Giant Bombcast 693: A Furry Entrance

Video versions coming soon! And another special shoutout to Jean-Luc for helping us out today!

Jeff's mini-thins (?) bit is great

For me the comparisons of Cruelity Squad and Deus Ex just don't compute at all. There seems to be way more focus on combat than the hacking/stealth/social potential of Deus Ex. Seemingly no conversation trees or the like. It's like someone took all the things I personally like about that kinda immersive sim and said "Lets get rid of those, and make it more like a FPS"

There is certainly some of that emergent sim genre in there, and maybe the games got choices. But I'd compare it way more to something like an old school Quake/Doom era game without the stealth then I would Deus Ex. Maybe more like original System Shock in some ways? Dunno. But "Deus Ex like game, just with intentionally awful graphics" this game is not.

I love the Roach Gwent card photo in Jean-Luc's background

@Dannyodwyer

Opposite of Damn. I chuckled, Keep it up.

kickstand-fail-watch-the-nintendo-switch-fall-flat. Hehe.

Powerwash Simulator really does wake something up in my brain where I can't look away, I forget to drink water, I just get sucked in for hours but I love it.

Game Pass has sort of ruined me because I would like to play Scarlet Nexus.. but I don't want to buy it and I feel like sooner or later it will be on Game Pass so ehhh.

It's insane to me that the new Switch has a bigger screen with the same resolution. So the DPI will decrease and the games will look even worse than they already do.

Is that Justin Gaethje’s brother?

The current Switch kickstand fucking suuuuuucks

"the pro controller is garbage"

Wow. I couldn't disagree more with that, I adore the pro controller its the most nice feeling gamepad I've ever had. I've been through three 360 controllers and still use the ps4 one on pc and I much prefer the Switch Pro one over all of them.

@humanity: It does sound like a nice Game Pass game

I've also never really liked the Joy-cons. It feels like they twist your wrists just enough that after using them for couple of days I get slight wrist aches. Coupled with the buttons being slightly too close together and slightly too small it just doesn't feel great. I get that Nintendo always designs their controllers for smaller hands, but still.

@janman: AND his name starts with 'J'

I will continue to say that PSO2: NGS changes all of the wrong things and leaves the things that most needed changing in place.

That Atari Hotel Twitter is amazing. They tweeted out "teasers" of the 24 page hotel backstory and I think the most popular one had 10 likes on it.

Good thing for Nintendo that they didn't reveal the OLED Switch during E3. They would have caused a riot based on the build up and rumors that were happening about a Switch Pro that could output 4K and run games at 60fps. Personally, I'm glad they didn't make a serious hardware upgrade. Yeah, people will have to continue to play Switch games under 30FPS, but at least they don't feel cheated buying a Switch only to be forced to buy another more powerful one to play the upcoming releases.

"Blood Law" sounds like the name of a Don "The Dragon" Wilson flick...

@julmajuuhan: Hori split pad pro is your friend.

I should get a floating shelf for all those action figures I accumulated against my will over the years and barely have room for.

@dannyodwyer, if you want ethernet on Switch there's a USB port in the flap on the dock you can plug an adapter into.

@lazyaza: It's a great controller in almost every way, but if you're the sort of person who prefers a mushy SNES-style dpad to a stiff/clicky dpad, the Pro controller has an obvious big weakness.

The Pro Controller is pretty great actually and maybe feels the best in my hand of the big three?

"Grotesque" is how I would describe Cruelty Squad. I'm interested to see more developers who grew up in the N64/PS1 era making games, which I'm assuming is the case with this game. Tech was in such a weird place then that, even though it was the cutting edge of graphical fidelity in gaming, there were still these eerie set pieces that were artifacts of their limitations. Things like the boxy-looking people, stilted animations, large but strangely empty environments - these things make that generation difficult to revisit. The era also makes this sort of surreal mood-game even more, as Danny put it, "more."

Bakalar's house has nice cabinetry.

Petition to add Jeff B's lethal pressure shower as a sabotage in Hitman.

This never showed up in my rss feed.

Jeff checking out the f2p Atari games and comparing them with their originals would be a fun video i think.

From a convenience standpoint i understand why you'd no longer want to have a grassy garden with plants and shit, but in general a green garden would decrease the overall temperatures somewhat and be better for the environment. Chatter is starting to happen here about how we should adapt to the changing climate. Making sure that our cities are much more naturey and green is one of the measures to keep temperatures manageable.

I think you may have misunderstood why people in California are letting their landscaping die. It's not because they're too lazy to keep it up. It's because we're in the middle of a multi-year drought and just coming off the driest "rainy" season on record.

Perhaps not the best time to be planting a bunch of urban greenery.

Finally got to listen to this with a nice cuppa. Now where did I put my biscuits.

The continued trashing of Eternal bums me out. I have never felt more powerful in a game than when everything finally clicked and I was romping around like a fucking creature from hell. Making enemies also be pickups meant the game wasn't ever about playing perfectly but about using opportunities intelligently. It doesn't matter if you get torn up because you're never more than one second away from being totally maxed out.

@frytup: Yeah i might've underestimated the situation California is in. Sorry if it came across as insulting and uninformed. Naturally i did know that they're having droughts & fires pretty much every year now.

I was just thinking about all the people getting rid of greenery enmass in California and how that sounds like it would make the heat even harder to cope with. The drought and heat could become an even bigger issue without all that greenery to absorb heat and a lack of plants that can add some humidity to the air through transpiration. Maybe that battle has been lost already when every year comes with it's natural disasters? I don't know. Whenever the fires and droughts are back in the news, you kind of feel like some parts of the world are no longer manageable.

I was so confused by the pancake discussion. I've never felt that they get worse as you go on/as they sit there. I always eat them last, and they're fine. Maybe if you douse them in syrup first and then let them sit, then sure, that wouldn't be all too great. But that's why you wait until you're about to eat them to do that.

The most fascinating bit of N64DD lore to me is that Mother 3 was originally being developed for it. There's even some screenshots of it, in 3D. Crazy.

@janman: Jean-Luc's name isn't in the cast section

They were joking about John McClane being part of Marvel but that actually could be done now:

The Die Hard movies were owned by 20th Century Fox, which is now owned by Disney. Marvel is also owned by Disney.

This means that not only Disney could put John McClane on a Marvel property, but it also means that now Bruce Willis is a Disney Princess.

Can't tell if it was a bit or just willingness to accept behavioral oddities involving Steve Ballmer as fact (I guess the latter would be fair given some of the things he's actually done), but the "Ballmer Peak" is an xkcd joke. Now I've ruined the joke by linking to an explanation. You're welcome.

@jasperkazai: I just got to that part, and I was left thinking, “Here is a group of adult men that don’t know how to eat pancakes.” I have not been this bewildered since Dan left.