Giant Bombcast 06/24/2014

People keep saying BF4 is still broken, and it irritates the crap outta me every time they do it.
I've been playing the PS4 version for a few weeks now and it's been perfectly functional.

Jeff's never heard of Super Table Flip before?! Go to Japantown, right now!

I think it'd be funny if Giantbomb just quicklooked that arcade.

Call me when they've got SDI out!

Bombcast. Laverly.

I take it Brad's vacation is compulsory.

GET LEADY! O,O

Agreed. : (

Caviar!

Giancarlo is KING; also: Game Cop

@drewbert: Can be had from a PCB assembly only order from http://febon.blogspot.com/2014/02/febon188-uvc-usb-sdi-grabber-card-user.html but it's best checking on our friends at BlackMagic for something tried and true and maybe more reliable. Too many things in the chain etc

Kobe beef only please. And, yes, I will have that fifty-year-old scotch.

Already missing my small businessman...

I will have nothing to do with Small Businessmen!

@foil1212: Yes, Fortune 500 only at this country club, old bean.

Skeewz my ignance but wuts the difference between this and the non-premium podcast?

RIP small businessman.

@enoteware No ads.

They got one of those table flipping games at the arcade near my work place. Good way to relieve stress one the days over!

Welcome to the VIP room

Please keep the couch stuff at 30!

60 is very strange. Alexis nailed it. It looks telenovela.

I hate these "do we even need E3 anymore?" discussions. I mean, I can understand the press being unsure of their role in everything, but as a consumer and someone who cares about videogames I fucking love E3 and find it and everyone's coverage of it extremely useful. It's great having a big event in the middle of the year where, ideally, everyone's bringing their game demos and suddenly we get a much better idea of just what these games coming out in the next 6-18 months are/are likely to be. Giant Bomb and Gamespot's coverage is especially excellent, entertaining and useful, between the Giantbomb after-hours podcasts and Gamespot's Stage Show.

I do think the press still play an important role in all of this, it would suck if this sort of game coverage was left purely to be controlled by the publishers. Even with something like Treehouse's stream it's still really useful to hear a variety of opinions from people who aren't employed by Nintendo who have played these demos at the show. It's also great to see those same demos on Gamespot's stage show because we get more discussion about them, directed by someone who isn't employed by Nintendo/Game company X.

E3 certainly felt a little more muted this year in terms of big exciting announcements, but it was still great to have that show and see all of these games.

Anyway, enjoyed the bombcast. Love Jeff Gerstmann pulling for 60fps on the couch, that batshit crazy, loveable motherfucker.

Destiny seems like the dev's thought "we can do an FPS MMO but totally different!". Then as they developed it they realized "MMO's all contain the same basic content and progression, let's just follow that". Then they released it only for consoles because that's the only realm that didn't have 50 variants of the same.

Do we get bottle service here?

超ちゃぶ台返し！巨人の星ド根性編 Is my favorite game in the whole goddamn planet. I played the shit out of that when I lived in Japan. I repeat, best game in the whole goddamn planet! I almost bought it, but it would've taken up my entire tiny Japanese apartment. It almost would have been worth it if it didn't cost like 10,000 dollars.

Btw, everyone above is playing the game wrong. You cause the most destruction by charging up the meter on the left by smacking (it says smack the table in Japanese on the table) the table, THEN flip the table once the meter has filled up. Read the directions! Haha if you can read Japanese that is...I can. Anywho, PLAY THIS GAME!

@meatball: I think the point there trying to make when they say E3 isn't needed anymore is that what does it do for the publisher's that they couldn't just have there own private event for which would probably be much cheaper to do. And with so many Pax's and gamescoms and TGS's out there if your not one of the big "HEY LOOK AT ME IM COD" style games its probably cheaper to show your game at a smaller show, and there's less noise for you to get lost in. Look at Konami and Capcom, whatever there working on probably wont be out till 2015 (assuming there working on anything) so why show it E3 when they can wait till TGS and not have to compete with western games as much.

Don't get me wrong I love the big 3 press conferences but everyone outside of that would probably be better off (and get better coverage) by just having the press come to there offices and play they game in a situation where there not thinking about how little time they have before there next meeting.

Yeah, completely agree.

Hmmm... Is it weird that I like Small Businessman?

This is where Big Businessman comes to listen to his podcasts.

I mean technically we don't even really need game sites at some point. Konami (for example) can put up all the trailers on their own site with full power of when they go up and what they disclose - and like Ubisoft they can hire community managers to stream the game and also show off all the important features instead of having game journalists bumbling through it saying "it's O-K I guess."

It's actually surprising that more developers/publishers aren't doing this already. They honestly don't even need the games media anymore.

@humanity: I'm not sure if I would go so far. There's still something to be said about the bigger gamesites like IGN, GS and Kotaku always getting a lot of visiters, and getting your games in front of more people that way than you would if you just streamed your game on Twitch or whatever. I'm sure that it will become more and more viable to just go at it yourself, but right now I think there's still a lot of value in getting featured on IGN in addition to doing some stuff yourself.

But yeah, I agree with what Jeff has been saying since he started GB: The "game site for everyone with everything" model of IGN and GS is dying, and has been dying for years now. They're extremely reliant on getting exclusives and such bullshit, and that will go away eventually. GB is an entertainment site and probably couldn't care less if game companies went more on their own with this stuff, they'd still get review codes. Kotaku has become reposted Reddit news, Game of Thrones reviews and a couple of really good articles a week and seems to be have found a big niche as a result, so good on them even if I don't care for the site.

Because you cant play everything, so finding people whos taste you share makes it a little easier to look at a game and say "yes this seems like something I want to play" or "Nope not for me". There are not very many sure fire sellers anymore and the risk of getting a site (Like giant bomb) to talk about it and potentially endorse it probably does wonders for sales numbers. In the case of something like IGN where its just this big faceless monolith of a website ya your probably right the publishers dont need them anymore really, but for people that pay attention to games on a week to week basis getting coverage on something like GB helps convince jaded people that have been playing games forever.

"Going to the pub to watch football" is correct.

"Going to the bar to watch soccer" is still wrong, but only because you're american :)

"Going to the pub to watch soccer" is completely wrong, mixing and matching terms so it's wrong from both ends

Who is the guest?

@dizzyhippos: I generally agree with you, but as I said above, I still think IGN and GS plays a valuable role for publisher because of the amount of visitors those sites have that the publishers probably wouldn't reach by just doing their own thing. But that's diminishing as those sites become smaller and the publishers get smarter with that kind of marketing, so it's "adapt or die" for those big sites in the next 5 years.

playmarvelheroes2015

itsagoodgame

But those sites largely get traffic because there the "known" places to go get the information, if the publishers just said "fuck you its on youtube" IGN's games traffic would fall off a cliff so hard. You see the transition starting to happen over at GS where there showing a little more personality on shows like the Lobby or the Point.

@dizzyhippos: this is the main reason that the GB acquisiton is the smartest thing CBSi/GS has ever done. GB has been a pioneer in selling on personality instead of just reading the news and churning out reviews.

@dizzyhippos: I still think there's value in the "one stop for all information" concept for now, instead of having to search individual YT channels or read gaming forums etc. I think there's still a large part of the gaming community that visits such sites pretty regulary, but don't go out of their way to search for information outside of what they get handed to them on those sites. That will probably change in time, but we're not there yet.

But I agree that it's a failing business model, and as you say, you can kinda sorta see GS trying to move towards more personality-driven content. But it's not easy for a site like GS to do that now. GS doesn't really have a community, they mostly have people who come to the site to read news articles and people who come there by searching for something on Google (Google loves sites like GS that's been around since forever). People there largely don't seem to care about "personalities" and that kind of content. The Lobby is a good example: Danny let on in the car during the E3 drive (jokingly) that The Lobby has less than 1000 viewers live (Jeff said that the stream had "only" 1k listeners after they had been away from the car for 40 minutes, and Danny said that that's still more than The Lobby). And that's supposed to be their flagship show! Every time Danny does a live stream on Twitch, it seems like everyone who watches are part of the GB community, not GS.

The problem for GS is that they totally moved away from personality-driven content when they fired Jeff, because Jeff, Rich Gallup, Ryan and to a lesser extent Vinny and Alex were the driving force behind that, and they all left around the time Jeff was fired (Rich may have left some time after, I don't remember, but it doesn't matter). After that, they seemed to give up on that kind of content and the people who liked the more personality-driven content moved with Jeff and Ryan to their podcast, blog and then Giant Bomb. GS gave up on that kind of content after that, and lost every part of that community as a result. For as much as I like Danny, I think what they're trying now is too little too late and the site will have to try to stay alive being a more or less pure news site for as long as they can.

Yah but if the publishers decided to simply not send out any press material to sites, and big professional websites would have to get everything second hand like Fan-sites, meaning when it simply became publically available, it would force people to go to those publisher owned sites for all the info. Initially it would be less coverage because there was only one site to visit rather than 5 big game sites talking about your game - but it would also mean that you'd get all the "proper" info first, and then Kotaku or IGN would write about whatever they wanted with the material they already had.

I guess for me it just seems smart to control the message instead of simply sending your press release to big sites and hoping they do right by you - which not always happens.

Here in the premium lounge, our chicken is personally deboned by Alexis.

@amyggen: It definitely feels like GS is the new IGN just focused more on games then the massive cluster fuck of coverage that IGN has become. But you are right there is still a place for that big "front page with wall of daily news" page, I just feel like as time goes on that audience will become smaller and smaller. But most people that care about games seem to stray away from them because civilized conversations like this one very rarely happen there. Every time I read the comments on GS it always eventually turns into a flame war, which makes me just want to avoid the place all together. I hadn't regularly checked GS in years until Danny started showing up on GB and I got a feel for his personality. They are definitely trying to play catch up on that stuff but a lot of it comes off as very forced.

@humanity: I hate to break it to you but a lot of that is already happening, most of the trailers that end up posted on GS GB or IGN are put up on youtube at roughly the same time. IGN and sites like it increasingly are starting to feel like Buzzfeed, there just throwing out titles and such to get people to click though to links. They ran an article about a league of legends player's opinion after his first time playing Dota 2 for crying out loud (Spoiler alert he thought dota was worse).

@dizzyhippos: Speaking of civilised conversations, I remember Gamespot implementing some big changes to moderation policy some time ago to try to get control over their comment section (probably as a result of the comments on the GTA V review, which is still the worst single comment section on the internet). This is one example of that policy change, I remember something being posted on the main page too but can't find it. The main problem with that is no one will take anything the GS staff say on this issue seriously until they actually delete the "System Wars" section of their forum, aka. the dumbest fucking place to discuss games on the internet and a section that literally encourages people to flame eachother based on what fucking console they prefer. I guess the problem is that that's the one section of their forum that still has kind of a community, the other parts are dead.

But yeah, if the "everything for everyone" kind of gaming site is actually dying, which I believe it is, I think it will be hard for GS to change with the time. The site brought about 40 people to E3 and is fucking huge with most resources dedicated to the old, news heavy part of the site. I don't see that focus changing anytime soon. This also makes it even more insane that Polygon hired 30+ people to make a site that's JUST THE SAME AS IGN and GS, but with better design and more longform features (which they have now moved away from). But that's another story.

@amyggen: Well the whole all things to all people thing is fine, if its just factually based say like say IMDB then there's definitely a place for that, GB has kinda crowd sourced that problem. It becomes a problem when you have 40 different people working for a site giving there opinion it becomes impossible to keep track of and gets lost in the monolithic nature of the site. Part of why GB worked from the start and has continued to work is that they run a lean crew, it limits the things that get covered but the community fills in the gaps somewhat.

@stimpack: also skipping ahead the ads is super easy.

Anyway the World Cup is far and away my favorite sporting event ever, it's such a wonderful spectacle.

Sony PlayStation Vita [New Slim 2014 version]

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/offer-listing/B00HY546NG/ref=dp_olp_new?ie=UTF8&condition=new

£163.29 direct from Amazon.co.uk.

It's always great to hear some Giancarlo Varanini.

Voodoo Vince, or Vince McMahon? This is important.

yay for flip table game ʕノ•ᴥ•ʔノ ︵ ┻━┻

I didn't realize they were already putting out another round of mystery Doritos. Seems like they just did that a couple months ago. I usually just go with Cool Ranch or Taco flavored ones.

Been catching up on some games during this slow release period. Trying to get ready for the Fall when I get my XBOX One and 3 games. Glad Jeff got a vacation and Brad is in the process of having one.

Definitely miss having someone else in on the advertisements. Still listen to them though to help support Giant Bomb as much as I can. Wish they would get some new shirts or merchandise soon. At least bring back the "GLHB" shirt. Mine is starting to wear out.

Thanks for a great E3, guys.