The Giant Beastcast: Episode 27

Yes, best gift from Black friday.

BEASTCAST!! Alex defecting to the west coast for a week, I hope we get some Navarro beastcast action in our bombcast.

This is gonna be fun.

Petär Stårmarä

Yes

I give thanks for the Beastcast; for Alex, Vinny, Austin, Jeff, and friends. Happy and safe holiday weekend, y'all!

Tomb building conversation is great!

I hope Vinny wasn't looking in a mirror when he said 'Secret Hitler' five times.

All of them pretending to be various company roles was a great bit. The Beastcast is amazing.

The Game of Lord of the Trek... Next Telltale game maybe?

Happy Thanksgiving, guys. Let's dive in!

I'm thankful for Max Temkin, because secret hitler

I'm thankful for whatever the hell was happening at 6:15 here.

Timestamps

00:00:00 - Secret Hitler Kickstarter ad

00:02:37 - Podcast Starts (Alex and Jeff call in)

00:06:15 - Austin and Vinny talks about Anno 2205

00:09:23 - Alex talks about Rise of the Tomb Raider (Who makes these Tombs?)

00:17:22 - Jeff talks about Call of Duty: Black Ops III and creating a better Fallout 4 PC experience

00:22:42 - Vinny talks about game of the year prep

00:23:59 - Flying and seating talk

00:27:43 - Austin talks about Overwatch

00:28:29 - Vinny talks about sound check weirdness

00:30:44 - THE NEWS, starting with Afro Samurai being delisted

00:39:54 - Dying Light Season Pass jumping in price

00:45:13 - Black Friday is messed up

00:53:42 - Dead or Alive Xtreme 3 Controversy

01:08:48 - E-Mails (Food ordering stories, Marvel games, Graphics that melt your pc, a degree in Xenochronicles, turducken of video games)

01:44:49 - Next time in San Francisco

I want to watch Vinny's version of Lord of the Rings and man the Building your own Tomb bit... SO GOOD!

Post here if you guessed the fake d20 roll correctly.

(I'm posting. I did that.)

Oh man, I totally did the same!!

In me and julio down by the schoolyard paul simon sings 'queen of corona' not king. I guess that's for corrections?!

I don't think the definition of censorship is so rigid that it can only mean the suppression of information by a government; and I think it's defined in enough different ways by word defining authorities to support this.

Yeah, removing content from Xenoblade X isn't a first for Nintendo, but it's just really frustrating every time they swipe something under the rug like this and pretend it doesn't exist. It feels like they're deciding for us what we should be seeing. Just release the game as it was created, and have it be critiqued as it is.

Connecting this back to DOAX3 not coming out in the west, I don't think that's the same situation as Xenoblade X. If it's really not a business decision, then it's just a really lame decision for not wanting to have the conversation about the treatment of their female characters.

I never knew how much I needed Creepy Vincent in my life.

What they need to do is get that dick tech from mount your friends into doa

@razzuel: Yeah, the DOAX3 thing reads to me more as a business decision. If they thought it would make money they would've released it. This is all built on the word of a CM, which the company has later said is not true. Excuse me if I have a hard time believing the narrative here. And yeah, I can see DOAX3 not being worth it for them because it's a super niche title in the West.

As for the "censorship" part, I think that was more to try to get this particular discussion away from the most hyperbolic "any criticism=censorship" part of the internet.

@amyggen: i can't possibly imagine those first two games sold well in the states

Hmm, I just started watching Mr. Robot yesterday. I saw a sign in the show that said "Fabulous Italian Ice", and thought that was pretty funny.
Now I know what that is!

@wrenchninja: thanks for the time codes. 20 minutes of DOA talk would have been hell.

@wrenchninja: Kudos!

@internetdotcom: I have seen conflicting reports about this to be honest. Everyone seems to assume like you did they sold badly..but then anyone against this move quotes the "Sold better here then in japan"

Which..might be true? But they might be talking numbers of people vs % of user base..and given the install base was massively higher for the..360 I think it was for the first two games in the USA...

So..maybe your right. Either-or, the game exists in an English form, and even if the Playasia version of the game is badly translated.. "Good spike" and "Teehee that tickles" is not so thrilling and crucial a dialog to get right for anyone who actually wants this game to matter.

(ok, now my main comment so I don't double post)

tl;dr Censorship doesn't work, waste of time. Everyone is wrong..everyone is right. Everyone wins, except the extremes of both sides who view anything but absolute victory to be failure.

The controversy I think is that people want companies to take sides, mainly their own. And any choice a company makes in regards to a game like this now has, for lack of a better term, political leanings. Declining/deciding to release a game in the USA is now considered to be caving/siding with the 'Insert derogatory term here" crowd by the "insert derogatory term here' crowd. Yeah, being intentionally vague cause there really is no difference in response, the extremes of both sides are nearly identical in their fanatical "Us vs them" mentality.

Personally, I'm against censorship in any form, mostly cause it doesn't work and doesn't matter. The existence of hardcore porn doesn't make citizen kane a lesser movie just cause they share the same media. The existence of twilight doesn't make war and peace a lesser novel just cause they are both books.

The issue of course is, videogames are a way younger medium and the old guard is viewing minorities coming in and saying "hey, we want games that appeal to us too" as "they are gonna take away our games!" mixed with some of those minorities going over board into the "This stuff is not made for me/makes me uncomfortable ergo it must not be allowed to exist!"

Again, both sides to blame..cause they are both wrong. There is space in gaming for honest and un-pandering depictions of women..and anime boobs, they don't cancel each other out, its not an either/or, its both.

Examples. See-steam, more boobs and uncensored patched sticked in threads then ever before. See also the large number of narrative driven games that have come out from gone home onward..see also the simple fact that more then just the hardcore fanbase is voicing an opinion and having their needs slowly explored, and met by game creators...while oh look, sekai project is releasing a host of new visual novels in english sex patches to be included...and Hunie pop is..well, a thing that exists.

Like I said, gee, its almost as if gaming is expanding, and censorship is a waste of time. Just like it was for literature, and comics, and movies, and music and..and etc.

That said. I get why companies do it. Don't rock the boat, don't generate bad publicity..the same reason they and other people did it for all those other forms of media back then..and will continue to do so as new forms of media are created in the future.

I have an Asus ROG g-sync monitor and while it was pretty pricey (600-700$ roughly) it is wonderful. Screen-tearing is completely eliminated and the picture quality is sublime but I would never recommend it over say a fancy video card. If you can afford it and your rig is already a beast then go for it but otherwise a normal 144 Hz monitor will do just fine.

@austin_walker: I'm a bit surprised you and Jeff were miffed at the digital pricing of games. Digital game prices are still absolute bullshit. I have written about it in my newspaper in a couple different ways (once in the business section!) so I have done quite a bit of research, but I've felt the bad pricing was obvious.

On all platforms, the sales are quite good. However, if you are looking to just buy a digital game that is around a year old, even up to two years, you will be paying full price for the game. The prices aren't being forced down for shelf space, and publishers and platform holders are betting that if X number of people will randomly want a game a Y dollars, they aren't going to lose many sales if the game is still priced at Y+20 dollars.

While physical prices are plummeting--you can get most games at a decent discount within a few weeks of a game launch--digital prices are staying up unless there is a short sale. This is something that consumers are seeing, and it is slowing the transition to digital. While the transition is still happening, some thought that it would be further along than it is.

While a lot of us are buying digital for convenience, high digital pricing is a deterrent to many. It's something we all thought Microsoft and Sony would have to solve in trying to push digital, but nope, it turns out they either don't have the want, or need, to do so.

Most censorship, especially in the West, has not come from the government and to claim it has shows a misunderstanding of the practices history. That being said, even if someone is not actively keeping them from doing something they might still feel the "outrage culture" that we have in the US isn't great. While the vocal minority of people who are like Sarkeesian is small its still there and it still gets more coverage than it typically should.

I think that this is a non-story and people's outrage over Play-Asia's tweets are equally outrageous. I've not heard anyone complain about the vitriol that a Luke Plunkett or Jason Schrier say on Twitter, lol. Why are we worried about what Play-Asia's twitter account says?

Good listenin!

I pay for the Premium but I still listen to the Regular for the Ads.....is that wierd? And oh yeah Secret Hitler.....

So, as a European am I right in guessing 'water ice' and 'italian ice' is just the dumb USA way of saying Sorbet?

Oh my god I am dying with the Corp Tomb Raider stuff! You guys rock!

I read up a little on the snails vs. knights thing and them being an allegory for death is a genuine theory so maybe this is another of Austin's niche interests? Striving to unlock the the puzzle of 13th & 14th century depictions of knights battling snails on the side?!

I think the point about misusing words it's extremely important. I don't understand if it's the internet environment, american culture, media reporting in general, games press specific (certainly one of the most hyperbolic), but misusing terms for inflammatory purposes, devalueing them in the process, has been a constant lately (being "censorship", "misoginy" or whatever; i'm not denying them, just saying that they are often applied to the wrong situations and it ends up making the actual istances of these situations less impactful when reported or talked about because the words have lost their weight)

edit: i'm gonna guess the "italian ice" is a bastardization of the granita?

@zabant: I think so, but what comes into play as well is Gellato.

@austin_walker The Dying Light reminded me of an article by Jason Rohrer.

http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/JasonRohrer/20140115/208673/Why_Rampant_Sales_are_Bad_for_Players.php

@sammo21: I dunno it seems like there should be a difference between someone acting like a child on their personal page and a company acting like one on their official page.

@efesell: that's subjective to each person. The fact so many people in this country will scream "free the boobies!" but then also get upset when they are in videogames is pretty childish. I know Austin says he doesn't know any feminists who say stuff like that (which honestly doesn't mean anything) but theyre out there and are pretty vocal minority.

I do agree that maybe stuff like this shouldn't be on a company's twitter account but its gonna generate them only sales. Austin comaplined about them on twitter but they gained like 12-16,000 followers just from doing it, so it seems to he the right move for them.

Different industries, different expectations, but in this specific case there was no outrage over this game. It was Koei Tecmo making a business decision while indirectly diverting blame, then other outlets made business decisions to manufacture a controversy to exploit a group of people in to being outraged. DOAX doesn't have any playable male characters, Zack is in a speedo for a couple of scenes here and there, but none of them are playable.

Not to be "that guy," but people get stabbed over PS4s all the time. The real question is: why do we only give a fuck about one day a year?

Also: I originally typed "stabbled," which doesn't sound awful at all. It sounds adorable.

I've had the chance to read up on the DOAX3 controversy and I just don't understand people. Why do people get mad about products not aimed at them? If they have no intention of buying said product why be so outraged by digital girls playing on a beach? Western media is literally EXPLODING with female sexualization (Film, TV, Magazines, etc.) and yet the world hasn't ended.

Koei Tecmo didn't want the game coming over because they felt it wasn't worth their time and money to deal with the inevitable backlash (all games in the volleyball series had faced similar criticism) from Western video games media. Seems reasonable to me.

What's so inevitable about a snail?