huser

@bigsocrates:

I always judge the year of Bombcasts by the first one back from winter break. I think it was 2012 one where they went over disaster scenarios that takes the cake. Just Ryan ending the segment with "Ok, your entire family is dead..."

So that's my pick.

@ezekiel:

Lava's pretty hot, it's molten rock after all. I would fully expect anything even remotely flammable to light up if held in close proximity. Trees for example in the way of lava flows (that have had time to cool for that matter). He likely would have died from overheating or the various fumes first though.

Re: Episode 1, as you said Lucas hadn't fully placed his faith in the technological terror he had created. Still had practical effects. I believe Adam Savage of Mythbusters fame worked on it some. I tend to view the Podrace less charitably as basically an excuse to make a video game, ultimately a bit of inconsequential fluff in a trilogy of it.

I'm not sure that bit about games being better is a given. Games also cost more and take longer to make in the current market. Risks have to be mitigated. There's a long list of dead devs that just ran afoul of a bad run of 50/50 coinflips (which math says is a near inevitability over enough time). I mean if we are talking going 3rd party, Nintendo would be even better served and at much less risk, if they got out of gaming entirely and went all Disney with their properties...kinda like Disney did with gaming frankly. Otherwise, they will keep chasing scenarios not a decade old where between the Wii and DS they pushed out 60 million Mario Karts out there...onto a quarter billion hardware units.

Like a lot of things, strange bedfellows. People that genuinely care, perhaps too much, that can't help themselves, and people that care but want to tear things down so any bad news is good news.

Depends on the game. Some games have magic users that aren't purposely hamstrung and can wreck shop at least somewhat on the same level as your magic users, so you gotta "silence/mute" them if that is an option.

Most games though don't really make it worth your while. They either nerf status ailments to prevent them from being instant win/challenge negating effects, or they are so esoteric or so limited in scope by a range of enemies that are immune that you simply forget about them.

EDIT - One game though that made good use of these was Etrian Odyssey. Poison was one of the more powerful spells early on, but had a hard cap, limited ceiling so you had to reroll a character by the midgame. More importantly, everyone in fights could only have at most three statuses active. Buff or debuff. So you could knock a buff off an enemy by giving them a debuff and they could do the same to you. This became critical in later fights where "wasting" turns of specific characters to make sure your magic users won initiative was sometimes super necessary. Also, there were whole classes devoted to inflicting and exploiting debuffs like binding arms so the enemy can't attack, or their mouth so they can't speak. Get them totally wrapped up and they are vulnerable to key attack synergies, while also being unable to attack. God I love those games.

Astroboy Omega Factor. It is dope.

Austin was a real blazing comet across the sky. Took a while for Patrick to grow on me I'll admit, though I think it fair to say he clearly improved his on air work along the way. By the end, when he was pulling New Dan for real and trying out stuff that was outside his wheelhouse, I grew to really like his work.

He's amazingly fit in fiction, but it would be slightly interesting if Hitman suffered a little from the altitude stamina bar wise. I'm also wondering how hard I'll have to look for any marijuana references.

I think Vinny's Dadness can also help mitigate some of Dan's more crazy outliers. Being more willing to call out crazy (him and Alex for that matter) and being able to do so with some patience. I mean it's not Austin Walker, but GBE did need someone else.

I'd like it if that threw off your visual spectrum so what would be considered blue on these yellow sun worlds would look dark grey to you, yellow might look blue, and big patches of red would have all kinds of other colors highlighting things because you can see into what would normally be infrared.

And you'd be left wondering why people think you're dressed like a circus strongman rather than a serious explorer outfit with a slight militant overtones.