Giant Bombcast 04/19/2016

Despite extensive reading I still don't get the phoenix down revelation am I just an idiot ?

Phoenix

Down

Pretty Clear the bombcast members don't drink with any kind of restraint.

Did they talk about The Division in this cast? I keep waiting for Jeff to get back to that game and talk about what a mess it is. I really want more media involvement because at this point, the game needs taken down and refunds issued.

@cicatrix1: He seems way into the game still.

I will be extremely disappointed if the next thing Sony works on isn't codenamed Agent Smith

@efesell I haven't heard him mention it since last week when he was saying stuff like "I want to explore the Dark Zone but I don't have any friends who play" when they were discussing time commitments and friend scheduling in multiplayer games. I had the feeling he put it down for a while.

With that said I'm only just getting to the end of the PS4NEO bit at the start of yesterday's cast.

I'm so glad Dan remembered that S3 stands fro Selection for Societal Sanity, not Solid Snake Simulation.

The 2nd to final question got me wondering, does Brad have anything he's actually really into? Everyone else has at least one thing they can name lore minutiae about, but I can't remember anything for Brad... except rare diseases and conditions he's scared of.

Oh man, Jeff is back to holding random things around his home again.

Dans says because everything in MGS makes sense, somehow makes it good.

When you set up to tie up every loose end to shut up fans like Kojima did in MGS 4, OF COURSE it happens like that.

@cementface9 said:

Do you think you could link me to that extension, please?

I know--it's too HQ. I don't need to hear everything fleck of spittle hitting the pop filter! Too raw for me.

EDIT: Is there any chance of you taking this into consideration in future recordings, @brad? No offence meant to Jason.

I laughed so loud at that :D

Very good podcast this week!

No I know but before then he was hardly ever on the show.

That's..not true? He was a regular while actually in office.

I think that anyone who actually trusts Sony to handle this properly and to actually enforce these limitations is naive as fuck. Games already ship broken through Sony's cert process practically every week. Now developers will start developing their games for neo and I have ZERO faith in them to hold developers accountable for shipping garbage versions of their game on vanilla ps4. In fact, I would be actively shocked if that doesn't happen.

I fully expect when Austin is introduced at the PAX East panel for the entire room to chant "NEO! NEO! NEO!" at him.

I'm always weary of sony pushing new tech. they would love to sell you a 4k tv to go with that 4k ps4.

Yesssss Jpop talk with Jeff

HEY GUYS I WONDER WHAT THE PLAYSTATION TRINITY IS GOING TO BE

@regular_kirk: He was a regular on the Bombcast when he was still at the office? Don't know what you're talking about...

I'm with the Bombcrew that I went into Transistor really amped to like it, and I don't even think I had overly high expectations. That game just has several flaws.

• Assigning the skills is designed backwards. You have to pick a skill first, then try it in a variety of slots (primary attack, secondary upgrade to attack, or tertiary passive effect on your character itself). It's so bad. Sometimes you've already picked your 4 primary skills, and you just want to select an empty upgrade slot on your primary abilities and quickly scroll through your 16 skills to see what each of them confers as a secondary upgrade; instead, you have to back out, and individually select each skill 1 at a time, then go and try it in that open upgrade slot to see what weird secondary effect it actually confers. INSTEAD you should just click on any empty slot (primary, secondary, passive) and then bring up the list of available skills to quickly see what any of them do in that slot. It's infuriating.
• The enemy design is just kinda bland, and instead of very many new enemies later in the game, they bring back old enemies with some minor new ability.
• They did a different take on the "Logan Cunningham is mostly the only guy you'll hear" thing, but I just didn't care for it compared to Bastion. The main character, Red, being mute the whole game, is really hard to get any kind of read on other than some comments she leaves on the news updates. The boyfriend character inside the Transistor (Blue?) talks all the time, but you learn absolutely nothing about him or his motivations or what he does, other than he seems like kinda an alright boyfriend. I just had no investment in either character.
• The city is super bland and the districts don't look different enough. Even though they were mostly floating tiles, I preferred the 3 distinct areas in Bastion.

Coming up with a "build" of different ability compositions was fun in theory, but the actual gameplay was kinda frustrating because once you weren't using Turn() and your Turn() was on cooldown, you just kinda ran around like an idiot while it refreshed.

@bisonhero: You know, it's funny you should say that because I played through probably 90% of Transistor without using turn() at all, just because I'm more an action gamer (Bastion) than a strategy gamer. It worked amazingly well until it didn't. I think it was literally one fight from the end boss that I got stuck on, because the enemies regenerated their health and that made them impossible to kill the way I was playing. Up until then I hadn't even died more than once or twice. Friend of mine who beat the game sat down to help me and, upon finding out I hadn't been using turn() the entire game, completely lost his shit and told me how insane I was being. He still brings that up because he has no clue how I was able play that way and get so far.

... Brad doesn't realize he is acting like one of those awful people! Dont want to be one of those? Nothing you can do but let it go.

@davidh219 said:

I can confirm that's super crazy that you completely avoided using it, because you get so many free actions and positioning in Turn(), and also all the enemies constantly swarm you and have much better move speed than you.

@bisonhero: What I lack in raw skill I more than make up for in being able to immediately find the most effective/exploitable builds/loadouts in games that have them =P My first play-through of Mass Effect 1 I managed to pick the right starting class and secondary class and skills to make my character literally invincible on any difficulty. Made getting those achievements real easy. Transistor has some real cheesy shit you can do to avoid using turn. If they hadn't put regenerating enemies in the game I would've been unstoppable!!! lol.

Video game is two words and the singular of "movies" is "movy."

"I need the D" - Jason Oestreicher 2016

As someone who has never really had an interest in baseball but has pretty much always watched wrestling, I just had my god damn mind blown by Jeff explaining that there was actually logic to having Kane attack Pete Rose year after year at Wrestlemania.

My mother's name is Ralph.

That's weird. Did anyone look at those words and not think that's exactly what they meant?

@rasmoss: it took me a bit but it was because i never refered to feathers as down until i had a down pillow.

Just wanted to say the five man cast was great and overall the podcast has hit a really nice groove. Brad has really come around to hosting.

Really enjoyed this weeks episode. Got a good laugh when Dan and Jeff were talking about by Pete Rose is in Wrestling.

@bisonhero: I had very similar feelings about Transistor. As a graphic designer I came into the game appreciating all the art I've seen up until that point but the game itself really failed to resonate with me even on a purely aesthetic level. The areas were too clean without a whole lot of character. The entire game was a great idea that somehow didn't translate as well when put in motion - for me personally. Even the story, which is usually the saving grace of even the worst of smaller indie games, was nothing special at best and full of plot holes at worst.

I feel like Supergiant need to really leave their comfort zone as a studio and try something drastically different. Jonathan Blow might have taken his sweet time but the jump from Braid to The Witness was substantial and the games themselves while sharing similar DNA of being "puzzle" games were wildly different experiences. In comparison Transistor felt like it was limited by it's tech in a way. Like they didn't know how else to make it so they made that same isometric, static environment with really well animation sprites, but since it was no longer an action focused brawler that same aesthetic simply didn't work as well anymore. I haven't seen all that much of Pyre but it does appear to once again be that same style of a static background with really beautifully animated sprites kind of superimposed on top of it with little to no environmental interaction.

@humanity: Yeah, it's like, I know Greg and Amir were both big Diablo 2 fans, and the team has a history having worked on Red Alert, but maybe shake up the perspective and genre moving forward. Transistor kinda just felt like turn based Bastion but all the weapons were nondescript energy blasts.

I kind of hate how everybody at Giant Bomb is talking about Rockstar and yet they won't say what the fuck they are actually talking about.

Got extremely excited hearing Jeff start to talk about sausages, but then Jason cut him off before he says the whole name...

@jonny_anonymous: They are actually talking about how much they need the Benz.

GIMME THE BENZZ

I always assumed it was some weird Japanese translation like Jeff.

Edit: In case it hasn't already been linked to.

Who doesn't like J Pop?

How do so many industry vets fall for the most skinner of skinner boxes?

DO IT

I'm fairly sure this isn't the first time Jeff has talked about tommy heavenly.

Ill never forget rose getting tombstoned goofy hair and all.

Drew always seems to manage to slip in something hilarious into a conversation that no one else ever notices.

I feel like not enough people in the comments are acknowledging how great Hakimoni Miso is.