badmood247

When I heard "I just think Cuphead should be higher" to the 500 time, I just wanted to hide in a bathroom surrounded by 99 brown robots.

@redhotchilimist: glad you are enjoying it!

Link to episode.

Date Posted: 3-4-2008

Hosts: Ryan and Jeff

Hello and welcome back to Bombcast from the Past, off the bat in this episode we have the Bombcast debut of Alex Navarro! Jeff announces that the Arrow Pointing Down Podcast is #1 in the UK, #2 in the US, and "big in Columbia" and attributes the success to the scathing drink review. Well hold on to you hats because this week's Drink of the Week is Cactus Cooler, which is a drink I have never heard of, and Alex explains that it is due to the fact that it is only available in the south western US. For the curious, you can purchase a 12-pack of Cactus Cooler for the low price of $28.50 on Amazon. Jeff later describes the taste as a liquid form of children's chewable Aspirin, which sounds fucking disgusting. Ryan has gone on a small vacation to Los Angeles, but he is happy to be back as he and Alex agree that no one should spend more than 3 days in Southern California. They spend the next few minutes explaining just how shitty L.A. is. Alex and Jeff have gone to see Cobra, a movie which Jeff deems the greatest movie ever made, ( currently at a 5.7/10 on IMDB) we also hear a name drop of future Giant Bomber Matt Rorie.

This week's new kicks off with a story of EA being interested in buying Take Two Interactive. The guys say that this is just something that's inevitable, but in mid 2008 the offer would expire and the deal will never be made. Phil Harrison has left Sony Computer Entertainment America and moved on to Atari, and from reading his wiki page, he hasn't done much of anything since then. They spend the next few minutes discussing the library of Atari's IP and how they basically only have DBZ at this point, and that maybe this move could save them, hindsight being 20/20 it has not. The next story is speculation on a Van Halen Guitar Hero. At this point it is only a rumor, the game would eventually be released on December 22, 2009. The talk for awhile about the downward fall the Guitar Hero series, and Ryan even makes a joke that a future Guitar Hero game would feature key-tars, while never making their way into Guitar Hero game, it would make and appearance in Rock Band 3. Speaking of Rock Band, they just released a huge amount of Greatful Dead dlc, which Ryan and Jeff just hate but Alex defends (foreshadowing?) They discuss Rock Band for awhile, it's nice hearing them talk about how much they love it, when the game came out I was totally into it, and like the rest of the gaming community it is nothing but memories at this point in 2017. In the last bit of news this week, Dungeons and Dragons creator Gary Gygax has passed away at the age of 69.

This week Alex is playing Conflict: Denied Ops, and gives it "two thumbs up... out of ten," and alludes to the idea that it felt liked a rushed version of Army of Two, this would be the last game in the Conflict series made to date. Jeff is still playing the Club, saying that it makes a passable first impression and it's all down hill from there, and Alex whole heartily agrees. Ryan has finally wrapped up Jumper, which he is only playing for the points. Jeff is closing in on 55k achievement points and eagerly awaits CSI to grind that to reach 56k. Jeff is also playing through the second season for Sam and Max and he is actually enjoying this game. Bully Scholarship edition is out, they like it so far but are disappointed with the frame rate. Also released this week is Army of Two, which apparently teaches us that bullet wounds can be plugged with tampons. Next week sees the release of God of War: Chains of Olympus and Condemned 2.

We get to the questions from this week, first being to name your three favorite Xbox Live Arcade games. Uno makes all their lists, Geometry Wars, Catan, Alien Hominid, Puzzle Quest, and Streets of Rage 2 are all mentioned as well. Alex pleads for a Final Fight arcade release, a wish that would be granted two years later in April 2010. The second question is if they could pick one game to be made for Xbox Live Arcade what would it be, Ryan picks Apples to Apples, Alex of course picks Final Fight, and Jeff picks Samurai Shodown 2, all three would eventually find their way onto the platform. Someone wants to know if they would ever get a sequel to Rumble Racing, the group unanimously says no, and they were right. The next question is what flavor would they make a Gatorade Alex would have a champagne flavored Gatorade named Boo Berry, Jeff would name his BLACK SHOCK and it would taste like Sweet Tarts. Jeff is asked what ideas he had to get more people to actually read game reviews, this takes the group on a few minutes of interesting conversation about aggregate review sites and actual review sites. The next question gets them back onto the subject of drinks and discuss a Pepsi Max coffee variant that sounds disgusting, and a sponge cake and jam flavored pop... yuck.

And that about wraps up the show for this week. Join us next time for the first every Bombcast!

Games Mentioned this Week

* According to vgchartz.com, complied all units sold accross all platforms.

Link to podcast.

Date Posted: 2-24-2008

Hosts: Ryan and Jeff

Guest: Alex

Well here we are folks, the podcast has made it to it's second week, even though Jeff was a little skeptical last episode. We also get the Bombcast debut of Alex, who we all know will be a staple for years on the show. The guys are fresh off a trip to GDC, and are recording this episode in Jeff's living room, which I'm pretty excited about because the audio is way better. But Ryan does give some insight into the depth of a 7-Eleven Slurpee-chino, a coffee flavored Slurpee. And Jeff give a revolutionary review of a Snicker's Nut'n Butter Crunch bar, deeming it hard and says it is the "World War 2 first person shooter of candy bars." They move on to discuss last weeks Drink of the Week, Gatorade Tiger, and Jeff's struggle to actually locate them. Alex pitches an idea of going after a Gatorade sponsorship, but Jeff shoots the idea down because no price can be put on his love for Gatorade.

On to the discussion of GDC 2008, or so I thought, Ryan talks about the wonderful tote bag he received when registering for his press badge. Which brings us to our Drink of the Week, 6-Hour Energy Mini Thin Rush, Ryan describes the smell as fruit punch Kool-Aide, the taste is said to be the same. He proceeds to chug the rest, and sound to have almost choked, then changes his taste review to "a bunch of ground up pills." Alex warns him that for the next few hours he will become manic at one point and then feel a slow fall as opposed to a crash.

Now onto the real GDC 2008 discussion, Jeff is happy with the events they attended. He goes on to describe all the parties that were going on that week, Ryan chimes in about how weird it is to be walking down the street and passing Gabe Newell and his posse or having small talk with Will Wright. From what Alex hears, the craziest party was the White Wolf party, which none of them attended. Ryan missed an entire day to the show, thanks to a hang over and missed what Alex felt was the best part of the entire show, the Portal seminar. The boys say it's a little weird to cover a show that doesn't exactly focus on games themselves, but more on the actual production and creation side of games.

On the topic of Boom Blox, they talk about some sort of head tracking that would be integrated into the game, which never actually surfaced in the final product. Gears of War 2 was announced with a release date of holiday 2008, to none of their surprise. They spend less time on this then I would have thought, I assume it's because nothing of the game was shown at this time. XNA games are brought up, Microsoft will be letting these games go on sale at some point. Ryan talks about the one XNA game he has played, The Dishwasher, and says its a very stylist game , and a good deal of fun. Ryan compares it to No More Heros, and Jeff says it's more like a Devil May Cry. Jeff played a little of Street Fighter 4, and was excited about the fireballs. They all make fun of Smash Bros. fanboys, which was pretty comical. Jeff briefly considers a lawsuit against McDonald's for stealing his intellectual property, but he will settle if they give him the ability to get a McRib when ever he wants.

Ryan finally got his hands on a copy of No More Heros, and he says it's completely out of it's mind but still playable. They praise the silly things about the game like the main characters name, Travis Touchdown, the games use of coconuts, and pizza suplexes. Jeff points out how the game looks like it is supposed to look bad, and the open world is useless. Ryan suggests it if you want absolute M rated madness on the Wii, and Jeff endorses it as well. The next game is Echochrome, Jeff thinks a pretty neat game. Jeff played some Bionic Commando at GDC and the group talks about the merits of a white guy with dredlocks. Ryan is playing Jumper, he kind of wants to like it, but its ugly and clunky. Jeff and Ryan both want to see the movie, and Jeff reveals that at one point Eminem was up for the lead role in the movie, that would probably have made for a much better viewing experience. Ryan suggests that you pass on the game unless you want some easy achievement points. Alex also says to skip the Crew, it's unoriginal and repetitive, and says the entire plot of the game is stupid. Jeff agrees and wishes it had some sort of point system for the stylistic killing, like kudos from Project Gotham.

New releases this week are Patapon, Lost: Via Domus (Alex expresses his love for the show, Ryan shows his frustration,) Puzzle Guzzle. Jeff has been playing some Professor Layton, but has trouble with some of the puzzles, so he just uses a faq. N+ is out, and although Ryan enjoys it, he fells for $10 he deserves more megs. Triggerhart Exelica comes out as well, and Jeff looks forward to playing it twice and then never again. In the near future Army of Two is coming out, everyone has hear that it's a train wreck so they all look forward to playing it. And they are all excited about Bully: Scholarship Edition, which according to Ryan has an "orgazmic rape simulator."

Here is the first questions section on the podcast, the general consensus is that the Dual Shock is the best controller available. Alex hates the D-Pad on the Xbox 360 controller, a feature Microsoft would fix later down the road. A question is brought up about the next Call of Duty game going back to World War 2 (what would be come CoD: World at War) and how they would feel about the franchise going to future settings. On the subject of a WW2 themed CoD game, they litterally say "Snooze." Jeff even says " I never want to play another World War 2 FPS again." They are also not really keen to the idea of a future setting for the CoD franchise, Alex jokes that the setting would be space (somthing we would see in 2016's CoD: Infinite Warfare.) I also find this amusing in hindsight in regards to Jeff's professed love for CoD: Advanced Warfare. Jeff talks about mayonnaise on pizza, which is fucking disgusting.

And that bring the second episode to a close. Nothing super revolutionary until they got to the questions sections and Alex brought out his crystal ball to predict 2016 Call of Duty. Join me next time for Arrow Pointing Down Podcast: 3-4-2008.

Games Mentioned this Week:

* According to vgchartz.com, complied all units sold accross all platforms.

Sorry, I'm shit at formatting with pictures.

Welcome to the first edition of Bombcast from the Past. Before we get started I want to take a minute to explain my plan and reason for doing these posts. As a recent premium subscriber, I love the fact that I can comb through years worth of content on a whim. My daily commute allows me plenty of time to consume podcasts, being all caught up on my recently released episodes, I decided to go back to the where it all started and listen to the Bombcast from the begining. As I was doing so, I found it very entertaining to hear the crew speculate and shit talk the gaming industry of 2008 knowing how it has played out afterwards. With these posts I will go back in order and highlight what was discussed and how it ended up afterwards, so please join me on adventure to the very beginning of the Bombcast.

Link to Podcast.

Date Posted: 02/18/2008

Hosts: Ryan and Jeff

The first episode is being recorded over Skype, the audio is a little rough, Jeff sounds like he is talking through a tin can. After about a minute of introducing the show and useless banter, we get to what seems to become a major staple at the top of every Bombcast to come in the near future: The Drink of the Day! This episodes drink is Gatorade Tiger, a Tiger Woods themed re-branding of Gatorade. They spend a few minutes discussing the finer qualities of the drink, the flavors, and how it will turn you into a winner. They go on to talk about the many differences between Gatorade Tiger, regular Gatorade, and even G2. We get our first peek into how lazy Jeff can be, as he describes to us the struggles of 2008 grocery delivery. My favorite quote from this part is then Jeff simply asks, "Does it taste like golf?" After about 12 minutes of Gatorade discussion, they move on to another hot button issue, HD-DVD!

Off the bat, Ryan explains that buying the Xbox 360 HD-DVD drive was, and I quote, "Retarded." To refresh your memories, in 2006, there where two formats in which you could buy movies in HD, Blu-ray and HD-DVD. Home gaming consoles had a huge hand in deciding who would win this format war, as Sony's Playstation 3 had Blu-ray capabilities right out of the box, without any extra peripherals, while Microsoft backed the HD-DVD format, but the consumer would need to buy an extra disc drive to plug into their console, for a low price of $199.99 on-top of the cost of the console. Anyway, by late 2007 it was clear that Blu-ray would win the war and in late February 2008, Microsoft discontinued the HD-DVD drive. Jeff mentions here that, before CES that year, Microsoft was set to announce a new model 360 with the HD-DVD drive built into the console, but once Warner Brothers announced they would no longer support the format, forced Microsoft to cancel these plans. I find this very interesting, as it seems Microsoft has learned by its past mistakes and now is the only home gaming console currently that supports 4K Blu-ray with the Xbox One S.

After a short discussion on the topic of Girls Gone Wild on HD-DVD, we finally get to game talk. They start by discussing Command and Conquer: Red Alert, a game Jeff sounded pretty excited about, he would later give the game a 4/5. They talk about how hard it is to get RTS games to work on console and what they would like to see for the genre on console. Ryan jokes that he hopes they still feature 80's fixture Kari Wuhrer, saying "She's gotta be what, like 60 now?" In rides white night Jeff to defend his maiden's honor, proclaiming that it's impossible for her to age, and in hindsight he may have been right.

They move on to the topic of GDC 2008, they both mention having interest in attending a seminar lead by Bioshock writer Ken Levine that focused on storytelling. They express excitement on seeing the gaming industry from the side of the developers and not from a press point of view. I guess at the time writing was not a huge focus for many developers but became huge with the success of games like Bioshock and Mass Effect. Ryan sticks a dagger in my heart by bashing Lost Odyssey, saying that its just another stale JRPG. They talk a little about the CES award how they probably mean more to developers than the DICE awards (I have no recollection what the DICE awards where.) and Jeff seems to have some weird grudge against a coked up Jay Mohr. Ryan mentions a seminar with Bioware about dialog writing, and how he felt that was the best part of the original Mass Effect. in 2017, this gave me a good chuckle thinking about Andromeda and all its issues.

While still on the subject of CES, they get onto the topic of PlayStation Home. At this point, its still in beta, and wonder exactly what it will be. They worry that it will just be another vehicle for content creators to push more shit onto the gamers, or if it will actually be something useful. Warhawks was brought up, and how you would be able to use Home to launch a server with your friends in that game. This feature for Home eventually did launch, but after some digging around on the net, I was not able to actually find any more types of features for PlayStation Home like this, so I assume that it was not wildly popular.

"You Can't Go (Playstation) Home Again." Giant Bomb's farewell to Playstation Home.

Spawning from the Home discussion, the get onto the topic of Xbox gamer pics. Why are some free, why must you buy other? What sets the standard of pricing for this sort of thing? Is it even logical to sell them? This truly was the infancy of micro-transactions, and if only 2008 Jeff and Ryan could see the gaming industry today. Ryan openly admits to buying the Command and Conquer picture pack just so he could have a gamer pic of Billy Dee Williams and Michael Ironside (I don't blame him.) Jeff thinks the whole charging for gamer pics is bullshit and that you should just be able to upload a jpg as a gamer pic and Microsoft should just work harder banning people who upload porn and such. He even says "If they (Microsoft) was Xbox Live to become this kind of ubiquitous service, they need to give gamers some control over it." As we all know, the Xbox Live platform has changed a lot to 2008 and its fair share of ups and downs, the custom gamer pic feature would eventually be adapted, but not until April of 2017.

They jump around for a little bit between Boom Blox, id/id tech, and the difference between id Tech engine and Unreal. It's kind of weird hearing now, because now in 2017, Unreal is probably the most used game engine out there and id tech doesn't seem to be used at all (the last game to use id Tech was 2016's Doom, before that 2014's The Evil Within.) The way they are discussing this, id Tech seems like something that was used a lot in the industry but I just don't remember it much. Then they lament on not working on 2nd street (Gamespot) anymore, and how they can't get Henry's Hunan as much as they want. Next it's onto Prototype and how you can't call it emergent game play after its already been released. During their next part, they discuss possibly going to a seminar about Fable 2 hosted by Peter Molyneux, in typical fashion they lovingly bash Molyneux, who deserves every bit. Ryan names it "Fable 2: Peter Molyneux lies about Fable 2" and mention the importance of customizable ham sandwiches in game.

They finally get to the thing that they both are the most excited about attending GDC weekend, a seminar about integrating writing and design into Portal. They mention just how refreshing it was to have such fun writing in a unique game like Portal, something that to this day has rarely been replicated. Before wrapping up their discussion on GDC Jeff expresses his need for Hatris on the XBL Arcade, only to be matched by Ryan's request for SimAnt.

At this point, Ryan is playing lots of Carcassonne "for no good reason" and Tomb Raider Anniversary, while Jeff plays Devil May Cry 4 and Uncharted, but wants to rush through them to get to CSI and Jumper (not joking.) New Releases they mention are The Club, which Jeff says in overly clunky, which I can attest to, and compares it to some old Sega games. Ryan decides that they will do this podcast weekly, Jeff doesn't sound so sure. Ryan also teases getting sponsors, doing giveaways, and setting up a call in line and email for questions, for which Jeff laughs at like Ryan is is a crazy person.

Games Mentioned this Episode

* According to vgchartz.com, complied all units sold accross all platforms.

** Steamspy.com claims 1,499,044 own the game on Steam at the time of writing.

+ Steamspy.com claims 9,884,825 own the game on Steam at the time of writing.

That's about it for the first episode of the podcast that would become something that we all know and love. If you made it this far into the post I would like to thank you for reading all my bullshit, and if you have any tips on how to improve this post, please leave them in the comments.

Next time on Bombcast from the past: Arrow Pointing Down Podcast 2-24-2008

Stardew Valley

Downloaded the Cheats for no stamina drain, auto water, and other things. Now vanilla seems like a prison sentence.

Gamestop man.... Gamepro