Giant Bombcast 03-12-2013

Yay Bombcast!

3.5 hour livestream now a 3 hour bombcast. Never thought I'd say it, but I might be bombed out today.

Why would you say; "Nintendo have done something"? Nintendo is a name and not plural, I don't get it.

VIDGAMS

uh oh! Boner alert!

@humphreys said:

It's a dialect thing; using pluralization rules in terms of verbal conjugation for a named entity like company is something that's considered correct under British English. The idea, I believe, is that the company Nintendo represents a mass of people, hence why "they (the people) have done something (as a company.)"

@pepsiman: So like the way people talk about data?

Tuesday is now saved

Sorry British people, but you pronounce foreign words wrong constantly. Pronounce Goethe correctly and I will drop it.

@humphreys: Technically speaking, I think even in American English, data can be used as a singular or plural noun. If people say something like "the data are..." then I would imagine it's under similar logic where the data is representing a group consisting of pieces of information and/or numbers.

So long story short, once again, our language has no idea what consistency is and it's nothing short of a miracle we all find each other as mutually comprehensible as we do. I speak Japanese on a day to day basis as well and while that has its own share of quirks, hoo boy do they not compare to the mess we've got going with English.

Man, Ryan sounds like death at some points.

woo plaguecast!

It's TUUUEEESSSSDDAYY! Which means Ryan is sick and Jeff is getting sick, just like the other six days of the week.

Data is the plural form of datum. "Data" is not singular in any instance of the English language. However, most people mistakenly use data as a singular noun fairly frequently. In most cases when people say "data" they mean data and not datum. "Datum" would be a single number rather than a set or something like that. People do not misuse the word "data" but rather the verb associated with the word. I'm a Canadian so I do not necessarily speak "American English" but our two dialects are very similar in terms of word usage.

Oh snap Bombcast.

Everyone has allergies!

I am excited about the GDC coverage. The show does not get as much love as it deserves.

SOMEONE PLEASE ANIMATE THE GOPHER DISCUSSION!

I wonder if Brad will play, and they'll have a quick look of Dead Space 3: Awakened. I know he didn't particularly love Dead Space 3, but I'd still like to see what he has to say about the story DLC.

I

It seems like the GB crew is constantly sick, especially Ryan.

I disagree with Vinny about Mirror of Fate, I think it's totally a fun action game, I think he sells it a bit short compared to my experience. :(

I really enjoyed it. It has technical flaws, but I found it super enjoyable. Boss fights were also great.

My main gripe about that game (from what I remember, it's been awhile) was that the late game was full of too many enemies with guns and often forced you to use guns yourself or stealth. That game was at its best when you were constantly running.

I do hope that Mirror's Edge sequel actually comes to fruition though. With some fine tuning it could be great.

Awwwwww yeeeaaaahhhhhh. Finally.

Definitely, it seems to be happening a lot and has been for a while.

I'm starting to get worried about Ryan. Yeah I know, it's an old hat tale by now with comments about his weight, but I simply do not want him to be in any real health or medical danger. Really hope he doesn't get sick or anything as frequently as he has been recently. Good to hear him back on the show, though.

Same goes for the rest of the crew, of course, but Ryan seems to be the one that gets sick the most. I know some people just get sick easier than others, so I'm not even saying his weight is attributing to anything like this, I just don't want the guys so sickly.

O SHI-

Yes.

Hey everybody' it's Tues- *cough* day... *cough* *cough*

Welcome to the Giant Sickcast

I love how, throughout the entire discussion of "how do we make games-as-services not such a trainwreck?" nobody said the thing that almost every person at home was probably thinking, which was, "stop making all games a fucking service."

The industry has done a really great job of training us to act like this thing we hate and resent, and which is often completely non-functional, is nonetheless good and inevitable for some reason.

It's pretty normal right now in California it seems. My family has been off and on sick for the past month or so and so have lots of other people I know. Something keeps going around and making people sick.

In the last month, I have had a sinus infection, a cold, and strep throat. Now I have red spots appearing on my chest and arms. I also work side by side with two guys. One of them has a wife with the flu and a one year old with some sort of viral infection. And he called in sick today. The other has a wife and 2 daughters with pink eye. Sometimes, I feel the end times are nigh...

this is weird as i haven't been morbidly sick in, like years (hangovers notwithstanding).

i'm afraid it's all going to hit me at once and i'm going to die soon. :\

Brad needs to do his own spoilers feature to get it out of his system, since he's always so eager to discuss plot twists and endings. Shoemaker's Spoilers. Spoilmakers. I'd listen to that.

Guess it is better for everyone to get sick now, instead of at PAX next week.

Why do people care how a fictional characters name is pronounced? My grandparents called me the wrong name til the day they died. I didn't care. I knew who they were talking to. When people mispronounce a name, do what I do. Roll your eyes, say "Yes, Ma'am/Sir.", and move the hell on with your life.

Leave the fucking gophers alone. Seriously, who cares if they dig up your lawn, what does your lawn do exactly but use up shitloads of water? Bees don't pollinate grass, you don't got cows or herding animals, let the gophers do their thing.

Fuck lawns, have a garden. Gardens can be full of life, and its fun having a nice glass of your drink of choice and watching all the little nuances that happen in your little garden.

fuck gophers, get a tribe of meerkats! :D

Bombcast !! ^^

Get over that they don't like the design choices of the game? Uh, isn't it kind of their job to be critical of this stuff?

Wow, they were right. People DO get uppity as fuck. Some of you people are so ridiculous it's sometimes hard to fathom that you actually exist.

Hey dude, I'm certainly no doctor, but I similarly had strep throat followed by red spots on my hands/arms which turned out to be scarlet fever. Meds made it go away post haste, but might be worth checking out!

Goddamn these guys get sick a lot. Ya know there's shit one can do about that; ways to bolster the immune system. But they all involve lifestyle changes, so... I might as well just stop there.

Between that and working in a different location, they probably are just having a hard time dealing with all of the new and numerous germs.

The name has been pronounced differently by developers and even within the games themselves. It's a bit of a shit show, and it's a freakin' name.

Brad and Vinny's arguments on whether customers should be more careful with their dollar in preordering games or whether companies should be responsible for broken products came across as an either/or type of deal. It seems to me like both are completely valid - it's not something that really needed that lengthy of an argument. Of course games should work at launch, and of course consumers should learn lessons from launches of games that require this sort of constant online connection.

That is fair i guess. Although i would argue it doesnt need to be repeatedly hammered into the communities brain for weeks on end, although it lead to a somewhat more interesting discussion this week. We get it, you guys dont like the Sim City game that Maxis decided to make this time around. You talked about it, its not a good discussion. Move on, maybe bring up the ongoing issues. Maybe discuss the "always online game" implications for a bit, but it just seems like its the same old discussion over and over again.

I shouldn't have pointed the last bit at a staff member directly(or at least at a different one) because its more a general issue i have. Just seems like too many people in general are trying to insist that EA is forcing ideas down Maxis' throat and in turn not giving them any credit for trying something different. They made a mistake, a big one, but no one is at least saying "Good on them for going out on a limb and trying to make something more than just another sim city game".

@jeff The one time I can think of when EA would give out a free game for a cluster-fuck of a game was APB.

I keep saying the logical concusion of where to take God Of War is to have Kratos murder every single Pantheon of Gods [Greek, Egyption, Norse, etc] until no one is left and he's the last man standing. Then Kratos becomes the last God alive, effectively becoming what we now see as the Christian God in our society today.

Amen - Brad needs to learn to shut his goddamn mouth. I get a feeling he gets off of spoiling stuff for others.

And yes, Brad, sometimes spoilers are so innocuous that I wouldn't know what you're talking about until I got to that point in the game - that doesn't give you the right to drop it on me, though.

Overall, spoiler etiquette is lax on all podcasts I've encountered. Outside of dedicated spoiler sections (Spoilercasts, Joystiq's Spoiled Rotten) the usual procedure is to say, "Tune out," and then provide no time stamp for when to return. It's frankly insensitive.

Last tidbit - there was that one article a few years back talking about how knowing spoilers actually improved the experience (not going to look for it now, but it's legit). That sounded like an article justifying people's shitty behavior; it's not your god-given right to decide for me what counts as a spoiler and what doesn't.

tl;dr stfu brad

PS A healthy solution would be to bring back dedicated Spoilercasts - make a member-only feature for all I care; would give me more incentive to sign up.