The Giant Beastcast: Episode 34

OMG 6 minutes and 14 seconds in and vinny lays out the sickest joke

Can someone explain the salad dressing joke? I'm not a native speaker and having never heard it that went over my head :/

I audited bowling in college for 5 or 6 semesters. 60 bucks extra for the class but then you bowled dozens of games, it was great. I would just put it in between classes where I had a big break.

@tennmuerti: It's a pun with the word "dressing" that plays on its use referring to a sauce or cream used as a salad topping and the act of dressing (getting dressed/putting on clothes).

Also, every time someone mentions Deep Down, I get Eiffel 65 stuck in my head.

THANKS A LOT, BEASTS

That's A LOT of fuck talk. More than I expected.

This Is Vegas!?

I'm all about those latest smells.

Here's a link to the David Wolinsky interview with former Rockstar Games screenshot capture artist Kathryn Green that I mentioned on the cast.

@lordkorax: Oh .... ok, that was bad.

We have bowling and Tractor Driving classes at UC Davis. That said, we're a big agriculture school.

CES: Slowly making Soma a reality.

Boardgamegeek.com and meetup.com are great resources for finding fellow tabletop players. I take a little offense to tabletop gamers being bunched in with vapers. We don't all vape. I had no idea the two were being placed in the same category, bummer.

Salad dressing. Vinny is the ultimate Dad.

Man, I lost my shit at work when Vinny you said "So you can see the salad dressing" hahahahahahaha

Damnit! It was so good.

I also took bowling in college. It was...it didn't help.

Ha! Too troo, duder. :D

I was helping unload a truck when Vinny hit me with that salad dressing. I had to just stop what I was doing and laugh. Then nod disapprovingly in the general direction of New York.

@austin_walker@vinny@alex

how was refrigerators the top thing of ces, when we got a passenger drone, roll-up displays, 4k 360 degree cameras, a camera that can see color in pitch black dark, and robots everywhere.

http://www.ehang.com/ehang184/specs/ - flying car thing

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-35230043 - fruit roll up tv

http://www.nikonusa.com/en/nikon-products/action-cameras/index.page - nikon gopro type thing but 360 and 4k

http://imaging.nikon.com/lineup/dslr/d5/ - top of the line camera, but the d500 was announced too, extreme low light capabilities

http://fortune.com/2016/01/10/butlers-robots-ces/ - robot butlers, and an R2D2 refrigerator robot.

drives me crazy when i see this and no one talks about it, and all they are saying is some stupid smart refrigerator.

Vinny, you are wonderful. Never stop making jokes.

Held off listening to this until the last Life Is Strange stream was done. Definitely need something to cut those feels with.

For the record, the "island of plastic garbage" is actually not an island. It's a loose grouping of plastic stuff. And most of it is smaller than like a quarter. It's not something you could stand or float on, it's just a big area where you could dredge a net and pick up some plastic stuff in that entire area.

I mean, it's bad, but it's not as bad as the image you get in your mind when someone tells you there's a giant floating "island" of plastic garbage.

I like Jeff...really I do...bad coverage of CES though. Still found tons of "galleries" on the site and he didn't scratch the surface on some of the other things at CES. great cast....poor coverage.

David Foster Wallace wrote a great article about the CES + porn Cross up in the 90's called Big Red Son you guys might wanna check it out.

@lordkorax: wait wait wait, hold up just a second....

Eiffel 65 had another song besides blue?

This was one of the best episodes of the Beastcast yet. Everyone was on their game.

I never played this game when it first game out and just finished my first (three hour) session with this version. A few observations:

-I love the pawn system. It feels like raising a talkative tamagotchi. I love talking to them and teaching them strategies. I love having them yell (even inane) things at me as we quest. I can't really explain it but this system, as silly and gamey as it is, feels like more meaningful character interaction than the colder "choices on narratives" systems most games employ (I wouldn't object to a game with both functioning simultaneously though)

-this is one gamey ass video game but in a way that feels fun and quirky rather than janky and uninspired. Ive never found a good way to put it into words, but I've always found it very charming the way many Japanese developers playfully shrug off internal world building cohesion for a silly pun, a funny animation, or some other novelty,

-I don't think I've ever played a game with this particular blend of action and menu/cool down based combat. It lands squarely in between the two in a way that is immensely satisfying. It seems like it shouldn't work but it does.

-I'm normally the guy that loves a good narrative (hell I have a PhD in Lit) and it used to be a real deal breaker for me if an RPG didn't even try, but it doesn't bother me in the least so far that the quests in this seem boiler plate because the quirkiness and the originality of the combat are good enough that the quests seem like just an excuse.

I never played this game when it first game out and just finished my first (three hour) session with this version. A few observations:

-I love the pawn system. It feels like raising a talkative tamagotchi. I love talking to them and teaching them strategies. I love having them yell (even inane) things at me as we quest. I can't really explain it but this system, as silly and games as it is, feels like more meaningful character interaction than the colder "choices on narratives" systems most games employ (I wouldn't object to a game with both functioning simultaneously though)

-this is one gamey ass video game but in a way that feels fun and quirky rather than janky and uninspired. Ive never found a good way to put it into words, but I've always found it very charming the way many Japanese developers playfully shrug off internal world building cohesion for a silly pun, a funny animation, or some other novelty,

-I don't think I've ever played a game with this particular blend of action and menu/cool down based combat. It lands squarely in between the two in a way that is immensely satisfying. It seems like it shouldn't work but it does.

-I'm normally the guy that loves a good narrative and it used to be a real deal breaker for me if an RPG didn't even try, but it doesn't bother me in the least so far that the quests in this seem boiler plate because the quirkiness and the originality of the combat are good enough that the quests seem like just an excuse.

My god, I damn near had a stroke from the memory flood hearing "Barth" said allowed caused.

Alex just sent me spiraling down a deep dark youtube hole with that one.

I have the print and play version of secret hitler and holy shit that game is an amazing board game. its also on tabletop simulator

The Master of the Dad Jokes.

@austin_walker Hey guys, just a quick correction. Amazon Prime isn't $130 dollars here in the U.S. It's $100. They did raise the price like you all pointed out, but it was from 80 to 100 if I'm not mistaken. I live in the southeast of the states, so I don't know if the price is different in other parts of the country. It' still a big number to throw down for any yearly service, but at this point Prime has become a staple in my household. The two day shipping and streaming alone is worth the price for us. Anything else is icing on the cake.

Joseph G.

I just wanted to say I think this episode was the best beastcast yet. Great stuff! Thanks for the laughs.

Vinny's dad joke game is hardcore.

I wish it was possible to get the lowdown on Rockstar New York by getting Laslow on the Beastcast but right now I can only imagine some alternate universe where Laslow and Vinny are in the same room.

I miss the Laslow Show. RIP Big Wayne

Kudos to Jeff for the Carl impression. Almost perfect!

Watch the salad dressing... Vinny's wit is truly unmatched on this site.

But I've found that one singular thing about that is actually a problem, I'm afraid, Alex. They were balancing against seasoned veterans of the game with nerf after nerf to player power, and the game becomes "low-ceilinged" where there are specific answers to problems very specifically designed to require those answers. It's a very different result from the two inspirations of this game (dungeon blobbers and roguelikes) and how the game was designed more towards EA's start (which are more "here's a bunch of gnarly shit that'll kill you, if you can break it to survive, good on you". I think it was good they stopped there as it could be a "bad difficult" which leads us to that excellent difficulty discussion:

Options are good, but it tends to disincintivize games that just say "deal with it" and a few super-players showing off on YT throwing it off to the ends of the spectrum.

@austin_walker Absolutely agree with the desire for more detailed difficulty options and Pillars of Eternity has a great one. It allows you to turn on/off particular things that make the game easier or harder beyond the combat difficulty (which is governed by the a tiered setting like most games). So you can turn off limits to what you can carry but also have the fights be as challenging as possible. It's very smart.

First time listening to the Beastcast and the only thing I've learned during the first hour is that is that Oculus Rift is worse than the Vive because... reasons?

There's nonsensical and then there's the Beastcast. Wow.

Don't worry, Vinny. I'd 'role' with your crew.

Considering that you are a Giantbomb subscriber right now, I assume that you are wholly aware that much of the media on Giantbomb can spend hours of discussion not saying anything significant, especially the Bombcast.

@austin_walker I thought your discussion on AI was quite interesting. Especially where one of you mentioned making an AI play like a human. Because its true that is very hard and its actually something that not a lot of research has been put into.

I am a AI programmer and i'm currently working on a AI research project at my university to create an embodied general gameplaying agent. That is a virtual agent that has a face, a personality and plays games. The thing is that there we have really simple games but even there its REALLY hard to set the AI up in a way where a "personality" shines through the way it plays. Most RTS have a crazy, crazy CRAZY branching factor when it comes to the number of things the computer can do each turn. Its a order of magnitude over a game like chess AND the computer needs to be constantly making decisions, it doesn't have time to think. So its hundreds of times more difficult than chess in most cases.. Yet just reading five moves ahead in chess consists of over 52 million moves. AI is probably one of the hardest challenges video games need to tackle. :D Its so fun :D

I live in the cloud on CaravellaNet. With my cruft.

Keep in mind that over the last year we had hours of dicsussion about the different systems and from what I remember they kept saying the experience with the Vive was better than with the Rift. I guess they just don't retell every story about it at this point.

Does it bother anyone else that they don't read the emails? Nine times out of ten, Vinny sort of presents the topic of the email to the crew as a subject and then they discuss it. I kind of hate that. There's a lot of nuance in what people say and how they say it, and there are times when it's obvious there's some fold to the topic in that email they're failing to discuss because if an email about violence in games comes up, they just say "So this one's about violence in games," and discuss that topic.

I considered writing them about this as a comment/suggestion since they do request them along with questions, but I'm curious if I'm alone in this.

Awesome Beastcast as always and thanks for taking my question about the alarm clock, would still love to know what smell you would hate to wake up to!

The tone of Jeff's response to @Austin_Walker's question about "what you mean by impedes" is perfect.

I really, really, REALLY wish they wouldn't just talk over each other every episode. Let Jeff speak dammit, I want to hear about CES so stop interrupting him every second!

For those wanting more info on Rockstar, David Kushner, the author who wrote Masters of Doom about id Software, wrote Jacked: The Outlaw Story of Grand Theft Auto back in 2012. I didn't find it nearly as engaging as Masters of Doom as he didn't quite have the same inside access, but it's still relatively interesting. It covers the studio up to the release of GTA IV.