Giant Bombcast 03/25/2014

Can the person who sent that trojan email to end all emails please stand up?! That was amazing, thank you! Still laughing...

A rape victim has a bomb shoved up either her vagina or anus. I am completely with Jeff there that something like that crosses the line into crass storytelling.

@invaderskooj: Hot opinions

More accurately a female prisoner is tortured in a variety of ways in order to make her give up vital information. Some of the methods are most probably rape, although everything you have to go on are vague noises from audio recordings. While unconscious they open her up and implant a bomb into her abdomen, having to remove some internal organs to make room for the bomb, sealing her fate one way or the other. At this point the main antagonist says "and now the second one, where no one will find it" and you hear generally fleshy noises. It's not like the main bad guy says "spread 'em buttercups" and she moans in some exaggerated way. It's graphic, and it's dark, but I don't think it's "crass." Ironically a lot of this is somewhat vague and your imagination does a lot of the work for you.

If anything the way all these events are portrayed in the form of a crackly audio recordings instead of some overly gratuitous cutscene is extremely clever, showing that Kojima is indeed very smart when it comes to presenting ideas in novel and impactful ways. It's all very uncomfortable but it's supposed to be, because torture is not a very comforting idea. I feel like once again the bomb crew threw out some terms like "crass" or "juvenile" and now everyone is hanging onto that opinion like it's gospel. Much like Tomb Raider was the king of narrative dissonance, despite countless games having the exact same issues before it.

Ugh I don't know that I can listen to you guys talk about Metal Gear Solid anymore. How could you forget about that insane epilogue in MGS4? Anyways love the show and I hope it stays informative and hilarious. E-mails are getting extra special as of late.

That's great for you. It doesn't change the fact that it was at least in my opinion good storytelling. It sets up a dark and heavy tone for the Phantom Pain. Would I have prefered if Paz was still around? Of course. Did the things that happen to her make me motivated to take out Skull Face... yeah...

Jeff says pretty much exactly what I've been thinking about Kojima for a while. Props.

Speaking as someone who has bought each Metal Gear Solid game multiple times over... you are out of your mind if you think MGS has writing that's better than 99.9% of games. It is incredibly poorly written, poorly paced, and obsessed with referencing older media. It's one of the reasons why I enjoy the series, but don't mistake what he does for anything close to a well-written piece of entertainment.

Metal Gear is hard to evaluate overall, because Kojima is one of the extremely rare auteurs in video gaming. Say what you will about the game's scripts (and I agree, there are many, many times when I lose all patience with them, when the nonsense-to-quality ratio gets too bad), but they are hugely ambitious stories. Kojima's writing, his sense of humor, his sense of dramatics are all highly questionable, and the needle swings wildly from hit to miss throughout his games. There's also the problem of repetition in his ideas, accusations of sexism etc etc.

But at the end of the day, he tells stories that feel very different to what you usually get. In these risk adverse times, we need more barely sane nutjobs like Kojima, SUDA 51, SWERY etc etc. And I say this as someone who has no great love for the Metal Gear series. I don't consider them very good games in terms of their gameplay, and their stories are hit and miss. But the one thing I will say for them is that they aren't boring, and they always have lots of really interesting ideas buried in them.

Personally, I was more of a fan of Metal Gear Rising. It was a good game in its own right (due to Platinum being involved), the spin off nature allowed to sideline most of the unwieldy lore of the Metal Gear series, but that still left plenty of interesting subject matter to be discussed. It wasn't perfect, but it was the most satisfying Metal Gear package that I've experienced.

@deadpanjazman: I thought of that too. I may not have remembered David Hayter not doing the voice or I simply didn't notice at the time. I was yelling at my computer as I listened to this, "At the end of MGS3! AT THE END OF MGS3! AT THE END OF MGS3!

That stand-wiper is doing something wrong. Dry poop flakes don't fall to the ground. The fuck. You poop, and it's all moist, and you wipe until there's no more poop left. As someone with white bathroom floors, I can confirm there is no poop on the ground post stand-wipe. I don't know what that guy is doing.

I think the difference between 'sexyness' in something like fighting games or music videos to that in metal gear, is that metal gear has the patented creepiness that Kojima seems to excel at.

Even in MGS3 (a game I love) you feel like a creep every time you're talking to EVA. Yes she's a femme fatale character, but its a million miles away from the girls in James Bond. Its all about tone. Even though the dating in say persona is much creepier in concept, it feels fine.

Its not WHAT Kojima is doing necessarily, its HOW he does it and how its framed. Its the difference between Silence of the Lambs and Hostel.

Jesus... they really just have no clue what they're talking about with regards to the older inFamous games. But then, hey, to the surprise of nobody. Really wish they had timestamps so I could skip ahead to a section where they're not talking about a franchise I'm invested in; at least if they're getting things wrong about games I don't know about I can live in ignorance and just go with the flow.

As a fellow stand-wiper, seriously, what the fuck. He must be talking about dried shit that was already on his asshole or something, in which case he's got way bigger problems.

As someone who knows his poop,

jeff gerstman : trust the government i Love Obama

Stand-wipers unite. I was horrified when I heard that slob's story.

What the fuck?! Stand wiping is a thing?

It is a raging debate, apparently.

http://deadspin.com/5424415/sitters-vs-standers--the-great-wipe-hope/all

Let's not make this the new "Australia beef" thing, though.

The fact that inFAMOUS made the PS4 sales double in the UK while Titanfall barely moved units, made me doubt the statement that Titanfall outsold inFAMOUS by 2 to 1.

No Premium version of this episode?