Giant Bombcast 695: KeyBoy

It's apparently pronounced Eric Pryda if it wasn't said so already

KeyBoys rally up!

I accidentally biked through Pokemon Go Fest over the weekend here in Cbicago. There was a giant egg in the park and I was quite confused for a second.

I love how they’re talking about Eric Prydz’ Call One Me on the beginning of this episode as if it was a recent song that got popular in the last few months, when in reality it’s a song from 2004 that was so successful and released so long ago that by now it is considered a classic by electronic music fans. That “out of touch with what the kids are listening to these days” moment was funny to listen to.

@subliminalkitteh: it’s pronounced Eric Prydz (as the “pri” prison). Pryda is his side project (and that one is like the “pri” in pride)

Any talk about Death's Door? Was lucky enough to get to review it early for launch and it's probably my favorite game of the year (alongside Chivalry 2) so far.

I was rooting for Team Jan as soon as Jeff said "canty-lope." @29:45.

just wait till Jeff hears Michael Greys "The Weekend" - 2004 is making a comeback baby!

@morphinekissed: Jan was trying to get in and question Jeff's cantylope thing, but he got cut off. I really thought he'd steer the conversation back, though.

Elaborating on that Nintendo question and the crew's answers on it, in particular the company culture and the culture of the headquarters' mother nation, there is overt sense of conservatism and patience I get from Nintendo and their movements over the years. As maddening it is to see how slow and opaque they are, they have often demonstrated those traits as strengths for Nintendo as a company.

As for Nintendo's darkest period, I would argue for the 3DS and Wii U generation. Virtual Boy was met with a quick death, and the Gamecube shared a similar position with Xbox against the PS2 juggernaut. With the 3DS and Wii U, Nintendo had a handheld console successor that sold critically worse than its predecessor and a home console that was moribund across its short life. To recontextualize: The Wii U was a sales failure and Nintendo lived with that for four years.

@janman some Pokemon Go clarifications:

Allowed trade distance doesn't change with friend level. You are always expected to meet up in person. There were a couple special events with somewhat expanded trading distance, but still basically within the same city. Practically no difference then to most people; if you live that close, you could have already arranged a meetup anyway.

Trading a Pokemon always randomizes that mon's IVs. It matters none how good that Pokemon was to begin with, in fact, logically you want to pick those that had the worst stats for trading. Any Pokemon may only be traded once so that you cannot keep re-rolling it over and over.

The Pikachu hats and the like: the Pokemon Go site had downloadable PDF papercraft to print your own. Maybe you saw people rocking the Pikachu visor?

Uxie/Mesprit/Azelf: catching one from a different geographical region during Go Fest Sunday was made difficult by time zones. "Frost Hour" was 12pm and 4pm local time, wherever you were. So you'd have needed to be online at those hours in their time zone for your Japanese or European friends to be able to invite you to a remote raid of their variant. In the end this was a much easier feat during the weeks those were the everyday Legendary raids.

Regarding the Steam Deck analog sticks with capacitive touch: At the very least I could see that being useful for disabling the trackpad input to avoid inadvertent inputs. Beyond that it's probably not useful for game inputs as they wouldn't map directly to any Xinput button mapping, or even the original Steam controller.

The USB-C port seems pretty crucial. Short on storage? Strap an external usb3 drive to the back. Short on battery? Strap a portable battery to the back. The device is already too big to be pocketable anyways, so filling that concave area between the grips with junk doesn't really change how usable it is.

On the Steam Deck: I'm not sure what this weirdness is around using an SD card to load games. People seem to be acting like that hasn't been done before or like it's a crazy thing but there's already a massively popular device that does this. It's called the Nintendo Switch. A majority of the games I own are all digital and installed to the SD card and frankly I don't notice much difference with loading times. Add that to the fact that Valve already said they're using some fast SD stuff and that all the games they showed off were running off the SD card and I don't see what there is to worry about. I guess the games on the Switch are possibly designed with that in mind? But the Switch doesn't come with an SD card so they have to be developing for the internal storage right? So I don't really understand the difference here.

Maybe we'll start seeing problems in bigger games that load a lot of stuff constantly but I'm sure a lot of games will run good off of an SD card.

I wonder how well a Steam library folder on a SteamDeck would work if the path were pointing to a mapped network share and you launched the games over wifi. Even if the theoretical bandwidth were sufficient (assuming excellent wifi and ssd storage) maybe the I/O latency would make things too janky.

edit: I guess at that point you'd be better off using the remote play streaming function and save yourself tons of battery and play with higher quality settings.

That Nintendo talk at the end was lovely. It made me reflect on a lot of video game history and made me stop and look at the bigger picture. Great podcast as usual!

If I could install Ableton or any other DAW on the Steam Deck... that could be fun.

I feel like the screen resolution would be the primary pain point there.

@hughj: Oh absolutely. I mean just in terms of seeing what it would be like and just how shitty it could be would be fun to see!

I have the same experience, in that Switch games don't seem to load faster or slower whether I have them on system storage or SD card. I believe the internal system storage might be the same kind of flash memory SD cards are, so it would have the same read/write speed, and the SD card port must have decent data transfer speed.

I suspect that setup really only works because of the size of Switch games and Switch RAM. Based on the handful of Switch retail games I've downloaded, it seems like they don't get much bigger than 4-7 GB, which means the audio/video assets that have to be loaded in and out of memory are quite minimal. On a SteamDeck, some PC games are more like 50-100 GB, and the time it would take to load stuff in/out of memory off an SD card, with all those higher quality audio/video assets, is probably quite a bit longer. The SteamDeck can probably run games off an SD card just fine, but you might have to sit through some pretty long load times, compared to if you had the same game on an internal SSD.

CALL ON MEEEEEEEE! CALL ON ME!

Curse you Jan. Just seeing the cover art you're making me want a Dole Whip but I'm stuck in Arizona.

Here in Ohio, no one wears a mask anymore regardless of if a person is vaccinated or not. It's wild tbh and kind of scary.

im just here for the piss

Were gonna kick it root down!

Wait, Call On Me is one of those rip-off songs of an older song?! I had no idea. For me, that song is forever linked to my high school Computer Science class, where the T.A. played it on loop (through speakers) for like a week. Why he was allowed to do this, I have no idea.

I just came back from vacation at the beach, and basically no one is wearing a mask anymore. I think I saw less than 10 people total wearing masks throughout the entire week. And there were plenty of people in general.

Absolutely, this was wonderful

Danny is right there needs to be more cider in america.

Public Enemy - Shut ‘Em Down (Pete Rock Remix) best remix

You know, Triple-I does sound dumb as hell, but what about Triple-Indie? Like Rodney Dangerfield?

I can't help but feel like Tom Clancy would be so disappointed