Giant Bombcast 708: wallbabies

As per usual, videos will take a hot second to encode.

Alternate titles for this week's Bombcast:

• Squirrel Pile
• Skink Shame
• Mahjong Waifus
• Occasional Vegan
• Russian DOTA
• You Could Fit a Chicken In It

Waaaaall baaaaabieeeeeees

Gentlemen. stoat your engines.

Going off the Prime games she turns into energy during the morph balls. The pirates dont figure this out and end up turning a bunch of their test subjects into ground space pirate beef trying to get morph balls of their own working.

@janman: I was only in chat for a minute, but I was already pullin for "skink shame"

The seaweed snack talk caused this scene from the Matrix to pop into my head. "It's the SMELL!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yL9Y24ciNWs

@janman: At ~55:00 a ghost voice can be heard that made me think I was hallucinating. Right after Ben says "The bats fun"

When I was 5 or 6 there was a TNG episode that really dug into the trauma of losing a family member and that fucked me up for a long time. My parents were like "oh good our small child is aware of his mortality already"

LOL is much more toxic than DOTA

@twins: I would've voted for "gas escaping a dying man"

@janman: I think you made the right call

Found out one of the groomsmen at my wedding finally got married because my other friend wasn't available to go for a walk.. because he was at that former friend's wedding out of town. I feel ya @janman, I feel ya

Uh, have any of them played Super Metroid?

The "shine spark" was in that, yet they talked like it was new.🤔

@admiral_crunch: to be fair, I love Super Metroid and I didn't remember shine spark at all. I barely remembered it in this game after the tutorial.

@admiral_crunch: Damn, you caught us. None of us have played Super Metroid, or, in fact, any Metroid ever. It's all been a big coverup and now our house of cards is crumbling down T_T

@benpack: At least you’re big enough to admit it.

Jason not chiming in to say "Monster Hunter Rise" during the "What would you need Nintendo Switch Online for?" doesn't bode well for the game's GOTY chances :p

Granted, MHR is soon getting a PC version and the Sunbreak expansion will launch on both platforms simultaneously. So some people will have the choice of not giving Nintendo subscription money and playing a better version of the game.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't recall the shinespark being a vital and necessary maneuver in Super Metroid or Metroid Fusion. I think it was an easy trick to miss unless you were going for 100% item collection.

looks like the admiral just got demoted to captain

As someone who learned about nuclear weapons after the Cold War had already ended, I also spent a fair amount of time immediately thereafter convinced that they would bring about the end of the world, and sooner rather than later. Glad that wasn’t just me!

35 is the cutoff for making friends? Shit. I only have a week to find some more. Wish me luck.

whatever floats ur stoat

Man, Ben bringing the hammer down by the end. Love it^^

Did Todd Clorox somehow make it into this episode?

THE CONTENT.

Thanks Voicemail Dumptruck

Next monday starts the clock for me, and at a grand total of zero, well, we have work to do, best of luck, if you fall short, well, i dunno hit me up we can play nintendo or somethin'

I think you perhaps may be confusing "everyone" with "yourself" there. I liked PUBG, I am deathly afraid of streaming, uhhhhh I dunno I committed game crimes.

I personally don't really think game of the year really matters anymore, there are a lot of video games that are really good, that I haven't played and came out years ago. My list this year is gonna be real weird and definitely not playing by the rules, baby.

Whoa now, no need to dismiss him so quickly. I've reviewed his case, and I think we've got a serious shot at overturning that GotY in appeals court. It depends which federal game judge we get, but if it's Justice Nukem or Justice Robotnik presiding over the appeal then we just might get them to strike 2017 GotY from the records.

Video game law is real, and Giant Bomb has to abide by it.

@bisonhero: @knoxt:lol ok fine I wasn't that serious. It's fair that PUBG was worthy of GOTY as you will. Still wish there were more games out that year that could have beat it...leaves a bad taste in my mouth IMO of course that most sites gave it GOTY that year and used the reason being its claim to fame/creation of BR to mainstream support...leading to our current flood of game copies. But I'm guessing for people who like BR the flood is not so bad. Like if there was a flood of dark souls clones (and there were) and many including myself happen to like em. I also like some BR clones. Case dismissed It stays GOTY. XD

What wasn't in Super Metroid is the shine spark transfers they went ham on in Zero Mission.

@topcyclist: I get what you mean but the thing is that there will always be controversy about any subjective list that get made. Most good novel ideas that hit with the audience, will be either patented or adopted by others. I think about the typical rogue maps we know from games like FTL still being relevant and popping up in a game like Inscryption. Haven't we been in the golden age of cardgames for a while too? Even the cardgame aesthetic layered over a JRPG game is well-worn territory at this point.

I'm sure there are plenty of people to find that look with a side-eye to these Hades GOTY awards and assume that it's because they're the fluffy indie underdog with connections to the games media. Clearly there are other games out there with more impressive technical accomplishments they'll say.

TLDR: Opinions, we all have em. There's never a 'correct' option to win anything. It all depends on who you're asking it to.

Also I'm surprised how many people are only now learning about stoats, maybe the term "ermine" is better known?

Where's Danny been recently?

@kdr_11k: I will say in general that stoat and ermine are terms I’ve heard almost zero times in my life. At best, I think I’ve heard ermine mentioned in the context of clothing made of ermine fur. And “stoat” is up there with “pine marten” in terms of being an animal that may as well be mythological because I’ve only seen or heard of one in a Redwall book.

Assuming my animal familiarity comes from either I physically see them in my town, or at a zoo, or in a wildlife TV show, I have to assume that ermine/stoat representation is low-to-zero in all those domains.

Listening to Jeff talk about his past experiences with in-game VOIP it's a good idea not to lose sight of the impact that the game and platform have on the age and maturity of people who play it. I have no data to confirm this, but I'm going to guess that console skews younger than PC, and games like CoD are going to skew younger than Counter-Strike (for example). That's not to suggest that all PC players are all well-behaved adults, but even a few years difference in the mean age can make a huge difference in the overall community temperament if you're comparing mid-teen to college aged.

Having never played any form of console multiplayer, I hadn't really thought about the PC vs. console demographic divide until the advent of cross-play started between PC VR and PSVR (which straight up ruined social games like RecRoom.)

I know nothing at all about the LoL and Dota2 communities, but I'd be curious to know if the age demographic is different between them.

wow, I didn't think food in the toilet was going to be such a contentious topic. If you don't have a garbage disposal it seems pretty reasonable to me. The garbage isn't a good idea, it could leak out. Are you supposed to empty it into a ziplock and then throw it in the garbage? Toilet is designed to dispose of liquidy solids. Obviously it's not an elegant or proper solution, but it seems to be the most logical option when you have nothing but bad options.

I love so much that the voicemail dumptrik is back, but maybe we get some mahjong mornings?

I don't think I realized how much I missed hearing Ben on the podcast, lol. The last couple have been a treat and I hope he sticks around for a while longer.

I'm pretty sure the Dota community generally skews a bit older than the LoL community. There might be some exceptions here and there, like Dota is extremely popular in the Phillipines and a fairly popular game in the internet cafe's, so that might make it easier for the teens to get into it than if they had a computer at home with less pressure to fill out a team with real-life friends.

This episode has me worried that Americans don't know about food recycling (green bin).

I can imagine a lot of things but I can't imagine bringing food into your bathroom, dumping it in your toilet and flushing it.

Maybe if you were drunk I could see it happening.

How does nobody on this podcast understand that the stuff you put down the sink and the toilet end up in the same spot? It's ALL SEWAGE. Unbelievable.

One thing they didn't point out with Team Spirit being "a Russian team" and Putin congratulating them, is that Team Spirit is not only a Russian team, 2 out of 5 players are Ukrainian.

I tend to agree with Jeff in that there never is an actually good reason to chat with the opposing team. I haven't played LoL since 2013, and back then all chat was opt-out, not opt-in, and I absolutely opted out of it. I now do that in every game when applicable, right from the start. Yeah, sure, some fun moments of trash talk can happen, I'm not disputing that. But like Jeff said, I imagine Riot has endless amounts of data, and I'd wager it is overwhelmingly bad and pointless interactions. In my anecdotal experience, all chat was either a lane opponent insulting you (or whatever teammate was their direct opponent) for being bad, or one of your teammates deciding your team was a lost cause and so they'd start insulting your team (which is also their team) in all chat in order to score some imaginary internet points with the other team.

That being said, making chat opt-in by default would've been enough in my eyes, which I didn't know had happened until this story hit. I don't blame them for removing all chat, because I think it's ultimately the right move, but it does seem a bit extreme.

The difference in opinions between Jeff and Ben on the chat stuff really highlights a major (and growing) difference between young and old players. As someone much closer to Jeff's age than Ben's, I definitely align with his opinion on the matter.

Also, having some aspect of a community be opt-in only is not a solution to that aspect being shitty. If there's a rot in a community, it needs to be cut out because it will accumulate and spill over into areas that aren't restricted. All that said, just killing chats altogether in these games is probably the best call in the long run. These games are just too hypercompetitive; they will always attract the worst of the worst.