The Giant Beastcast: Episode 284

From what I've seen of it, Nurse Ratched looks like they got some of their characters straight out of Bioshock.

Hey Vinny, just a suggestion on the Turbo Trainer.

Get a direct drive rather trainer (i.e. Wahoo Kickr) than a wheel on trainer, yes they are more expensive but it’s going to be silent. I have my dads wheel on trainer from Cycle Ops and they can get pretty loud and disturb your child’s learning from the next door.

Haha, already a done deal and got a direct drive one for that specific reason. Thanks for looking out!

@vinny: sweet

Yeah, Vinny and Abby are right, that new Amnesia has an extremely slow start, where there just isn't any real tension for like 2 or 3 hours.

Full disclosure: I watched a stream of the first 4 hours or so, haven't played it myself, don't plan to at this point. I think a big problem is there is just way more exposition and VO than is really necessary. Like in a typical horror game, there's the tension of long stretches of silence so that you can kinda spook yourself if any small thing makes a noise, but instead the new Amnesia has:

• endless VO from your character talking to themselves
• lots of flashbacks which include VO from other (now deceased) characters
• people hailing you on a radio message that just repeats endlessly
• any time you go in the darkness it makes this "creepy" noise that's supposed to sound like a bunch of bugs skittering, but also kinda sounds like sizzling bacon on a skillet, and frankly it's not very scary

Ambient sound design is extremely important in horror games, and I think the first Amnesia has that in spades. You'd read the occasional letter, have a very small number of flashbacks, and that was it, everything else was about the here and now and the atmosphere in that mansion. Maybe the setting was just better, maybe the limited budget of that first game was a blessing in disguise, but the sound in the new Amnesia is...I don't know, overproduced? There's just sooooo much audio happening all the time in the introductory hours of the game. There's no suspense at all.

But like, I get it, probably a deliberate decision. This game and Machine for Pigs seem much more focused on delivering exposition and narrative than creating any real sense of horror/danger/suspense.

Love how Bakalar still asks about the running around. It's a good gag, but I can't stress how important the running around is. I have bought 60 dollar games for the running around.

Correction: @alex, you mentioned that No Man's Sky was released in 2015. This is not correct, although I can understand those two years getting mashed together in a way. No Man's Sky was as a matter of fact released in August 2016.

I remember this specifically because of two things.

1. This was was during the time when Dan visited the New York office while he was still stationed in SF. He was one of the most important people on the quick look for bringing up important questions such as "what would happen if the moon disappeared".

2. The first Beastcast after the release was the one when Austin made his first visit since leaving for Vice. This was a very memorable episode, with not only discussions about No Man's Sky, but also general science discussions and once again important Dan-questions that brought us all the way back to "the beginning".

Love my Peloton, lost 50lbs since June, still have 50 to go but I'll get there.

I was just thinking earlier today on my lunch break if Vinny would dip into that Transformers game (and of course he did). It is wild to me that we are not only getting Transformers and GI Joe games (the latter especially wild), but that they aren't abject train wrecks. I never would have guessed that both would just end up being completely middling experiences.

Jeffrey needs to get himself an inline PreAmp like a Fethead or Cloudlifter for his fancy expensive Hipster everyone-has-one Shure SM7B, it's very, very gain hungry at 1.12 mV (-59 dB/Pa) sensitivity. That's quite a bit more juice it needs than the EV RE-20 they have (had?) at the studio, with 1.6 mV (-53 dB/Pa) sensitivity.

The crew were on fire this episode. Real fun, great energy

I feel like watchdogs marketing really played up the wackiness, when most characters in the game are just boring and serious, I think the ai might be the only character that tries to tell jokes

Do not make dummy facebook accounts. Their bots ban those accounts all the time, and if you had like a bunch of games bound to that dummy account, that is then no longer accessible to you until you confirm your identity. Good luck confirming your identity mr Throwaway Account446.

Facebook is quite a bit worse than the other devices/services you have an account on because of its urge to change you as a human. Make you angrier and more likely to engage with stuff. That's what separates Facebook from something like Amazon. Amazon doesn't need your eyes on amazon.com to make money, they need you to buy shit. Facebook just needs your eyes on their site as much as possible so adverts can be served, so instead of giving you ads for Peleton, they give you far right posts about how gays probably shouldn't be allowed to [insert that which would anger you the most]. While you're writing a reply to a neo nazi, the ads are just ticking away non stop on the side. Kaching! They need your eyes on the screen in a seething rage.

Our brains are easily programmable and Facebook is all about that. It's really horrible. That said, you can have an oculus device bound to your true facebook account and then just never use the web portion of this.

You know if the "first" hitlermustasche came with a mutebutton the 40's and subsequent years might have looked very different.

I loved Ratched... for the first 3 episodes then it jumped a shark and I lost interest. Had so much potential.

PlayStation was brilliant in their NDA... if you only let people talk about 1 thing they are all going to put out four articles and videos that talk in detail about that one thing (8K rumble.)

@mostlysquares: I was a bit disappointed in the "all companies are bad" excuse for not making a decision as an informed consumer. Doing the both sides argument to defend purchasing from Facebook/Oculus while not actually comparing them to the alternatives in the VR market was a bummer.

I think the Junji Ito story Vinny is talking about is The Enigma of Amigara Fault. Ito has a bunch of amazingly creepy and gross stuff, with Uzumaki (the spirals one) probably also being my favorite. Having read most of his work Amigara Fault was definitely one of the most unsettling ones for me though.

@vinny

My local library has a pretty good physical comic collection. They also have digital comics that can be read through the kindle app. The kindle app has the option to zoom from panel to panel like the ComiXology app.

I'm starting to think CD Projekt got a little up their own ass with consumer friendliness and wanting to strike while the iron's hot post-Keanu reveal. Worrisome, is all I'll say about that. To say nothing of the crunch or their social media seemingly possessing a fundamental misunderstanding of the world of Cyberpunk. But hey, those Witcher games absolutely rule, so here's to hoping.

@vinny As someone with a lot of experience, you definitely AREN'T supposed to just take those coverless comics...aren't SUPPOSED to...

If you make another Facebook account, Facebook WILL ban you. Do not make another account just for Oculus. They will ban you and delete your purchases.

Abby with the “all companies are bad” take, and calling it “more nuanced” is some next level Dan shit right there. Thinking the worst thing facebook does is mine our data is some willful ignorance considering the role they’ve played in undermining democracy the last 4+ years. Super disappointing stuff.

Otherwise, dope episode 🤷‍♂️

Good ass cast, what else is new.

I wonder if by nature Cyberpunk will be received in a similarly critical way that Watch Dogs 1 was. I mean, fuck ubisoft for misrepresentation of what hardware was even capable of, but, you know, we were all young, stupid, naïve, bound to gpucpu hddvdssdp2plol.3 cores that make us laugh and spill our wine as we look back with our metaphorical sunglass'ed-4k television-based murder simulators that produce such sikkening rays that we require them. It's actually very impressive, and decisions they make with Legion in base "GTA CLONE 101" are extremely smart about 5-ish things that made open world anything a chore, and/or were lacking. It's good on it's own sandbox level shit, basics, and then on top of that allows itself to try and RPG upward, and walk back from the weiner-ness of 2 into a more pretentious but dark and edgy area of fast and furious with more spraypaint and less san-francisco parody. I don't hate it, ima go play it, thanks crew, abby pls stay

Beastcast disappeared off Apple Podcasts?

It was downloaded, but it now only shows through Episode 283 on the full episode list.

I can listen to it here np, but I figured I’d let you guys know.

@strabo said:

Came here to say exactly that.

Vinny: "...in our household it was deemed that you do not get rewarded for being a good person..."

Alex: "That bears out in society, yes."

Brutal, just brutal.

The penny dropping for Abby, when it came to Peleton and Google searches XD

Woof that peleton stuff looks very expensive. $2k for the bike and 40$ a month for metrics & videos. Good on Vinny for looking beyond the big brand. Although i guess the financial pressure of a monthly subscription might add an extra incentive for folk to make as much use out of it as possible to get as much out of the investment as possible.

Please don't tie purchases and expensive hardware to an account you try to deceive Facebook with. They have mics and camera's all over the product and will eventually find out that this very blank slate account is not a 'primary' account and get rid of it together with your purchases.

@vinny

You were right, we had guilders before Euro's came around here in the Netherlands :)

@alex

While 5M Euro doesn't sound all that bad compared to the riches that Fifa harks in for EA, the daughtercompany EA Swiss (that EA uses to sell Fifa here) has been slapped with the same legal ruling. So now we're looking at a situation where EA is selling something illegally and getting slapped with a 2x250k euro fine each week, until they resolve the issue or until the 2x 5 million euro has been reached. If the activity still continues at that point, the judge can up the fine as long until the company finally ceases their illegal activity. The word 'dwangsom' contains the dutch word for 'force' and is meant to forcefully put an end to illegal activity. It's not just a payment-barrier, the situation actually has to be resolved afterwards.

Also, There are 'only' 1,5 million dutch Fifa players. Let's assume half of them spend money on microtransactions. 750k users are not a do or die number for EA. They probably don't want to spend 10's of millions from here on out to get 200% out of that userbase instead of 100%. And depending on their implementation, they can still let these people spend money on microtransactions. The whole gambling aspect would just have to go.

At some point it makes more sense for EA to follow the law in the countries they operate in. In Belgium, EA already stopped selling FIFA packs for real money. The judge noted that the Belgian implementation isn't satisfactory for the Dutch market though. They offered 3 solutions:

1. Disable the trading market

2. Offer a direct buy mechanic to sidestep the gambling aspect of getting a certain player.

3. Get rid of lootboxes entirely.

The discussion at the beginning about the "collective" internet hating something was what I felt back around the time Ready Player One was being talked about. I had never heard of it until the movie was announced, and then all I saw was basically the entire internet shitting on it/hating it. But I spoke to my friends, and they all liked it. One absolutely loves the book, and they also all liked the movie once it came out. I still haven't bothered to read/watch it and don't really feel the need to, but it's one of those things where it's a weird divergence of opinion I had never really encountered before, and I'm not sure which one I should "listen" to - basically everyone in the world (certainly seems like that, anyways) who all hate it, or my friends who I actually know?