad it had become.