The Giant Beastcast: Episode 117

@coolarman: thank you!

As someone who absolutely loves avocados, I really don't care for full on avocado toast, I'd much rather have toast with just avocados. The best thing to 'put an egg on it' is the original breakfast scrambler.

I really hate my generation and this world as a whole.

I tend to think WB makes some pretty good games, but their aggressive DLC/Micro transactions practices, bad PC ports, and poor pre-release PR makes it hard to be a fan of them.

Dan's issues with eggs is the most Dan thing I've heard in a while.

It's depressing to hear Alex talk about the written journalistic scene, especially when it looked like Giant Bomb was going to be a great scene for those types of writers. I know that's the way the world's headed, but it still sucks.

Woo! Episode 117, the Cade Foster of podcasts!

I'm now worried about how many people are just flesh sacks filled with millions of little spiders, thanks Gbeast.

You wouldn't have Game of Thrones without Lord of the Rings. You don't have to like LotR, that's just an objective fact.

I'd love a Giant Bomb cooking show. Get that NY local Andrew Rea in to teach Dan Ryckert's torso and arms about different kinds of eggs!

Also I'm pretty sure he and Drew specifically talked about different ways to cook eggs when the Sunny scenes came up.

Shenanigans! I call Shenanigans!

Jesus Christ, Dan's insistence on being ignorant baffles me.

@tr0n said:

Oh please no.

Eggs are the worst.

Edit: And I'm right there with Dan on food not being time-specific. The Mountain Dew, not so much.

BeastCAST

Vinny - A is old horse pulling a NYC ice cream truck in 1905. When he speaks, “Mozzarella” becomes something like “mutzadell.” “Ricotta” becomes “ree-goat.” “Prosciutto” becomes “pruh-zhoot.” Final syllables are deleted, certain consonants are swapped with others, certain vowels are mutated in certain places.

Alex - The fruit bat....He don't drink blood; but, yes, be scared of him as he is of you.

Jeff - He does what he wants...he dares you to keep smoking if you blow smoke in his face - he's a Honey Badger.

Abby - She's a curly headed cutie. Loyal and honest...but may pee on the rug or she might call into question Ben's junk.

Dan - He goes for the face, and he's got "The Hot Zone" look in his eyes. Manic and Mischievous Dan is often teh center of attention.

Going by some of the comments, I can already tell that Dan opened his mouth and stirred up some shit again.... woof.

I love LotR, I've re-read the books a dozen times. But, I think Tolkien did two things that make the books less interesting - he made the Orcs purposefully one dimensional and viewed them as so "fallen" that they had no culture worth observing. To me that makes the story the books tell less interesting. The side of good fights a foe that is described as disorganized, lacking any technical know-how about moving an army, and yet should be feared in a broad military sense on their field of battle---err bullshit.

Now does the game do anything right in terms of expanding the Orcs as characters or as a cohesive understandable society? Well, yes and no. It gives them some society but it tend not to make thematic sense to the books, movies, or even ephemera. The game developers turn them into Cockney "East Enders" with crops, commerce, villages, and a hierarchy that is adhered to for status. Tolkien makes them lack any culture and the games make them into rude folks from East London. You could almost imagine in the third game Talion, will become Professor of phonetics Henry Talion who makes a bet with a GHOST that he can train a bedraggled Orc flower girl, Eliza Skidmark, to pass for a she-Elf at an the King of Gondor's garden party.

jesus christ, it's Fleur de Lis, pronounced "Lee" or "Lease", you monster

Did Dan piss everyone off again?

Holy balls that Shelob explanation..

They have to know that people were not happy about the story in the first game right? To be fair, they probably can't be like oh you're the same guy as before and the only link to Tolkien is Celebrimbor, when they paid a ton for that licence. But at least treat your customers as something more than mindless idiots. Who is actually reading that explanation and thinking, you know.. they got a point there!

So you've got Shelob representing darkness and then you've got Galadriel representing light, so you've got a duality between these two powerful women basically opposing each other in the same way that there's a lot of duality in our game. So we thought those two in opposition are really interesting, and the way Galadriel basically manipulated and sent people off on these different quests [testing the Fellowship with the mirror in Lothlórien] but ultimately left to themselves that quest [to destroy the ring] would have failed. Then you think of Shelob as almost the dark mirror to her, who actually had this minion [Gollum] that... if you think about it in a way, ultimately succeeded.

"We were also thinking really in a lot of ways that, not intentionally, but it felt like Gandalf and Galadriel kind of lied to them [the Fellowship] a little bit about their chances and what differentiates Shelob is that she's completely honest.. So she's evil, or perceived as evil, but she has this honesty to her, and so as we started thinking through that and thinking of her as this dark mirror to Galadriel and filling that role in our story of that narrator and what that would look like."

So they basically needed a satanic girl as an opposite to angel girl Galadriel and thought, let's use that spider. And now let's make her less 'pure evil' by giving it the meaning that she's giving it to you straight, without filter. That way, she's still a valuable friend, eventhough she's the evil one.

Is SWERY's next game "The Cat Returns - The Game"?

@onemanarmyy:

Yeah that explanation is terrible XD

The one about Shelob trying to murder Frodo cause she thinks he is incapable of completing his mission, though, is cool to entertain. It still doesn't make much sense. Like, doesn't the spiderlady have vocal cords? Or she could have at least tried to explain her motivations to Frodo in an attempt to persuade him... And how does she know that Gollum would be able to destroy the ring? Cause as far as I remember Gollum didn't actively go there with the intend to toss it in...

(In fact doesn't Frodo essentially toss Gollum into the volcano along with the ring? I was a little kid when I read the books so I may have it wrong but I thought there was a struggle there not entirely similar to the way it ends in the movie. I probably have that wrong, I should look that up)

Ah I looked it up. Apparently Frodo ordered Gollum to be thrown into the fire if he ever laid fingers on Frodo or the one ring again and that's how that happened. That's a little different than how I remember it XD

Either way I'm fine with them being a little creative with the LotR plot, same with Star Wars and such, cause those IP's can get a little stale over time.

@rasrimra: Yeah eventually this will just be remembered as that ork game with the devil lady and the angel lady, instead of the game that decided to turn Shelob into a lady. So i guess it's good that they throw this bombshell out there before the game is released so that everyone can get prepared for an ork game with 2 mirrored ladies in it.

It's just , that in a perfect world, this game wouldn't need to have the LOTR licence to sell well and be interesting. In a perfect world, licences would only be used if the person cares deeply about the property, is proud of using that licence front and center, and has some cool things to say about it.The first game and this announcement felt very much like : yeah, we have that licence thing going, but the story we want to tell is not actually about the characters you know. So you might see Gollem and Shelob in some form, but please don't pay too much attention to that.

The constant bashing of anything LOTR related on this website is getting real fucking trying.

I think that if you're upset that they turned Shelob into a woman. that is hot. you need to chill out, video games characters of either sex are almost always unrealistically hot people like in movies.

But I can get behind being upset if they fucked with the lore of something you like, and they did a poor job of justifying it.

my Millennial Menu Option is a gingerbread house of an institute of higher education where the waitstaff bring it out and set it on fire right in front of you

also extremely pleased that the controversial thing everyone complains about in the comments this week is the ill treatment of the lord of the rings series

@onemanarmyy: I'm not even a Tolkien fan...sure, I like the movies, and I've read about half of The Silmarillion, and I read Return of the King. I find the lore largely fascinating, but I'm by no means a purist. I thought Shadow of Mordor was a lot of fun and I didn't care about the story.

But even then, even as a casual fan of the franchise, that explanation is fucking ludicrous.

Man, I wish Monolith would just ditch LOTR stuff and use their tech for a new IP. For people like me who hate LOTR, all that stuff just gets in the way of a great game and for LOTR nerds all that stuff makes them angry. It's a lose-lose situation.

Here are some pictures of old Welly Boot and his cone.

It's a grand tradition that goes back to the 1980's and follows other pisstaking of Scotlands imperial past. Glasgow City Council have routinely tried and failed to get it to stop and at one point even considering making the statue bigger so that people couldn't reach it.

I would just like to say that I appreciated Vinny asking if the cat-lady from D4 might be related to Swery's new game, since I think that is totally possible.

Even though Swery's games are in separate and disconnected worlds, there are inter-connecting elements. For example, the town in the new game is called Rainy Woods, which was the original name of Deadly Premonition. Plus, if you watch that trailer, you'll see that the main character is called David Young; Deadly Premonition's main character is Francis York Morgan, and 'David Young' was repurposed for D4.

So will The Good Life continue the story of the lady from D4? Probably not, but we can probably expect the themes to be related and, potentially, for the nature of that character to be unexpectedly expanded-on.

I think that Hellblade mechanic they were discussing works perfectly well as long as you aren't spoilered on it, but it seems like a lot of people are out there telling everyone about it which is a shame because it is a pretty cool way to do it while not ruining the game experience.

+1 my parents read the hobbit to me when I was super young

Hey! Jesus is Jew, not French.

Am i the only one or is it weird to send costumer support questions to the Beascast. Like that WWE pre-order thing ? Also don't ever pre order a WWE game for CHRIST SAKE !!!!!!

This isn't the first time Dan's has egg troubles. If I'm remembering right that was the first time we were fully introduced to Dan's... eccentricities.

In the lead-up to the launch of Shadow of War, I look forward to many more weeks of Vinny trying really hard to recall half-remembered bits of Lord of the Rings lore and nobody else being able to help him because it's 2017 and everyone takes their fantasy in 45-minute capsules of incestuous dwarfism now.

I'm with Dan on not knowing all of the ways in which an egg can be prepared. That said, isn't "sunny side up" or "over-easy" pretty much one of THE main ways to prepare eggs?

As far as having a Diet Mountain Dew upon waking up, I don't really see how that's different from coffee with sugar that a lot of people have.

Did Abby say that eggs on a HOT DOG are good?! On a burger, I heartily agree. But...how does that even work on a hot dog?

@bladeofcreation: I'd say fried is a main way, while sunny side up and over easy are variations on that (the former yolk face up, the latter yolk face down as it is flipped halfway through). I think the three main types are scrambled, fried, and boiled. Everything else is a variation on one of those.

Writing vs video: I absolutely hate this in game instructions. Often when it comes to strategies and how-to's there's just no comprehensive written guides anymore. You may have to dedicate several hours of your time to watching youtube videos. There's certainly been times where I've done just that for Rimworld and Cities Skylines. A written guide for what you want either doesn't exist or doesn't get in detail enough.

The end of Terminator 2.

@johnymyko said:

It is indeed a myth that Goldfish have very short memory. Dan, on the other hand, does. This is not a first. There are numerous recorded times where Dan discusses something or something is explained to him and then later he goes right back to having no clue about it. Dan does not retain information.

I'm extremely anti-Dan now after the hatred of breakfast.

Vinny was talking about Hero with a thousand faces but he also mentioned a similar book about movies. Does anyone know which he meant?

I did find Save the cat by Blake Snyder which seems similar, but I'm not sure if that's the one.

Most newspapers will die by 2030 as they're not developing a robust inate gated on-line strategy tied into strong, unique output.

Warren Buffet got me realizing this when he talked about buying his hometown Omaha World-Herald that the NYT, WSJ, and WaPo have this setup and still can afford large journalist brigades in many fields that have the leeway and skill to set aside weeks to chase big scoops and long-form reporting.

Or maybe, these four papers are owned by billionaires and can afford that. A bit depressing.

The egg conversation was stressing me out, how can none of them know what different eggs are, EGGS!