Giant Bombcast 02-19-2013

Two minutes in and it's already great!

Did anyone else not realise Brad was there for the first 14 minutes?

I love me some EVE Online, man.

Yay Dave :)

Davecast

Ps4 better be POWERFUL!

You guys complaining should try living in Australia. The supposed tuesday podcast is actually the wednesday afternoon podcast. You get used to it.

Yeah, honestly, Chinese Democracy is a decent album. It's just not a good Guns N' Roses album. It's Axl Rose's solo album in everything but name.

In Japanese it's similar. 四 can be read as shi. shinu means to die.

The second half of this podcast (after the break) was a fascinating discussion to listen to. A real good summary on the state of the industry as it currently stands, and the pitfalls / promise of new consoles. Great stuff. Hopefully I'll be able to catch some of the Sony livestream here as it happens.

Ryan - "I Know What I Want and I Want It Now"

- Culture Beat: Mr. Vain

Compact Cassette player looks great!

Holy shit, I'm moving in about a year, and just listening to Vinny talk about moving stressed me out hard. I can't even begin to imagine moving WITH A GODDAMNED BABY!!!

I really want someone to animate the "Three Middle Aged White Guys talk about Culture" bit. That was hilarious.

Man... some parts of this Podcast were a real bummer in the best way possible

Also, about ten years ago I worked at the Home Depot - I'm pretty sure the correct way to dispose of paint is to leave it in the Home Depot parking lot and drive away.

I Think brad is wrong , we've never had a console announcement this close to a console launch , sony need to come out strong (this is their world stage) with a great lineup of games starting with Destiny ,BF4 , madden , little big planet , killzone , grand turismo , beyond 2 souls ,star wars 1313 and infamous 3 (or whatever sucker punch is working on) nothing playable but this is sony chance to say to ms "you want to F*ing GO!"

The 360 was announced in like April of the same year it was released

Is anyone else still having trouble with iTunes?

@supertom11: Nevermind. I just had to resubscribe for whatever reason.

I love that Brad says that Sony is the "first out of the gate" when the Wii U is already out.

You mean that system that's on par with the consoles that came out 8 years ago?

Hey, you'll get no argument with me on that, brother.

Fantastic ending.

@generiko: ya but those system specs were out long before that . point is this is going to be a super short launch window for both systems , so games are well into development

Dave's corporation should be named 'Hardco'.

Brad playing GnR at the end to a panicked Ryan is one of my favorite Bombcast moments in recent memory.

I find it ironic that the ad that I have at the side is for condoms while Vinny is talking about how different being a dad is.

WiiU is what Wii should have been minus the firmware update and the inability to just play Wii games, and the lack of games..Hmm maybe the Wii was better off the way it was.

Pretty disappointed that the biggest news story of the week (Aliens:CM and previews in general) was swept under the rug, by Brad saying, "I don't want to talk about that." Well, I love you Brad, but screw you! I want to hear you talk about that, even if it's in defense of the subject, we should hear your opinion; that is why we are here.

LOL! The last 30 seconds here are priceless, way to wrap it up guys

I am also a bit puzzled why they didnt discuss Aliens:Colonial marines at all.

They spent 46 minutes discussing the upsides and downsides of fatherhood. Sometimes i wish that the Giant Bomb podcast could be a tad more structured.

One thing going for the weekend confirmed podcast is that the conversation is a bit more focused at times.

This is a gaming podcast?

Vinny's parenting talks are always the best.

Where are my Playstation Inhalants so I can start hallucinating my video games?!

Man, usually when they joke about not talking about video games, they are actually joking.

I know where you're coming from but I for one really enjoy their non-gaming talk and didn't miss a Revengeance, Crysis or Alien discussion one bit. It just comes down to personal taste and as long as those kind of episodes don't become to common (I think they usually talk enough about games) I'm all for it.

Podcasts for middle-adged men by middle-aged men! Podcasts for kids was soooo last week.

Loved all the Vinny talk. You never know what you're going to get on the Bombcast, but it's always entertaining!

1) Dust 514, while giving me more fun than BF3 PC, is not QL-ready in its current state. After the next build comes that reworks the graphical side of things, stability (server) and smaller patches bringing in more goodness I think it'll be time for a QL and a TNT. It's mouse and keyboard capable and you should probably play it if you're tired of the ordinary arena shooter action FPSes or even BF3. (The F2P model is perfectly fine, you'll have to eat a lot of bad luck and make a lot of bad decisions to get broke.)

2) They say playstation "three" in Japan, we'll know within hours if they'll be saying "four" or not, but what makes me doubtful is that ふぉう makes "foe". If PS4 paywalls online gaming I'll be whining about it, if it adds region locking to the 360s level I'll be raging, we all should. But if it ends up working like the PS3 with a dual SKU offer and wants PS+ sub to use Gaikai based PS3 gaming then I'll be perfectly fine (because I live in good-internet-land Europe). The thing begins at 8 AM Japan time, and they'll get their own presentation later on the 21st.

3) Analcysts said that this generation would be the last one and they all pointed to iOS gaming as the one reason for it. Look at what companies they fellate, look at what companies they call dead or dying, you'll find that the majority of these analysts are really peculiar in what they say and do.

I predict an earthquake up in here! Coz' we cast bombs on it, cast bombs on it!

This COULD be the Sega Saturn / Atari Jaguar no man's land hardware release. Who knows if either SONY or Microsoft will be successful. Maybe these systems will bridge the gap to different tech.

The last thing that needed to be done for buying my house was for them to get rid of the piano. I said oh no problem. I played for 7 years when I was young. Thinking of getting back into it. They were creepily happy about that. Fast forward a few years. I had to pay like 200/300$ to have it hauled the fuck away. It was quite busted up and I couldn't give it away for free! Before you think you can give a piano away for free please go to Craigslist first and run a search for "free piano".... or " I will blow you if you take my piano!"

If there's one 'American thing' I'll never get it's the whole lawn business.

The concept of "no cycle" customers was an interesting one to touch on. We all think generation to generation, but it's logical that companies see consumers even more narrowly, SKU to SKU.

Think about the iOS line... people want to get the "new iPhone", the new thing. Sometimes that has a number, sometimes a letter, sometimes just the word "new" (iPad). Brad's right, when you skip a version, you really notice the difference, but for the millions of consumers who "keep up", it's incremental.

Think about all the times this generation that we've had hardware refreshed... "hey here's the new $250 thing on the shelf: it's the PSP-2000, it's the PSP-3000, it's the Go, it's the 360 Slim, it's the white Star Wars one, it's the Lite, it's the XL, it's the ultra slim, hey the hard drive is on the bottom now, it's the Wii Mini, it's the Wii U..." wait a minute... they just slipped that one by.

Now take the idea of a subscription-subsidised console, letting them keep that sweet spot price. And they don't want to take 360s or breadboxes off the shelf yet either... it's just another SKU. Some people want the new games, so "let's go pick up the new thing, it's about the same price as the old ones last year... wow this looks way better". But they don't see the shift as generational, in that it's 8 gigs of RAM instead of 512 megs, they see it as "looks as good as my buddy's expensive computer."

New consoles will look as good as today's PC games right? But much better? I'm not sure how. The plan seems to be off the shelf parts, not try to cram a Silicon Graphics workstation in there. Until resolutions need to change again, all of that processing power can start going into better AI, procedural worlds, the uncannyvalley... better made games that are also easier to make... or at least not have to fight the hardware.

Fascinating stuff. Good marketing study.

@nardak: Maybe they haven't played it yet since Alex was the one who reviewed it and not around the office. Would love to hear what they think of it too.