Bombin' the A.M. With Scoops and the Wolf: 12/15/2014

the beauty of online shopping cannot be denied :D

Ghost cat!

@patrickklepek How's Valkyria Chronicles going?

On hold until GOTY is over.

What if this is Alex natural voice and that other one his sick voice?

Mind blown and radio star born

He is evolving in front of your eyes ears.

Ghost cats.

I find it bizarre that they're so bewildered by the idea of a toaster oven. I thought that was a common thing? I've had a toaster oven for over 20 years. To me, actual toasters are appliances I believed to be left back in the 70s.

@julesodies: I'm going through old bombcasts from the beginning, and I just listened to the one from PAX 2008 where his voice is the same as it is here...so you may actually be on to something

And here I kept wondering at what point they'd give Lamar all this heavy backstory, because so far he's only been a sublime idiot wannabe gangster.

Man, most of the GB crew really soured on GTA V's story stuff. I really liked the things they did. Of course there are places I thought they could have done different, but I dunno. At times it feels like they are asking for something completely different from what it was always intended to be. I'd definitely play a game that addresses the things they brought up (here and elsewhere, last year's GOTY stuff especially), but I never expected GTA to be the deep thinking drama they seem to have.

@alex You're asking if parents recording every little thing their children do is weird in a world where smart phones exist? There are probably more pictures of children born in just these last few years than in the preceding thousands.

The one thing you don't really get anymore that you did in those VHS-recorder days are those interminable, unedited videos taken at kids' birthday parties and such. And I say good riddance.

Yeah! Scoops!

So I have read both House of Leaves and 'S'. Do yourself a favor and skip House of Leaves and go right to 'S'. It is infinitely more comprehensible and interesting. Even still, it can get a bit of grind, but it is nothing compared to the slog that HoL is. Some would say there is a lot of depth and some odd connections easily missed in HoL, but at some point you have to make me want to keep reading.

House of Leaves is good, but for my money Only Revolutions tried to do more. Both are well worth reading, but OR made me quit and it was not until later that I came back to read it and everything clicked. One of my favorite books, and one I can natter on about at great length if not stopped.

Danielewski has been teasing the release of his new book The Familiar for the last couple of years, presumably because the book(s) is(are?) set to release sometime next year. I think in the spring (Amazon claims May 2015 (and that's where my pre-order is)), but WHO KNOWS FOR SURE.

Other neat books in that vein include the Raw Shark Texts, which is pretty great in its own right.

Pardon me, Patrick, but VC games on the WiiU do actually have additions as far as being able to play on the gamepad, and being able to remap controls. Slightly beyond 'ROM dumps'

Is Kevin Conroy doing voice over for our GB duders now?

I think "The Bioware Formula" is a very quantifiable thing to grasp, given that they've been doing their games with a similar structure since Neverwinter Nights. You have some sort of overarching threat that only your character can solve for one reason or another, a bunch of different areas to go to and a supporting cast of characters who all come from a handful of well-worn archetypes. Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn't.

Of course, it's also fun to point out that the much-maligned Dragon Age 2 was, in a lot of ways, a subversion of this formula. It didn't totally work out, obviously, but it's one of the reasons I will stand by that game as being alright.

Oh dang. Alex's voice is even deeper than usual.

Just gotta... loosen this tie. Oh, dear.

@patrickklepek: Just wondering, but did anyone on the GB staff have the chance to play Tri: Of Friendship and Madness this year? Probably just behind ShovelKnight and KR0 for my favorite 2014 indie game. I don't think many people played it though.

So I googled House of Leaves quickly and it seems to be a lite-version of Infinite Jest with some added horror. Is that anyhow accurate? If it is, I might need to read it.

I read through House of Leaves in a week or so when I was at my grandma's house while I was in high school. It's really weird, it's got some interest atmosphere to it, it's actually not as much of a tome as it seems like. 1/3 of the book have basically no sentences on them. I was pretty into it at the time. It's kinda a book I felt like was a something hipsters would be really into since everyone I knew who read it at the time was the hippest of hipsters.

@alex: I am pretty sure either an entire album, or maybe just the song "Angry Johnny", was written to sort of coincide with that book. Looking at Spotify I think most of the album Haunted is based around the book. I know Haunted and 5 1/2 Minute Hallway definitely are. Actually one of the songs is literally just called House of Leaves.

I think the disconnect occurred when GTA started to move into the Xbox 360+PS3 era - most notably the tonal shift that the GTA series took when GTA4 was released. I think just about everyone could agree that the tone and nature of the story in GTA4 is far and away different than any of the GTA games before it, especially San Andreas. That tonal shift certainly carried over in places for GTA5, but how much of that darker and more serious tone carried over is debatable.

I don't think there's anything wrong with trying to ask for a deeper or richer and more cohesive story from those games, but it's certainly a weird arena and balancing act to do just that in.

Did they think they were playing Downton Abby, or GTA?

Sounds like you should have put that on the list of "missed games" for them to look at for GOTY.

Any possibility for future episodes to have timestamps of topics discussed similar to how 8-4 does it?

And after IV, I'd rather they not try that again till they can pull it off. Good storytelling in games is like a souffle.

Edit: Kitty!

This.

Being able to complete my Christmas shopping without setting foot in a mall is pretty awesome.

You're not wrong - I fuckin' love a good soufflé, and hate it when it's awful - but the only way to get good at making them is to keep trying to make them.

@patrickklepek do you include the time challenges in 100%'ing Captain Toad? I definitely had to "claw" to do some of those too. I don't know if something unlocks for doing them all.

Lamar was picked because Jeff is a smooth criminal in GOTY.

The ingredients and recipe can be off and you can't perfect a flawed premise most of the times. It felt misplaced at best, melodramatic claptrap at its worst; especially for a game in a series that came from a totally different thematic direction; it felt like a pet project (ala Gears 2's "KUURRREAAA!!!" moment of Blezinski's) and it's hardly the kind of thing to be doodled around on during a sequence of $100m projects, you know?

Course, that kind of thinking defined AAA gaming, so...

hey guys, keep doing game of the year stuff the way you have been doing it. This isn't a scientific process. It's all opinion and tastes anyway. You can't let numbers dictate how stuff shuffle out.

My Spooking with Scoops vote is for more Blair Witch games. @patrickklepek

You didn't miss shit and your not weird Alex, my parents never had a camcorder either. And only one of my friends parents had one.

PATRICK I BEAT 1001 SPIKES!!! I'm now working on 100% that game. So close. What a long game, have you played any more since the last video?

Thank God for Amazon!

Good answers to my console gaming history question. Thanks guys! I looked into it and Joy2Key might actually work on more older games than I thought, so I'm gonna test a bunch of stuff.

@Alex needs to be sick more often. I could not break away from that voice for a second.

Glad to hear you're trying out that program. I've never tried it with older stuff, so let us know how it goes!