Giant Bombcast 700: Toilet Crime

Welcome back Jeff!

No video archive?

@tartyron: probably still uploading

@tartyron: Usually takes a bit longer to process than the audio.

That's the perfect Show Image. lol

I'm waiting for the video, but based on the deck, it looks like with Alex no longer there to state his disdain for bathroom talk it has been allowed to roam free once again. Bring it on!

Video is up now!

I'm going to miss Jeff's old room

The title should have warned me ... that deciding to eat my breakfast while watching the beginning of this bombcast was a really, really bad idea ........

The title of the show is not a lie.

I work in plumbing, toilet felonies are a daily occurrence; if you smell something, say something.

No Halo co-oop is a total bummer for me. I am all about playing that game campaign wise with friends. I will definitely try out mp but won't be touching the campaign until I can play co-op.

Jason's Jason wall is sick

for Twelve Minutes, is Jan under the impression that You have to kill your wife in order to progress? Because that's actually never necessary to do even once.

Agreed shit is dope.

So I must be a superfan because i didn't understand the skyrim bit at all. Its free if you have the pc version or the special edition version. I was confused by jans hate.

@larmer: Pretty sure it's about the whole roofie your wife thing

@rorie: sorry Matt, I knew that subconsciously, just brain farted that I might be checking literally in that encode/upload window. Thanks for letting me know.

You guys did a great job of explaining AEW to a lapsed wrestling fan. Bakalar, get back into wrestling, bro!

Timestamps for skipping all wrestling talk? Is there no brave soul?

Sorry I didn't want to go back and parse that out. One thing in the back of my mind while listening to the entire bombcast is that all the excitement they had seemed to be focused on the wrestling and Jeff B's short take on pinball. All the video game talk to me came off as pro forma and tossed in as a matter of routine. Could be that there aren't any flashy/sexy games out right now. I do wish they'd break out the wrestling chat into a separate feature and perhaps have guests on that show but yeah I don't care for it at all and it seemed to be a large chunk of this week's episode (probably my perception of how long it took was due to my disinterest in the subject matter and it was not that long).

Are there glitches in the video for anyone else?

Good to see Double Fine finally taking advantage of a full budget.

That said, I too want Trenched 2

So is wrestling basically LARPing?

Yes, but you're getting paid for it and your employer refuses to give you health insurance or treat you like a human being.

Oof, wrestling talk is going on, so instead of trying to scrub forwards, I entertained myself by reading the comments, and now posting.

Fascinating to me as a kind of academic game design learning how surprisingly incensed people can get over the repeating loop of Twelve Minutes, which most often is more in the ballpark of 5 minutes, rarely approaching the full 12, with the whole game lasting on average 4 hours. How does one even begin to compare that to a checkpointing system in a 100-hour game?

Twelve Minutes is the rogue-lite point-and-click adventure game experiment. Given how few people these days pick up and play a pure point-and-click adventure, perhaps the main fault is the game unexpectedly getting a much larger audience than would enjoy the concept. Whereas stuff like Thimbleweed Park could stay so obviously niche that it managed to self-select having only the audience that wanted it in the first place.

To bring it full circle to wrestling, it was delightful to chance upon & watch Evil Uno, who's apparently some kind of wrestler, having the same kind of joyful fun with Twelve Minutes throughout that I did. Part 1 & Part 2.

ps. Wrestling talk appears to end around 01:49:00 in the Premium Video.

@player242: Uno is awesome. He and his tag partner do game-inspired moves. :D

Episode 700!

Congratulations on the milestone guys!!

I think Bakalar's right, in that whomever did the Toilet Crime 100% knew that they did. We've had a number of people come to work on our house over the years who attempt to cover up something they fucked up. Just a couple of years ago, some guy working on a bathroom wanted to open a window for ventilation, and he broke off the handle because he didn't unlock the window first and tried to force it. Instead of informing us, he just tried to hide it behind the curtains and we didn't find out until a few days later. The person who did the Toilet Crime probably shrugged and walked away once the toilet got clogged, because he knew there would be no recourse for the home owner (Jeff, in this case).

Happy episode 700! To celebrate, they... brought back ~15 minutes of wrestling discussion... with no one like Brad to rein them in anymore... yaaaay. Fucking christ.

@larmer: I was wondering this too.

I think the knife and the sleeping pills accomplish the same goal, and he must have discovered the former but not the latter? I would not want to watch the knife interaction playout as many times as I used the pills.

@otterchaos: I felt that Jeff G. was pretty happy and excited talking about the Quake update and Axiom Verge 2.

That said, the CM Punk thing seems like a big, sea change, deal, even as an outsider. And there is novelty to talking pinball strats.

You are correct and I guess my focus on the wrestling segment clouded what happened on the rest of the podcastt. I have been one of those unhappy with the new direction of the site and it seems any small thing bothers me more than it should.

@tayliastwist:

@dijidiji: In the same way that stage theater is LARP

Hockey > Soccer

Wait, did Jeff ACTUALLY move to Saskatoon??

Jeff's new location is a mystery, but he did say the drive took hours. The new studio is a myth! (I have no proof that the new studio is a myth)

Jesus, this Lanternfly right behind the Emerald Ash Borer

I'm here for the AEW praise. Feels good to hear.

:D

As someone who recently watched Alien and Aliens for the first time this week, it seems like the new Aliens game is par for the course with the step up from Alien to Alien. I think Alien was a that suspenseful horror movie feel trapped alone with an invincible alien but Aliens (the sequel) was a different kind of scary with literal hordes of creatures coming from every angle "They're coming out of the walls!" etc. They almost completely ignored the acid blood in the sequel as well except in story appropriate times, like if someone got real close quarters with one the blood would splash on a face, chest, or boot but otherwise ignored. Theres a scene with auto-turrets that supposedly mow down dozens of aliens but the corpses don't melt through the floor or damage the hallways in any way (you actually don't see the guns kill any aliens, just a round counter counting down and occasional cuts to the gun firing but maybe one clip of an alien being shot).

But yeah it seems like the new game has more in common with Aliens than Alien. I still haven't watched Alien 3 yet, up til now my only experience with the franchise was through Resurrection, Prometheus, and Covenant (I know right? such quality films). A part of me wants to give it a shot but not until it's much cheaper and/or the inevitable potential Playstation Plus free release lol.

Am I the only one depraved enough to be watching this after I listened to it hoping to see an image of the titular toilet crime?

The HTML5/AUTO version seems to be borked

Surprised to hear JeffB saying that 12 minutes is exactly the type of game that he thinks everyone should have a look at. Like a timeloop game can be really gratifying as you slowly unfurl the mystery at the heart of it, but that's still a very niche thing to enjoy. Especially when the game is so linear and really wants you to experience the same thing over and over, instead of games like The Sexy Brutale and Outer Wilds where you can go out and see a bunch of different content each loop. It would be far more easy for most people to go play a Monkey Island, Grim Fandango, Wolf Among Us or a Longest Journey if they want a narrative to plunge themselves into. Or games like The Room and Obra Dinn if you're all about slowly unfurling puzzle boxes. But it seems like those kind of games are just not what a mainstream audience is generally looking for. If you only like shooters & sports games, that real time action or online banter is what you enjoy out of games.

I thought it was funny how the discourse around the Aliens game was pretty much 1:1 on Jeff's opinion on the movies. It doesn't sound like they found a novel twist on the left4dead formula apart from letting you put handicaps in place to make it harder. Maybe that's the thing about all these games. It's only satisfying if you have a good group together and the difficulty level is at the right point where it feels harrowing and gratifying to get through an area.

I do wonder though, we have like 8 of these type of games of which like 5 are mostly modern gun-based. Does the franchise add enjoyment to the formula or are we getting the same enemy types over and over? Like it almost sounds like these aliens are not bringing anything new to the table and you can just as well gather your gamegroup together and turn the difficulty dial up 1 more notch on a left4dead / WorldWar Z/Back4Blood game and save some bucks.

That frogger fake mic situation definitly looks like they were just trying to evoke the 'shoutcaster' table at a live game event. Either that, or they use the Shure mic as a sort of symbol for coolness nowadays. You have people singing with them in hand too.

I am disappointed that they didn't cover the biggest story of the week. That being Tim Schafer committed a double homicide with Jeff Grubb and Jan Ochoa as the victims.

The fuck you go from 12 Minutes to Doki Doki, not similar even slightly

@onemanarmyy: Outer Wilds is a bad game in every respect though?

@dolphin_tequila: not sure what that has to do with anything, but that's an opinion you can have for sure.

I can see the wire coming out of the Shure under the tripod. The XLR port is on the side facing the commentators.