Giant Bombcast 05/06/2014

I listen to quick looks and old premium stuffs as I'm falling asleep.

Drew said what I was thinking HL3, Valve doesn't need E3 but it would be cool!

@hollitz: Yes, if I can't sleep sometimes I will put up an old GB stream until I can fall asleep. Last night in fact I watched the old SNES stream featuring Shaq-Fu and Uniracers.

Also I don't believe ANYTHING they read in the emails.

I'm glad Jeff has finally found the podcast music. It's sent me back to a simpler time.

Descent gave me nightmares as a kid, where I was trapped in a maze-like cave while a clock counted down to my doom. It was pretty awesome. I never invert my controls, though.

Yup, I have really good memories of that franchise. I played it when I was so young that I only remember bits of it, but I remember having a great time at least! Wouldn't be against a reboot of that franchise, actually.

Great bombcast. Amazing e-mail from "Dave from Chicago", wish that through the power of teleportation technology we could have heard that from him in person, it would have been incredible.

@amyggen: descent was the first game demo i ever downloaded. two hoursish for 6mb??? aww jeah...

I loved Child of light, played it on hard and it was a good challenge but not annoyingly difficult. Highly recommended. story, combat, and art are all great but the writing is a bit annoying.

Where's my small businessman?

http://www.amazon.com/TV-Games-Deluxe-Golden-Tee/dp/B004S572PE/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1399474714&sr=8-1&keywords=golden+tee+golf

There is a home version of Golden Tee with a TRACKBALL!

I feel like its time to stop reading all the "Fuck place X, it sucks." mails. It's like watching westerns. It's entertaining, but it's basically the same thing over and over again. People with crazy jobs are way more interesting. And the occasional game relevant question is not bad either.

Excellent episode. I also listen to the bombcast every night to drift off to sleep. I download 7 old episodes each week to my phone and play them through my speaker pillow. Those sultry tones being sent directly to my ears really help me relax. Although sometimes they help me disturb the family household with major cases of the lols

I could listen to Vinny talk about Animal Crossing all day.

Mmmm....news music

I agree with Dave from Chicago. Fuck Colorado #GFB

I don't always agree with Jeff, but, yeah. Unreal Tournament III was a good game. I really prefer it over UT2k3/4 specifically for it not going with all that vehicle crap. The only interesting vehicle level in UT2k4 was that space ship one, but even that didn't hold up when playing it more than one time.

That said, I do love full on vehicular combat games like Necrodome, DeathDrome and Interstate 76, but really, the way UT implemented vehicles wasn't fun. Battlefield does an alright job with it though.

I'd say UT3 did have a decent mod community though, certainly not to the degree that UT99 had, but there were quite a few good user made maps and mutations, and even PS3 users could access a lot of them. Just like Jeff I really love playing on servers that have a ridiculously large playlist of user maps I've never seen before. Fuck "THIS ONE MAP 24/7" servers, which I guess was popularized by Counter-Strike. I don't want to memorize map layouts, spawn points and shit, I want to see new and interesting maps on every map change, and do my best with the game's base mechanics in unfamiliar territory.

Basically, fuck DOTA.

Fake/awful beef emails are still terrible, so I'm still going to supplement the Bombcast with actual entertaining e-mails.

Shelby, please write a response email to your ex at bombcast@giantbomb.com. I want the Bombcast to become the Craigslist Missed Connections of video games.

With all due respect to whatever English degree Brad has, if Jeffrey Yohalem graduated from Yale with a degree in English lit, and this man is a creative writer by profession and also chose to write a game entirely in verse, I'd guess that he probably takes poetry a little more seriously than whatever Brad half-remembers about poetry from his time in university like a decade ago. So I dunno, I'm gonna defer to that guy, and assume Brad is just too much of a rube to "get" the writing in Child of Light.

Granted, that means the vast majority of players are too much of a rube to appreciate Child of Light's poetry, since there are tons of lines that are not just simple rhyming couplets.

For that guy who talked about his company overcharging stuff for defense: FUCK YOUR COMPANY!

Yeah, I'd be all for that. I wonder if Interplay has the capability to do that though, seems like they only have one studio these days, and even their effort to update the original three Descent games for modern systems takes awfully long (not to mention that Wii port that just vanished after being announced like 4 years ago). I have vague memories of dreaming nightmares about those red spider robots that exploded into several smaller robots when destroyed.

Hey Brad,

I too thought successful FTL runs ultimately came down to RNG, but the skill ceiling is actually insane on that game.

For example: there's a twitch streamer did normal difficulty with all ships just after the expansion came out. How did he do? 28 victories, 0 losses. He won with with every single ship in order on his first attempt at trying to do so.

That's why they had to patch in a hard mode! Believe it or not hard no-pause is how many streamers play the game. Ridiculous!

Wooooo I emailed them to ask for the email music again and they put it in! I'm so happy!

Kevin Spacey did not look good at all imo, he looked better texture-wise, but practically no facial animation and completely dead eyes.

I wish the emails were more game related.

Wait, didn't the guy who wrote Child of Light also write the generally terrible story of Far Cry 3?

@arbitrarywater said:

I mean, yes, but I still imagine that Brad barely remembers what he's talking about with regards to poetry, since it was neither his focus in school nor is it something he has ever used since graduating. I'm willing to bet that since it was his fucking job, Yohalem probably brushed up a little bit on poetry before starting to write the script for Child of Light.

I mean, if Gamasutra or Polygon or somebody want to get on some guest writer with some real ass poetry credentials to criticise Child of Light, I'm all for it, but Brad is not that guy. Neither am I, but for what it's worth, I think the poetic nature of the dialogue in Child of Light came out just fine.

Damn, i wrote an email saying denver loves dave lang, fuck boulder, and how they are dirty hippies, but dave lang beat me to it!

@kvfinn said:

Yeah, if you pause and micromanage properly, you can wring all sorts of advantages out of the gameplay in that game.

No offense, but I feel like nobody on the GB staff really "gets" FTL, and they just think it's too hard and there's nothing they can do to improve (categorically false). Credit to Alex for at least being a big fan, though apparently from the start he somehow picked up the habit of never pausing, so it doesn't surprise me that he has beat the game exactly once after dozens and dozens of hours. That's like playing Baldur's Gate (as a newcomer to the series) entirely in real time, and being surprised that you get your ass handed to you pretty constantly.

I think what Vinny said during the Quick Look was spot on. You don't need to have master's degree or be a poet laureate to evaluate if a specific style of writing is done well or not. It either works for you, or it doesn't.

Yeah, I'm all for that as well, in that if you want to get purely into whether you think it sounds nice and suits the mood of the scene, anyone is free to judge it on those merits. But if you want to judge the verse on its technical qualities (which Brad clearly does in the Quick Look because he is a man of science and facts, even when talking about poetry), there are people FAR better equipped than him to do so.

Like I said, as a layman who has not studied poetry since I was 14 in a high school English class, I like the writing in Child of Light, and anybody else is free to have their own gut reaction to it. If we want to get into more serious, higher level discussion of the game's poetic qualities, I do not value Brad's opinion in that arena.

Good to know regional beef wars are still going strong in Emails.

1:26:56

"Also, fuck psychiatrists."

Yo, dissing on psychiatrists?! I'm hoping to become a clinical psychologist, so that's a bit different (just can't prescribe drugs...yet), just finished my final exam for masters in psychology. And I love neurology. I want no part in this beef!

Get your prefrontal cortex checked, Frankie, or I'll induce a lesion in there so you have enough cognitive impairments that you don't even get the planning or decision power to listen to the Bombcast ever again! Also, induce a lesion into your ventromedial hypothalamus so you overeat into obesity.

I've never gambled online on my couch, but I've gambled online whilst sitting in my chair in my bedroom and that was pretty fun.

Of course, I don't bet on horse racing so I can't speak to that specifically.

Anybody got the link to that soundboard Jeff was using? I NEED THAT

@fisk0: Agree about UT3. Probably my favorite Unreal game though 2k4 was a blast. My biggest issues with it are the somewhat slower pace compared to previous UT games and the gray/brown Gears of War aesthetic. Also, coming out at the same time as COD4 and TF2 probably didn't help. I reinstall it occasionally and am disappointed at how dead that game is. I don't want to get my hope up but I'm looking forward to the announcement this week.

Fully half of this Podcast is now an E-Mail section :(

I like Giant Bomb for their opinions on games and the industry. I feel like lately that their individual segments pertaining to their week and their experiences with games has been reduced and the segment dedicated to Email has grown exponentially. The critical segments of the show now feel rushed and as if none of them actually want to be there discussing games anymore.

I feel like the Two Best Friends/Super Best Friendcast is what Giant Bomb used to be. It's disappointing to see that content gone :l

According to Kyle from Philly, New York City consists of one borough and its population is 3/4's white, 1/4 black, and 100% male.

Bourbon....

El Bourbon

@jeff Are you Jimmy Ray?

Man, does anyone else thing the emails have become a total fucking bummer lately? The whole "gratuitous anger" thing was cute at first, but now I feel like it's devolved into just a bunch of hateful garbage.

More crazy insider info, less self-indulgent regional drama please.

The Super Best Friendcast talk about anime for half the podcast sometimes, I'm not sure if that's really what the Bombcast ever was. But yeah, those guys have clearly copied much of the Bombcast format because they're huge fans of the site, but I don't see how it's what GB "used to be".

I completely disagree that "The critical segments of the show now feel rushed", since they've talked more about games on the Bombcast this last couple of months than I can remember them ever doing, except for the the GOTY podcasts and the podcasts leading up to that. Just because the e-mail segment was unusually long on this podcast (and I'll add that over half of those e-mails were game related), doesn't mean that they talk less about games on the 'cast than before. I'd say that the e-mail section, on average, isn't any longer than it used to be.

END THE EMAIL BEEF

Speaking of Ubisoft, here's hoping to see something more out of Beyond Good & Evil 2.

I'm also kind of feeling game fatigue. Maybe it's the lack of good triple A in a while. Sort of also waiting for Watch Dogs.

And oh my god I remember Gunz the duel!