Giant Bombcast 444: Cricket Mouthfeel

Well Alexa seems about as big a fan of all things Final Fantasy as I am so she's cool in my book. :D

@abrasion: At a certain point it became background noise while I built Gunpla. Plus I kinda feel the need to finish things that I start, with some exceptions.

@patmcc19: It depends on what you're into.

I'd personally recommend stuff like Bebop, Trigun, Black Lagoon and Baccano as starter shows because they're relatively short (Bebop and Trigun are the longest out of the bunch at 26 episodes each) and becauser they're very American centric, so they're easy to get into. Also Bebop is episodic, save for a couple of two parters, so it's easy to drop and pick back up again without missing anything.

I wouldn't recommend going after Shoen shows like DBZ, Naruto, etc. unless you've got the patience to sit through 100 plus episodes of basically endless fighting.

If you wanna get into Gundam, Gundam Info (the official Gundam YouTube account) just put up the 0079 movie trilogy, which is an adaptation of the first series and is arguably better than it due to it having better animation and possibly better pacing.

Macross has become slightly more easy to get into due to the first series being added to Amazon Prime, though I've heard mixed reports about the quality of the subs. I think Plus is up there too, but I'm not too sure. 7, Frontier, Zero and Delta are probably never getting a Western release because of Harmony Gold, though maybe that's changing since SDF is on Prime like I said.

Other stuff that's worth checking out as a newbie would be Space Adventure Cobra: The Movie, which is worth it for the animation and style alone; JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, which is on Crunchyroll (TM) and one of the most fun shows around right now; Golgo 13: The Professional, which is trashy fun; and Gunbuster, which is probably the ultimate mecha space opera.

There's obviously other shows and movies out there, but I'm weary of overwhelming people with recs as I feel like anime is one those things that people need to seek out of their own free will in order to enjoy it. It's very easy to get put off if you have people shoving shows down your throat and getting hostile if you don't enjoy them as much as they do.

Maybe I just notice it more with anime, but I feel like anime fans really try to get you to watch a bunch of anime. I guess it happens with TV shows and movies a lot too...

Apparently Brendan Dassey will tentatively attend Wrestlemania next year if his release is secured. He's still a huge WWE fan.

It sounds like the Halbach family still has the ability to push for an appeal on his overturned conviction though, so who knows what will happen. Poor kid.

@brad: Brendan Dassey was recently ordered to be released within ninety days--he isn't out yet. He's known to have been into wrestling and gaming. (And what other young man has recently been in the news for having a wrongful conviction overturned, anyway?)

He was first arrested ten years ago, not eleven; but the murder occurred almost eleven years ago, so perhaps the emailer confused the dates. Assuming they weren't just completely bullshitting you, they were very likely talking about Dassey.

The Anime and Cartoon Megathread on these forums recommends, for those completely new to anime:

• Cowboy Bebop
• Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
• Samurai Champloo
• Fullmetal Alchemist
• Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann
• Baccano!
• Attack on Titan
• One-Punch Man
• Anything by Satoshi Kon or Hayao Miyazaki

It's a mixture of big, mainstream international or American hits and/or non-japanese settings, with mostly stellar animation, and pretty much all ACTION. For other shows that fit those bills, I would recommend Death Note, Monster, Michiko & Hatchin and Lupin III Part 4. Other popular stuff includes Hunter X Hunter and Jojo's Bizarre Adventure(shonen fighting, the Dragonball genre), Fighting Spirit/Hajime no Ippo THE FIGHTING and Haikyuu!!(sports), Kids on the Slope, Welcome to the NHK and Nana(drama) and Ouran High School Host Club and Haven't you heard? I'm Sakamoto(comedy). Considering this is a video game website, there are anime adaptations of Steins;Gate, Persona 4 and Ace Attorney.

But who's to say if any of that's to your taste. My first anime shows were the anime adaptations of the Moomins and Pokemon, and the next one I watched was an action show where teenage girls killed each other with robots. And I kept watching. I know people who watched the One Piece movie Strong World, and then watched 400 episodes of the show it was based on. The important part is to just try one and see what you think.

Wait did Lochte (sp?) really ripoff MC With? I need really confirmation.

I did not expect Jeff of all people to call for a Ghost Trick (AKA GotY 2011) sequel.

Also, yes, the same guy directed both Ghost Trick and Ace Attorney.

I just had a thought. I wonder if PSPlus's price increase is to add free PSVR games to PSPlus every month. If so, that makes me feel better about the extra cost.

@matatat said:

I agree, I don't know if it's the type of people, or just that anime sometimes feels like a community where you don't often get to meet someone IRL that also likes anime, but when someone asks "what anime should I watch", I agree that anime fans go fucking nuts and recommend way too much random whatever.

I've reached a point in my life where I'd rather just ask people what they're looking for first (for really all kinds of things), and give them more of a responsive recommendation based on their answer, whereas a younger me would've just blurted out whatever thing I'm excited about at the moment. Also I'm pretty much out of the anime game, so I don't even know what the kids are watching these days.

It's not random whatever, it sounds like random whatever because the names are meaningless to you, since you've never heard of them, furthermore some (most) anime titles are just plain stupid, doesn't mean the show is bad.

If a dude who didn't grow up with any western influence at all asked you to name some "amazing stuff to watch!?" and you came back with "Commando, Robocop, Band of Brothers, BattleStar Galactica, Batman Begins and Inception" those names would be utterly meaningless to them too.

Also there's a LOT of terrible terrible anime out there, if anything people are just trying to shield you from garbage :)

I feel so happy for Drew that he's actually making a dream come true.

DotA Anime Video:

What's that picture, Is that Pen Jillette from the future?

Edit: Jeff should watch cyber city uedo

Oh hey Vocaloid blather. There IS a English version of Miku with her v3 bank but it is really bad, to the point where even I wonder how they could have considered it releasable just from listening to it. Gumi's v3 has a really good English bank if you know a few workarounds for her. Miku has a v4 of her bank with a new hopefully considerably better Eng bank out on her 'birthday' of the 31st of this month. A French Canadian company called Plogue has a plug in that does vocal synthesis as well called Alter/Ego that has a free English bank called Daisy (who is voiced by the writer of a Gumi English song that went supernova coincidentally enough). Other straight up Eng banks that are made with the newer v4 Engine are Ruiby who had a bunch of weir scandal stuff around miscommunique about her character design, and a male/female duo known as Dex and Daina who's initial designs had animal ears and tails but that got nixed ultimately for doofy marketing reasons. (I'm really keen on this particular piece of tech as you can probably tell!)

Good show. The Jason head shake was cracking me up.

If Drew gets his pilot license and buys a plane, does that open the door to Giant Bomb at PAX Australia?

Hey @drewbert. As far as useful travel apps for your upcoming Japan trip are concerned, definitely check out Maps.me. The offline maps they provide for free are in some cases more accurate than Google or Here maps and were extremely useful for me on my recent Asia tour.

I'd sleep with Leesa, if you know what I mean. ;)

lol, I had laugh at the Alexa's response to Star Citizen. More or less saying folks who put money into that game are getting swindled then instantly getting excited for Final Fantasy 15, a game which by its title alone has swindled folks for 20 years haha.

The gamescom demo is showing just how massive a project that game has become, and yeah, don't buy spaceships, but if you wanna support the endeavor, there are more stupid things to give a couple hundred bucks to. I wish Jeff, as a man who bought a smart watch and never wears it, or a vocoder he will at best get a weekends use out of, would realize that. lol

But yeah, fun podcast this week!

thunderbolt fantasy is epic watch it

Drew you inspire me, you inspire us all!

@jeff please dont watch code geass

Oh god, I....I know the anime the dota vid is riffing on.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Himouto!_Umaru-chan

The top light on the DS4 is for VR. No games right now use the tracking of the controller because not everyone has a camera. To have VR even work you need the camera, so there's 100% hardware support all of a sudden, which is why VR games always track the DS4.

Tilt your hands down a lot and the bottom light is obscured. Top light is still visible in camera. You won't NEED the new controllers for VR, but they will lose tracking less. Simple as that.
You won't even see the annoying light on top in VR, because much like the pesky real world, the fugly controller light is also rendered inconsequential whilst you're punching deck.

@shadowtheulf: Yup! I hadn't realised quite how much I'd turned my speakers up, and when another application played some audio I was almost blasted across the room :)

@shadowtheulf: You're not alone.

Thanks for introducing me to Thunderbolt Fantasy. That thing is radical.

we need to talk.
linky: goo.gl/qHD5ed

Did Alexa say Cowboy Bebop is like Star Wars? Because my god not even close.

Exactly. But do give Ghost in the Shell's first season a chance.

American coverage of the Olympics sounds like it sucks. The BBC here in the UK have it down to a tee.

Anime is bad for you, don't do it. It's for people who like eating garbage.

Is the audio on this super low for anyone else?

I think if someone explained to Jeff what Cowboy Bebop was he might like it. I remember for ages thinking "I'm not interested in watching an anime about cowboys in space" but Cowboy Bebop isn't that at all.

Do they just randomly select thumbnails, or was this one intentionally selected?

Damn, Drew is like the most interesting guy in the world or something. Every time he's on the front instead of the control seat and they ask him what he's been doing, he always talks about something cool and makes everything sound fascinating. I'm really happy for him for following his dream. After spending so much time on flight sims with Vinny and Dave he will be ready for any real-world stress.

Alexa was a cool guest. Nice episode all around.

I don't have a Vocaloid (Or an Alexa Mii).

@haze: Audio version no, I haven't tried the video.

Also Drew is a fucking action man yo.

As far as anime recommendations go, I'd say jojo's bizarre adventure is a pretty awesome show, also Mob Psycho 100 is currently airing and available on crunchyroll and it has an amazing style and animation.

I'd say just avoid the new Berserk, it's fucking garbage and I hope they don't make a season 2 of this burning trash.

And also good podcast I guess.

Jeff on Kessler.. "he had to bail, he was worried there would be bananas at the bar... " gold.

I kinda would prefer it if the Bombcast stopped having guests so frequently. I enjoy the candor between the crew and it feels a little muffed when someone new steps in.

PS4 streaming is weird -- it's damn close to lag-free on my Vita -- even from my office-to-home (I'm fortunate to have a fibre connection serving the video from my PS4).

However it runs horribly to my PC via gigabit ethernet. Either the PC support is really bad, or perhaps it's an issue with the PS4 rendering the video. The Vita is relatively low-resolution. It's a bummer because it'd be really useful to me on PC while the wife is watching her stuff on the TV. The Vita is pretty good, but the lack of shoulder buttons hurts.

Xbox Live went from $50 to $60 several years ago and I don't remember anyone saying anything about it and their excuse was something like "the rising cost of development" even though they own all the datacenters they use...Sony does not.

Clickers are terrible.

Star Wars is dungeons and dragons in space.

Cowboy Bebop is 100x better than Star Wars.

Supporting the olympics is just as bad as supporting FIFA...so...don't do that.

But it's pretty good dawg, although I don't think he'll get much out of the mechs.

Madden isn't from California, he is from Minnesota.

Thanks as always for the podcast duders. I see Drew is continuing his quest to completely hack his life right into the cybernetic future that awaits us all. I'd like to play Deus Ex at some point but I feel like Jeff has given this game and the previous one a lot of tilt in his reviews purely because of styyyyyle. I love all that cyber punk shit too but man I could not bring myself to get very far in that previous one and to hear that the story in this new one isn't that great either is somewhat disheartening.

Alexa was a great guest though I'm reminded why I don't like when anime gets brought up on the bombcast. Even as someone who watches some on occasion I personally would not recommend any anime to people who are just done with cartoons in general(regardless of the country in which they're produced) i.e. about 60% of this podcast crew. I say stick with what brings you pleasure whether it be life hacking, internet speeds, or 3 copies of Samurai Showdown. For the record I think Attack on Titan ain't all that. It starts with an interesting premise and completely drops the ball within like 4 or 5 episodes. Someone, anyone who's not Bandai/Namco or Koei/Tecmo needs to take a shot at some of these anime licenses because the ones I've tried are not cutting it. Recently I've been slogging through the story mode of that JoJo Eyes of Heaven game and it's just not that good.

I'm by no means a big fan of the Olympics but hearing Jeff and the gang talk so dismissively of them really annoyed the hell out of me. "I didn't even know they were on," somebody said. Are you kidding me? Have you been living in a cave for the last two plus weeks? Even if you don't watch TV the coverage was inescapable all over the internet.

"The prime time coverage was boring", another said. Yes watching Katie Ledecky, Simone Manuel, Michael Phelps et al, plus the entire women's gymnastics team break world records, make history and win medal after medal was a real snooze fest. Usain Bolt won another gold? Yawn!

I think Jeff said there should be an app where you can watch all the sporting events. Err...there was one, wasn't there? Sure the NBC TV coverage was bad but I heard nothing but good things about the streaming content.