Giant Bombcast 555: Super Mario Bros. Review

@capncrunch: There is no way that you made this post and ever worked a 100 hour, passive aggressive, overtime is "voluntary" ("you can leave, sure but your name is on this so you don't want us to churn out an unfinished product, right?" - management) job and said this. And from what I understand the people at Rockstar largely didn't get paid for the OT even!

For the GTA 3 GameSpot E3 2001 hands-on impressions, here ya go!

(I remember reading this when I was 13; well done, Mr. Gerstmann)

https://www.gamespot.com/articles/e3-2001-hands-on-grand-theft-auto-3/1100-2762402/

Might be what Jeff was talking about.

Now i know why i don't like BO4, i've always had the opposite opinion to Jeff when it comes to COD.

That drone footage is actually fucking incredible...

I've been getting into sinister boat music recently. Anyone have any good album recommendations?

Is SCVI important? You dismissed it instantly when you were talking about fall releases a month or two back.

I work 60-70+ hour weeks for 9 months out of the year, every year. I haven't worked a 40 hour week, without vacation time involved, in years. It sucks, but that's life and they pay me for it. I am not saying what Rockstar, or any game company is doing during these crunches is right, but come on, this isn't a video game issue, this is a business issue in most fields, and a lot of this "outrage" comes off as incredibly naive.

I love that score breakdown they showed for reviews and wish we got that for every sites' reviews. With the increasing importance of metacritic scores we should have more uniform review scores or at the least a better explanation for the scores with this type of breakdown.

Yikes. Doesn't sound like an awesome place to work where you are 'encouraged' to work overtime.

I suggest everyone who is going to complain about this take a very hard look at game development through the years. Actually research what "crunch" is and how many hundreds of companies have been doing this for the ENTIRETY of the existence of the hobby of video gaming.

I really encourage you to look into what normal "crunch" is versus "crunch" that actually harms devs' mentally and psychologically, and the difference in what western devs and eastern devs consider "crunch".

[pro tip: In order for any game to meet its "deadline" set by the idiotic CEOs of the company and the press release cycle, any major game company is going to have to enter some sort of "crunch" period. Its dumb, but everyone does it, and some companies do it without being completely horrible to their employees]

"Crunch" also happens to non video game industries. Its an unfortunate effect of having supervisors that work with numbers instead of human hearts, minds, and psyches.

Furthermore, lets also remember this is Kotaku, who has and will continue to post inflammatory content and also exaggerate the truth (like most mainstream media does) to get you to click and share the link with other people.

And if this simple article is going to dissuade you from purchasing a game....don't even begin to look up what horrible practices we are still running to produce the electronic device you're reading my and other people's posts on....

@dastardry: Soul Calibur VI wasn't out "a month or two back", so I'm not sure what kind of coverage you expected from GB then.

I understand Ben is excited about the character creator and that's great. But as someone whos last Soulcalibur was 3 on the PS2 and hasn't played that series in a decade until 6. I'm somewhat disappointed at how little the system has changed or improved, it's basically exactly the same as it was on the PS2 only with less stuff.

However I did notice that you can modify alot of the existing characters a great deal which has me thinking why not throw all the parts into the CC then? Give me the ability to say... select Kilik's face, give him Cervantes voice and dress him up as Siegfried, just let me go all the way dumb with it. As it stands it just feels too limited in a lot of really unnecessary ways when all that content is in the game.

Then just make DLC be alt costumes and stuff from other Soulcalibur games that are then also available in the character creator. (I would really appreciate the Shorthaired Red/Gold Knight Siegfried outfit from SC3)

They already put Deckard Cain in Heroes of the Storm, @jeff !

Am I the only person who doesn't like meters in fighting games?

The only time I get to post this. Happy 555 Podcast:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrR2AZrdc_I

@mr_shufu: I'm with you, not a fan either. They do add depth, but I prefer the raw simplicity of games like the old MKs and Soul Caliburs.

@stamp: @peterjames: You guys on the beta? The Bombcast (and Beastcast) installments are all consolidated now - you flip between video/podcast and premium/free on the episode's page.

Looks like these are the Hands-On previews they talked about at the end.

https://www.gamespot.com/articles/e3-2001-hands-on-grand-theft-auto-3/1100-2762402/

https://www.gamespot.com/articles/e3-2001-hands-onstate-of-emergency/1100-2762403/

@benpack

Patrick just wrote an article about fighting back against crunch culture, and while I don't agree with parts of it, one bit that struck me as good advice is to make an effort, as a consumer, to support studios with good labor practices and independent devs, shopping at outlets like itch.io that give creators a larger percentage and not waiting for sales if you're able.

@adamalc: If you feel that your 70-odd hour work week is worthwhile and that you're being fairly compensated, good on you (no sarcasm - it's tough to balance long work hours with personal contentment, so kudos to anyone who can pull that off).

That said, it's *very* obvious that several Rockstar employees do *not* feel that their "crunch" hours are worthwhile, nor do they feel that they're being fairly compensated.

In that light, saying "I don't know why people in Job X are complaining, because I can do my job without complaining" sounds like it's missing the point somewhat.

Holy cow, they rambled on and on about this Rockstar employee stuff for almost 25 minutes of the podcast. And everyone in the room has the same mindset, so there was no actual debate or argument to be had. Simply an echo chamber.

@dasakamov: A point was definitely missed, because I didn't say that at all. I commented on the outrage from publications and fans being naive, not the employees.

The employees have every right to be upset and hard choices to make about staying or moving on. However, considering all these publications will cover this game to death, and make.money doing it, their criticisms ring hollow. There was an entire thread on this website of fans justifying their purchase to themselves so I won't even get into them.

Alucard Captor Sakura should've been the title of this podcast tbh.

Is this spreadsheet accurate ?

What are those multipliers used for ? why not simply sum all numbers and divide them by number of categories and get normal avg score ?

Boy, can I just say that the part where they seem to write off that R* employee as too brainwashed to realize how bad his situation is comes across as really patronizing and condescending and not at all cool.

On what grounds are you so confidently asserting it isn't genuine? The guy offered to provide proof of employment if they asked, that's pretty high-risk if you're just bullshitting.

Besides, nothing about that email rang untrue to me. Just because you've never found a job that inspires you to the point that you're willing to pour yourself into it, doesn't mean that nobody else enjoys their work. Hell, I've said things like that about my graduate studies at various points when I was working 75 hour+ weeks.

It's a weighted average, which is commonly used when you want certain values to impact the average more than others. You multiply each value by a weight, and then divide by the sum of the weights. Gamespot clearly thought that gameplay was more important to the overall quality of a game than sound, and so on.

"I promise I'll put a link in the show notes" famous last words

@captunnecessary: It really should have have been the title. @benpack that was legit funny and deserves fanart.

About the "credits becoming too long" if they credited everyone who had left - pretty sure the GTA V credits ended up clocking in at like 45-50 minutes long. I remember informally timing it by glancing at my watch when it started and ended. Credit length for games such as Rockstar games have long since gone out the window for anything resembling brevity. I can somewhat understand the mentality behind they left so they don't get credited, but man does it look like garbage from the outside.

Was a bit surprised to hear Jeff say that games are way better today than they used to be. Not that I think he thinks games suck nowadays or anything, but he clearly loves old games and I always assumed he liked them better.

Email 2, Sequel to Email. I fucking almost swerved on the freeway from laughing so hard

I haven't watched the video version of the podcast in a while, all the overlays reminding you what game they're discussing rule!

Back at around 2:08:00 Jeff is trying to name a console it reminds him of, and he's talking about this:

I was laughing my ass off during the review section, that was great.

@adamalc: well said.

@dasakamov: then leave @adamalc: well said.

@michaelafingers:

Careful friend, I tried posting something to this degree and was immediately jumped on. People gotta have a mountain to stand on and for right now this is their mountain.

@schindigg: Duder, people answered your question. If you didn't want people to answer it, or if you were prepared to write off anyone that did answer you, why did you ask?

And yes, workplace fairness and work life balance, etc...are extremely important issues to a lot of people, in a variety of industries. So yes, they're upset about it.

Marvel's Spider-man 7.8

Confirmed

Ben was unrelentingly negative and cynical in this episode. Amico, R-Type (which honestly is still a great game), Vita, wet naps. Just shit on everything. I think the jaded game industry attitude is starting to take over already.

@Jeff: The "Megaton" term came from Famitsu, who teased a megaton for their next issue. It ended up being the very first Naruto game, back when the anime was exploding in Japan. It wasn't airing in the US yet, though, which caused a lot of anger from people who hyped themselves up, only to learn it was a show they'd never heard of.

Wish I'd listened to this Bombcast a few days earlier. Ah well.

@divinekataroshie: It is, Gampeplay was worth .3, Tilt was worth .3, value and graphics were worth .15 (i believe they usually rounded down though, so games would get 8.1 instead of 8.15), and Sound was worth .1. Math checks out for 4.8 on the image. I spent way too much time rating games on Gamespot as a teen to forget.

The E3 moment where they revealed that the PS4 would allow you to play used games is definitely one of the biggest positive E3 moments. Didn't that get a standing ovation? Everyone was so happy that bullet was getting dodged. Everyone knew about the Xbox plan to register games to a system so that only big stores like GameStop and Best Buy could unlink them. It was assumed Sony would follow suit and trading games with friends would be over forever.

@benpack: ahhh. you're so nice!

Rank dem Marios.