Giant Bombcast 07-31-2012

Someone make a video for the elephant part!

Their lack of knowledge on Kingdom Hearts games is hilarious.

It's Tuueessddaayy!

Awwwww yeeaaaah, they talk about Snoop Lion. This's gotta be a great one!

"Journalism just got real"

@mutha3 said:

Hearing them sing Advance Wars' praises really makes me wonder why they never tried out Fire Emblem. Its basically Advance Wars with RPG elements and non-disposable units.

I seem to recall Brad bringing up Shadow Dragon when that was a thing, only for it to never be mentioned again. Honestly, I bet it's the perma-death aspect that turns them off, though that should be rectified in the future since the 3DS one has a "casual" mode where dying only puts the character out for the rest of the map.

Brad was extra funny on this one.

Lol at the "Phelps is failing to medal" thing and he now won enough medals to be the world record holder for the most olympic medals won by a single person (19).

I'm going to throw it out there... Kingdom Hearts Endurance Run with Vinny at the controls and Ryan as his partner.

KH games are awesome, and yeah the princesses DO make eye contact with each other at least in KH1.

WoW is the only successful MMO? What about Guild Wars, RIFT, EVE, not to mention the games that have flourished in in F2P like Star Trek.

No it's not a contradiction, Brad. Even if you close one eye, you can still blur it and focus farther or shorter with the open eye. Depth focus and convergence are two different things. We're used to associating the two because our eyes do everything simultaneously when we switch from focusing on a close object to a far object in our actual 3d space.

Koopanomics.

Kingdom Hearts 1 is a simple, fun Disney adventure, everthing past that is so absurdly convoluted and batshit insane that it would make Kojima blush. Kingdom Hearts 2+ is what happens when you give Nomura too much power.

New Kingdom Hearts game has a TRON level I believe, and that makes it worth it in its own right.

Depth of field is the worst thing ever* in games. That's because it doesn't do what eyes do. Eyes focus on what they're looking at, and things outside that are (by definition) out of focus. My eyes are already doing that just fine. Depth of field just makes everything that's not at some predetermined location on the screen and distance from the camera all blurry, regardless of where I'm actually looking on the screen. Sometimes I'm looking at something toward the edges, sometimes I'm looking at something off in the distance. DoF just makes it all blurry. Why would I ever want that. DoF is the first thing I turn off, even though I have a PC that can run mostly whatever game with it on just fine.

Soome games, though, some games try to hide the option to turn it off, or don't have the option at all. Those games are the worst thing ever!*

*not actually the worst thing ever, but I don't like it and this is the internet

Wait...a Wario game that was a side scroller came out for the Wii like 2 years ago...

At 2:02:00 my mind is blown... I played with @GlenTennis on the Giant Bomb Warlords machine last year, before they bought it. Probably. O_o

@LegendaryChopChop: KH2 has a TRON level. KH:3D has Biodigital Jazz Jeff Bridges.

I am glad Brad doesn't seem to hate Kingdom Hearts 3D, and that Vinny seems interested in revisiting the series.

@msavo said:

I'm going to throw it out there... Kingdom Hearts Endurance Run with Vinny at the controls and Ryan as his partner.

That would be: how long could Ryan take it before he lost his mind.

BOMBCAST!!! xD

@RedRoach: I think that they are specifically talking about the pay to play model?

Hearing these guys talk anything about football is hilarious.. and me yelling at my monitor when they were talking about what new franchise popped up recently.

Whats with these guys? I'm just killing some time till I have to do a task before I get to go to bed. These guys .... get to the back of the bus Vinny!!!!! Street pass and the Man owns your ass!

Need to listen to this more tomorrow...

Was Ryan doing his Bane impersonation at 29 minutes with the "Mmm, this coffee is delicious" line?

Best Western has really improved over the past few years and is way better than a Super 8 or Motel 6.

@thebigJ_A said:

Depth of field is the worst thing ever* in games. That's because it doesn't do what eyes do. Eyes focus on what they're looking at, and things outside that are (by definition) out of focus. My eyes are already doing that just fine. Depth of field just makes everything that's not at some predetermined location on the screen and distance from the camera all blurry, regardless of where I'm actually looking on the screen. Sometimes I'm looking at something toward the edges, sometimes I'm looking at something off in the distance. DoF just makes it all blurry. Why would I ever want that. DoF is the first thing I turn off, even though I have a PC that can run mostly whatever game with it on just fine.

Soome games, though, some games try to hide the option to turn it off, or don't have the option at all. Those games are the worst thing ever!*

*not actually the worst thing ever, but I don't like it and this is the internet

I'd say the DoF in Uncharted 2 was actually very good, mostly because it only really kicked in when you went into over-the-shoulder aiming. The success of DoF in this instance was probably due to it being pretty obvious where the player was looking given the much more narrow FoV while aiming.

And in cutscenes it's fine, of course, since focus can guide the eye to what the director wants the audience to...uh, focus on. Since it's non-interactive, the director has total control.

But yes, most FPS implementations of DoF are poorly done.

Thank you Ryan for finally bringing the true sensible argument for why MMOs are struggling to the podcast. Missing the massively multiplayer aspect and focusing on the singleplayer experience that WoW brought has been the cancer of the genre for years.

There is still plenty of multiplayer in MMOs, it's called end-game. If you want multiplayer there it is. It's only the levelling content that is soloable.

kept wanting to renew my SWTOR subscription, now i feel fucking guilty for not doing so :(

game was a gift too so fml. maybe i'll do it before it goes F2P just to show solidarity or summat.

hillarious podcast/pandemonium, but have to say i'm missing patrick :(

@Ares42 said:

Thank you Ryan for finally bringing the true sensible argument for why MMOs are struggling to the podcast. Missing the massively multiplayer aspect and focusing on the singleplayer experience that WoW brought has been the cancer of the genre for years.

Jeez...WoW really HAS changed since I played it.

@thebigJ_A: This post would make more sense if you were talking about Motion blur. I HATE MOTION BLUR, IT'S LIKE SEEING THE WORLD AS AN ALCOHOLIC OR SOMETHING

Poor Cleveland Browns fans on this site.

@Undeadpool said:

@Ares42 said:

Thank you Ryan for finally bringing the true sensible argument for why MMOs are struggling to the podcast. Missing the massively multiplayer aspect and focusing on the singleplayer experience that WoW brought has been the cancer of the genre for years.

Jeez...WoW really HAS changed since I played it.

yeah that made me go "wait, what?"

either WoW was a single-player focused game and that's a good thing, or a multi-player focused game and that's a bad thing...

jeff's really tearing this up

@ripelivejam said:

@Undeadpool said:

@Ares42 said:

Thank you Ryan for finally bringing the true sensible argument for why MMOs are struggling to the podcast. Missing the massively multiplayer aspect and focusing on the singleplayer experience that WoW brought has been the cancer of the genre for years.

Jeez...WoW really HAS changed since I played it.

yeah that made me go "wait, what?"

either WoW was a single-player focused game and that's a good thing, or a multi-player focused game and that's a bad thing...

I wasn't talking about WoW, but rather the MMOs that have been following it. They all saw WoW being a huge success and it's one big revolution was bringing a single-player levelling experience. So they all focused on that part and neglected the second part that also played a huge role in it's success, great multiplayer content.

I want to hear some hot Dota 2 talk.

Only 48 minutes in and already one of the funniest Bombcasts in a while.

Ryan, the Cleveland Browns are in fact still an NFL team.

It's always weird to listen to the bomb crew talk about MMOs but old and successful MMOs, like Ragnarok Online, FLYFF or Maple Story are not mentioned. People can argue the quality of these MMOs, but they definitely have standing legs even today, and some old MMOs like Priston Tale were successful enough to have sequels. Personally had more fun in these games than in World of Warcraft.

On that note, Maple Story's company is a real proof "Free-to-play" MMOs can rack up money, each of their games are wallet vacuum if you want to invest into having really strong characters, monthly fee MMOs are cheap in comparison to what you can pay in these games to get a +7 helmet. The Item Mall business tactic is more lucrative than you would think.

Are my headphones broken?

@Rollout: they clearly men major mainstream traditional MMOs.

@Rudeboy217 said:

Someone make a video for the elephant part!

Absolutely!

This answers who'd you want for as your Giant Bomb DAD. Clearly, Ryan.

@MordeaniisChaos Those were all popular MMOs with significant features that people consider WoW-like, even if some came earlier than WoW. For the amount of MMOs there was back then, if you searched for a MMO, you could easily end up at one of them.

I know the bombcrew really liked World of Warcraft when it came out, but some like me have fond memories of other MMOs that had an audience at the time, and it just sounds like the bombcrew never heard of them.

Priston Tale was one of the first 3D MMOs in a (for the time) large world with landscapes where you could walk for a long time in a direction or walk up the geometry, click-to-attack hotbar skills with cooldown, Diablo inventory with class-specific bonuses on gear, huge monsters, tech specialization and equipment that shows up on the character. I originally thought WoW was a Priston Tale inspired MMO, having played a ton of this game. It became pay-to-play, but was popular enough for its time for a sequel eventually.

Ragnarok Online had a large world too with multiple places to train for a same level, multiple starting towns, slot inventory, and introduced to me the roles of tank, healer, DPS, and MVP while fighting bosses as well as stats specialization. Bosses gave great drops, and were farmed all the time. It was really popular and crowded people had hard time logging into a server, it was the game to clone and have private servers back then. It became pay-to-play with free-to-play server and had 2 sequels. I always considered this a "classic" for MMOs.

Maple Story is arguably the most mainstream 2D MMO. The casual crowd doesn't get far in the game, but it's so easy to pick up, you don't have to be invested to come back every month during an event and gain a level, the gameplay is so simple it's ridiculed by its kill 1000 monsters quests. Half the game's grinding, the other half is hanging out with buddies and guilds or exploring. It had stats dice rolls to start a character, promoted partying to level up, had instanced areas, channels, a large world with hidden areas and secrets and is very similar to WoW when it comes to its content growth and add-ons, it even eventually had a cataclysm where every area on the first continent were changed. I think this MMO is THE model for the free-to-play item mall, FLYFF has a similar one too, although I think it's detrimental to the quality and popularity of the game. Never been surpassed in popularity by other 2D MMOs, though, it's too giant at this point even if it's so aged.

Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

@Rollout: For the longest time F2P games had a stigma of being kind of crap and pay-to-win. I'd wager they still classify Maple Story etc. into the 'F2P crap' category where most of those games were before LoL, TF2 and such. They mention EQ once in a while, so it's not like they're not aware that MMOs existed before WoW.

Come on, Ryan. The Cleveland Browns have been back and around for a while now...

Can't wait to hear the CAX talk

Yeah, I like when they talks about older MMOs, Everquest, Guild Wars, EVE online, etc. I'm kinda biased because I got burned out on World of Warcraft early, and would like to hear more talk about other MMOs, only to hear them base their thoughts on World of Warcraft. No necessarily wrong, considering WoW's success and popularity, I admit.

The hinge...that fucking hinge...I sent my XL back. You can't have the XL flop around like a fish on land!

COPS IS FAKE?!

Wow, bombs have been dropped!

What a way to end a Bombcast on.