Quick Look: House Flipper

I know we give Dan a hard time, but you could help him out with better answers. "A breaker box has on/off switches labeled by room." Done.

@warpigs330: Do you know how the law says they would have to disclose the info? Do they have do it on that specific video or content, can it be a general disclosure else where? I only ask because I'm not very familiar with the actual laws that pertain to disclosure. If you are, could you let me know where to look, I'd like to read the laws themselves, sometimes I'm quite fascinated with all that stuff! Thanks in advance if you know where to check them out!

I am not familiar in depth with the laws, but here is a place to see what the law actually is, at least for the US. FTC endorsement guides.

@warpigs330: Thanks again! I'll check them out. It'll help me decide how, what or if I even want to make a forum post.

@warpigs330:This is interesting from just scanning it:

The Guides are intended to give insight into what the FTC thinks about various marketing activities involving endorsements and how Section 5 might apply to those activities. The Guides themselves don’t have the force of law. However, practices inconsistent with the Guides may result in law enforcement actions alleging violations of the FTC Act. Law enforcement actions can result in orders requiring the defendants in the case to give up money they received from their violations and to abide by various requirements in the future. Despite inaccurate news reports, there are no “fines” for violations of the FTC Act.

When I visited England, every hotel room we stayed in had a heated towel rack, but I've never encountered or heard of anyone having one in the States. So I'm not surprised that everyone chiming in about theirs does not seem to be American.

Anyhow it's all way off topic so I'll check it all out and decide if it's worthy of a forum post so that it's not so bothersome to everyone else here that aren't into this kinda stuff!

As a homeowner, this stresses me the fuck out. Especially the water damage.

This looks peaceful and all, but if I want to clean something I turn to Viscera Cleanup Detail

Haha at them being mystified by a rad, do you not have radiators in America?!

No. They're employees and get paid a fixed hourly or annual amount. If their content was commission-based then there would be a lot more free content on the site covering "hot" trending topics like Fortnite and stuff they hate. Which Jeff would never stand for! The CBSi sales and marketing team might get commissions, but they're not directly connected to the crew and don't have direct control over the kind of content they choose to produce.

Sometimes the crew will do a "Quick Look EX" with developers of a game, and this could be viewed as (unpaid) promotional material, but the crew ultimately decides if they want to do it or not, based on their actual interest in the game itself.

Premium memberships are the site's main source of income, followed by ad revenue. Jeff has talked about this in the past. You can also see for yourself that the site is focused on producing premium content (at least when they want to push membership sign ups during a sale) and not on super trendy subjects. In fact, a lot of their content is kind of obscure (e.g Garfield games form the mid 2000's!)

PR teams are always trying to do this, but nowadays it's mostly aimed at social media "influencers" and popular YouTubers or streamers. Ads on the site are of course paid for, but again I don't think the crew has any direct control over that, and this has no influence on the type of content they decide to make.

However, there are other non-compensation based ways to influence their coverage. The most obvious is free stuff. The crew is constantly getting free codes for games from both big publishers and small indies in the hopes it will get them interested and help generate free publicity for these games on the podcasts and/or quick looks.

Abby even said on the last beastcast that the developers of House Flipper sent her a free code. So that probably got her interested in the game when she might have otherwise passed it by. She's also new to all this and might be a little more susceptible to outside influence. Jeff, on the other hand, being a veteran of the industry is much more wary and jaded about games in general. So it seems getting free stuff all the time has it's trade-offs, since it removes any real monetary considerations from your judgement, which can be good or bad.

Nothing personal, but I would always take gaming website coverage with a grain of salt because they just don't view or experience games the same way the "average gamer" does, but this doesn't mean their opinions are invalid, and the "average gamer" or "influencer" is also not immune to corruption. So this should really apply to all types of coverage to some extent.

I think the key is to just always have a critical eye and a diverse collection of sources to judge from (gaming websites, steam user reviews, etc.) when looking at any game. Then it doesn't really matter what is influencing the coverage you see because you can ultimately make up your own mind about it.

@icyeyes:

Absolutely agree... and that goes for basically everything in life in a roundabout way! Thanks for the well thought out response!

@steveurkel: You're describing my nightmare! The scorpions that climb like that are Arizona bark scorpions; they are highly venomous and can kill a person if that person doesn't seek medical treatment. I would've packed up and left that house ASAP.

Pretty sure I'd just burn my house to the ground if I walked in on that many roaches.

And I had never heard of a washing machine that takes hot water too.

(And there are chickens in the house next to ours) ^__^

this was a cool quick look, a game and commentary about real life stuff who whadda thunk. this would be a cool Mario game.

Drywall is concrete? Come on, Vinny....

This reminds me of Viscera Cleanup Detail, but without the mop that needs to be cleaned every few seconds. That damn mop kept me from enjoying that game.

Loved this one... Honestly, I want this to be a feature now where @danryckert learns about house stuff from @vinny while they play through this game until they can afford a replica or something of Vinny's current house or something like that.

@solarfx: sssshhhhhhh

Too simplistic for my tastes, I think it would be way better it if was a bit more involved like Viscera cleanup detail

@tsuchikage: ugh I was worried they were because everything i looked up said they were but people insisted they were harmless. It was a miracle the first time I ever saw a dead one that I could even sleep in that house. I find a skeleton in my kitchen that looked like a exoskeleton and thought it was an alien or something until I saw my cat chasing an orange bastard one day. We bought a black light to help us find them and one night saw 2 in my room crawling on the wall and I sprayed one with some household cleaner while my girlfriend looked for something else to kill it and it turned black but was like who cares and kept walking we smashed it and it still got up and walked off before she hit it with a hammer lol. The other one we saw we never found ... I'm so scared of bugs and spiders so I don't know how I coped with scorpions AND black widows living in my yard. Same deal girlfriend was smoking and a black widow was under her chair repeat ad nauseam since we couldn't eradicate those either. The worst part was when a scorpion was in one of my hoodies she was wearing and it crawled out the sleeve. They were orange and semi translucent and I hate the fact I've ever seen more than 5 in one week.

fuck scorpions forever

Hmm....

The following good, popular,interesting games are out:

Conan:Exiles, Raft, Pillars 2, Ancestors Legacy, The Forest, Warhammer Martyr, Agony, etc. etc. and a dozen other really interesting games you can fill a swimming pool with,

GiantBomb decides to do a quick look of "HouseFlippers?"

How exciting and interesting! Boy am I am glad I payed that Premium Subscription!

(I'm being ironic btw)

As someone who used to flip houses, I think there needs to be more variety in the sorts of things you come across when going into a new (old) house. Cockroaches, dirt, unidentifiable substances? Of course, but call me back when they've added dead cats rotting between the walls and hidden stashes of nude photos of the previous owner...

This makes me wonder what they ended up doing with my previous apartment/trash fire that I lived at.

Honestly the best part of this game are the doors that make the AOL Instant Messenger sounds when you open them. Every door makes the same noise too, they just pitch shifted it for cabinets and stuff.

I've been doing some fire/water/flood repair temp work recently, and I guarantee you, none of these houses are particularly bad.

I feel like there's DEFINITELY a Premium feature of Dan just asking Vinny how to do stuff as it relates to home ownership.

tile on top of tile is pretty common, laid floors like 4 deep, gets kind of ridiculous at times.

I have never quite understood the widespread fear of cockroaches. Yeah they are unclean and need to be dealt with but I don’t know why people are genuinely terrified of them, they can’t do you and direct physical harm

...and I'm installing Viscera Cleanup Detail again. Great. Thanks, GBE.

@madscientist18:

Might be true for home owners, but I would be surprised if most folk understood how most appliances worked or what they needed prior to that stage.

Even then, It's something you might set up once every 5 or 6 years, assuming you don't have someone set it up when getting something replaced.

Just chiming in to say that here in Australia, I've not encountered washing machines with only one water input, heated towel racks, or not-fuseboxed houses (though I don't think they call them that here? Not sure about that one).

@apothaeos: Only then did I start getting onboard

@vinny In my part of the world the dual hot/cold hoses plus drain on washing machines have mostly been replaced by a single cold hose and drain and the washing machine contains an internal coil heater.

At the 11:45 mark, I wish the game would have been like "Oops! You never turned off the power before working on an electrical outlet. You Died".

I need a series where Abby takes various jobs while Vinny points out why every house needs to be burned to the ground instead.

@karwowski: There's not really a strategy/RPG guy working at Giant Bomb. DOTA guys are closest they've got. (And Rorie) There's many more new games coming every week and they possibly cannot cover them all. I would rather see GB do their own stuff than review/QL every game every other gaming website already has coverage on...

Also I'm pretty sure some of these new games that you mentioned will be tested in the upcoming Unprofessinal Fridays etc.

@danryckert Hey Dan, your aversion to cockroaches (which any sane person would have) reminded me of an experience I had while working for a Rent-a-Center.

We had a customer who paid off a TV set about a year before I began working there, a much older model, one of those big tube sets with the wooden frames that weigh a ton. One day it just stopped turning on, and even though we were under no obligation to service the set, my manager figured if we did him this kindness he might come back in and rent something else. When my partner and I arrived I immediately noticed a ton of German roach carcasses on the top of the set and the floor around it, as well as large cracks in the wood frame where live roaches were just crawling in and out. I'm not some weirdass bug expert, but if I had to guess, they got in, fried some components, and made a nest.

The customer explained that one day they heard rustling above their dining room table, so they smacked their ceiling with a broom and it just kinda caved and roaches poured out. I didn't like the idea of having to pick this thing up and haul it out, much less bring a potential infestation of German roaches back into our store, and pointed out that since he had paid off the TV we didn't need to do jack shit for repairs. My partner had seniority and shot me down, so the next thing I knew I'm helping him lug this incredibly heavy set while roaches crawl all over my body.

My partner suggested bombing the truck out overnight rather than bring the set inside with us, but he didn't seem to understand that German roaches are especially resilient to toxins. Getting them in your home here is a massive ordeal, as they multiply rapidly, can fit into very small places, and are a total pain to kill. Needless to say, they were just as active as ever after stewing in the back of our truck with a few roach bombs. We sent the TV to our service department who promptly called up our boss and yelled at him, telling him that if we ever brought something like that to him again, he would stop doing business with us.

Anyway that's my roach story, thanks for reading!

Watching this and hearing the crew freak out about the gross house I want them to watch some Dan Bell videos, mainly his "Another Dirty Room" series and some of his urban exploration vids!

Listen it only takes one instance of a cockroach flying out of your cereal box to hate them for life. That being said this game looks calming and I kind of want to give this a shot.

Aw man I hope Dan never stops being curious and asking questions. Some of the comments here are pretty rough.

Ah, yes. The most interesting game... Conan.

@karwowski said:

Do the Visceral Cleanup! Severed heads on a space station!!

If this had a co-op mode, I'd totally buy this game. I played Viscera Cleanup Detail for hours with a buddy. That space station was pristine!

It is. There's no heating coil in the US machines and what they'll do to actually get things clean is mostly bleach it. Like, EU machines have a 200 degrees F hot cycle to actually disinfect pieces like bedding and sheets. No way the hot water connection can provides 200 F water so bleach is the solution.

Regarding the heated towel rail. We have those in our bathrooms and they just replace the normal radiators you'd otherwise have on the walls. Essentially there's underfloor heating pipes branching off to the towel rails. In there flows regular hot water in a closed loop heating the house and the towels.

@karwowski said:

Hmm....

The following good, popular,interesting games are out:

Conan:Exiles, Raft, Pillars 2, Ancestors Legacy, The Forest, Warhammer Martyr, Agony, etc. etc. and a dozen other really interesting games you can fill a swimming pool with,

GiantBomb decides to do a quick look of "HouseFlippers?"

How exciting and interesting! Boy am I am glad I payed that Premium Subscription!

(I'm being ironic btw)

Free QL?

GOTY? I wish there was little more to some of the cleaning procedures but what a great concept.