Giant Bombcast 03/29/2016

Dear @drewbert, please, no more NZ accent. You made me look like an insane person as I burst into laughter while jogging on a public trail. Literally could not coordinate my feet for a few seconds. Thanks a lot.

@legendarychopchop: See here.

I listened to the Mario discussion carefully, and I'm pretty confident in saying that Dan literally has no argument for why Mario 3D World doesn't count as a main Mario game. Even Jeff's opinion on Majora's Mask's validity in the Zelda series has more substance.

Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders was amazing, and probably my favorite adventure game of all time. It was weird and complex and you had to control 4 different characters on Earth and Mars, and 2 of those characters are a pair of young college women who built a spaceship out of a van.

There's a sequence where you make a space suit for Zak out of a fishbowl, duct tape, and a diving suit.

You could commune with a two-headed squirrel, a yak, and a goldfish using a crystal.

Thanks to Jeff for reminding me of that crazy thing!

Seems like everyone came to their senses with VR, though I'm curious to see the Vive coverage. I sort of echo Dan's feelings about it in that it's cool right now but I'm definitely waiting till Gen 2 or even later until there's some real killer app for the thing and the price becomes reasonable.

I think they were all expecting better games, plain and simple. The tech demo and minigames over the years were cool novelties and had a lot of unrealized potential which has remained just as unrealized now that the thing is actually out. The Rift doesn't have single killer app to it's name and the Vive probably won't either, and even though roomscale + motion controllers add a lot to the experience it still isn't enough for 90% of even established gamers to drop the absurd asking price. People weren't just joking when they said Half-Life 3 needs to be a VR compatible title, the possibility of this all being a flop is still real (if unlikely) but a megaton like that would make a ton of sales. We'll see where everything stands come Christmas time and all 3 are out in the wild.

I'm guessing there's nobody queuing for hard missions on The Division because it's not worth it, at level 30 when you start rerunning old stuff for loot they're so easy you don't need a team and they don't award anything you'd care about anymore unless it's a daily. At levels before that you'd have to find someone exactly in your level bracket since hard missions scale with the player level and don't have a recommended level, probably a pretty small pool.

Challenge difficulty, now that's a different deal. Everybody is guaranteed to be in your level 30 bracket, the rewards are worth it and the difficulty is such that you should really play with 4 people at all times.

For someone who doesn't give a shit, Jeff sure loves to tell people that the games he doesn't like are all terrible.

if you enjoy playing dota 2 every day for years on end or the latest call of duty or assassin's creed each year, i don't see why it's so crazy that someone would enjoy a new mario and zelda every few years even if it doesn't dramatically change the face of gaming.

No talk about Killer Instinct season 3?

The end of the podcast uses the pause theme instead of the bombcast theme. Why? I feel this isn't the first time Brad does this.

I think the difference there is that he is professional games critic/reviewer.
As opposed to a random person with a twitter account.

I'm not sure of the system to system limitations for Dark Souls 3 online, but it is very much enabled. Lots of PvP happening on Twitch.

LackingSaint animated incoming!

You just described every person on the internet ever.

Hunked

For

Life.

yay 141th!

@kdr_11k: I do the daily hard missions every day on hard and challenging and it never takes more than 20 seconds to randomly matchmake- I'm on PS4. Brad just ran into some weird bug or something, there are plenty of people playing.

I've watched a few streams of the JP version and it's definitely online enabled. Outside every boss room is littered with summoning signatures.

As far as everyone always looking at their phone, I hate that going on now. I can be the same way and I really fight it and like that. I've also started meditating, following Dan's reccomendation. Doesn't have to be more than like 10 minutes a day to make a good difference for you.

Anytime Brad starts to sound like a sugar-charged chihuahua, it's pretty certain he's got his wires crossed.

Amazing what people can find out to be able to play a game early and in their own language.... I bet some increased XBONE sales were seen during this time frame

The segment is called "News" not "facts"

@roy42: I mean isn't it obvious that 3D World/Land is not a traditional 3D Mario game

When Super Mario 64 launched everything about it was different from its predecessors Same goes for Sunshine and the Galaxy games 3D mario in general has always been its own separate thing form the 2D games.

Its one of the main reasons why people did not find 3D world as memorable Galaxy and 64 were especially mind blowing and one of the best games of all time regardless of What Jeff and Brad might think May i remind everybody that Brad played a total of 3 missions of the first galaxy that is literally maybe less than 2% of the game. Jeff in general seems to hate every single good Nintendo game so no surprise here.

Even so Nintendo is trying to mold 2D and 3D Mario together and it really seems to be a bad decision on their part. This is one of the main reason Mario has become stale since every single game they have released was basically 2D mario in a time were the new super Mario bros games have been milked to death. If anything this is the opposite of what Nintendo should do right now.

Also there's a certain entertainment value given the whole "Jeff hates everything" meme.

Drew's comment on abs. Best.

Yoshi's Island definitely has the best looking Koopas in all of Nintendo games. Oh and Mario Sunshine and 64 play the most similarly of any of the 3D Mario games. While I adore Galaxy and Galaxy 2 (3D Land & World played similarly), it was disappointing that the games were slower, floater, and less responsive than the first two games. Luckily the post-Sunshine games are far superior for just having drastically better designed and more fun levels.

Also Croc is dogshit.

There's been 4 to 5 "3D" mario games (however you want to count 3D World) in 20 years, how can that be played out? There weren't any complaints about the quality dropping off so I don't understand why there couldn't be another great 3D Mario game.

I agree with some of the above that the Nintendo discussions are pretty frustrating. For me it comes to Jeff and Brad's complaints or desires being so nebulous.

wanted to add that though i know they were complaining about the quality of the image on their machines with things like PJC dont forget all the settings were set to mids and lows, though i dont say that to champion VR cuz im still not convinced

Here's the flappy bird mario video. Note that he does indeed do it by hand.

Ketchup and eggs OTP

Drew: "Are you staying hydrated?"

Dan: "I drink a lot of soda..."

That's an 'Oh, Dan' answer for the books.

My friends and I in college would always come up with powers similar to the seeing Wikipedia entries thing. We called them practical powers, and they'd usually be takes on "normal" super powers but with incredibly limiting drawbacks. Unfortunately I can't remember many off the top of my head right now. The only ones that come to mind was one a friend came up with that I thought was stupid: being able to know what the teacher was going to write on the board before they did it. Being able to microwave something with just your hands was another. But it wouldn't be heat from your hands anytime you wanted or something like that. Literally just microwaving a food object.

Wow my gaming desires are so different than people here. I am all about immersion and story...gameplay is secondary. Must be why I hate platforming games and was aghast that Mario maker was game of the year.

"Can you put Bernard in a bikini and make him show it?" Oh god Jeff don't do this to me...my stomach! Oh lord...man we really should sit you down with some actually bad Japanese echi games and have you play them...

I came here to make sure everybody noticed this as well.

Not to be "that guy," but Jeff could probably hit as high as 4.5 GHz on his 2500K with decent temps with nothing more than a $20 Hyper 212 Evo air cooler. I wonder what his temps are now with only the stock cooler.

An easy RAM upgrade can actually make quite a difference in some games as well.

Just to weigh in on the Hyrule Warriors Legends thing: I haven't gone so far as to get a WiiU yet, and so I ended up buying HWL for my old 3DS. Yes, the framerate is sub 30 (maybe around 25 or so), the graphics is bad compared to the WiiU version and there are fewer enemies on screen at one time.
Still I am having a great time. The game is fun, and I have quickly gone past noticing the graphics and framerate. Unplayable? I don't think so at least.

If Brad really wants the dirt, instead of seeing the last wiki page a person was at, how about a power that allows one to see the last private browser tab a person had open? *gag*

For me, Mario 64 still hasn't been surpassed. Its all about the large levels and exploration. The Galaxy games were small and linear feeling. They were fun to play, but running around trying to find hidden stars in 64 is still the best.

@devildoll: Thank god someone here is a voice of reason. I was tearing my hair out listening to their VR discussion. The processor will make almost no difference as you aren't taxing it any more than with standard games, if you are playing the games fine outside of VR, you can play them fine inside of it. The GPU is a much more limiting factor due to the increased resolution over what most people run at.

They seem to be in this mindset that processors performance increases generation over generation in the same way graphics cards do, and that hasn't been true for a very long time.

Their is 100% something else holding him back, like you said he is running an insider build of Windows, like seriously how can you not expect to have problems at that point?

@blackspur: Yeah, he confirmed on the podcast after this one, that something on his machine was eating 80% cpu constantly, so an OS wipe and a bios reset made the game run better.

"ZENY YOUNGMAN"

#jeffgerstmanisstillathreat