Giant Bombcast 554: A Nice Skin Deal

Oatmeal is best with maple syrup.

Jeff Minter tag I assume will refer to the Winamp update.

A bob-ombcast

its like theyre going out of their way to spoil what little story points the game (blops 4) has

@hassun: Second that motion

fuck borderlands 3. give us Battleborn 2: Battleborn Royale

Podcast time baby!!

The menus and UI in Black Ops 4 are prettttttyyyy bad.

Did they? My brain shut down after 45 straight minutes of BLOPS talk.

gang gang

Yay, things!

"black ops IIII" will fuck up the way people understand the roman numeral 4 for months if not years

Jesus do they really talk about CoD for 60+ minutes? I know Jeff likes the modern military shooter but jfc. VC4 got like three minutes.

Am I the one who is out of touch? I thought these games were over and done with. First time I've skipped part of the cast in a while.

The people who are jumping out immediately in Blackout are doing it right by the way. If you want to get to most places first you have to jump right away. It's the one thing I kind of don't like about the game. At least for Squads this makes it very likely that you will have at least one team landing with you which is not great when you have friends playing with you as someone is going to die, and making them wait kind of sucks. I think they need to add more points of interest to loot.

Good thing this isn't the YouTube version. Otherwise the video would be DOWN.

@clearandsweet: Call of Duty is still very much a big deal in gaming for a lot of folk out there. It’s like the question of who keeps buying FIFA or NFL games each year? The answer is millions of people.

same thing happened to me in mega man. was pretty bummed out about it

The Giant Bombcast, here in these desperate Youtube-less times

Seeing "IIII" in place of IV makes my skin crawl, and results in irrational anger. -_-

maybe this is one of those fundamental gulfs between people who play video games for a living and everybody else but i feel like complaining that a video game "doesnt respect your time" is super lame. like respect your own damn time and put the controller down if you feel bored?? i jsut dont get it

Jeff needs to really clean that waterbottle. Zojirushis are great but you do need to take the seal apart and clean it regularly.

I mean, that's basically saying, "Well, this game is bad and I wasted my money."

A good game generally makes players say, "I can't wait to play more of this". A not-so-good-game makes players say, "I don't want to play any more of this."

Future 18 year old hologram programmer: "Man, I want this old viet nam vet to sound legitimate, but I don't know anything about history. My lame uncle says this 'LIT AF' so I guess that's something old people from the past said.

Then he clocks off and snorts space blow off a holographic strippers ass.

This is the only scenario that makes sense to me

3 Hour Bombcast! Oh boy!

I put a spoonful of peanut butter in my oatmeal, it’s pretty good. Sometimes slice some banana in there too.

You guys have to meet that dog.

This podcast is Lit A.F.

@entireties: Ah, you missed out on all the Assassin's Creed Odyssey discourse where some commentors were mystified on some critics (e.g. Alex) saying the game has too much Ubi Soft content to a detrimental degree on the game.

Skip the first 70 minutes right past that BLOPS talk.

I Fucking love 'Far completely loose sign ups!"

Man, if the post above this gets deleted it's gonna make no fucking sense!

Jeff, please wash that waterbottle.

Is oatmeal the same as porridge?

If so some of the combinations mentioned sound pretty disgusting.

Sounds like Treyarch got there first.

@entireties: yea, it's a very lazy criticism. It's even more mind boggling considering he said he loved Origins. Odyssey is basically just Origins with more variety, better side quests and characters.

Also, the only "spoiler" that I could detect was Jeff saying "Blops IV picks up where Blops III left off", which...doesn't sound like a spoiler to me at all.

It's fun watching everybody's heads explode over the fact that Giant Bomb is enjoying Call of Duty.

PSN name changes being the big headline over the Rockstar stuff? Huh

I hope Brad keeps playing The Missing but it'll surely be forgotten in GOTY talk.

@mems1224: It's called burnout. Not everyone wants to be playing hundreds of hours of the same thing, even spaced out over a year and change and if they once were enjoying it.

Happy they're enjoying blops the IVth and they're tipping me ever so closer to diving in. It's always great to hear then go in depth on something they're digging.

I actually think it's an entirely legitimate critique of a game. I've said it about MLB The Show 18 several times this year. It is a fun game to play and a particularly useful one for podcast catch-up since sound is completely irrelevant outside of Franchise mode. But the way their Diamond Dynasty (MyTeam/Ultimate Team) mode is designed has absolutely no respect for anybody who would like to get the most out of that mode but has interest in literally anything else.

I've been playing the game for maybe 2-3 hours on average, many days far more than that, nearly every damn day since it came out if I'm being honest. There are player cards known as Immortals that you unlock entirely by playing the game. These are the Griffey Jrs, the Ripkins, the Ryans, the Robinsons of the world.

I won't get into the minutae of the stats requirements for these players, or the winding roads you have to take just to get to the point where you're working on the stats that unlock a given player, but I will say that just one portion of Babe Ruth's grind is to pitch 200 innings with a starting pitcher Ruth Card you'll only have unlocked after amassing 700 hits and a variety of other hitting stats combined with both left and right fielders. Starting pitchers are selected at random from a pool of five whenever you start a game, and games are nine innings long, which means you need to pitch just over 22 complete games with that Ruth card to pass that innings goal, which generally take around 1hr 20mins to complete, and there is no way for you to guarantee Ruth will be your pitcher until you start the game. Either way, that is a 22 hour grind for one portion of one of the Immortal cards.

Some make the argument that of course it should be an investment to unlock The Sultan of Swat's Immortal card, and maybe they're not wrong; you get a pretty good version of him halfway through his program. But if you bought this game because it gave you the chance to play with Babe Ruth on your Ultimate Team - or you're like me and bought the game to earn and use Ken Griffey Jr.'s best card last year - you're suddenly faced with this insane level of investment played at a near mindless level since the best way to accrue those stats quickly is to play the very worst quality teams on the very lowest difficulty, through on some podcasts or sitcoms or Youtube channels and just...grind.

Again, I don't buy a lot of games before they go on sale in a given year, and I listen to a lot of podcasts, so for me this hasn't been something that makes me not want to play the game. In some ways, I'm even grateful that I still have things to do in this game so I have something mindless to occupy myself with while reading the news or catching up on Marc Maron interviews. And I will gladly put it down whenever a God of War, or Spider-Man, or Red Dead drops. But in between? This game has been literally all I've played this summer, and I have played nearly 30days worth of it in game-time, and the only Immortal card I've unlocked is Ken Griffey, Jr., because as I said before he's my guy. There are, like, thirteen other cards that require that same level of investment of time, and I'm close on several of them, but it's taken me the equivalent of a month in play-time - and seven actual months - to get to that point.

If I were the sort of person who wanted to play more than one or two 30 hour games every couple months - or looked at my backlog logically and figured I should play some of those games I got on sale but still paid real money for and now just let sit there in a digital locker - I think I could pretty reasonably say that this game does not respect my time.

@ripelivejam: that would be the fault of the user not the game. You can't blame the game because you're playing something you don't want to play/don't enjoy anymore.

Idk, AC Odyssey is so much more interesting than Origins. Just ignore the message board quests. The actual side quests all are fleshed out, but the contracts and message board quests are the ones that are just basic fetch/kill eith no story. I've done the actual side quests along the way, and the level never has impacted me besides the gear i wear

Idk, AC Odyssey is so much more interesting than Origins. Just ignore the message board quests. The actual side quests all are fleshed out, but the contracts and message board quests are the ones that are just basic fetch/kill eith no story. I've done the actual side quests along the way, and the level never has impacted me besides the gear i wear

Megaman 11 prompts you to save before you quit the game.

It's refreshing to hear a positive (and lengthy) take on Black Ops 4 since most of the internet has a raging hate boner for the Call of Duty franchise.

Yeah this was baffling but Ben seems to be a person who has very little patience... which is totally fine! If something doesn't respect your time then stop doing that thing.

I just started playing it through the Google Project Stream and am 2 hours in and already Level 5 (not using XP Boosts). I'll pick the game up next year when they bring in the option to disable enemy level scaling but it's already vastly better than Origins.

Can I change my email notification sound to have Ben screaming "EMAIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIILS"?