The Giant Beastcast: Episode 200

Wohoo Friday!

Congratulations on 200-ish episodes!

WOOOOoooooo..... friday

The big two hundo! Congrats, y'all!

I've struggled as how to describe Dan. "Professional layman" is a perfect distillation of what that man is.

Horah.

Thanks for the years of top-shelf podcasting! On my first complete listen-through in over two years, there's a lot of gold in those old episodes.

Two hundo

And no Vinny?

Old internet: I remember yelling to my roommate in college, "Hey have you heard of MP3s?"

I also started out on Prodigy for my internet. Man.

Noooo Vinny you almost got your 200th stamp on the punch card but now they've collected them from everyone else and you have to start over also you're late for the bus to school and your pants are missing!

This metaphor got away from me a bit.

Thanks so much, all of you, for doing this for so long. It's seriously my favorite part of the site and it brightens my day every week.

Even though V is my favourite character by far I'm not surprised that Dan and Abby don't like him.

I was fine with V until I went through on Dante Must Die, now I really don't like him and have a lot of learning to do to get those S ranks on all the missions.

BaBa is Good

Happy 200!

Happy 200!

Vinny missed the big 200 but I'm glad he's taking a vacation! Well deserved!

I hope that that doesn't happen to me. I'm on Son of Sparda and was surprised by how much fun I'm having with V, considering how un-DMC-like his playstyle is. It's just really satisfying to get Griffon and Shadow to gang up on a single enemy with their powerful attacks and then summon Nightmare to clean house. Maybe V kind of reminds me of Chaos Legion, one of my secret favorite games ever?

Happy 200 guys.

Abby, if you cant remember the title of a game that is in another language, don’t pull gibberish from your ass ‘or whatever,’ as it can make you look ignorant and/or dismissive of something. Just some friendly criticism.

I agree with Dan, gamers have been angry and over reactionary forever. Honestly, people are way too angry about everything. I will never understand attaching ego to a product that you had nothing to do with other than buying it.

Dan's internet story makes perfect sense for a kid in the 90's, but I'd believe him if he said it happened six months ago.

The movie question was great, for me it would be between Will Smith and Bradley Cooper, for variety's sake. DiCaprio and Sean Bean have some of my favorites also, but less variety/quantity.

I love discussions around BABA is you

Costco is amazing.

I watched Bee Movie on a date. yes that jerry seinfeld bee movie and it stunk.

My friend Pedro - talk reminded me of this from Gintama S01E48

Congrats on 200. The beastcast is always a great listen.

I get why some people can’t get into the soulsborne games but if you push past the opening hours it gets a lot easier. That said Sekiro is kicking my ass and I’ve played all these games multiple times each.

Happy 200! Here’s to 200 more

I remember waiting all day for a 20mb download of RPG Maker to finish in the old days. If someone had used the phone I'd have lost my shit. Fun times.

Ahaha that's actually why I love V so much. It's the closest we'll get to a Chaos Legion remake.

golf hole. beautiful

You Can Feel Good About Hood

Fan backlash to endings is a very old thing! Charles Dickens changed the ending to Great Expectations after reader backlash, for instance. It's not just a social media thing.

Google Stevia is super sweet AND sugar free.... can you believe it?

For sure, there's definitely nothing new about that.

Happy 200th Beasties!

Welcome to Costco, I love you.

The first time I saw an HD TV was in Ginza in Tokyo, at the Sony showroom, in 1998. They had a demo with topless island women, and it looked like looking through a window, it was so clear, but I don't think I've seen anything since that looked as nice (and I've lived in Hawaii most of the time since then, the women don't tend to be as topless as that demo suggested.)

i dont think you could make Sekiro, or similar FromSoftware games much easier without fundamentally changing what they are. And they probably don’t want to do that.

I feel like games are in a weird position where they’re half art and half service industry, and so you end up with these weird takes like “why don’t they put in an easier mode.” Maybe this is a hyperbolic comparison, but would Ulysses be the same if Joyce had included a glossary for all the words he made up? I’m sure more people would have understood it.

If the difficulty is part of what the game is trying to do, it’s weird to me to treat it like an accesibility issue. I don’t think it is. I think it’s about your willingness to engage with it on a particular level. And maybe that makes it not for everyone; that seems fine to me, I don’t know. ideally, I’d rather people make the games they want to make exactly, and then if I can’t get through them and am still invested, I’ll just watch a let’s play

Daddy can I have some creamy milk?

@cheburashka: oh i dont know, Dan still seems completely baffled by basic recycling. I feel like your looking down on the typical "layman" with that comparison.

Alec Guiness is my dude, get to watch Lawrence of Arabia whenever. Hell yeah.

Also worst movie on a date was A Million Ways to Die in the West. There were 3 couple in the movie to begin with. One left 20 minutes in, one left a half hour before the end, and me and the girlfriend stayed for the whole thing and were stupider because of it.

Wow Dan spoiling ME3

@ryan3370: Dude, the game is like 8 years old.

@eazeapeazea: dude. no kidding. But you are aware someone on that very podcast is playing through the series now for the first time?

@hassun: I remember J. R. R. Tolkien having to deal with fans showing up at his house or calling late at night from other countries to ask about some elvaan trivia. Do the decades of riots as a result of sports matches count as toxic fandom? I know people worry about how the worst fans can hurt public perception of their hobby, but football and futbol seem to be embraced by the mainstream despite their fans killing someone every week.

The most amazing parts of history are the small facets of humanity that haven't changed.

I don't believe in maximum accessibility in games, a game is either for you, or it isn't and that should be okay, in fact we're better off this way if we let people make exactly the kind of game they want we get better and more interesting/unique products and experiences. Which sounds harsh but I've seen too many games end up being less than they could have been, or messier and more confused than they would have been, more mediocre. All because they've tried to cater to this or that audience when that wasn't the vision from the outset.

I'm not someone who really changes difficulty in games, I'm not someone who needs a ball busting hard game, whatever the Developer set as the default is what I'll play with. I think if you tried to add difficulty settings to Fromsoft games you break them and you defeat the point of them, you remove the experience that Miyazaki is trying to show/give you, the emotions and feelings you start to feel for your situation and environment coupled with the way the world is presented all told through gameplay and the stuff you find.

It's hard to articulate for me but Dark Souls, Bloodborne & Sekiro are exactly as difficult as they need to be in terms of what Fromsoft is trying to get across, that's always been the point (Not to say they've been perfect, but still).

But the thing I've always said about these Soulsborne games is that aren't trying to ruin your life or punish you or even be unfair, they just don't hold your hand. They're not made to be nightmarishly hard and they're not out to get you, they just have the "safety turned off" so to speak. They're like playing games from the 90's where you were often meant to learn something from playing them, learning by doing, gaining a skill.

They only seem so hard because people now have so often become complacent with games giving them freebies and outs and safety nets. Just for a bit of instant gratification that means nothing because people can't seem to deal with not being perfect at something from the start, no sense of "Oh well, I'll get better!". A game is something you learn, something you win at, something you can lose at.

They don't demand anything superhuman, they simply ask that you think about what you are doing, and use the resources available to get to your destination, usually the games place items and/or equipment that are convenient for nearby or upcoming fights if you so choose, it's like playing a SNES game or a PS1/2 era game, they're wonderful treats in a sometimes suffocating era where not many really want to "play" things, they want to be placated.

I think Abby's attitude about the Fromsoft games is both surprising, refreshing and healthy.

Jeff, the only thing I can recommend is grab Dark Souls III since it's on PC, get Cheat Engine and make yourself have infinite health. I started saying this as a jab but I honestly think if you did that to take the fear out of the equation, you'd quickly find that through a bit of experimenting there's not really that much to the combat and it's pretty straight forward, the psychological aspect accounts for a lot in these games. But, there have been games you guys have talked about and enjoyed/finished over the years that I would say were harder for me to get through than like Dark Souls.

@11111110: Yeah I think the only thing that has changed is the massive reach such voices have due to social media/the internet. Allowing them to band together and have a bigger impact together.

I like V. Both as a character, this kind of mellow dude who still shit talks bosses in his own way, and as a weirdly specific zoning playstyle. That said he took a very long time for me to finally come to grips with. Like Dan I had a hard time wrapping my head around how the command input worked and that you do it in relation to V´s position and not Shadow or Griffon´s.

Playing on SoS right now and I feel like I´ve mostly gotten it down. Still, Shadow´s unwillingness to stay by me when I need him to, and to move in close when I want him to still trips me up now and again.

VERY LATE-GAME DEVIL MAY CRY 5 SPOILER BELOW:

I´m also bummed that V is effectively out of the picture by the end of the game. I really wouldn´t have minded seeing more of him.

@caffeinatedking: Games are made by dozens, if not hundreds, of people, so you can't really say a game reflects one particular person's vision. Also, just because you play games to learn and master them, doesn't mean everybody has the same purpose in mind. Some people play games for story or just to have some fun. Keep in mind, some people have disabilities and may not have the manual dexterity to pull off twitchy controls required in some difficult games. Gaming, as a hobby, is having a hard time shaking the image of being a space that is immature and territorial. Gatekeeping like this doesn't help.

Woohoo! Abby's back baybeeee. You know what that means.

The actor discussion got increasingly depressing when i realised no one was going to say JACKIE FUCKING CHAN.
And no i don't think it's an overreaction to think single player campaigns have been going away, especially in AAA, they used to be standard now they're like gold dust.
There are companies with massive online hits who don't need to make them, Valve, Blizzard, Activision, some who are chasing an online hit so they can stop making them, EA, Epic (who have both recently succeeded), and the rest keep making them either because they want to or they can't see themselves competing, Ubisoft, Bethesda, Deep Silver, Sony.
If you wanted to be really sour about this discussion you could look at all the people EA and others laid off for making unsuccessful single player games, they're a risky and expensive venture, and ever increasing costs have massively reduced single player output.

100% this. "Serika or whatever the fuck" is a really shitty way to refer to a game that a lot of people are interested in and kind of disrespectful of another language. I love this podcast, but between that, the weirdly gatekeepy statement about fans sending in uninteresting emails every week and telling them to stop, then pulling nearly a half hour of movie emails for a video game podcast, I was left scratching my head.

Made for a shaky 200th episode, but I am looking forward to 200 more regardless.

Oh, and V is awesome. I respect Dan's opinion, but it's a super innovative way to shake up character action mechanics and I would love to see more of it in the future.