The Giant Beastcast: Episode 270

Some versions (free/premium video) might still be processing and seemed to be taking longer than usual so hopefully everything will be available soon.

@vinny: I was frantically refreshing Overcast so I will now be patient.

Is Ben's track missing?

@vinny: Thanks Vinny! Couldn't listen due to meetings while working from home. Have a great weekend!

@vinny is the Ben thing a bit or is his track missing?

Nope! Not even sure how that happened! Fixing now.

Edit: Ok! Should be fixed. Hopefully, if your RSS pulled the old one it updates automatically. Sorry and thanks for the heads up.

Thank you for everything you guys do. This shit ain't easy and I know you put everything into this stuff even when there is nothing left in the tank. So that being said, is there something up with Abby's mic on her end or whomever is recording? She seems to be crazy compressed or autoducking. I am hearing her start on her second or third word and when it does come through it is pretty garbled. Right before second break (I think) is where I really noticed it and if it was me I would want to know.

Stay safe and see you guys soon!

Is it on the video or audio version? If it's the video version it's something she's been trying to track down for a bit but the problem is fairly bizarre and unpredictable (solutions work one day but not the next).

is this the good stuff if there's no beans talk?

I initially had the version with silent Ben, and because it was audio I assumed they were doing some weird performance art.

@les_os: Ben Pack**

@vinny The PS5 is backwards compatible with the PS4! Effectively every game will come forward, including VR titles. The 100 games thing was just about the state of testing at the time of the PS5's performance enhancing "boost mode" which can increase framerates and resolution for games without needing a "PS5 patch". It has fall back compatibility modes to make sure the vast majority of titles will play without errors if the boost mode introduces bugs.

@bradgrenz: has the complete backwards compatibility with PS4 games been officially stated because last I heard they were still using very unspecific wording around it.

@breakawaylamb: I just had a look at the PS Now games list, and while there are a large number of games on there, none of the big hitters are there. Horizon, God of War, Spiderman. All 'old' Sony games that aren't available.

@chrisflavin: They aren't put on there permanently, I think Spider-Man just came off of there. I'm not saying that PS Now is the better service, just that there is not this giant gap between the two. I just wanted to push back on this narrative that Sony doesn't have comparable services.

@breakawaylamb: Fair enough. To be honest it's the first time I've actually looked at PSNow properly, I'm just an old fart who just likes to buy the games I know I want to play!

@cmhound: I meant is audio track. On the original upload his audio was missing from the podcast.

what happened to the Beastcast thumbnail images? I just realized they've been missing for over a month

"PC's aren't complicated" isn't a very good argument to the mainstream audience.

Hell, I've been playing games for 30+ years. I tried playing F.E.A.R. on PC the other day and my frame rate was terrible. I had to research it, download a file from some message board, put it in the proper system folder, then reinstall, and then fudge with my settings because apparently there was something incompatible with my video card. Mainstream folks may not do that, or maybe they'll just play at 10 fps because they wouldn't know any better.

So, since PC's are easier than before but are still a nightmare if something goes wrong, I propose a petition for Giant Bomb to stop making that argument when talking about console recommendations to their less techy friends and family.

I know we used to rib Dan for not knowing anything about movies coming from film school but this episode fellow film school graduate Abby showing that she’s no slouch in not having seen a lot of classics either.

Shout out to Abby for making me google "Mark Zuckerberg dog"

Ben is correct in that the Supermarket Sweep Big Sweep music is phenomenal:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PgQpEd1f8mQ

(sorry, wouldn't let me embed the video for some reason : "error: don't recognize this video service")

It sounds like you're on the vehicle select screen for a long lost Sega Dreamcast racing game. It's much more obvious when you listen to the track independent of the show; usually it is drowned out by the audience and Johnny Gilbert's sweet commentary about all the hams and cheese the contestants are grabbing.

I watched way more Legends of the Hidden Temple than was probably healthy. I'm guessing Abby must have seen reruns because there were only 3 seasons? I was also partial to Animaniacs. I have seen way too much TV.

It was really frustrating for the crew to miss out completely Ben's point in that Console Vs PC gaming these days and therefore dismissing it entirely, because Ben's has a huge point and Abbey's opinion about PC gaming is very outdated.

Console market is very muddled, to a point that building a PC (Be it 1080 or 4k) is much easier proposition. Abbey comes from enthusiast PC gaming point of view in terms of complications of PC gaming.

You really don't need play around with sliders and numbers in options if you are casuals with a medium range because publishers set everything up in standard mode and you are good to go. and building it is quite simple. You buy case, GPU, CPU, RAM and cooling system and you are 90% there. Again, unless you are hardcore PC gamer, you really don't need to complicate things.

Yeah, but you have to consider, you average Joe is not gonna play a niche game from 2005, which was made in an era where gaming PC was not mainstream and Devs never optimised it, let the community to fix their inability to fix simple framerate issues. Your normal casual will just play the latest COD, FIFA, or just stick to League of Legends where you really don't need to calibrate anything and the game simply launch in seconds.

PC gaming is no longer a ''techy'' hobby and it has simply became less complicated.

@faridmon: I suppose. I was thinking that older games would be easier to run because of lower requirements, but an old game like that was made in a different era so probably less easy to run. So yeah, my example would hopefully be less common.

Still, I occasionally hear about games causing memory leaks or crashing to the desktop or being broken with the wrong setup (i.e. Arkham Knight) and that makes me run away. I like the closed systems and not having to know which components can potentially cause problems. Buying a system, then trading it for an upgrade halfway into a generation is just so much more appealing to me. Maybe because generations used to be much shorter and I got used to new systems every 4 or 5 years.

@humanity: Not sure on the official wording on the compatibility stuff but the cpu has been designed with a mode limiting it to the same freq as a ps4 for back compat with games that would freak out if ran too fast. This was in the Cerny GDC talk, where the 'hundred' popular games was mentioned also.

He was talking about taking advantage of boost essentially and they had tested it with a number of popular games, it wasn't the clearest message tho which is why they released a statement later specifying that the hundred games thing were leveraging more power from the system.

I think some of the confusion comes from Sony marketing "we believe in generations"... in trying to keep it concise and soundbite-y they have left space for confusion. All it means is Sony are 'pushing' their studios to not make cross generation games. Games will come forwards but developers are not forced to accommodate for an ancient HDD and weak cpu in new work.

Hey yo Ben, if you want to try a buildy/crafty type game I recommend giving Ark a try. Would love to see some more Ark content on this site after Vinny's hilarious stream a while back, and would enjoy seeing you give that game a shot if you haven't already. Dinosaurs and prehistoric beasts are cool :)

@faridmon: The big difference is that a lot of people don't want to deal with ANY of that like at all. Most casual gamers just want to pop in the disc and go. They don't care nor want to see graphic options surfaced. To the more savvy person a lot of those options indeed don't need to be touched but you really can't overstate how apprehensive people are towards seeing sliders for odd sounding things like "ambient occlusion". This combined with the potential for games to break in some weird ways is why computers are still a much higher bar to entry than some might think. Abby is actually the prime case here, oddly enough. She doesn't want to deal with any of that stuff and she is a young, ostensibly computer savvy person working in games media. There are plenty of people like her out in the world that similarly do not want to deal with a computer for gaming purposes - as strange as it might seem to people in the know, it's not an outdated point of view at all.

65/35 peanut butter to jelly, minimum. Like Jeff I'll go up to 75 on PB.

Jam flavor is strawberry.

@humanity: Yes. The wording they use is no more ambiguous than Xbox because neither can be certain of 100% compatibility. It will probably work out to 99.8% compatibility like the PS2 had for PS1 and the PS3 at launch had for PS2.

@vinny: For me, it's only on the video archive. I compared the same spot on both the premium audio and premium video archives, and the audio version is crystal clear.

Bug pizza! I ate cricket pizza at the state fair, once. It was fine, and I couldn't even tell the crickets were there. I passed on the scorpion pizza, though. Bugsnax, yo.

bro if you think makin a pc is just as simple OR as approachable as walkin into a target and using your credit card and going home with a playstation 5 then we live in 2 different worlds.

Never said it was just as simple or approachable, all I was saying was that it's been easier than ever to recommend to someone who wants into gaming get a PC instead of a console.

I'm so with Ben. Just spend a couple grand on a PC and you're good for the next 10 years. PCs are not complicated like Abby thinks. Then I'd recommend a Switch or PS5 later as a secondary platform.

@benpack:Being easy to recommend isn't the same as being just as easy to use for the average person.

@benpack: As someone who has built 4 computers, it is both incredibly easy and immensely gratifying. And also if the consoles come in swinging at $600, then imo it'll never be a better time to jump into PC gaming.

Agree with your points.

The Herman Miller Logitech chair is just an obnoxious skinned version of one of Herman Miller's pre-existing chairs.

1. Grape jelly is gross. Hearing people defend it is bizzare.

2. I enjoyed during the director question that Jeff said "Anderson" and Abbey agreed. Jeff had earlier made a comment about "There Will be Blood", so I assumed he meant Paul Thomas Anderson, whereas Abby's comment afterwards made me think she was referring to Wes Anderson. EIther, or both, are great choices though, I just found it funny.

I agree with Ben about the the confusion with the console experience has made the jump to PC much more enticing. Having to worry about which console skew to get, then worrying about which games are available on which subscription when, and finally having to choose what mode to play a game on. The Console experience outside of Nintendo is no longer "plug it into a TV, load the game up and play". There's so many more mental hurdles now.

Buying a pre-built gaming PC or Laptop has never been easier too (you don't even need to get people to build their own now). Controllers on PC just work now, and default options games assume when loading them up has become pretty consistent.

With the number of people now open to working from home now, I can see more people than ever being open to the argument of spending their console budget to improve their work PC and playing games on that. There are so many ways to send the games to a TV in another room now that's no longer a huge issue either.

Plus, with Microsoft's X-cloud option joining the Gamepass Ultimate subscription, you don't even need a machine that's powerful enough to run these games any more. Any windows 10 machine will have an identical experience to the old Xbox One in the new generation.

The biggest issue (outside of the current pandemic heavily restricting supply right now) is the requirement to have consistent internet connectivity, however that looks to no longer be alleviated from having a console either.

@bradgrenz: well while XB1 has done a lot of work to bring the past games to the current generation the PS4 was really lacking in this department.

On the topic of which console to choose, barring PC, i think the choice comes down to this. As it stands now, Playstation has the killer exclusives, Xbox has the massive Gamepass library, which entices you more? Thats saying nothing for the future as well, as I'm sure Xbox exclusives are going improve greatly with all the new projects and studios, and surely Sony is hard at work trying to develop an answer to Gamepass.

I got a kick out of Vinny's love of Samurai Jack. I had assumed he would have been too old for it at the time but I guess not. Personally I'd say Dexter's Lab is probably my favorite Gendy Tartakovsky cartoon but Samurai Jack is probably his most consistent work and is the closest thing he has to a magnum opus.

Growing up I was under the impression that grape was the canonical jelly of a PB&J, to be honest though I wasn't big on jelly when I was a kid and just preferred plain PB sandwiches. As someone who works in a grocery store I can say we get those Uncrustables in equal supply grape and strawberry and both sell out at roughly the same rate so there's probably market data supporting the 50/50 split.

Haven't read through all msgs so I might be redundant but Spotify is still Benless

@vinny: Castbox (podcast app) is still playing the version with no ben//

Y'all shit on Stadia, but what you are asking for for simplifying gaming is there with Stadia. You open a Chromium browser and be able to actually be in the game and playing it within less than 30 seconds.