Giant Bombcast 603: Call of Tuesday

Ben's idea that Sony should make some mediocre Playstation games so that we'll appreciate the good ones "even more" made my head hurt.

If you really are tired of whatever "prestige games" are, you can play literally everything else on the console.

You have to steal the hat the farmer wears already for him to put on the sun hat. You can do that when he bends down to replant the flower you steal in his garden or when he hammers his thumb and passes out. If you some how steal the sun hat he just puts it back where you got it.

Goal of Goose Game is to make as much of a mess and watch how the ai works in Goose Game so you can sneak around and do some of the goals. You also do not need to complete every tasks in the list to complete the area. you can do all but one and then the last task to open the next area opens up. Also keep in mind you can steal certain clothes or mess with people's clothes yourself.

Finally, a Brad solo cast.

Weird. A Brad only show.

lmao this goose game chat is unbelievable

Code Vein is fine and calling it soulless is a damn bummer to me. I'm enjoying my time with it and from the sounds of it Im not sure what Jason actually wanted from it. It is a Souls ass Souls game, though its way easier which has me a bit confused with that complaint of banging your head against it. It's a solid 7/10 I think and there's nothing wrong with that.

Cast: Brad

Posted by: Brad

In This Episode: Brad

@royalghost: I’m not super hot on the game myself, but it sounded like Jason didn’t really engage much with the game beyond a surface level. Like he was talking about how he kept using the default fighter class and didn’t sound like he even really tried the others, and otherwise didn’t really talk in much depth about the games story or mechanics

I guess at this stage, it’s kinda to be expected of GB. I love the crew and they are really fun and funny when they’re in their element, but are also probably the most superficially informed games critics I follow (except of course for Jeff’s encyclopaedic knowledge of the history of the games industry)

@mysticpirate: its just like all across this podcast. It's the sum of them being a bunch of aging game critics. Being bummed they want to make another Horizon like what? They'll keep pumping out Cods but you don't see Jeff complaining about that. He'll spend a half an hour talking about Ubisofts next bland ass murder simulator though? I don't usually get annoyed with them but it was a bit frustrating today.

@mysticpirate: @royalghost:

Genuinely wondering: any recommends for "more informed" games critics? I've stuck around here because of their personality and taste being generally aligned with mine, and they've been around long enough to avoid the pitfalls of over-hype and marketing misdirection. I too sometimes feel like they whiff on things, but I guess i'm not a big fan of Japanese character action games or JRPGs, which seem to be their weakest area.

I'd love to check out anyone ya'll think is doing good work.

@rpjeff: Waypoint is really good, especially when it’s Austin or Rob, as they can go into really deep dives into both a game’s mechanics and writing/themes. Like a really good recent point of comparison is their conversations on Fire Emblem Three Houses vs how GB talked about that game

Overall though, I’m probably not the best person to ask. Part of the reason I’m still a GB fan is that I prefer watching people joke and goof off and ultimately don’t care that much of a critic doesn’t really know what they’re talking about. If that bothered me, I would have stopped following GB ages ago

@rpjeff: might not be what you’re asking for but I love Watch Out For Fireballs as a games criticism podcast. It’s more of a games club than a weekly round table format so they cover whatever games are interesting. They do a mix of new and old games but really dive deep and get to the good stuff. It’s a great supplement to GB.

@royalghost: to each their own but I love hearing Jeff talk about shooters I will never play lol.

What is this Al Snow Rick & Morty video? Can't seem to find it.

@royalghost: If you aren't swapping classes to learn different skills and tweaking your loadout for different fights I can see how you could be having a lot of trouble. Both of the bosses you can fight 2ed can be massively punishing if you aren't equipping the skills to deal with their debuffs.

@benpack Asher Vollmer and Greg Wohlwend were the team who made Threes! , not Zach Gage. Maybe you had Tharsis on the brain?

Listen to waypoint. The way they talk about games is out of legitimate enthusiasm for the industry and they really feel like they are reporting on games.

I love GB and GBE becasue they are hilarious and many of their series are great but they don't have any interest in pushing the industry forward the way the waypoint crew does. (not throwing shade like I said I love these guys it's just 2 different styles.)

@liquiddragon: He's talking about toxic wrestling fans but it applies to toxic fandom in general.

Ugh, that whole thing with Troy Baker is cringey...

@wiseblood: Thank you.

Man, fuck everything going on with Gearbox... I can't anymore, oh my god.

In the "B-mails" I have to say I think a game got overlooked for best opening cinematic/attract screen. Ninja Gaiden on the NES was a game changer.

A lot of this episode felt like the personification of the “old man yells at cloud” meme which is a bummer. The GB guys can just be so negative nowadays. There’s totally ways to talk about games they don’t like and still be entertaining but it’s feels like they aren’t even trying. Maybe my tastes in games media is just different now?

@aires: yea man, the longer it drags on the more it pains me this is my favorite game series. If they can get rid of the toxic elements and obviously terrible senior staff there they'll do much better in the long run.

I don't want to support the outward facing part of this company, but goddamnit this game is so fun to play.

@anupsis: Y'know... you don't have to take them disliking a game you like personally?? It's not like Jeff thinking pickles are disgusting tasting is some kind of personal attack on people who like pickles. You aren't the media you consume, anymore than me eating pickles making me a member of the Pickles Lobby or something.

Goose Game is great.

I dig Breakpoint, it is very good with doing what wildlands does (tactical shooting that requires you to really be on your shit or you are dead/varied and exciting explosive encounters and objective variety), once you get through the pretty thick layers of it trying to also be a semi-social-hubb'd game where they really leaned into customization as a big deal, but didn't really build an infrastructure to get you going with squads, almsot at all so far other than the prompt for a lobby. I hope they change this.

. The loot score thing makes no difference and I'm not super sure why they did it, all I know is I am glad they didn't ruin the game with it. A headshot is a headshot no matter what (unless helmets and heavy duty armor that's supposed to make you aim for an opening), so I'm not entirely sure why they did that other than to extend either the gameplay loop, or the economy back at the hub. Either way, it's almost ignorable because as stated, any gun with a headshot is a headshot. Anecdotally, I very much dig the hold your breath mechanic, the combat roll, the animation improvements, the graphics on PC, and of course, the most important part, the guns feel better than wildlands entire catalogue to shoot and utilize space so you don't go down.

The early impressions generally around the game have to do with bugs and micro-transactions, as well as the confusing structure..But..to someone who really enjoyed Wildlands, Breakpoint succeeds for me on a gameplay level above all, in all honesty, because it is built on mechanics from Metal Gear Solid 5 with stuff from MGS4 like ground camo, is cool when it's online with buds and looks this rad, it does make a pretty impressive set of things exploding or feeling like Metal Gear Sandbox.

The story and characters are dumb as hell, not in the metal gear way, sadly, but it's a little less flat than last time. Not a high bar, and it's very skippable jock pulp, but it does involve more than one singular room interrogation scene, that was repeated over 100 hours of missions which was the joke of Wildlands. It may be this complexity to the game that makes it even weirder, in some ways too. Not bad, just weird.

In the end, to me Ghost Recon BP continues wildlands trend of being Metal Gear Solid 5 Coop Sandbox, and in the end, I'm very cool with that.

I just want to say that I would die for Untitled Goose Game. You boys better stop bullying it. Love ya.

Please finish Outer Wilds.

So are we just going to ignore the elephant in the room and not mention the ridiculous amount of micro-transactions in Breakpoint?

Edit: People are now complaining that Sony is making ambitious games? Wait, what?! This made no sense at all. If you want to play something different just play something different... there's plenty of games around.

I've been looking forward to Breakpoint since E3 more than almost any game in a very, very long time. I played the alpha, the closed beta, and the open beta and every time I knew it seemed like it could be better but I have hopes it will be a lot better than launch eventually knowing that they really want to make it the best Ghost Recon they can and Wild Lands ruled and Odyssey is in my top 10 games of all time. So I have faith they will eventually get the kinks worked out but as it stands the game is freakin incredible.

I was having fun but then I turned up the difficulty and now I am having ten times as much fun. I can get killed in one quick round of gun fire and enemies are very good at hunting you down at higher levels. It is just a lot more engaging and exciting to play this way and I got to say I am loving every second of this game! This is probably the most fun I've had playing a game with a silenced sniper rifle exclusively.

I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to play Assassins Creed Odyssey, but with guns. The complaining I've heard about this game (mostly from youtube and a brief foray onto reddit, not here) is on a level of bizarre and just seems how everyone hates Ubisoft these days despite them making better games than most companies.

The microtransactions are a nightmare but they don't affect much since it is a single player game. I wish they weren't there, and I wish they would focus on other parts of the game but I really have hopes they can make this the best damn shootin game ever because right now it is PRETTY close.

It's more gbwest. gbeast has optimism to spare about a lot of stuff. gbwest can be super down on stuff for any reason they can come up with.

like, untitled goose game is kid-friendly hitman. not as complicated but same basic idea, and it's got the checklist for outright explaining objectives. it's baffling they're pretty unanimous on the west coast in their lack of interest at best in it. must be something in the water.

Breakpoint sounds like yet another watered down, designed to appeal to everyone, grindy factory game from Ubisoft. It's super frustrating seeing them slap the Ghost Recon name on this. And you didn't even talk about the insane microtransactions. The store is gross in a way that makes you feel like you're playing a free to play mobile game, except they charge full price. I can't believe people keep buying this shit.

I also miss those typical B games. Now it's just AAA games with microtransactions and indie artsy games.

Apple arcade has brought us back to the dark podcast days of skipping half of the video game section because they're rambling about some flavor of the moment phone game instead.

It's weird that y'all are having trouble with a game and I'm not (re: Goose Game). Usually I'm the one beating my head against a game, questioning whether I'm getting too old or a game is just too damn difficult. This was a...strange listen.

"I don't like prestige games" sounds like the most out of touch, elite thing I've heard someone in the game's press say in a very long time...especially when I see the types of games I feel gets pressed onto me. I think there is a real disconnect between "people who review things for a living" and people who actually buy and play the games...and that can actually be said for movies, books, comics, games, etc.

Jeff was certainly not positive about Ghost Recon but I was surprised how little he mentioned the myriad of bugs or how it might be the grossest implementation of micro transactions in a AAA game. Also, most of the enemies are "drones" that are literally nothing but bullet sponges that you dump multiple magazines worth of ammunition into.

They all hate Untitled Goose Game because they can't figure out the early standard adventure game puzzles? That's surprising. You just knock the dude over with the hammer and steal his hat from the other side of the gate. It's not hard.

@sammo21: For what it's worth, I agree with them. "Prestige games" that Sony is putting out all follow well-worn mechanics and construct their narrative completely separately from them. Like God of War has you as an all-powerful killing machine who can punch a man through a literal mountain, but if you don't have the right pants on during gameplay, a wolf can kill you. That makes it very difficult to believe that Kratos is as strong as cutscenes make him out to be, or as fragile as the gameplay makes him out to be.

As someone who genuinely cares about narratives in games, seeing such a huge disconnect between narrative and gameplay over and over again be praised as some of the greatest video games of all time is disappointing.

(FWIW I think the term "prestige games" is pretty dumb; it's more that many big-budget games have to be risk averse and so they populate the mechanics with mass-market appeal and then write a solid story around that. That style of game just doesn't hold much appeal to me.)

I love you guys. Love your content too. But how. How.... can you all play video games for your whole life and all of you including Ben’s COMBINED brain power with his partner have that much trouble with the first. Puzzles. In Goose Game?! My. God. I’m... I honestly am at a loss. Brad being unable to hit a planet in a FPS is one thing. I don’t know what this is.

@the_nubster: I can't really agree with something that hyperbolic. Agree to disagree. Also, those disconnects don't apply when talking about The Last of Us, Spider-Man, etc. as what you are complaining about is the end result of RPG influence bleeding into everything.

Brad solo show would be helluva NPR of him.

I love that Goose Game now has a toxic fandom, laugh.

Ben's humor is often snarky and attempts at being "clever", but his jokes fall flat because he's just completely wrong about the subject matter. This week he tried to make a joke about the Star Wars VR license only to be corrected by Jeff who said "No that game was made by Lucas". Last week when talking about the MediEvil remaster he said "What's next a Voodoo Vince Remaster" to which everyone said "They've already made a Voodoo Vince Remaster". I wish he'd either make jokes less often or be more informed about the subject matter in which he's trying to make fun of.

Bens humor is just "Look how ironic and contrarian I am"

I dont like the tern prestige games, but I agree. Sony games have become somewhat rote. Always a heartstring tugging/emotional story (or an attempt at one), usually hero's journey-esque. Gameplay has never really been a focus, a lot of them feel railroaded. They kind of feel manufactured, in a way. Just not exactly my thing usually

Regarding the Michael Transactions in Breakpoint, per an article on Kotaku, they seem like things you do not have to engage with at all. https://kotaku.com/ghost-recon-breakpoint-s-microtransactions-explained-1838678464