Giant Bombcast 558: Boattle Royale

Ooo, I get a chance to watch this. Missed it live.

Banana Nut is the correct answer to favorite muffin.

I'll do a 6 pack of Costco muffins in 6 minutes.

Fun fact: if you own Hitman (2016) on Steam, you can download the "demo version" of Hitman 2 and unlock all the original game's content in it, in addition to the prologue mission, for free.

Jeff "Red Dead Redemption 2 is total garbage, check out this new idle game"

Careful headphones users! Rather loud and abrupt audio chirp at 30:35! @janman Dunno what caused it but figured you'd like to know.

Ole two towel Shoemaker

I stopped playing PUBG when they removed rain and fog.

I hate to break it to you guys but uhh Suburbia is totally a place the Hitman series has gone before. I remember pretty distinctly that one in Blood Money with like a clown and stuff.

Video is quieter than everything else on my PC. Some chirps too.

Yeah, they hate the old games so it's funny when they talk about these new games like everything is brand new. I also remember enjoying the story of Blood Money... so yeah, Hitman has had good story before.

My RSS feed really loves this episode. So much so that it decided to post it 4 times in a row.

Ya'll OK over there?

Weird criticism regarding Hitman2's multiplayer deducting points for killing non-targets, given that that's how the points system works in the single player of every Hitman game, including these recent ones. If non-target kills don't matter, then the safest and fastest strategy on every map just boils down to eliminating a handful of threats that can see through a particular disguise and then using it to sprint to the targets and nearest exit, and in that case what decides the winners and losers is fast execution of combat rather than interacting with the disguise and stealth systems. Even playing on 'professional' difficulty, completing the progression challenges and escalation sequences are pretty trivial if you're allowed to eliminate anything that's in your way.

@bsmittel: how DARE he like something different!

@grandcurator: Thanks for the heads up, it's not helped by this video being *so* quiet

Does Brad not know how to wear headphones? :)

The re-launching of the site is a perfect time to launch a video version of the Beastcast. I miss the Beasters so much. I know I can watch all their other content, but I know the Beastcast is probably some of their best, but... I can't do Podcasts anymore. I'm not sure what happened to me. I used to happily sit and listen to them every week for years and years, and now, I just get too antsy. Video Beastcast, please! I should be posting this in the Beastcast comments, but... whatever.

nonsense. lemon poppy seed muffins are the pinnacle of muffin technology

The briefcase in Hitman 2 is not a new thing. It was a very popular feature in Blood Money and it's in the new game because fans requested it.

Maybe it's time for a Blood Money stream, no one seems to have played it and it was amazing. Still my favorite Hitman.

@dryker: You sit and listen to them? Why not toss them on while you walk/drive or get groceries or something?

So, maybe they get to this at some point, but if not I'll be nerd with egg on his face for telling them something they figure out later.

While I can't speak too Tetris effect's exact nature, my watching of the speed-run/grand master exhibistions of Tetris from AGDQ of Tetris (go watch those, they are great) I learned as follows; The game sorts all the possible pieces in a random order, delivers them too you one by one, rinse repeat.

The way they described it as I recall was to think of it like this: Imagine you take 1 of every possible tetris piece. Put them in a bag, and blindly draw from that bag until its empty..then repeat the process.

So its possible to get 2 of the same piece in a row, if its the last peice pulled from the now empty bag, and the first piece pulled from the new bag. Or its possible to go for upwards of 13 pieces (I forget the exact number in Tetris) before you see another long-piece if you pull one as the first piece out of a bag, and then don't draw a new one until the last piece of the bag you'll be pulling from when the first is empty.

Good show.

Ben is so bad with taking in media content XD first with Smash and now this 'I watched it on mute.' Come on Ben! Open those puppy eyes and take it ALL in!

Destiny 2 is not under-performing because it's intimidating or anything like that. It's not a very deep or versatile game. Even the progression difference between new and adept players is negligible since it's a co-op game... You're not competing for levels or missing out on a high level of skill when you start. Maybe I'm too optimistic but I think it may have everything to do with their treatment of their customers. I bet we are going to see some impact from Battlefront 2 for decades to come.

There were like roughly a 10 million missing BF2 sales, plus a lot of angry people who did buy it anyway. So angry they phoned in their governments. Governments that are now threatening EA's bottom line to the point that their stocks have been dwindling to like a 40% loss I hear? Destiny 1 players are seeing a repeat in the way Destiny 2 screws people over.

And PAL > NTSC **sticks out tongue**

@brad Tetris pieces haven't been truly random since like the mid 90s. It uses a "bag" system so you explicitly will not get the same piece over and over.

http://tetris.wikia.com/wiki/Random_Generator

@captaininvictus: I agree 100%. Nothing tops lemon poppy seed.

@dryker: I agree with you but Vinny recently said that making the Beastcast in video format would be a major headache and unless something changes is not going to happen.

Keep tryin

Notice my ankles, senpai!

I don’t understand why they think the XB1 interface is so slow. Mine is quick and snappy. My PS4 however is SO slow. Just looking at friends takes 10-15 seconds to load in. Looking at my game library takes about a minute. Everything has a long delay to it. Looking at the store it sometimes won’t load items in period, despite my having a good connection. Add on to that the confusion of purchased games not showing up in your library sometimes, but needing to go to the store page to download them. That and not having any place to show your DLC and install it without going to the store. It’s all such a pain on the PS4, but the XB1 is smooth sailing.

They read my email!

@itsahme: Mine too!

About the Hitman 2 talk, how are they so surprised with Whittleton Creek? It's not really that left field for Hitman, it's similar to A New Life from Hitman: Blood Money.

Do they not know about the Giant Bomb easter egg in the game? I know it's not a big deal but I think it's a funny nod the developers aded to the game and was curious to hear the crew's reaction to it.

QUEST 64 is the only game I’ve ever written a review for. It’s way too long ago to remember the name of the website, and I surely didn’t get a byline on it.

why do videos load so slowly now. or not at all.

oh, maybe cus it was set to the broken html5 player instead of youtube. i don't remember changing to that

yay it works now that i reset it back to youtube

Pistachio Muffins are GOAT

Do not fucking punch animals. That last email made me very sad and now I'm worried for Jeff's Cat.

In RDR2, unless you run over people so hard that you MURDER them, you can just defuse situations and walk away or go to jail.

Brad's story about this launch PS4 Pro has me amazed. How close is he sitting to his PS4 that it's that loud? My launch Pro rarely if ever spins the fans that loud and the blu-ray drive spinning is actually more noticeable. My launch PS3 60gb on the otherhand sounds like a jet engine but still works.

@haneybd87: I'm with ya on the PS4 XMB not being great but we are in a vast minority. I used to think it weird that considering we all play games on big TV's or at least monitors with decent resolutions everything is so incredibly bloated and large, showing very little information at one time, then the GB website re-design came around and showed me I haven't seen nothin' yet.

Wow....RDR2 is the biggest release of the year, and save the week it came out, west cost is barely talking about it just because Jeff’s impatience with it makes him hate it. It’s an open world game that you can literally put hundreds of hours into, and they spent maybe an hour talking about it over the past three weeks. Game of the year discussions will be really interesting if he’s going to discount a massive game he’s the only one not playing.

@johnymyko They usually downplay that sort of stuff pretty heavily. Even when Cook Serve Delicious came out and had The Ryan Davis burger recipe in it, Dan helmed the Quick Look and it was basically just another bullet point to hit during the video. I'd be more surprised if they made a more than casual mention of it than actually celebrate it or discuss it in detail.

@sekou I imagine it's a hard game to talk about at the moment. There are people like me and Vinny who have been completely derailed in Chapter 3 by hunting pelts and tracking down side work, Brad who seems to be plain moseying along with it in general and then people like Alex and Dan who have mainlined the story. Obviously you could talk about all the incidental element but I think everybody realized that was a bit less exciting than it initially seemed once everyone realized their shining examples of emergence in the game was a man asking you to suck venom out of his leg or sprinting around like it's every other video game where you Always Be Sprinting and accidentally breaking the law as a result. All of the actual cool stuff is scripted and stumbled on by exploring the world, so even if you want to avoid story spoilers it's hard to talk about Red Dead in vague details and sound interesting, and this is coming from someone who is still really curious about the staff's ongoing experience with this game.

Ben has become extremely negative. It's too much some times.

A Giantbomb cookie? What does it taste? Nacho cheese.

@nodima: Well said! The thing I'll say to the contrary is that, well...finding ways to talk about games we're all playing currently is... kind of their job. RDR2 certainly isn't the first massive open world game (Fallouts. Skyrims, and every other Rockstar title for example), filled with specific emergent stories and instances which should stay untold that the boys have played. Talking about a huge title that everyone is still playing is quite literally in their job description! I really feel Jeff's fairly massive hate for the game (and I say hate because this is so far beyond simple, 'eh, it's just not for me') has affected how vocal other staffer who ARE enjoying it the way the rest of us are. And not for the first time, either!

@haneybd87: I have to agree - this episode was kind of a shit-show. While I would not say I dont suffer from occasional delay on hitting a button on the controller and seeing the UI respond - I am rather baffled that means we should dump on the UI as a whole, going so far as to call it "the worst console interface ever". Seriously? So the lesson here for MS is "dont bother caring what your insiders say, or what could be considered good UI design, just make it fast - that works for Sony and Nintendo just fine!".

On a side - and directed at GB itself :

A) There is no new Forza next year. How do you guys not now this? Considering the opinion the press love to have concerning annualized releases (but still give them good/great scores, so, I guess they aren't that bad, are they?), you would think Dan Greenawalt sharing that news would get more play online. I guess not, though - it's not like for some people, covering this stuff is there jobs :-P

B) No, Brad, MS didn't "steal" the second Tomb Raider game. SE didn't want to give CD the same overall budget for the sequel since the first didn't break even until the new gen rereleases. SE told QD to get outside help if they wanted another go (spread the risk around), and it was MS who stepped in. How about bitching that FromSoft was going to make Bloodborne either way, and Sony threw a bunch of money at them to grab an inclusive since Sony for the first 3-4 years of the generation barely had ANY exclusives (and arguably none worth talking about). I guess totally restricting PC and Xbox gamers from that game is not worth talking about, but getter a 6 or 12 month delay (with DLC included at a cheaper price) is a crime against humanity.

Glad that Brad has seen the light finally. You know how Jan said his pillow is gross because he doesn't wash his hair before going to sleep? Well if you don't take a shower at night your whole bed is gross, because each night you are using it as a big wet-nap for your sweaty, dirty body. Brad has finally entered the world of clean livin' so good on ya Brad.

Lugia is cool as fuck but Ho-Oh is more iconic. The first episode of Pokemon featured Ho-Oh long before Gold/Silver and it's just one of those moments that can't be touched.

Also, Jan you're wrong. Crystal was awesome.

Nevermind me, salty gen1/2 fan here.

Thank god SE is (almost) finished with FFXV, whole thing's been a huge & expensive disappointment to me and I'm happy to hear they're finally moving on. Not sure I've any faith left that they can make a good FF anymore, XV seemed like it could've been a return to form but I can't get past the story/world issues.

Love Jeff's Casey Kasem impression.