Giant Bombcast 02-14-2012

@GioVANNI said:

@Rmack said:

I am....OFFENDED at Jeff's taste in fries!

Dude, In-N-Out fries suck.

Oh, I wasn't talking about that (I wouldn't know as I'm on the East Coast), I just couldn't believe he didn't like Five Guys fries but enjoyed Wendy's fries. WHAAAAA?

@Humanity said:

I enjoyed how Ryan quieted the room down to mention how that lead art designer for Fallout 3 passed away and within a breaths pause Patrick going WANNA TALK ABOUT THAT KICKSTARTER THING????

Great segue there.

Agreed.

@TeflonBilly said:

Imagine if they had a machine where they hooked Brad and Patrick up to each other where Brad's sleepy suaveness and Pat's spazzy manicness fed eachother and evened out giving us a more invigorated Brad and a less overbearing Patrick.

Hell, have the engineers build a teleporter and give us some kind of The Fly amalgation Bradrick creature, built for Bombcasts.

FUND IT!

KICKSTARTER

If you watch the kickstarter video it's implied ron gilbert is directly involved. Sorry guys you totally wiffed that one xD

Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't Valve hired the original creators of DotA to work on DOTA 2? Just curious.

@thedavehooker: Not too sure myself but during the discussion, the guys mention the creators are working on League of Legends while the Dota 2 guy was some kind of maintenance dude.

@Rmack said:

@GioVANNI said:

@Rmack said:

I am....OFFENDED at Jeff's taste in fries!

Dude, In-N-Out fries suck.

Oh, I wasn't talking about that (I wouldn't know as I'm on the East Coast), I just couldn't believe he didn't like Five Guys fries but enjoyed Wendy's fries. WHAAAAA?

Wendy's fries are pretty good. In N Outs problem is they are too damn small. But you should also ask for them well done, world of difference.

@Brackynews: I'm blown away that the only one in Canada is in little ol' Saskatoon. That's cool I guess.

Isn't Catherine a dumbed down dating sim "at that point"(when you cut out the bullshit puzzles)? Or is it maybe more of a visual novel? I haven't played the game yet.

Edit: Also, that obsession with Nolan North is something that's unique to Giant Bomb. I could name several other VOs that are just as prolific and well-known.

@paulunga said:

Isn't Catherine a dumbed down dating sim "at that point"(when you cut out the bullshit puzzles)? Or is it maybe more of a visual novel? I haven't played the game yet.

Ehh.....Calling Catherine a dating sim seems a little shortsighted to me. You're not trying to "woo" either Catherine, neither in the story nor in the gameplay. You don't fill their "heart meters" or whatever-- you're dealing with the implications of Vincent's action throughout pretty much the entire game.

It would probably somewhere inbetween a visual novel and a adventure game without the puzzle sections. That being said, fcuk that noise, the puzzle sections were the best part of Catherine.

Don't have Patrick on for a while. He seems like a narcissistic little prick. Great show otherwise as always and a healthy length too.

Imagine if they had a machine where they hooked Brad and Patrick up to each other where Brad's sleepy suaveness and Pat's spazzy manicness fed eachother and evened out giving us a more invigorated Brad and a less overbearing Patrick.

Hell, have the engineers build a teleporter and give us some kind of The Fly amalgation Bradrick creature, built for Bombcasts.

FUND IT!

I'm fairly sure Call of Duty 2 was the first game to have a 'Directional Damage Indicator', also the first CoD with Regenerating Health and the perhaps the first game with the little 'Hit Indicator' on the crosshair when you hit a guy.

CoD2 was a goddamn amazing game.

EDIT: Do correct me if any of this is wrong, Halo may have done a lot of this stuff first, now that I think about it some more. Still a great game.

@Thompson820 said:

I'm fairly sure Call of Duty 2 was the first game to have a 'Directional Damage Indicator', also the first CoD with Regenerating Health and the perhaps the first game with the little 'Hit Indicator' on the crosshair when you hit a guy.

CoD2 was a goddamn amazing game.

EDIT: Do correct me if any of this is wrong, Halo may have done a lot of this stuff first, now that I think about it some more. Still a great game.

Counter Strike 1.5(and 1.6) had directional damage indicator also Quake 3 you could have your crosshair flash when you hit someone.

What was the name of the Iphone rhythm game they talked about?

Edit: Also, that obsession with Nolan North is something that's unique to Giant Bomb. I could name several other VOs that are just as prolific and well-known.

@Shun_Akiyama: Yuri Lowenthal, Troy Baker, Johnny Yong Bosch

@Shun_Akiyama: Yuri Lowenthal, Troy Baker, Johnny Yong Bosch

@Shun_Akiyama said:

@Vasta_Narada said:

@Shun_Akiyama: Yuri Lowenthal, Troy Baker, Johnny Yong Bosch

who are the guys beside troy baker?

Wikipedia is your friend. I'd list every videogame Yuri's done but I'm afraid I'd break the page. You might know him as Yosuke from Persona 4 or the Prince of Persia. He was also mentioned by Nolan North in his Giant Bomb interview.

Two other ones I'd like to mention are Steven Blum and Jennifer Hale.

@TheHBK said:

@thedavehooker: Not too sure myself but during the discussion, the guys mention the creators are working on League of Legends while the Dota 2 guy was some kind of maintenance dude.

Actually, Valve hired both Eul (The original creator of DotA) and Iceforg (The last maintainer of DotA Allstars). The guy(s) working at RIOT are neither the creators nor the last ones working on it.

GB, come on.

@pyromagnestir said:

The lack of love for Metroid Prime 2 saddens me. I think it might be a better game than Prime (outside of adding ammo for the guns and less impactful world design artistically speaking), but the surprise and nostalgia that came with Prime had worn off so it was slightly well less received and is therefore the least recognized Prime game. This from someone who had never played a Metroid game prior to Prime.

While Jeff's irrational dislike of the whole Prime series is uncommon, yeah, despite Metroid Prime being a pretty big deal among critics, they kinda stopped caring for Prime 2 and Prime 3. I was surprised to even hear somebody on the podcast defend Prime 3 (was it Patrick? I've already forgotten).

I'm not really with you on Prime 2 being better in any particular way. I think Prime 3 had the best "story"/data logs, followed by Prime 2, followed by Prime 1. Prime 1 had the best world design, then Prime 3, then Prime 2 (I only really like Sanctuary, because it was this completely rad looking technofortress thing). I do think Prime 2 had the best suits (Dark Suit and Light Suit had cool original designs), and had the best visors (the Dark Visor was lame, but the Echo Visor is the coolest thing ever. I wish I could personally email whoever came up with the Echo Visor visual effect because it's just that good).

I honestly wonder if Nintendo didn't do as much of a promotion campaign for the 2nd and 3rd games, and that skewed reviewers into thinking Nintendo was quietly slipping them out and that they weren't significantly "proud" of the followups compared to the first Prime. It's just really weird to see very little of the Prime trilogy get any recognition after the first one, yet most other recent trilogies in gaming (Halo, Uncharted, Killzone, Modern Warfare, Gears of War) peak in the 2nd or 3rd game. I guess lack of multiplayer certainly didn't help.

I guess the closest comparison to the Prime trilogy is Resistance, in that both are kind of underappreciated trilogies that people gradually forgot about after the first game.

@TheHT said:

Pariah stands out in my mind as one of the worst games I've ever played.

Indeed. It was completely incoherent.

The guns were alright for what they were trying to be. But the game was ripping off Half-Life, and failing so bad at it. They gave ridiculously few details on the setting and world, not to make you really pay attention to dialogue that would fill you in (none of the dialogue fills you in), but just so they could pull plot twists out of their ass. Similar to Half-Life 2, the whole game is one big errand to get to a particular place (a prison), except you get to the prison right in the middle of this massive prison break/riot that goes completely unexplained and I guess must be a coincidence. Then the final level is a massive ripoff of the Citadel from Half-Life 2 (almost exactly the same visually), where you're suddenly in the alien stronghold with only one super overpowered weapon, and you waste all of the enemies immediately. Then there's a bullshit ending.

@BisonHero: I think what Prime 2 did best was game design. Difficulty was even and challenging throughout, unlike Prime where it spiked at the bossfights and most everything else was a cakewalk once you got the charge beam (I only died once outside of a boss fight in Prime and that was because I missed a save station then stumbled into a mini boss fight and was playing sloppily because I was looking to save and quit), while 3 boiled down to shoot everything a lot, taking away the puzzle-y elements of combat and while it could be tough it felt like it was due to damage vs health sliders and not actual design.

And it also made the best use of the morph ball, in Prime and 3 the so called morph ball "puzzles" (which also seemed to be radically reduced in number in 3 as part of the hole lets streamline this thing initiative) were little more than mazes with only one lane where you would go the one direction you could then blow something up or bomb jump or boost jump to get around an obstacle until you came out the other side. 2 however made these sequences more puzzle like, including having a couple of bossfights that were fought entirely in morph ball form.

I had a couple other small points as I played through it that don't occur to me now, except for adding a color scheme to the scanner in 2 after having everything be orange in Prime, but that pretty much sums up my argument I think. Prime was great, but since I had no Metroid nostalgia it didn't hit me quite as hard as it would someone who'd been wanting a new Metroid game. 2 hit me harder because it adjusted almost all the issues I'd had with 1, and 3 was very streamlined (less powerups, one gun that just became progressively stronger and stronger rather than 3 with varying strengths and weaknesses, shorter overall, fewer morphball sequences, segmented and linear level design), not to the point that it didn't feel like a Prime game, but more so than I would've liked. I also liked 2's story more but hey...

Oh and it was Patrick who defended 3. But they all dismissed 2.

@pyromagnestir: Another thing I think Prime 2 handled really well was the "safe zone" mechanic when you were in the Dark World. The Dark World itself was unfortunately kind of dull and looked pretty similar no matter what region of the world you were in, but having to stick to the safe zones was implemented quite well, I thought. As the game progresses, you don't have to rely on them as heavily, but even with the final suit, the safe zones give you free health, so they're worth walking through occasionally.

Prime 3 was a bit of a bummer in how the beams you get just stacked permanently, as well as the morph ball stuff you mentioned, and the fact that while Samus' ship was cool, it could also only be used in very predefined areas (though it was really fun to bombard enemies in the handful of open areas where that was possible). But I think they added talking NPCs in an inoffensive way, and I thought it was interesting that each planet was its own sort of scenario, instead of just being an abandoned wasteland you had to explore like in Prime 1 and 2. And by comparison, Metroid: Other M handled talking NPCs and the morph ball way, WAY worse.

@BisonHero: Yeah the biggest flaw with Prime 2, I think, was that the light world, dark world split just couldn't compete visually with the classic snow world, lava world, jungle world, desert industrial world split that 1 had and 3 rehashed a little (the snow world particularly) while adding the weird alien pod worlds and a sky world. The only visually interesting place in 2 was the techno place you mentioned, and that was the last one you went to I think, so some people might've quite without having seen it. Other than that in 2 I remember swamp, and a general nature intruding on architecture and technology thing.

Also having a light world/ dark world motif at all nowadays seems to strike some people as lazy and so gets dismissed.

The NPC's being added in 3 were nicely done. And it did give that game a different vibe, less of an isolated mystery solving thing more you're a badass being called in to do bad ass stuff. But also so few (that I can think of off hand anyway) games try for the isolation that the first Prime games nailed so perfectly. I can think of team Ico, Bioshock sort of.. minus the people chatting at you in your earpiece the whole time, ditto Portal. It was refreshing. Adding that element just made the game feel more typical. But since they did it to change up from the first 2 and because it was done well I liked it.

Jeff just has no fucking taste.

Smart, sensible guy, no taste.

@SaturdayNightSpecials said:

Jeff just has no fucking taste.

Smart, sensible guy, no taste.

Just because he doesn't enjoy the EXACT same things as you doesn't instantly mean he has no taste.

Internet at its finest!

@pwnmachine said:

@SaturdayNightSpecials said:

Jeff just has no fucking taste.

Smart, sensible guy, no taste.

Just because he doesn't enjoy the EXACT same things as you doesn't instantly mean he has no taste.

Internet at its finest!

Do you agree that there is such a thing as no taste, then? If so, at what point do you draw the line? Expressing a disinterest or even dislike in a series that's both critically acclaimed and beloved by virtually anyone who's played it might be a good starting point. I think it's a much finer gradient than "sitting in your trailer, drinking Bud Light while watching Larry the Cable Guy".

I don't agree with SNS' statement but I think that's still a valid opinion and the way it was formulated let's me think it's not based on this podcast alone.

@paulunga said:

@pwnmachine said:

@SaturdayNightSpecials said:

Jeff just has no fucking taste.

Smart, sensible guy, no taste.

Just because he doesn't enjoy the EXACT same things as you doesn't instantly mean he has no taste.

Internet at its finest!

Do you agree that there is such a thing as no taste, then? If so, at what point do you draw the line? Expressing a disinterest or even dislike in a series that's both critically acclaimed and beloved by virtually anyone who's played it might be a good starting point. I think it's a much finer gradient than "sitting in your trailer, drinking Bud Light while watching Larry the Cable Guy".

I don't agree with SNS' statement but I think that's still a valid opinion and the way it was formulated let's me think it's not based on this podcast alone.

If you are going to start grading some objective sense of 'taste' or sourcing it from popular opinion, videogames probably wouldn't even be up for discussion period. It goes down a real dark path. Even questioning opinions on harmless entertainment is starting on that path.

@pwnmachine: Okay, yeah, I was mostly just raging because I strongly disagree(d) with him. I'll cop to that.

But when I most often either agree with him or see where he's coming from on any game or gaming-related topic, and then he has this active distaste of some of my favorite games ever - Majora's Mask, Metroid Prime, SSX, Demon's Souls - it's really really baffling.

great podcast as always

5 million copies of minecraft have been sold now. if they were all alpha copies, the revenue would be about $60 million and if they were final version copies, the revenue would be about $130 million.

so its somewhere in between there, id say notch/Mojang AB could rattle out the 13-20 mill needed to fund a psychonauts 2, if they really wanted to.

i doubt they've spent enough money to not have 20 mill :D

They rip on the Vita so much, but the 3DS launched with total crap, the online store came out months later, they bitch about how they don't want console games on portables when you get Mario Kart 7, Super Mario 3D Land, Ocarina of Time, etc, most DS games don't use the touch screen well at all anyway...

@BenderUnit22: They're not really playing favourites, though. They'll stop ripping on when it starts having some must have games. They're only starting to respect the 3DS due to mostly downloadable games like Pushmo, Mighty Switch Force, and Sakura Samurai. The GB guys seemed to like Super Mario 3D Land, but its design differs significantly from the way console Mario games have been lately. By comparison, Uncharted on the Vita is designed very similarly to its console counterparts.

@MisterMouse said:

I have tried all three of those burger places... this is the order of the taste and quality of the burgers...

1. In-N-Out

2. Five Guys

3. Dick's

Why do they all sound so filthy?

@Aas said:

@MisterMouse said:

I have tried all three of those burger places... this is the order of the taste and quality of the burgers...

1. In-N-Out

2. Five Guys

3. Dick's

Why do they all sound so filthy?

This is amazing. Start formulating your conspiracy theories now.

@Aas said:

@MisterMouse said:

I have tried all three of those burger places... this is the order of the taste and quality of the burgers...

1. In-N-Out

2. Five Guys

3. Dick's

Why do they all sound so filthy?

This is amazing. Start formulating your conspiracy theories now.

@Aas said:

@MisterMouse said:

I have tried all three of those burger places... this is the order of the taste and quality of the burgers...

1. In-N-Out

2. Five Guys

3. Dick's

Why do they all sound so filthy?

They all like putting their meat in warm buns.

@selbie said:

@Aas said:

@MisterMouse said:

I have tried all three of those burger places... this is the order of the taste and quality of the burgers...

1. In-N-Out

2. Five Guys

3. Dick's

Why do they all sound so filthy?

They all like putting their meat in warm buns.

Gotta love being the meat in the sandwich

@InfamousBIG said:

@Aas said:

@MisterMouse said:

I have tried all three of those burger places... this is the order of the taste and quality of the burgers...

1. In-N-Out

2. Five Guys

3. Dick's

Why do they all sound so filthy?

This is amazing. Start formulating your conspiracy theories now.

It's just a distraction before the attack from Soviet Norway, they are coming!

@MisterMouse said:

I have tried all three of those burger places... this is the order of the taste and quality of the burgers...

1. In-N-Out

2. Five Guys

3. Dick's

Why do they all sound so filthy?

Wait till they merge into a chain called Five Guys Dick's In-N-Out. That's a mouthfull.

@FirebirdINF said:

@MisterMouse said:

I have tried all three of those burger places... this is the order of the taste and quality of the burgers...

1. In-N-Out

2. Five Guys

3. Dick's

Why do they all sound so filthy?

Wait till they merge into a chain called Five Guys Dick's In-N-Out. That's a mouthfull.

Five Dick's In-N-Out Guys.

@FirebirdINF said:

@MisterMouse said:

I have tried all three of those burger places... this is the order of the taste and quality of the burgers...

1. In-N-Out

2. Five Guys

3. Dick's

Why do they all sound so filthy?

Wait till they merge into a chain called Five Guys Dick's In-N-Out. That's a mouthfull.

And this is where Vinny says something about being a room with so many guys on the Bombcast can lead to a mouthful... huh huh?