The Giant Beastcast: Episode 51

Steph Curry moment was perfect.

That Stellaris segment was absolutely hilarious!

Oh man, those fucking 1-877-Kars4Kids ads are the goddamn worst and seem to be on every radio station in the Northeast. Jeff should apologize profusely about slagging Vinny's singing after hearing some of these kids and the Raffi-ass motherfucker belt that out.

I like @austin_walker 's Eastern Europe Pikmin idea. With any luck put together by the guys who did Fantastic Planet, which is secretly the best animated movie ever.

That Macbeth movie is also very good. Highly recommended.

Never.

I think it's a problem with the USA's school grading system.
A is 90+, B is 80-89, C is 70-79, D is 65-69 and anything 64 and below is a fail.
When I found this out I understood why so many people think 70 is bad.

Probably one of the only western country with a B or C that high.

@purc: Yup! Boy was I tired when I said that!

I think this is the best Beastcast they've done so far. Funny stuff.

I think this is the best Beastcast episode they've done, some funny stuff.

Not true. This is what Christian Guillemot, one of the founders, said about the name: "Ubi it's a name invented by my brother Gérard because he thought it sounded good" ("Ubi est un nom inventé par mon frère Gérard parce qu'il trouvait que ça sonnait bien"). Also, since it's a french company and not from an english-speaking country, you would not pronounce it you-be anyway.

@regular_kirk: @skadave: Ah, thanks for the clarification, I never knew this!

Thank you for this line @austin_walker "There are so many smiling white people"

@ajroo: That conditions you speak of (normal morale and not more than a couple of days in the trench) might have been true for british troops; not being british myself i won't speak about it, but i absolutely, 100%, assure you that it wasn't the case for at least the italians and the austrians and i strongly "suspect" for also the majority of other continental armies.

@jetlag: Is criticising them for only mentioning one of two video card makers really unfair? These guys were talking about buying the 1070, with little testing of NVIDIA's claims or knowledge of what its main competitor was imminently going to offer. They didn't even mention NVIDIA had competition in the field of graphics cards. It would have been enough if one of them merely said, "hey we don't know what AMD is going to offer. Let's wait for their presentation and independent testing before we make up our minds."

These guys have influence. They seem convinced that the 1070 was the best graphics purchase available in the next month. Odds are, they;ll have convinced some listeners of that fact as well. But this might not be the case. We'll know more when AMD gives its press conference next week. And we'll even know more independent media tests both NVIDIA and AMD products under similar conditions.

If the guys praised as purchase-worthy one of two very similar video games and didn't even mention the second game then they'd very fairly be harshly criticized by knowledgeable members of the community. The same holds true for graphics cards.

@duluoz: I love Fantastic Planet, such a bizarre movie...and that funky soundtrack.

@vinny@alex@austin_walker Great episode! Thanks, guys!

Johnny Depp QWOP is making me laugh quite a bit.

Alex shouting "You gotta believe!" around 44:40 made my heart happy. :)

You just couldn't leave the vape sweat stuff out, could you.

It's like every week, the Beastcast is catching up with the Bombcast's strange esoteric nonsense, and I think they are ready to lap them.

Oh my god, these music cues need to continue.

The GBeast crew talking while stock music plays under them is this episode's equivalent to Ross Perot impressions. A++

Also, yo, I understand why @austin_walker loves KotOR II so much, but 14-year-old me still has a chip on his shoulder in regards to how much that game is totally not at all a sequel to the Bioware game Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. Those two games could not be more different in regards to tone and writing style, and as a result I couldn't have been more disappointed with that game and its extensive list of bugs and cut content when I played it in 2005. I've since come around on it and think it's actually a solid game, but Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer is similarly a fantastic and moderately subversive take on an established universe without any of the personal baggage I have with KotOR II.

"Some Michelangelo shit"

This episode was genuinely some of the best, funniest stuff I've heard in a while, not to detract from other great episodes of the Beast/Bombcast. I haven't laughed that hard at a podcast since the glory days of the 5 man podcasts with Ryan hosting. Great stuff.

It's possible they're just not even aware AMD has new cards coming out as well. If they're not majorly into PC hardware (which they don't seem to be), it's possible they only hear the loudest voices. Most tech sites and places like Neogaf are just talking about Nvidia right now, so maybe that's all the Beastcast crew knows about.

Also, to be fair, AMD seems to not even be attempting to compete with the 1070/1080. If they're strictly interested in performance, then it makes sense they'd talk about Nvidia anyways.

It astounds me how good this show is, beastcast is amazing.

Wait, isn't Vulkan a graphics API? I'm pretty sure it's a graphics API like Directx 12. It's true there are special drivers but all graphics APIs have their own drivers.

And yeah, AMD is going for more economy class video cards. Last I heard about AMD is rumor has it they are having yield issues with GPU clock and compute units. AMD at this point is a huge question mark, while Nvidia is out there with dates and in-house benchmarks. The benchmarks floating around not from Nvidia paints the new cards as monster overclockable cards and that's where the performance comes from.

Episode 51 of the Beastcast is, literally, the best one Vinny, Alex, Austin, and Jeff have done so far. every minute was either intriguing or hilarious.

I love what this has become.

@profhowell: Jesus, fanboy much? AMD haven't announced anything worth discussing yet. We don't have any specs, price points or performance comparisons. All we have learned so far is that they aren't targeting enthusiasts (i.e. 1080/1070 buyers) and they're using the same process node as Nvidia with the resultant power and performance benefits. That's it.

I have no doubt they'll ask Jeff about Polaris when we actually, y'know, know something. In the meantime, cool your jets.

Just a warning regarding Blueprint for Destruction and Dan Carlin in general. He is very entertaining but often quite poorly fact checked.

Here's an example specific to the WW1 podcast.

https://reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/3v63nh/dan_carlins_blueprint_for_armageddon_has_7/

The first 2 real games I ever played were Kotor and Morrowind and they're probably still my favorite games. Kotor 2 is good but it has nothing that matches the Revan reveal. Talk about subverting a formula!

Fuck the Warriors

-Salty Rockets fan

I really like the JG Wentworth jingle. They make the commercial so over the top that I can't help but smile whenever I see it.

I also agree with Alex, the "Kars for Kids" song is like nails on a chalkboard.

???

@reticulate : i don't know guys. The obvious analogy to compare NVIDIA and AMD is Microsoft and Sony. Let's say Microsoft held a press event and debuted a very cool new product. Then the guys talk glowingly about the new product for 10 minutes and talk about how much they'd love to buy the products offered at the end of the conversation. Sony isn't mentioned in their conversation at all. What also isn't reported is that it is widely believed by credible outlets that Sony will have a competing product that compares well to the Microsoft product by the time the Microsoft product launches. Wouldn't they get roundly criticized for their coverage if this were the case between Microsoft and Sony?

This isn't just four guys just having a conversation - this is four guys from a pretty major video game outlet having a pretty one sided and uncritical conversation about the video card market. They were talking about buying video cards without even considering what the competition was up to! That seems like a pretty bad conversation for a big video game podcast to be having. If you're going to cover an aspect of video gaming that doesn't get talked about a lot on the show then you've got to do it fairly. You've got to at least mention the competition and what they might credibly be up to

Regarding the "bordom" in the Assassins Creed trailer, i don't think when you use the animus to relive your ancestors memories that you inhabit that person, it seems judging from the games that you are in some way guiding their actions in the moment but not entirely, Fassbender wouldn't be able to marvel at everything in an obvious way, i think people are acting more stoic than bored, the lady assassin has a cheeky smile, trailer seemed fine to me.

The Peachy Printer video really is the most bizzare thing. Why even waste the time and money creating this? Just take the fucking money and vanish.

@profhowell: They're not covering the product, they're covering the announcement. AMD's new stuff does not have an announcement. When it does they will either talk about it or give you better cause to complain. Additionally they're under no obligation to give equal attention to every product that exists in every market they talk about.They talk about what they are interested in and that is part of why they have become so popular in this space.

This is accurate. Totally hadn't even heard the AMD rumors. Hell, it was a fluke I even heard the NVidia news last weekend!

Never quite understood where the Oooobisoft pronunciation came from myself. Not only does it logically make sense that it's You-bee-soft but they've said it like that, themselves, at E3 and other events.

Here to represent the people who don't like Jimmy Kimmel. I pull a muscle rolling my eyes at him.

Can't wait drop a huge amount of money on a VR PC. The time to strike will be right after the reviews come in for all the new graphics cards (both AMD and Nvidia).

The next good time to buy-in won't be until the release of the Rift 2 or the Vive 2, which will probably be in 2018. Though people willing to wait until then will have much better game choices, so it's not a bad alternative strategy.

@austin_walker: Thanks for commenting Austin. It's a pleasure to meet your online acquaintance.

I want to apologize for being rash and inflammatory in my earlier comments. But it was tough listening to you guys talk about the press conference and start to draw conclusions without acknowledging a competing side of the story.

AMD is keeping mum about about their launch event (frustratingly so!) but there is plenty of speculation about the event date and Polaris details on credible sites like WCCFtech. Mention that Polaris should be coming soon and speak a little about the event when it happens and the coverage scales will be balanced.

Cheers and thanks for chiming in.

Hands down amazing episode. Add it to the list of "things people new to GB should watch/listen to", stat.

It's fascinating the divide I've seen on how okay/fucked up the use of WWI as a theater of war for the new Battlefield is. It's one of those things that clearly shows how different points of views are on things, which isn't anything new. But, whenever other subjects come up it winds up feeling like everyone believes the world is of one mind on everything (or maybe it's just a couple of people who make it seem that way, really). I gotta say, too, speaking as someone who moved around quite alot between New York and Florida and went to probably a dozen or more different public school because of said moves...that public schooling within the U.S. doesn't cover WWI much, anywhere. Or, atleast in New York or Florida. I actually remember, more than once and from different history teachers at different schools, being told that WWI was only a big deal because it's what led to WWII....and that it didn't matter much for us because we didn't really do anything there. And...by in large, that was how it was covered. The times I remember WWI being covered, it was done within a day, in less than an hour if it was covered at all.

Which, can be a little nuts when by the time I was in Art school learning about how the generations of families and young men that were brutally killed in it. And just how WWI sounded like the most literal version of a human meat grinder I'd ever heard of. And I'm going to assume that the game won't do it justice. Nothing I've seen from the Battlefield games would suggest that they've got the storytelling chops to do it without either being over the top ala Michael Bay's Pearl Harbor.

On another note, it was kinda weird to hear how annoyed Austin was about Uncharted 4, and how he seemed to just be contrarian to just disagree with other people who were saying things he didn't like. It was just weird, and I'm not looking forward to hearing him talk about the game when he does play it. I'd rather they just don't talk about the game at all if it just leads to this point-by-point-why everyone is wrong segment or something. Also, I was reminded at how much the Giantbomb crew didn't like The Witcher 3, and that's just a bummer, and how 'since nobody beat the game that means the game sucked' or 'the story was shitty because the game was too long' and....sigh...just a bummer. Another game I'd rather nobody on the crew talk about again, either.

Games I would go to bat for:

Smash TV, Fallout 1, the original X-Com, Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast, original multiplayer Quake, Saints Row 2, Chrono Trigger, Dwarf Fortress, Laura Bow 2: The Dagger of Amon Ra, Full Throttle

Probably #1 would be Fallout 1. I'd fight a dude to get that on a list

@t3hh: This episode really is fantastic.

@quantical: Thanks for the tip. I will definitely do that.

@dedbeet: Right on, Ill definitely do that- Thanks!

@regular_kirk: I absolutely think this is true. Good Point.