Giant Bombcast 607: The Wang Chung Zone

Where DID that Ben go?

Roriecast is my favorite cast

Hey, The Good Fight might be the best TV show right now so... yay CBS All Access, I guess?

Song of the 80s is “I Remember You” by Skid Row

People often mistake Daryl Holland and Polish Oates as Holland Oates but they never actually called themselves that

Lady in Red is not bad

I just want to say whoever nominated a Hall & Oates song is officially history's greatest monster.

A podcast? Everybody's going to have fun tonight! I know I will :)

I hope at least its spluck and not splack

I honestly don't understand the point Jeff is trying to make about the Highway of Death thing. He says they "didn't do the research" and simply "fucked up" - and then he dismisses concerns that it was intentional. Am I crazy or doesn't this make any sense at all? Fictional country or not, they clearly based this on the real life event...like how is that even debatable??

I can't wait for "Giant Bombs' 2019 game of the year "Worst song of the 80's" category." in December.

@anwar: Because the Switch is portable. And it's the only console that runs Nintendo exclusives.

I was very confused in that whole segment. I actually thought for a minute that in the game your protagonists knowingly did it, then as a game story element blamed the Russians to cover their deeds. Thanks for Brad for getting some clarification.

Dance hall daze now

People's Republic of California

I think Jeff is taking the very reasonable stance best encapsulated in the maxim "never ascribe to malevolence what best can be described by incompetence." When so much of that game evidently spends time doing everything it can to avoid having any kind of real-world connection to the point of being nearly ridiculous, it is probably a more reasonable assumption to think "yeah, they probably fucked up" rather than "ooh boy they really got one over on the agenda of war-crime white-washing in this game where they're otherwise afraid to even name a real country in." The former is a much simpler explanation than the latter.

While i agree with Jeff that Infinity Ward probably didn't bring this highway of death up out of nowhere just for the chance to rewrite history and blame it on the russians in game, i do think that in their research they thought about this real life event and saw that it could be pretty potent for a campaign mission. Then they were faced with the choice to let the americans , you know the 'good guys', commit such a horrific action or let the 'bad guys' do it and realized it would go over a whole lot better with their core demographic if they made the russians do it.

Thank you Brad for pushing West End Girls downwards a bit. I don't get how that appears on this list :D Africa is a top 10 80's song. I think Hip To Be Square is a bad Huey Lewis & The News song.

I'm going to say it, Power of Love is a bad song.

Blizzard has gone on record since Vanilla stating that they plan storylines two to three expansions in advance, so while it is "fun" to think they are only bringing Bolvar back due to Battle For Azeroth's reception (despite people knowing that game development takes time), that is very likely not the case.

I think, with perhaps the exception of Danger Zone's positioning, this might be the closest I've ever been in agreement with a Giant Bomb ranking.

I just googled splacking and that's my kinda word

I don’t know if Jeff has Xfinity, but with their DVR you can hit a button and it will skip all the ads. It’s not perfect, you still have to go back a minute or so, but it’s close to what Jeff wants.

Hearing that EA's going back to steam: HA HA HA!

love ya gang, but there is CRIME HAPPENING in most of that 80s music discussion.

@zorak:

I guess that's true in most cases, but I personally feel that the Call of Duty devs don't deserve the benefit of the doubt. I mean they have military officials and war criminals like Ollie North involved in the development of their games, so I'm not at all surprised that their games would stoop so low as to change history in order to glorify America and demonize enemy countries.

Here's a little list I've done

You might want to rank it song for song

Don't worry, beeeeeee buzzfeed

Coolest part about Death Stranding coming to PC is that it's using the Decima engine, the one that Guerilla Games uses. I wonder if optimizing that thing for PC will lead to other Sony-backed/Sony-funded/Sony-adjacent games coming to PC? Or maybe Sony is just happy to soak up the good press from letting this happen while keeping their first party games exclusive.

this "Ranking of 80s Songs" thing is gonna make every Bombcast 3 hours from now on.

Yeah and it's been hinted at for the last two expansions. Though I would say none of that is confirmed and while it does seem likely, reporting unsubstantiated leaks as fact feels a bit uncool (not that they are even close to the only ones).

Not to have a go at anyone but I think Rorie's dislike of the game (perfectly legitimately) causes him to go a bit far with what he says. For example there is no evidence that FF has more subs than WoW even if it is doing very well.

On a personal note I would say calling this the worst expac is pretty wild, how quick people forget about WoD.

Love the podcast and all the staff, just bristled a bit at this convo.

If anyone even utters a Tears for Fears song to make this list, i riot.

This whole '80s music thing stopped being funny after the first email. Music, like all art, is subjective. Objectivity is a lie.

Let it go y'all.

This ranking of 80’s songs is giving me GOTY PTSD. 🤕

The worst 80's song is Little Girls by Oingo Boingo. Do not defend it.

Ranking music from over 3 decades ago is not how you get the zoomer demo guys. Y'all need to stop skipping Dave's meetings.

ooo I'd love for worst song of the 80's to be an actual category this year. That'd really be a nice break in the tension for the inevitable Death Stranding or Disco Elysium catastrophes that I'm predicting.

Is that baba booey?

I don't understand the Modern Warfare bit. Jeff seems to really like the game but t hen 75% of the discussion is about how poorly made most of the modes are and how more of the same gameplay wise it is and how the campaign is fine. What's to like? I just don't get why people still play these so much.

The Captain Price/Jeeves crossover already exists. Alfred Pennyworth, former SAS turned Butler.

@lazycon: I think the tendency to highlight what a game can do better can (and often does) lead to downplaying what it does right; in this case, what CoD does right is more of a known quantity, so it's downplayed in favor of what fresh deficiencies this new one has. Which is a bummer, because, as someone who took a few years off of the Call of Duty series, I'm really enjoying my time with this one! The strengths are newer to me, because I forgot about them, so it's easier to focus on them in addition to whatever improvements I feel could be made, and I'm finding it easier to enjoy the whole experience as a result.

My theory is that finding critiques often presents as sophistication more than unbridled enjoyment, and that leads to lots of modern discourse (particularly online) that focuses on what went wrong, rather than what went right; if you have more bones to pick, you probably have a more knowing—and therefore more correct—opinion, right? It's the kind of thing that causes the Game of the Year talk to turn into, e.g., how much *this* game doesn't deserve X category, even though *that* game, which should win the category, is also bad. Honestly, I find it exhausting. Anyway. here's to a future when we can properly acknowledge good feelings along with the bad, and not feel like they have to cancel each other out.

Shouldn't "Worst 80's song" be it's own podcast? I wonder, if 'Owner of a lonely heat' can be considered a bad song? I like Yes, but I feel that this song can be obnoxious.

@lazycon: I don't get why people play "X game" is the baddest take

@bsmittel: It's that it's the 40th game in the series and it's not any better playing than the last 10 in any significant way. The story is never as good or surprising as they just keep trying to recapture old fame, and apparently half the game modes are completely busted. It's just fifa at this point and people want the new lineups, but it's so boring and bland and uninteresting that i really don't understand how people can still be into a formula so stale that the last major change up and famous moment was so long ago Sopranos was still on tv. If no one plays the campaign, which is the refrain, then people are literally just buying a map pack at this point for $60 when there's so many other shooters doing interesting things. I suppose it's comforting to just slide right into it and feel at home but as someone that put too many hours into COD4 the series has been dead since black ops 2 as far as i can tell and people are just Weekend at Bernie'ing the game along for the same reason Disney keeps putting out shitty live action remakes. Maybe that's helpful in understanding what i don't understand.

Ah yes another episode of "Blowing Up In Your Ears and Your Eyeballs Maybe"!

Claiming Sony via Shu Yoshida threw Hello Games under the bus was a trash take then, and it still is now.

@lazycon: While i agree that the actual gameplay from game to game is fairly similar (you have a bunch of guns you can aim down sights with and upgrade those weapons) the trappings around that familiar gameplay do get changed quite a bit. It's not a Fifa situation where the Fifa 18 signs get replaced by fifa 19 signs, the database gets updated and the animations get tightened up a bit and that's that. It's not a WWE game situation. It's not a Football Manager situation. It's not a Madden situation.

COD has moved between modern day combat to near future combat to space combat to world war 2 in the last few years. It had Overwatchy characters with their own specific abilities in one game. There was a battle royale mode in one. There was an elaborate zombies mode. There's a 32 v 32 mode. They gave you a jetpack. In a nutshell, they do take risks with their modes & settings.Granted, that's often done by looking at other successes in the industry and putting it in their own game, but i can imagine it's still a huge risk to fit COD into a battle royale when COD has always been about small maps with close-to midrange firefights. Especially when your fanbase has a decent amount of people that don't play all that many games outside of COD and wouldn't necessarily care for their fav game to adopt stuff from other games they choose to not play.

Most COD's have their own campaign, which from a technical standpoint can often go toe to toe with the most modern games out there. It's undeniable that a lot of effort & asset generation has to go into these games year by year. From a technical performance standpoint, i remember those games being quite sound as well. What would you want to see them do to change it up even more? Tackle entirely different genre's? Make it a squad-based game? Make it third person? dialog choices?

Last COD i played was Modern Warfare 2 (and a free weekend of Advanced Warfare) because i'm just not that into shooters and i still need to replace my GPU after it died, but if you think these games are way too similar, you would lose your mind looking at something like Football Manager 2020 vs Football Manager 2019 and wonder why people pay 60$ for that. Like the main feature of that release is 1 screen where the club gives you objectives to hit over a 5 year timespan instead of giving you a target on a yearly basis. Personally i feel like COD is not all that more stale than series like Uncharted, Assassins Creed, Far Cry, Halo or Gears.

Jeff should really check out this pinball table in Dreams called Pinball Table - Steampunk Factory. When you get multiball the whole table zooms out and then back in when you are back to one ball. It is totally Rad! I wish I had the patience to create somethin', but I'll stick with playing other people's creations for now.

I have compiled this list into an Apple Music playlist for your ears to be terrorized: https://music.apple.com/us/playlist/giant-bombs-worst-songs-of-the-80s/pl.u-0Vp1zsPpj79

“Eventually” is five years ago, Jeff. That’s how long Sony have had a games streaming service.