The Giant Beastcast: Episode 39

DA BEAST!

BEEP BEEP

Beeeaaaaaaaaaaaast!!!

Seems like only the Premium version of the cast is live on the site?

Beast gon' give it to ya'

@y2ken: non-premium beastcast is now up

Aw yes.

Digital prophets eh?

Please someone tell me I am not crazy disliking Pacific Rim? I mean come on, the writing is worse than majority of anime.

awww yus

No one is watching Pacific Rim for the writing. It's super campy in a fun way and the art direction along with the special effects is outstanding. It's everything any fan would ever want out of a live action robot movie. Over the top in exactly the right way.

@humanity: I agree, but the characters annoyed the shit out of me. I just could not look past the dialogue. I don't know man, Transformers was a lot better experience for me, the first one.

@edgaras1103: Whatever floats your boat, ain't nothing wrong with that, I was simply pointing out that I think most people that champion Pacific Rim are fully aware of it's narrative shortcomings. Personally I can relate to your frustrations with characters because I can't stand Charlie Day but was able to look past his bits and simply enjoy huge robots beating the hell out of monsters.

I thought all the Transformers movies were pretty bad - acting aside I simply did not like the designs of the robots.

The Day of the Beast has come！ Rejoice！

Round dice have been a thing for about 25 or 30 years. They're just weighted so that they stop on one of the six 'sides'. And domestic pigs do grow more hair and become much more dangerous when they go feral. Epigenetics and increased testosterone production when released into the wild.

@humanity: I am mostly talking about that female and her relationship with Idris Elba character. I am just venting, that's all.

As someone who enjoys reading comic books, Jeff has excellent taste in comic books. *golf clap*

@edgaras1103: It's all good, the Beastcast is a safe place.

None of my favorite games are Bioware games. They're all over the place, and everyone wants different things from them. Even within the context of good story, they seem to either get characters right or the storyline right, not both. The environments for most of them have been tiny corridors that never sold me on the idea of say, an asteroid party crime club. The music is generic shit I forget immediately. The gameplay is either okay or bad. The faces never look good except on aliens. But they're my favorite games to complain about because of that breadth of content. If you were gonna talk about one developer's games forever, I can't think of anyone better except maybe Nintendo.

I have been reading a long retrospective about the changes in the themes and narratives of the Mass Effect series for over a year now, and I heartily recommend that. Especially if you wanna read one guy's opinion on the difference between ME1 and the others, which the Beastcast touched on briefly.

The Beast Incumbent, Jeff Barokalesnar!

BEAST!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Beast me up, Scotty.

Friday Night Beastcast Hype! 신난다!

Friday Night Beastcast Hype!

Vinny still has, what, a third of the Witcher remaining? My favorite part is coming up though. Kaer Mohren and all of the cutscenes surrounding it are phenomenal.

@edgaras1103 said:

One can easily get the wrong impression from Pacific Rim, especially if the action sequences don't sell it completely. It is a self-aware, hyper-dramatized action film that takes one extra step in all directions. The action, the speeches, the comic relief, the caricatures-- Ron Perlman's character must've been created through a group effort working out of the expression: campy menace.

Like B-movies, if you miss the overarching point, the film falls flat. Your negative opinion is warranted and Pacific Rim remains awesome.

Something like that, depending on your personal main quest vs. side content ratio.

@dougfunk15 said:

Friday Night Beastcast Hype!

I LOVE Korean Dominos! Put more eggs on that bad boy!

My East Coast therapy right on schedule. Love you guys!

@rahf: Also the fights in Pacific rim were actually long enough to be watchable and not a giant fast-cut-fested shaky cam mess that the Transformer movies were.

Watched the Del Toro/Kojima talk at DICE. It was pretty enjoyable!

Apex Twin hid an image of his face in his track 'Windowlicker' that you can see if you run it through an oscilloscope.

The Scalia discussion was disappointingly unsophisticated and showed a real lack of understanding for how the Supreme Court works and just how important Scalia's work was in getting video games the protection they currently enjoy. I get it, Scalia had wrong thoughts (though the idea that the video games industry's views are as homogeneous as Austin says is laughable) but this industry does owe him quite a bit.

I absolutely hated it for the garbage writing. Watched Godzilla (the latest one) after expecting nothing and was very positively surprised.

I think you guys could have handled your response to the whole PC discussion of last week differntley. You guys ended up sounding like the commenters started a PC vs Console debate because of how they misunderstood your comments. Whereas I feel like they were simply pointing out that you guys were kinda applying your situations to those of gamers in general.

I like it, but I will admit that it would be better with 30 minutes cut out. I woudl even cut everything after the middle fight in Tokyo. Nothing that happens from that is really great. Even the fights! Placing them underwater makes them really lame.

Vinny starts talking about underworld and how they are all the same movie. The thing is though that I'm certain he's told this exact same story before.

Nice "Doug" reference, Alex....I noticed it.

@napstar: I think if you saw some of the emails we got in response to last week's conversation, you'd understand why we responded the way we did this week. There was a lot less "pointing out" and a lot more "yelling." And while the comments section last week was generally more polite, I still think there was a lot of misrepresentation of what we were actually talking about.

Is that AOL's Digital Prophet Shingy, have you got him on the podcast finally!

I think the font from the Wired cover Jeff is looking for is Modula Tall.

Edit: Oh, I think may have misunderstood Vinny's comment and that's not the one he wants.

The one from the Leo article might be a variant of Neuzeit Grotesk based on the shape of the M and R glyphs. Not 100%

Regarding the book stuff:

Please bring back Bomb After Reading!!!!!!

@alex: Fair enough, I never thought people cared enough to actually send personal emails. Thanks for responding

@tacosgigante: Can you point to anything in particular worth reading on Scalia's impact? I'd like to learn more.

Loved the book recommendations. I think George Saunders would go over well with the collective group tastes. Separately, Orphan Master's Son is the best book I've read in the last five years.

The opening moments made me chuckle. Also, Austin saying Destiny:Fate was his favorite visual novel series gave me a warm and fuzzy feeling.

Pretty big Saunders fan with Pastoralia probably being my favorite.