Giant Bombcast 679: Feed Gems to Tims

MAKE DANNY A REGULAR!

LOVE HIM!!!

As someone who has also had his nose cauterized for sinus issues...it ain't fun. It does help, but your nose looks like a mess and the sheer nastiness you pull/blow outta it for weeks is naaaaaaaaasty!

So... Balan Wonderworld is a divekick-like?

@unastrike and @janman: Idk if it changes your mind or makes you feel less bad about the wirebug count, but the "shared pool" feature of it is definitely because of game balance. The fact that the wirefall recovery move is so SO powerful of a tool means that if you had a separation between the mobility and attack skills, you would literally never be in danger of carting.... and that 100% goes against what MH as a series has been doing in terms of their action and difficulty.

Also, you really wouldn't be using the mobility wirebug actions other than wirefall during combat, which is when you would want to be using the combat wirebug actions, other than in some limited situations (e.g. shaking off the hellfire blight).

After seeing the Balan demo on UPF, there is no force on earth that could compel me to play it. Between the weird color palette and shit fading in and out and constantly pulsating, it actually made me feel physically ill.

Oh also, it seems like it was created by and for an alien's idea of a preschooler.

I've had my CPAP for about six months at this point and it really has had a substantial positive effect. It took me around about two months to get adjusted to sleeping with the mask on, but now I barely notice it at all. I've pretty much stopped snoring at all according to my wife, which she appreciates, and I don't wake up with gigantic headaches anymore, which I appreciate. Also it'll prevent my heart from exploding in thirty years, which is probably good too.

Worrrrrdddd uuuuuuppppp!

I'm currently going through and downloading everything I have on the PS3 PSN store. Everything. Not Fun. It's going on my NAS, 225 GB at a time.

I'm probably overreacting, but I'm also having a similar bad experience where I'm dealing with other people trying to claim ebooks from a publisher that just up and shut everything off. With 5 days notice.

Naka has this wierd fetish with that harlequin thing, similar to Iizuka(?) has with making Sonic in the human world.

Edit: gl on that CPAP Jan!

Losing access to the Playstation 3, PSP, and Vita stores after only 9 years sucks so badly as a lifelong gamer. It should make us all question whether or not we want to buy games digitally in the future. I recently got into gaming last year after a decade long break, and I was immediately weary of digital downloads.

I've purchased a handful of games digitally because I either didn't want to wait for shipping, or there was a really good deal, but now I'm going to buy physical copies of games I really enjoyed.

I already had to deal with it once with Snoopy Flying Ace. I wanted to buy it last year because I love Peanuts and didn't hear about it back in the day when it came out. But guess what, it's not for sale anymore. I went so far as to message some of the devs on Linkedin but never got any kind of response.

Fuck everything about a future where we forever lose access to certain games just because a company decides that it's no longer worth their time to keep the servers running.

Jan and his Timbs :)

It Takes Two is phenomenal. It's genuinely hilarious and the gameplay is awesome. Shocking to hear them be so negative about it.

There was a fun concept for a show where dozens of random objects in a weirdo motel room all had powers that escalated and combined as more and more objects were accumulated. Starting with innocuous minor effects. I don't remember the show being great, but I feel the concept was pretty awesome.

@doncabesa said:

My wife and I are having an amazing time playing it. We're about 5 hours in and the gameplay is so varied and fun. I really don't get why everyone at GB seems so focused on the divorce aspect of it. The story is pretty corny but easy enough to gloss over if it bothers you

@sixtycakes:Yeah, all the other coverage I've seen has barely focused on the setup and instead is praising how good the gameplay is. One of our favorite co-op games of all time, and being a married couple the divorce aspect of it hasn't been weird at all.

My favorite games you can only play on the PS3 and never got a physical release are:

Noby Noby Boy

Nucleus (more interesting than it seems twin stick shooter, original soundtrack from Bogdan Raczynski!)

Digger HD (not as good as Mr. Do! but lots more levels)

Crash Commando (better than Soldat!)

Every time Disco Elysium is brought up, I think about Abby

So when's the Baland Wonderworld endurance run?

Disco Elysium: Best Written Game of All Time (IMO)

Sleep apnea sucks, because once you have it, you have to deal with it for life. And while obese people are more likely to get it, it can happen to anyone as it is really about your lungs air pathway while sleeping. I have a family member who suffers from sleep apnea, but the funny thing is that she was already a huge believer of the benefits of distill water in terms of drinking it years before she was diagnosed. Distill water while I don't drink a lot of it because of the potential to eliminate minerals from the body, it is the most pleasant form of water to drink. It goes down very easy, and you don't realize how solids in water are a factor in drinking it until you drink water with no solids in it. With that said, sleep apnea is very treatable and much better than the alternative. Just keep the water handy and keep the machine clean and you're good. Personally, the story of the random nose bleeds Jeff was telling sounded more frighting to me.

And speaking of Jeff, I agree about what Sony is doing about shutting down those PSN stores. Even if a lot of people weren't using it, this way is just a bad look in general. I have a lot of digital downloaded PS4 and some PS5 games, and now I'm wondering if 5 to 10 years from now will Sony pull the same nonsense and abandon those digital downloads, because while they claim you can still download purchases now, will that last forever, or is there a limit to how long you can actually own those games. If Sony does end up pulling the plug one day, I will never support them again. Because even physical copy games need downloads in order to play it these days, so it doesn't matter.

It's insane that Street Fighter 3 HD isn't available on PS4/PS5. It's the biggest loss when the PS3 store closes down IMHO.

Simple 2000 Series Vol.420 The Platforming

@theonewhoplays: Wait. Third Strike HD?

I was also prone to nosebleeds in my teens, and I also had my nose cauterized. It didn't do shit for me. I had my next nosebleed less than a month afterwards. The doctor said "yeah that can happen, just have to redo it" and my mom and I were like nah not doing that again (aka not paying for that again).

Jan's hoodie is sick. Is that an old one or is it coming in the future?

Jan, from one sleep apnea guy to another:

1) fiddling with setting and getting used to the whole mask thing can take a long time to get used to, sometimes months

2) once it works you will swear by it I promise

3) full face masks make it so you don't have to worry about your mouth opening. I made the switch 8 months ago from nose only and it helped a lot

Good luck with your breathing bud!!!

I hope Jan does a complete playthrough of Kingdom Hearts with a cutout of Ben's face on the screen with him and every once in a while Jan looks over at the Ben image says "this one's for you, buddy."

I watched some of the gameplay or It Takes Two, and I immediately thought of Unravel Two, which got kind of forgotten, but, to me, does co-op puzzle platforming so well. And has a weird serious story about...child abuse maybe? It Takes Two looked nice, but the “humor” seemed insufferably bad, along with the godawful broad acting. If the unremarkable to my eyes gameplay is the only thing that matters then why make it about divorce and a miserable couple of duds with a possibly racist book?

Man...that MGS4 Database was a wild thing. I should boot up my PS3 and Vita and see if there's anything left on there I want to buy. Sad to see the one true PSP exclusive never got a Vita/PS3 release.

Regarding the "burrito bank" email, when I was visiting my Dad several years ago, we were driving around inland California and I spied in a former bank building a walk-in counter service restaurant named something along the lines of "The 1st Bank of Tacos"

ETA: There wasn't a drive-thru as part of the original bank so there were no opportunity for pneumatic tube take-out.

Yo shoutout to Carson, Arlington VA wutwut

What I would give to see Jeff stream a Balan WonderWorld playthrough. A great follow-up to those Garfield playthroughs.

It Takes Two has some of the most creative mechanics I've seen in a co-op game. Brad was right that the bosses aren't easy, but I found the checkpoints pretty forgiving and you can always respawn within seconds as long as your partner is alive.

black olives are my NUMBER ONE solo pizza ingredient!

Why you guys are ripping a game that's clearly made for children a new one, solely because the developer made some legendary game decades ago, I'll never understand. You/we are all the wrong demographic and while I get mechanically it's terrible, there's little point in being critical about something that's not meant for adults to engage with. All you can do is talk about how much it sucks, yet you're still playing it ironically? Dunno fellas, just seems like a colossal waste of time.

My 2 year old son saw @janman and yelled "Daddy!"

I looked in the mirror and said "fair."

The language spoken in Balan Wonderworld is not Japanese-- it's made up. Some people say it's actually english read backwards (not reversed audio, but spoken as read).

The way they talk about WW2 CoD is so divorced from the context. A stop gap? How about mention the amount of nostalgia that had been building for years for a World War shooter? Battlefield One came out a year earlier. It wasn't some happy accident that both of those franchises returned to that era at the same time. People were clamouring for a return to those games.

@sekou: Jeff has specifically addressed this "defense" of the game, and it basically boils down to: children deserve games which aren't dogshit. A game can be made for children and, you know, not suck.

@the_nubster: So he's NOT just taking an opportunity to dump on precisely the type of game he's said multiple times in his youth he'd have roasted and told friends to play because "it was SO bad", rather he's getting upset in the name of the children. Gotcha; don't know how I missed that.

@beggary: This is definitely the most accurate comparison I have seen. I think Unravel 2 had some of the best co op that required both players to be good at the game (especially for the collectibles), and It Takes Two does the same thing. The way they are able to make both characters fun to play and vital to get through the level so consistently is really impressive. If you liked Unravel and have the extra person to play with, I would highly recommend It Takes Two. Honestly, the "A" plot line is obviously bad, but the individual plot lines per level are fine, and it at least makes a little more sense than Unravel's child abuse memory story.

Only semi-related: I also just played through Maquette, and I found the characters in It Takes Two slightly more believable to have been in a relationship than I did in Maquette, despite those actors actually being in a real life relationship.

@sekou: He is also taking an opportunity to dump on it, yeah. Those things are not incompatible. it's a bad game so he's trashing it, and kids also deserve better.

Cuno is absolutely scouse and not cockney in Disco Elysium, and they kind of ruined his voice acting in the new one by changing it.