Giant Bombcast 05/12/2015

Let the casting of the bombs begin...

@danryckert Dan PLEASE make your music segment a weekly thing. It's exactly what we need to crush Brad's soul now that you guys don't read the Nintendo downloads anymore.

Of course The Witcher 3 isn't for you, Jeff. Of course it isn't.

Rhapsody is still a thing! It’s the best service! They just have no marketing department, which is why you haven’t heard about it since it launched. $10/mo for unlimited playback of the full library with nice interfaces on both desktop and mobile.

Dan Ryckert is the 2015 Wink Martindale of CBSi.

@shadowconqueror: yeah, it isn't? He didn't like it and that's fine.

Not since "Jimmy Buffet or Kenny Chesney" on mbmbam has there been as barn-burning a musical podcast segment as Kirkhope vs. Wise.

@sarumarine: Same! I just picked the one that sounded like Muzak! :P

23:15 - 35:30

Jeff's impressions of Witcher 3

"Maybe this will end up being the Witcher game for me. I don't think this is the Witcher game for me. I ended up not playing much of it. They sent it to us on PS4, the build that had the Day 1 Patch pre-installed and then it crashed twice on the Gwent tutorial (Gwent is their card game that they put in there). I've not played a ton of it. I don't know, man. The combat is exceedingly straightforward. You hit the block button, if you time your block well it's a parry. You can swing the shit out of your sword, there is a stamina meter but it seems fairly forgiving compared to how I remember the Witcher 2 being. There's something about the way it moves. Felt the PS4 version based on what I saw didn't particularly run great. There were parts of it that looked perfectly acceptable but I don't know, seemed a little janky. Some of the character movement, some of the animation in cutscenes and stuff like that didn't really - you think of that game as a graphical powerhouse - ehh it looks really good but it didn't...

I'm not saying this to scare people. I literally played 3 hours of it but I also had that and it crashed a couple of times...Basically you start preparing for a hunt as it's going through the motions, you're chasing for Yennifer (who's a lady). You're hunting her down originally. To get information, you have to do odd jobs for people. In the tavern, you're talking to people, shaking them down for info, you gotta go talk to these guards and they kinda say like 'hey it's really cool you want to know this information but we have a Griffin that's fucking people up around here'. They'll kick you off into setting up traps and hunting this Griffin. You're out in the world. They do some really nice stuff with some of the movement, like you get on your horse, you just double tap R3/L3 to call your horse and get on it. You can basically get on roads with the horse and hold down X, it'll follow the road even if it curves which is pretty cool. You have to know where you're going, though. Holding X is the middle speed, tapping X is the high speed, so you can't high speed and stick to the road I think, it'll deviate at that point. It seemed like a relatively elegant system but there's also fast travel. You'll find signs in the world and you can walk up to them and fast travel to any other sign. I wandered and found fights. Fought various enemies. Wolves. This doesn't feel like that [Witcher 2 combat]. You have a light attack, heavy attack, go to town. It's got a little bit you can have animations get interrupted if you're not timing them properly. It seems the move is to properly time your block which creates a parry opportunity which then counters off that. So you just counter off your blocks and murder wolves all day long. You start with 4-5 different spells, 1 trap. There's a pretty decent combat tutorial that you can skip if you like. The magic like Agni, the default fire spell, never seemed like that powerful anyway. It seems potentially interesting but it just there are things about it that seemed rough right out of the gate. Some of the character movement [turning radius], walking through tight doors in a tavern, just felt fidgety. The movement speed, the radius, just didn't feel right. [Momentum stuff]

I would actually sum up my time with the game with by saying I don't think it feels good. People who are more into Witcher will have a lot more to say, one way or the other, about the changes they've made and the scope of the story and stuff like that. But like, first impression kinda, you know in terms of hoping this would be the game that grabbed me - I could really go for a gigantic open world-y quest-y thing, I don't think this is the game for me. I'll check out the PC version, maybe give that a look and see if it controls a little better there or mouse and keyboard or something or what the deal is. I don't know, felt weird."

39:40 - 41:00

Westerado sounds awesome. Sounds like it has better branching/emergent narrative than most.

Jeff "You can go all kinds of crazys ways in that game."

Dan "Yeah, my uncle turned into a ghost!"

Jeff "Because he shot him! But he's an important tutorial character."

Dan "He just hangs out at the ranch and still helps you in tutorials even though you murdered him."

Brad "Everything I hear about that game makes me feel like I need to play that game."

Jeff: "It's really neat. It's really really neat."

If the Witcher 3 doesn't have guns then it is obvious Jeff won't like it.

This is the best compliment I've ever received.

@assinass: not sure what you're trying to say here. Jeff likes Westerado more than witcher 3? And?

@assinass: that westerado exchange is gold. i probably need to get that but, er, backlog.

Thanks for transcribing jeff's impressions; i'm assuming you mostly did it to clarify it for others that were angry with his opinion. I believe he articulates it well and concedes that others will surely love it. he already stated he didn't like previous witchers so it isn't surprising. He gave it a good shot at least; he doesn't have to like every game others do.

The DKC2 soundtrack is fantastic.

Needed this! Got a several hour bus commute ahead of me

I would probably generally agree with Kirkhope>Wise at least from the N64 era on, but DANG is Donkey Kong Country 2 a killer freaking soundtrack.

Jeff finally got into a Souls game. Expecting him to enjoy a Souls game and a Witcher game in the space of a couple of months is just plain silly.

Konami's response to their changing business strategy is so weird. It's not like PT can be put back in the bag so they might as well reformat it as a small game and sell it as "something".

It really seems like Konami don't care anymore.

http://xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html

Brad, learn the truth. Stop downloading pointlessly large, or even worse-sounding audio files in the name of feeling like an audiophile.

@ripelivejam: Yeah, I feel like with narrative heavy rpgs, they have to not give Jeff a reason to stop for him to stick with them. (At least for a bit more than normal.) Controls not to his liking, crashes, narrative stuff he isn't familiar with, etc...all things that I could see turning him off on their own. I'm definitely one of the people that will most likely love the Witcher 3, and don't see Jeff's experience as telling of anything (for me) other than the console stability needs work.

I guess I'll find out next week if my intuition is right.

@danryckert: You need to invest in one of those thin stick microphones that Bob Barker used. Hell, you are a part of CBS, just ask Les Moonves for one.

So one game doesn't do choice well (end of Mass Effect) and we should get rid of it? Not that it's always great and there isn't value in a specific narrative. But we are talking about the Witcher 2 here and it was done SUPER WELL right there with choice. "If a game did it well it would be great..." ... yeah the Witcher 2! That conversation was a little maddening... This isn't the only game that has done it well either. They basically just said "oh far cry 4 was bad"... yeah guys.

Even Deus Ex did it quite well.

And I don't care when, in the next game, they make their canon choice. Go for it. Choice is still interesting no matter what.

You're trying too hard Dan. I respect your commitment, but that game show segment man...

Huh? I'm just giving time stamps and summarising what they thought of the games. Should I have mentioned timestamps for more games and what they thought of it to make it sound like I'm not making comparisons? There is no comparison. Not sure where you got that from. Sorry if my post gave such an impression.

Bold move, starting out with an ad. I like it

David Wise's music is so much better besides Viva Piñata. Like, all those Kirkhope songs sucked besides the last one. Wise has much better melodic ability.

Also it's funny how they mention choices not mattering or just being a different character model in the same place in the Citadel. Then like Witcher 2 had a massive splintering in the story where you went to a totally different area with different quests and characters.

Sword<Whip

so is the skipping issues we've had the past few weeks just never going to be fixed?

The shit talk is getting kind of ridiculous. I'm a DKC fan, so I'm biased, but it's kind of annoying to hear them shit on the franchise and David Wise in a voice that suggests they're subtly trolling. I can't say for sure, but I feel like Ryan wouldn't abide by it; that never happened when he hosted. Since Jeff/Brad took over they've encouraged Australia beef, this music beef, and something else I can't quite recall but wherein they both just said how that thing was "poop" and "garbage" and "stupid".

I feel like an old man, complaining that for once it was my favorite things and how dare they, but it's not like DKC is even a bad franchise. I get it, I was a kid and they were teens/adults at that time, but unlike some shitty licensed game that I could have loved as a kid but would have to admit it was actually crap, that's not the case with DKC. The level design was excellent, mechanics were good, characters were decent (I don't give two shits you don't play as Donkey Kong, as if he's some deep anti-hero that simply by appearing improved the experience) and last but not least, the music was fantastic. Weird that Dan didn't play either Stickerbrush Symphony or Aquatic Ambiance to shove their awesomeness in Brad's and Jeff's faces.

Rant over. Quit being dicks.

probably installing voice over ip (voip) to replace the phone system there.. its going on everywhere lately.

Random thoughts in bullet BLATBLATBLAT points:

• Biscuits. It's not even possible to consider waffles are better than them. And I freaking love waffles. Get a warm Donna Bell Bake Shop breakfast biscuit and feel the whole world's smile...in your mouth.
• Dan, if there was a steady chance of getting a wasp in figs, the fig providers would be sued into nonexistence. It's usually good standard operating procedure to assume that in a first world environment, a produce/food provider will go out of their way to not get sued to hell and back. Just try. TRY, so you can escape this cage of food fear. Snake would do it, Rocky too, and Bob Dylan covering the songs of Stealers Wheel would make time for it.
• This is the third bullet point. I ran out of things to say but I said BLAT three times. Gotta have some consistency.

I'm pretty sure the Mario Mario and Luigi Mario thing was in the Super Show in addition to the movie (if it was in the film).

Don't diss the Wise.

Oh man, I forgot all about the Mysterious Stranger. *guitar twang*

something something the OLD BLOOD

The whole conversation about choice is kind of depressing. I mean choice is always going to be an illusion in games but I don't think they should stop. I personally felt connected to my Mass Effect playthroughs even if I knew it wasn't that much different save for a few major choices. And the Telltale games are really good at it if you don't go back and play it again. And then there's Witcher 2 and Wolfenstein which both kind of have one big choice and then split.

Even in Far Cry 4 when it's limited, I still liked getting to choose. And liked it even better when I just said eff it and spared Pagan and killed Sabal and Anita.

I can't believe they got that last melody wrong. have either of them even played Banjo-Kazooie? Brad even mentioned earlier about Kirkhope's arrangement style which fit that melody to a T.

@ch3burashka: they're just having fun like dan does and exaggerating for comic effect. Plenty of people in the forums have extreme opinions amd don't get shit for it (in fact they usually bandwagon together). In addendum to quit being dicks i would say maybe calm down and don't be so angry at things all the time?

Yeah I don't really understand why DKC gets ridiculed here and some other places. In an era where every second game was a platformer, the DKC trilogy were amongst the most enjoyable. They're still a lot of fun to play now except for some weak spots which all three suffer from.

You have to remember that they've got a habit for poopooing games which are different from the ones before it in the series. Yoshi's Island and Super Mario Sunshine come to mind, for example. And while I don't think any of them are super attached to the original Donkey Kong games, I could believe their opinions being a little skewed because the Country games were different to what they grew up with.

Just what i need after a shitty day at work. Go bombcast!

"If I'm ignorant to the fact it can't hurt me." ~ @danryckert 2015. A real American with a real American attitude.

Haha.

Someone please please please gift Brad the experience of a Red Lobster Cheddar Bay biscuit, asap!

Funny how they are talking about story choices in gaming not having been done well right after they brought up The Witcher, arguably the one series that does this well.

Weird, Jeff has nitpicks with a game

"Wolfenstein" is a german word in the sense that it is composed out of german words, but there is (as far as I know) no actual place or an actual word.

Also: "Mein Leben" ist also composed out of german words but is not a phrase that anyone would ever use. I understand what they were going for but it's a phrase that I would expect someone to put in his/her game that uses google translate.

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Shadowrun: Chronicles ... yeah that game ... I am a huge Shadowrun fan and this game was a neat idea in theory but sort of fails to actually capture the way Shadowrun works. The skilltrees are sort of boring, the choice of weapons and cyberware is very slim and the combat desperatly lacks some features (how they made a turnbases X-COM-style game without some sort of overwatch is beyond me). Especially Decking and Magic are sort of boring. I liked Shadowrun Returns/Dragonfall but I still hope one day there will be a game that does the Shadowrun-world justice.