The Giant Beastcast: Episode 67

The Cast of the Beast!!!

Well done guys. My favorite podcast.

Man, I hope we still get a new Christmas Fiasco episode...

Who's patting what bear?

I'm here in the Baer Caev....

Awww yisss

Yeah! Looking forward to listening to this one.

Great so far, but I have to say, I miss Bakalar.

Come back soon, Jeff!

It's the best time to play video games!

Wocka Wocka Wocka!

Yay more Hearthstone talk. I've been wanting GB to cover Karazhan for a while now, but with Austin gone Alex doesn't really have anyone to bounce of off. Baer with the save!

Avoid Gabriel Knight 3 at all costs, 1 + 2 are pretty good.

@mathey: Flocka!

Pretty sure that anime is supported mostly by sales of all the statues and body-pillows. Take from that what you will.

0:40:20 Jeff said the exact opposite on the Bombcast.

@azuresama: I mean, sure 1 and 2 are much better but I feel like people dismiss Gabriel Knight 3 entirely because of those infamous shitty puzzles at the start. It still has plenty of good moments.

I would say avoid the 20th Anniversary Edition of Sins of The Fathers if anything. It completely ruins the pacing of the original game and it looks ugly too. Plus no Tim Curry voice acting. It's really terrible.

EDIT: I hope they play Gabriel Knight 2 sometime. It's a 90's FMV game but an actually good one. I really think Vinny for one would like it.

I haven't played EVE in ages. It was one of those things that were super fun when you're an awful 18 year old with a mind for smacktalk and griefing people, but the good parts of the game are buried in a mountain of tedious, annoying and repetitive tasks. And the fact that your losses are permanent (or used to be when I played, at least) makes it even less likely you'd be willing to risk your time investment in battle.

When EVE was fun, it was probably the best multiplayer experience I've ever had in any videogame. But that was probably 1% of my time spent with it.

Alukrab = Barkula

Just what I needed for work on a Friday.

@djees: Ralakab?

Live from the Caev!

Giant Bestcast.

As someone that lived with garbage rural internet until a few years ago, I think Vinny got a little too wrapped up in the shock idea of patches. Even a decade ago, patches were expected, and not a game ending wall.

It's something you learn to deal with in various ways; I once downloaded a 2 gig WoW expansion patch through a nearby library to bring back to my dial up home internet so it didn't take a week straight to get it.

Trust Georgia Tech's triple option offense to make someone who has never seen football even more confused by how it works, oh boy

Best time to be podcast listening

@ratamero: Trust Boston College's offense to make someone never want to watch football again

Alex always gives the developers the benefit of the doubt even though the store page for no mans sky is still showing pictures and videos of things that aren't even in the game. Good on Vinny for speaking up.

If this guy says like one more time my head is going to like explode! I'm sorry he is probably a really nice guy, but fuuck.

That was my correction on Back to the Future pt. 3, and Doc did not want to go back initially and didn't want Marty to go back in time to see him, but when Doc was foretold his own death by Buford 'Mad Dog' Tannen, and how time was forever changed when the Clayton Ravine would not be named as such because Clara Clayton did not die, he wanted to return to 1985 and destroy the DeLorean so time could no longer be altered. My knowledge of this movie series knows no bounds.

@meltdown547: i think it was less about the concept of patches but the idea that the game on the disc is unplayable without a multi-gigabyte patch, which is lame. I recall Tony Hawks 5 and the Master Chief collection doing the same thing.

A better solution would have been to release as download-only then a boxed copy with all the Day 1 patches a little later. Rocket League did something similar iirc.

I LOVE Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura. You can indeed beat the game in many ways but certain choices can make this incredibly hard.

I GoG does do some stability updates when it can and I have played and beat the GoG version recently without running into game breaking bugs. Still had those silly crashes that seem like memory leaks so it's good to save a lot. However it still works and you can still play as a naked idiot that kills everything...

I remember once my ps3 broke and sony just straight up sent a (at the time) brand new white ps3 which was pretty awesome, can't remember exactly what went wrong with the console itself though.

Pat Baer <3

Michael Doglass

Pleasantly surprised by the discussion on the legality of Fansubs...

Pretty sure Activision fixed that epilogue boondoggle by now.

Alex directly contradicts what Jeff said about old school game returns :P

After finishing Fallout 2 back in 1998 for the 5th time or so I was ready for a new equally engaging and awesome RPG that wasn't elves and dwarves. Arcanum seemed to fit the bit and boy did I ever try to get into it but somehow it just never clicked with me.

I am with Pat on how great the premium subscription is for downloading your videos. I use to be stuck on satellite internet with a 12gb monthly cap. My premium subscription let me take my laptop to work and download all the videos I wanted. I also did the same thing with patches on steam games. Let them update at work and then transfer the files to my gaming pc.

I came here for my weekly kiss on the cheek from Jeff Bakalar. I'm expecting two next Friday.

The Irish person seeing an American football game seems like the exact inverse of my problem when I went to a hurling match they played in Boston.

Except American football is incredibly insane and complex. Alex does a good job, I had a Scottish person stay with me before and explaining American football was a nightmare.

Boston College was one of the worst offenses in the country last year, like laughably bad. Georgia Tech basically will never throw a pass if everything is going right since they exclusively run a version of the option Alex mentioned

A few updates on the EVE stuff:

• The Goonswarm/CFC collapsed pretty spectacularly about a half-year ago. They finally angered enough people the whole universe basically declared war on them. Last I heard the remnants had fled NullSec to hole up in LowSec.
• KiteCo (the GB EVE corp) is basically hibernating right now since 90% of its members lost interest in EVE. We still hang out together, though, and might return to EVE with the free-to-play push.

Humble Bundle Sierra Bundle is still active for 13 hours!!!!!

I think 'never pre-order. NEVER.' isn't really always true.

The last game I pre-ordered was XCOM 2, and before that I think it was Wolfenstein (DOOM beta). Both times I waited until I got enough information to see that the game was what I was predicting it to be. I was very happy with those games.

People can be smarter about the damn games they buy. But they're hyping themselves up to the point where they are shutting their eyes to obvious signs of problems. And No Man's Sky was a very clear representation of this happening to fans. When the game was first announced, I was skeptical, and as time went on, I was sure they were lying based on the way they were 'releasing' information on the game. It was EASY to see, and I have no idea why people purposely shut their eyes to the obvious signs.

But for example, Mafia 3. I'm a huge fan of the Mafia series. And when the third one was announced with trailers and information, I was very excited. I like the new main character, I like the new setting. However, once I saw the E3 gameplay, I was put on high alert. And no one else seems to agree with me for some reason.

Maybe they dumbed down the E3 build, but all the mechanics looked really simple when you compare it to other modern games that are along the same lines. The sneaking looked terrible, like the AI was purposely ignoring the player when they weren't sneaking that well... It looked really unrealistic there. Then the odd mini-game of controlling territory and assigning these weakly written 'henchmen' characters looked VERY tedious.

Because of this, although Mafia 3's pre-order bonus is one of my favorite cars of all time (1969 Ford Mustang Fastback), I'm not pre-ordering. I'm just not sure that game's actual gameplay design will actually be worth $60+.

Too bad. I was really looking forward to that one. Now I'm going to have to wait for it to come out and wait to see what the reception is like.

I get any number of hours has to be arbitrary, but given how Steam counts time, 2 hours is no where enough time to troubleshoot a game that has any kind of real issues. It basically incentivizes just walking away from anything that isn't immediately fixable.

CORRECTION: Missile is a Pomeranian.

Loved Pat and all the anime chat :D

As someone that buys only digital games: I'm real disappointed about not being able to return things within a small window. Some games I was super excited to play and, after researching, looked fun, but then I played it for an hour and was like, "maaaan this is a huge bummer".

This is just a tiny plea to, someday, get Sony to let me return Senran Kagura Estival Versus. Because it's Senran Kagura. God. Damnit.

Though it is difficult, region exclusive Pokemon in Pokemon Go can be hatched without visiting the other regions.

@jedikv: Yeah, I get that. I just meant that it's a bit more of a known quantity for people in the situation. Would always consider that a game bought one day may need to patch through the night before getting to it.

Definitely agreed that it's lame and could be better, though. Make physical copies fill a role that digital doesn't.