The Giant Beastcast: Episode 51

Oh god that after credit scene.....

That'll teach me for getting excited and jumping the gun! Deleted my comment.

Just a quick thought.-

I studied WW1 a bit in college so i am pseudo-familiar with it. Most of what people say when they talk about WW1 is either myth or some twisted version of a "whisper down the alley" beaten, fact.

I believe its mysterious to many because of the lack of "Time Life Books series" or Band of Brothers, historically driven entertainment. Its also misunderstood by some who think the lack of focus it has received in public education, is in someway connected to some unspeakable horrors unique to The Great War.

In fact, it wasnt the most deadly war many of Great Britain's pre WW1 citizens had known in their lifetime. (The Taiping Rebellion had double the death tolls of WW1)

Another little thing....soldiers were fed well and never spent more than a couple days in the trenches at a time. Morale was actually no worse than in other conflicts.

Which leads me to----Im a bit confused by the taboo nature of WW1. It was sinister and heinous, but that is the nature of war. Ive been unable to find any characteristic that makes it less suitable for a video game, then say, Vietnam. The Vietnam war is far more controversial, and was especially brutal.

In fact, the worst part of WW1....the thing that makes it stand out to me.....was its peace process.

The way the Treaty of Versailles was negotiated and written, all but assured WW2. It was the inability of men like Woodrow Wilson and France's Georges Clemenceau, to put peace above war spoils and vengeful punishment, that directly led to the rise of fascism in Europe. Its very interesting.

Sorry....i start with one sentence and suddenly im 3 paragraphs in.

Anyway, i enjoy the thoughtful discussion.

Goddamn this is a fun podcast - I love the spontaneously generated segments.

Also @austin_walker if you record these in midtown you're not too far from a Food Emporium - I've never seen flying muffins or a smiling person there myself though.

Austin Walker was sent from on high to deliver us from evil with perfect videogame opinions.

(KOTOR 2 + Morrowind own so hard)

Jeff suggested running two 970's as a logical upgrade down the line?

That's suspect decision making.

After listening to guys speculate about the tone and possible gameplay style of Battlefield 1 I just want to say let's not kid ourselves. Battlefield 1 will have the tone and gameplay style of all the other previous Battlefield games. Despite it's focus on old weapons it'll play largely like other Battlefield games.

The weapons might be a little slower than modern day equipment but they're not going to make them as slow and clunky as they were in real life. This isn't going to be a realistic portrayal of WW! by any stretch of the imagination. It'll be very videogamed so to speak, very Hollywood-ified.

So in that sense yes it more or less will be an alternate history of World War 1. In this version of Word War 1 you have a healing factor like Wolverine from the X-Men. You have endless ammo. Your weapons are going to be far more accurate than their real life counterparts. Vehicles will be more easy to handle than in real life.

Anybody thinking Battlefield 1 is going to realistically portray WW1 is going to be disappointed.

Ha. I did the same thing. Cue the trombone! Let's head to the corrections!

Do you think I have to play KOTOR I to fully appreciate it? I want to get through KOTOR game.

Someone made a podcast just for me!

@yothatlimp: I think so, there's a lot of talk in that game about a significant character from KOTOR1 and characters from 1 make appearances.

There's story and lore stuff, but not really necessary to picking up II. You'll manage if you skip the first one.

But is WW1 really taboo or is it not talked about as much today because it's causes aren't as clear cut and easy to understand as World War 2?

@regular_kirk: WW1 is treated as taboo because it is not a clear good guys/bad guys conflict. It was just a bunch of runaway nationalism, treaty-making, backstabbing and technology. It was the first modern war, and the horrors of that (the shelling, the machine gun, and chemical warfare) was sufficient to fuck up an entire generation who spent their remaining years suffering from severe PTSD and disillusionment with their previously sunny views of both the power of technology (remember, at this point the narrative was "science will only ever benefit us") and the beauty of war (which was seen as a gentlemanly affair). In some sense the media coverage of WW1 opened a lot of eyes, and the stories that came back were not those of putting down savages in some colony, but of massacring "civilized" Europeans. That and the aftermath of the war demonstrated the sheer inability of old-fashioned notions of what winning and losing a war meant when it came to securing a lasting peace (the Treaty of Versailles is an absolute shitshow).

I know Drew's mentioned it in the past, but the Hardcore History podcast has a pretty fantastic series on the causes of the war and goes into depth as to why precisely it is treated with the sort of gravitas it gets.

Yo I was waiting for someone, somewhere to back up liking the Super Mario Bros. movie and I am vindicated. When you step back and acknowledge it's truly terrible, it's a really fun movie.

There are no "Aliens" in Assassin's Creed, Mr. Walker. The precursor civilization originated on earth as well. They aren't extra-terrestrial, they were the original inhabitants of earth who created men in their image to act as servants/slaves.

A lot of people seemingly got the idea that they are Aliens, maybe because of the images of the solar system we see at the end of AC2, but they never say anything to that effect.

Yep, Vinny with live audio cues was golden.

I think a factor in Overwatch's appeal is the ways it makes players feel good, like Play of the Game. Even if it's just a bog standard multikill, the heroic music really amps up the awesome factor of it. Even if your plays aren't featured, it records personal highlights and gives them the same treatment, so you can still feel like a badass. And then there's the results screen, which not only shows some best of statistics but also lets people rate up their favorites. Getting the most objective time feels good; having eight other people agree with that feels great.

My email was read this week!!!!

I am the person who wrote in about the NY commercial jingles from the 1980s.

skadave

http://www.peachyprinter.com/

Welcome to the rabbit hole.

@skadave: Good work!

The Beastcast's interpersonal issues are HILARIOUS.

The Super Mario movie is a perfect work of dumb art. It's kind of a shame we never got Super Mario The Movie The Game

EDIT: I've been thinking about upgrading some of my 6 year old PC parts so that discussion has me interested.

Those peachy printers sure do look like food blenders.

Possibly the best episode yet! Love that kickstarter is evolving into what I thought it would (gross overstatement, I know; I'm sure some fine products have come from it and success rate is probably higher than I think). I've never understood why anyone has been encouraged to spend money on a kickstarter project as it always seemed to me like an easily manipulated system. Sorry for those that lost money on the Peachy Printer, but, looking at the campaign videos on the kickstarter page, I'm not convinced the guy ever had a working printer.

You might want to look at the comments on this week's Bombcast (maybe last week's?) as someone wrote a post stating that many Europeans view WWI in a similar way that U.S. Citizens view the Civil War. I thought it was a well written post, but can attest to the validity of it.

Alex was right. This Beastcast was really something else.

I don't think it was ever on the rails.

Yeah, it is a lot more personal for a lot of Europeans than it is for most Americans. A lot of us had family that were involved in the First World War.

@supercubedude: i just stopped the podcast so i could make this same post.

I randomly found my lost copy of Flower, Sun and Rain last weekend, despite the warnings I feel like I need to play it XD

Yeah, there's a lot of parallels between the American Civil War and World War I. You see a lot of innovations/horrors from the former appearing in the latter, and some historians will point out that Napoleonic tactics were already proven irrelevant back on the American battlefields before the killing fields of Europe. The rifled musket was waaaay more effective at range than the muskets that preceded it, and the machine gun just took that to the next level.

I think its a little distinct given the clarity of the causes (and cultural interpretations of said causes) involved - you can't talk Civil War without addressing slavery and its eventual abolition - but the general perception in America is of it being a costly, bloody murky mess that staggers you when you consider the numbers.

About 625,000 men died in the Civil War. That's more Americans than died in both World Wars, Korea, and Vietnam combined. This amounted to 2 percent of the population at the time, which would be the equivalent to about 6 million Americans dying today. Battles weren't as deadly as disease, however.

By comparison (using google sources) Serbia suffered around 20% (!) casualties and the UK had around 2% casualties, the latter of which is comparable to losses for America in the Civil War.

Damn this podcast was gold! Hot fi-ah! There's such a fun energy to it, love it!

And I'm so glad Austin brought up Morrowind as his game to goto bat for even if it was an impulsive answer.

@alex@austin_walker

Speaking as a guy who grew up and still lives in Louisiana, my fave part of True Detective was the shockingly accurate depiction of the big empty and (to my mind) bleak bits of the state. You combine those visual details with the pessimist philosophy and it lines up with my depressed state of mind.

Pretty weird, bordering on bad, conversation about NVIDIA's upcoming graphics cards, the 1080 and 1070. There's no doubt those cards are impressive and represent a great performance per dollar leap. But there hasn't been a lot of independent testing of NVIDIA's claims yet.

Also, NVIDIA faces serious competition in video cards from AMD. AMD is set to debut its next generation graphics card technology, Polaris, in the next two weeks, before Computex. Polaris has also been touted to be a great leap forward in game performance and energy efficiency. AMD is on the record saying that it aims to provide great performance at lower prices with its new cards.

I don't fault the guys for being impressed by NVIDIA's new cards. I can understand talk of buying the 1070. But not to even mention AMD and its imminently launching new cards, which could represent even greater value for money? That smacks of incompetence guys.

Sorry for the harsh words but you kind of earned it today with your NVIDIA talk. I normally love the show and love the things that you do. I'm giving you straight talk out of love for you and the Giant Bomb community.

edit:

AMD tweeted out an announcement:

Join us 5/18 at 9AM CT for the next MTE as David Nalasco shares an inside look at Polaris. http://bit.ly/1s6FPm2

That's next Wednesday, ladies and gentlemen. Maybe hold off on pre-ordering a 1070 until then?

Hey, dudes. Cotillard is pronounced Co-tee-yar. Not Co-tillee-yard.

You're chastising them for hyping up an announcement but you want them to hype up rumors, that's just, interesting.

Wait, did no one correct anyone that the band is "Green Jelly" not "jello" or am I missing something here?

@austin_walker I think you've given me my next DS3 character name, Clair Debussey, nice mashup :P

If i recall correctly. . . "Green Jelly" was originally called "Green Jello." They were sued and had to change their name.

This was such a great episode from start to finish!

Such funny stuff I was laughing all the way through.

You guys are totally wrong. 6.9 isn't "above average", it's the worst ever. It's killing babies and eating them for lunch. Anything under 8.5 is hot garbage.

Scores are fucking stupid. Seems like nobody reads reviews, they just look at the score. Hell I don't read reviews, I watch quick looks and streams instead.

If a game gets below an 8.0 everyone in the company gets shipped off to the salt mines.

Yep, that's a Saskatchewan accent all right.

(I'm from Regina.)

This week's episode is fantastic. Props gentlemen.

it's really too bad that there's no "rate this podcast" feature so i could give this one 5 or 10 or 20 stars.

I think they started out as Green Jello until Jello threatened to sue and then they changed their name.

I know I say this pretty much every week but this is really the best show.

Please be nice to Popplio, my idiot son who nobody loves.

Marion Cotilliard. I could have sworn I've heard Alex say her name properly before on Screened.

I know it gets mentioned all the time, but it's worth mentioning again, that if anyone has any iota of interesting WW1 they should go listen to Dan Carlin's Hardcore History. He did a six part series on WW1 called Blueprint for Armageddon that's something around 16 hours long and is currently free to download. It's a fantastic primer about WW1 and the major events leading up to it, and how fucking bleak and depressing the war itself was.