Giant Bombcast 01-24-2012

Patrick voiced the problem with becoming the leader of every guild poorly. It just never seems reasonable that they would let you take control of their operation. You (the character) slam through these quests in a very short period of time and suddenly you're more worthy of being charge than everybody else? Even the people who have been there a very long time and should have formed strong bonds with their peers? It's just shitty "you're the chosen one!" writing. And it isn't even like there's any benefit you gain from being the leader that you couldn't have otherwise.

Brad's blind adoration for the writing in Skyrim (which is frequently garbage) is annoying and I can't wait for the crew to stop talking about the game.

On RE6, gonna put this out there: Leon isn't very interesting. He simply benefits from starring in the series' high note.

Patrick voiced the problem with becoming the leader of every guild poorly. It just never seems reasonable that they would let you take control of their operation. You (the character) slam through these quests in a very short period of time and suddenly you're more worthy of being charge than everybody else? Even the people who have been there a very long time and should have formed strong bonds with their peers? It's just shitty "you're the chosen one!" writing. And it isn't even like there's any benefit you gain from being the leader that you couldn't have otherwise.

@gladspooky said:

@selbie said:

@gladspooky said:

Yo Ryan, science fiction is a subgenre of fantasy.

Where on earth did you pull that one from? Sci-fi and fantasy both fall under the category of Speculative Fiction.

No, they don't. Speculative fiction is also just another term for what "fantasy" actually means. It doesn't mean "elves, everything's ye olde, and there's magic."

....who cares

@gladspooky said:

@selbie said:

@gladspooky said:

Yo Ryan, science fiction is a subgenre of fantasy.

Where on earth did you pull that one from? Sci-fi and fantasy both fall under the category of Speculative Fiction.

No, they don't. Speculative fiction is also just another term for what "fantasy" actually means. It doesn't mean "elves, everything's ye olde, and there's magic."

Then what is your definition of fantasy? because I've always understood it as comprising settings with dominant magical and supernatural themes, as opposed to sci-fi which involves scientific ideas typically based on real-world theories. Horror is the other branch of Speculative Fiction which deals with the macabre. Sci-fi, Fantasy and Horror all fall under Speculative Fiction because they each tend to overlap depending on the story. Even the most far-fetched sci-fi novels that I've read (eg. Arthur C Clarke - City and the Stars, Alistair Reynolds - House of Suns), can contain fantastical ideas, but at the same time, I've read fantasy novels (Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels) that contain real-world scientific ideas.

So how can you say Sci-Fi is a SUBgenre of fantasy, when the two are both speculative in nature? You can't label 2001: A Space Odyssey and Lord of the Rings as both being Fantasy because they differ in their themes.

It makes me think you'd label Pride & Prejudice as fantasy as well >___>

Anyone know where to find the animated gif of Patrick that was mentioned?

"You know what they say. If there's grass on the astroid..." "...blow it up".

Vinny's brain should be preserved for future study. Multiple layered jokes on the fly, bravo sir!

My Dark Brotherhood quest worked fine I just used the ice Wraith to kill her for me.

The most hilarious thing about the "fur out of the ears" thing for me is that I'm playing as a Khajiit. "Is that fur... coming out of your ears?" "No shit, Sherlock. I'm a fucking cat!"

I hope they stop talking about Skyrim. Its just turning into nitpicking the game and blurting out spoilers. And their arguments aren't that great when it comes to criticizing or defending it

@sabin1001: here you go duder

http://i.minus.com/iby2NKvlYpyS2F.gif

On RE6, gonna put this out there: Leon isn't very interesting. He simply benefits from starring in the series' high note.

I still don't get it. Sharing anonymously is criminal and immoral, but sharing in person is not? Is letting your friends borrow a game ok because it actually requires effort and non-laziness on their part to get off their ass and come get it and return it, as opposed to just downloading it off the internet, playing then deleting it?

I also don't get the idea of sharing something paid for making the people you share with "thieves". That doesn't even make sense. Is it the anonymity? I agree that there's a minority percentage of lost revenue from people who think "Oh hey, I was gonna pay for this, now I don't have to!", and that sucks, but calling it "theft" doesn't compute.

Hell, I do that all the time. There have been games I was sort of into, and a friend was clamoring for, so he bought it and let me play it after him, and vice versa. For online pass games, we'll just swap consoles or something and use each other's gamertags. No one has a problem with that, since people share by nature, and it's usually a favorable trait, but if I had just hopped onto a torrent site and gotten a game...suddenly I'd be looking at criminal charges? What the fuck is that about, exactly? Especially since what's being "stolen" exists in a purely digital space and doesn't have anyone paying for shelf space in a store for it. It's potentially infinite.

Now, in the case of leaks....I can get behind the "theft" argument. Leaks are akin to being in the parking lot of a retail store, and an employee just chunking merchandise out that no one has paid for. There's definitely an issue with that.

I'm with Jeff though. Change the business model. A service like Netflix for all forms of entertainment would be great. A shitload of content organized into one convenient space, and not even that expensive. I just don't see us getting there, though, because it's far too lucrative to have people spending $60 a pop on your game and keeping a large part of that revenue than just throwing your game onto a subscription service where people pay a third of that to play all the games they want. At least I would think. I don't know anything about the economics of that. Maybe some of you guys do.

@chaosnovaxz: The difference between sharing and using torrents is actually quite vast. The difference isn't the anonymity it's the duplication of the software. When you swap discs or accounts with games on them you're trading a single actual piece of content, physical or virtual, between two people. Only one person (or technically two if you wanna game the DLC system of xbl and psn) at any given time has that content and no additional person can play it; even the original purchaser. When you torrent games and "share" that way, you're not giving up your ability to play that game; you're simply making illegal copies.

@selbie said:

@gladspooky said:

@selbie said:

@gladspooky said:

Yo Ryan, science fiction is a subgenre of fantasy.

Where on earth did you pull that one from? Sci-fi and fantasy both fall under the category of Speculative Fiction.

No, they don't. Speculative fiction is also just another term for what "fantasy" actually means. It doesn't mean "elves, everything's ye olde, and there's magic."

Then what is your definition of fantasy? because I've always understood it as comprising settings with dominant magical and supernatural themes, as opposed to sci-fi which involves scientific ideas typically based on real-world theories. Horror is the other branch of Speculative Fiction which deals with the macabre. Sci-fi, Fantasy and Horror all fall under Speculative Fiction because they each tend to overlap depending on the story. Even the most far-fetched sci-fi novels that I've read (eg. Arthur C Clarke - City and the Stars, Alistair Reynolds - House of Suns), can contain fantastical ideas, but at the same time, I've read fantasy novels (Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels) that contain real-world scientific ideas.

So how can you say Sci-Fi is a SUBgenre of fantasy, when the two are both speculative in nature? You can't label 2001: A Space Odyssey and Lord of the Rings as both being Fantasy because they differ in their themes.

It makes me think you'd label Pride & Prejudice as fantasy as well >___>

Selbie's right. Well said, sir. It's very much an "Every poodle is a dog, but not every dog is a poodle," issue and Gladspooky is claiming every bulldog is a type of poodle. Technically every one of those genre's could be considered a fantasy or science fiction because all of them contain elements outside of actual possibility as we know it. So how do you decide which is a subgenre of which? You don't you simply take the pre-established terms that have been sharply defined by their typical characteristics and categorize them that way all under the term speculative fiction.

@TPoppaPuff: I get that. The argument against piracy so often though is that it loses revenue, when just sharing games with friends has the same effect. Either immoralize both or let both be. There has been many a game, like I said, that I refrained from buying since I could just borrow it off of friends later down the road.

I'm just saying that for what it's worth, the guys borrowing a game could pirate the game to the same end. They were never going to give the publisher money for the game, so vilifying them for getting it off the internet instead of from a person seems nonsensical to me. Everyone in the industry makes it sound like the anonymous sharing is so wrong, even if it's not a leak situation, even if the person sharing the content has paid for the game. Even though a ton of people can pirate off of one copy, that same physical copy could be passed around to endless numbers of people as well. The internet just happens to allow for that. I was just confused as to why one method of sharing is fine but another isn't, even though the people are experiencing content for free.

Hell, even game sharing over XBL, like you mentioned, is viewed as immoral these days, as absurd as that is. Next thing you know, it'll be illegal to listen to an album with your car windows down, lest you make everyone around you content thieves, since they're not paying for the content they're experiencing. :P

@Marokai said:

@paulunga said:

On RE6, gonna put this out there: Leon isn't very interesting. He simply benefits from starring in the series' high note.

So happy hearing someone else saying this. I have always been mystified at how Leon suddenly became a popular character in the RE fiction. All he has going for him is having been in RE2 and RE4, two of the better RE games. Right-place-right-time character popularity.

While I actually like the character, look, personality, relationships etc., I can see someone having that argument.

@msavo:Personality?I haven't noticed any personality in any RE characters.I mean they aren't exactly sitting down and having conversations they are killing things,being shot at, and saving people.Their dialouge rarely goes farther than "Yes I understand my mission" "Here take this" "Door's locked" "Understood" "LEON!" "Help me!" "Damn it" "I'm hurt!" "The locales are hostile".....you see where I'm going?But I guess Leon does has an interesting hair cut, and his voice is pretty smooth.

@TPoppaPuff said:

@selbie said:

@gladspooky said:

@selbie said:

@gladspooky said:

Yo Ryan, science fiction is a subgenre of fantasy.

Where on earth did you pull that one from? Sci-fi and fantasy both fall under the category of Speculative Fiction.

No, they don't. Speculative fiction is also just another term for what "fantasy" actually means. It doesn't mean "elves, everything's ye olde, and there's magic."

Then what is your definition of fantasy? because I've always understood it as comprising settings with dominant magical and supernatural themes, as opposed to sci-fi which involves scientific ideas typically based on real-world theories. Horror is the other branch of Speculative Fiction which deals with the macabre. Sci-fi, Fantasy and Horror all fall under Speculative Fiction because they each tend to overlap depending on the story. Even the most far-fetched sci-fi novels that I've read (eg. Arthur C Clarke - City and the Stars, Alistair Reynolds - House of Suns), can contain fantastical ideas, but at the same time, I've read fantasy novels (Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels) that contain real-world scientific ideas.

So how can you say Sci-Fi is a SUBgenre of fantasy, when the two are both speculative in nature? You can't label 2001: A Space Odyssey and Lord of the Rings as both being Fantasy because they differ in their themes.

It makes me think you'd label Pride & Prejudice as fantasy as well >___>

Selbie's right. Well said, sir. It's very much an "Every poodle is a dog, but not every dog is a poodle," issue and Gladspooky is claiming every bulldog is a type of poodle. Technically every one of those genre's could be considered a fantasy or science fiction because all of them contain elements outside of actual possibility as we know it. So how do you decide which is a subgenre of which? You don't you simply take the pre-established terms that have been sharply defined by their typical characteristics and categorize them that way all under the term speculative fiction.

You just do as convention always has, with the term fantasy representing a subgenre of fiction on the same level of science fiction. It's not unlike whenever someone comes along and says technically all games are RPG games. You nod your head and say "well yeah, but not in the sense of the way RPG is used when referring to a genre" (more likely simplified to "well yeah, but no").

@Masha2932 said:

The guys never seem to have enough time for emails nowadays which is unfortunate. I'd prefer if they scrap them entirely and just have a special all emails podcast at the end of the month. This means five podcasts instead of four every month.

Yeah its about as bad as new releases. But I mean e-mails has always been a short segment.

@TheHT: "Fantasy" has come to mean one thing..but at one time it meant something very different. Spider-man's first appearance was in a book called "Amazing Fantasy". An anthology series that included science fiction stories as well as sword and sorcery style stories that, in more modern times, have come to label as "fantasy". The idea that science fiction falls under the Fantasy umbrella is an out-dated concept. But not necessarily an incorrect one.

@TPoppaPuff said:

@selbie said:

@gladspooky said:

@selbie said:

@gladspooky said:

Yo Ryan, science fiction is a subgenre of fantasy.

Where on earth did you pull that one from? Sci-fi and fantasy both fall under the category of Speculative Fiction.

No, they don't. Speculative fiction is also just another term for what "fantasy" actually means. It doesn't mean "elves, everything's ye olde, and there's magic."

Then what is your definition of fantasy? because I've always understood it as comprising settings with dominant magical and supernatural themes, as opposed to sci-fi which involves scientific ideas typically based on real-world theories. Horror is the other branch of Speculative Fiction which deals with the macabre. Sci-fi, Fantasy and Horror all fall under Speculative Fiction because they each tend to overlap depending on the story. Even the most far-fetched sci-fi novels that I've read (eg. Arthur C Clarke - City and the Stars, Alistair Reynolds - House of Suns), can contain fantastical ideas, but at the same time, I've read fantasy novels (Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels) that contain real-world scientific ideas.

So how can you say Sci-Fi is a SUBgenre of fantasy, when the two are both speculative in nature? You can't label 2001: A Space Odyssey and Lord of the Rings as both being Fantasy because they differ in their themes.

It makes me think you'd label Pride & Prejudice as fantasy as well >___>

Selbie's right. Well said, sir. It's very much an "Every poodle is a dog, but not every dog is a poodle," issue and Gladspooky is claiming every bulldog is a type of poodle. Technically every one of those genre's could be considered a fantasy or science fiction because all of them contain elements outside of actual possibility as we know it. So how do you decide which is a subgenre of which? You don't you simply take the pre-established terms that have been sharply defined by their typical characteristics and categorize them that way all under the term speculative fiction.

"Fantasy" means anything fantastical. Elves and lightsabers are both fantastical. And I don't decide this. Someone else already has, namely the publishing industry.

@chaosnovaxz: It is a little weird labeling piracy as "theft" necessarily, though morally it often is (especially if the intent is to keep it and never pay for it, or distribute it). The real problem of piracy vs. sharing with a friend, as I see it, is that you're artificially creating another copy of the game by pirating it, where the scarcity of the physical/downloaded media is where its value comes from in the first place. It's kind of heady economics speak, but it's simply that when your friend is borrowing your game, you can't play it at the same time. When a game is pirated, though nobody is "stolen" from because the original copy is still there, the paid-for copy hasn't changed hands. Arguing that sharing with a friend is the same thing as piracy is just like arguing that buying used games is piracy since the developer doesn't see a cent of the revenue from that. Unless "sharing" with your friend is ripping a copy for them, which would be the same thing as piracy.

As for the economics of $60 games versus subscriptions, it's a tricky speculation-based problem based as much around economics as cost accounting. I know that game rentals stopped being particularly lucrative business, and thus you only see overpriced services like GameFly and minimal selection at Red Box anymore. The business model does need to change for sure.

@gladspooky: I know the point you're trying to make, but Star Wars hasn't been science-fiction since 1983 at the latest and arguably never was. Star Wars has always been traditional fantasy in space. It's already been coined Science-fantasy some time ago. Hell, I'm pretty sure the Bombcast reiterated this statement not too long ago. You should have said elves and replicants.

@gladspooky: Well your argument of publisher-determined categorisation is flawed as well, because there are two main forms of literature of which publishers produce - Fiction and Non-fiction. Let's put aside my opinion on the "Speculative" terminology and go with those two. Underneath the fiction category you have all of the genres contained within it. All EQUALLY falling alongside each other because of intangible taxonomy, just like games or movies can be hard to fit into a genre because of some cross-over of the themes. Hence my original argument. The fact that you try to lump everything as being Fantasy is just as fallacious as calling everything Science Fiction.

You guys should totally play Chrono Cross! It is Awesome!

Definitely different from Trigger, the art design isn't as immaculate, the character are not as strongly crafted/written, there are over 100 party members so no one besides Kidd and whatever the main character's name is (Sypher?) get much attention.

But when the game connects up to Chrono Trigger, when you learn what happens to several characters from the first game, it is some compelling stuff. The plot is super convoluted, but you really only need to play it once, unlike Trigger. You guys might not appreciate the plot stuff quite as much, I beat Chrono Trigger 20+ times, but I think what Cross does to the lore is some great, tragic, magnificent stuff.

The soundtrack is awesome, the combat system is very good (might be a tad simple nowadays, but it is element based with your 3 characters each being a dif element and then the enemies have their element etc), and the plot is top notch. Cinematics are good.

People who hate the game don't fully comprehend how it connects up with Trigger. Or they really hate the huge casts who get almost no plot time after you have them fully recruited, which is understandable.

@MormonWarrior:I get what you guys are saying, especially the "this is shitty for our business" angle, just not the morality angle. People share things. If the internet makes it more convenient for those they share with, then I don't necessarily think less of those who benefit from the sharing; that's all I'm saying.

It's just getting more and more absurd. I've heard people get upset over friends sharing map packs with one another with game sharing, for example, and that's just crazy.

A subscription model where you can experience all the content you want is the way to go; we just have to hope someone can come up with the right infrastructure, and publishers become less greedy and trying to sell their games stand alone at high prices. :/

A Wild howler monkey has appeared.

I had to go to filthy iTunes to listen to this! How dare you!