The Giant Beastcast: Episode 88

I'm ready for this!

Happy birthday, everyone

My commute requires Beasts!

Woo woo!! Love the Beastcast!

Edit: Goddammit, no Bakalar :( Get well soon!

A great way to start the day!

Anyone know when the RE7 talk is starting and ending? Still early on in that game and trying to avoid potential spoilers.

EDIT: Back to The Future III is a bad movie. I fell asleep in the middle of it. II is the best one.

Oh yeah, time for my favourite podcast on Friday.

Beastcast is Best Cast!

I gotta be honest here, it was only when Vinny said "88 Miles... per-hour" in the intro that I got the pun in Tails' name.

Also, while I much preferred Part II to Part III when I was a kid, I have a much greater appreciation for the third BTTF film now. Tom Wilson's Mad Dog Tannen is just fantastic, the train sequence is an excellent climax for the series, and everyone just seems to be enjoying their roles more than they did in the second film.

Once the futuristic sheen wore off Part II, it's actually a pretty weak film compared to the other two.

Fuck. Stone Cold Dan Austin. FUCK.

Also apt for episode 88 to be on the eve of the lunar new year.

They are making an Apocalypse Now game, but we already have this.

Edit: Vinny mentions this, the perils of real time commenting.

Well I can think of a few corrections for next week based on the first 10 minutes

Kiss on the cheek

88 is actually the luckiest number in the Chinese culture. The Lunar New Year starts tomorrow! How fortuitous!

Also the BTTF game is surprisingly solid and I guess Canon? They do a cliffhanger but I doubt we ever get season 2

Sweet. Rip Torn. Best name ever.

"Bazambo!" - The Big Bang Guys

GIMME A HELL YEAH IF YOU'RE DOWN WITH PREY!

Ahhh the last ditch effort for Blockbuster Video. No late fees ever. I remember renting Resident Evil 4 for GameCube when it had just come out and keeping it until they were literally going out of business. I returned it about a week before they locked the local one up, having purchased my own copy at that point.

Good times.

Apocalypse Now is a first-person RPG with survival and psychological horror elements.

You will explore the jungles and rivers of Vietnam in first person perspective. You join a crew of “rock and rollers with one foot in their grave”.

It’s like Fallout: New Vegas on acid in the middle of the Vietnam War

Hmmmmm...

Hell yeah!

Ditto

RE7, not BTTF.

BTTF2 is an unpleasant movie, BTT3 is a masterpiece. Thanks for reading my opinions, online, in the internet thank.s.

I....think....I....can get behind that.

@magmamud: RE7 talk starts at 10:15 and ends at circa 25:00 (they're talking about VR related non spoilery RE7 stuff at 22:30 though)

Just used the google maps to see what my childhood blockbuster is now. It's either been demolished and had a building built on it's lot, or converted into a business, a real estate/home business. Not really a funny story.

I vote for "You're A Kuza" for the series name

@vinny My childhood video store, Video Tyme, had its retail space split between a GNC and an orthodontist.

@dray2k: Thanks!

my childhood Blockbuster store is now a local barbecue joint, it's actually not bad

The worst game I remember renting as a kid was Ghostbusters for the NES. That was really bad. Bad enough that I took it back the same day and asked if I could exchange it for anything else.

Damn, I wish this was in video format.

Dan, as someone who lives in the Midwest (Michigan) I can safely say Family Video is a regional thing. We have 3 or 4 in my city alone, and they aren't exactly new.

My area didn't get a "chain" video store for about 15 years into the VHS craze. All we had from 1982 until 1998 was a local place that rented tapes. It was a good sized place, with a good amount of videos, but probably only 1/8 the size of a Blockbuster.
What I think is funny about the VHS era was it was typically a family occasion when we rented a tape. We'd make popcorn and we'd bring down soda to drink while watching. It was not just like watching TV, it was a bit more special because we blew a whole $4 to rent something.

I like Feel the HEAT for a Yakuza series. Hard to get particularly punny with Yakuza.

Or.. Popped Collars.

In the pitch video for the Apocalypse Now game they specifically say that the reason they are kickstarting the game was because the studio's they pitched the game to wanted to make the game a shooter. They are saying that it is an RPG in the vein of Fallout New Vegas and Wasteland 2 and said it also borrows from Survival Horror games. The pitch video along with the description on the kickstarter page do make it sound like a pretty unique game and not Call of Duty with Martin Sheen

As excited as I should be for an entire series Yakuza endurance run, I can't help but wonder if playing them in release order or at least waiting for Kiwami would have been the right call. While I haven't had the chance to play it yet I'd imagine 0 has plenty of callbacks (call-forwards?) to earlier games that'd be lost on first timers. Also going from Kiwami(assuming they wait for it) back to 2 on PS2 will be rough but whatever, nitpicks aside, this promises to be excellent.

My Hollywood video, blockbuster, and local video stores all became gyms. :( It's quite sad.

I should send a correction about the theory of general relativity...

The first BTTF is by far the best one, for similar reasons to The Matrix. Either first installment works as a great standalone, and you can look at the ending and go "OK, yep, and then the adventures continue, but I'm good." The sequels prolong it into a trilogy, but are fairly skippable because they feel pretty bolted on.

The 2nd and 3rd BTTF also just have some hacky character development. The first movie, they establish that Marty isn't a total loser, but lacks confidence in his eventual music career ever being a success, partly because he sees his old man get bossed around by and taken advantage of by Biff. He goes back in time, gives his old man enough advice to be more confident and make a better life for himself, which in turn doubles back on Marty and makes him have more confidence in himself. It works great.

Parts II and III have to gin up some other problem for Marty's character, so they out of nowhere establish that Marty doesn't like being called a chicken and doesn't back down from a fight and gets himself into dumb situations as a result, which eventually will lead to him drag racing somebody, getting in an accident, and messing up his hand so he can't play guitar anymore, which we see in 2015. This whole thing gets brought up and kinda goes nowhere in Part II, then in Part III his big character moment payoff is Flea challenges him to a drag race and he's like "nah, whatever." WOW, WHAT A POWERFUL MOMENT, I CAN HARDLY CONTAIN MYSELF. It's not anywhere near as good as Marty's advice finally giving George enough confidence to stand up to Biff back in the 50s.

As for the content of the movies, Part II is kinda weak. The future stuff is fun, but the rest of the movie of jumping around from '85 to '55 to figure out what went wrong and get back the sports almanac is just kinda lame. I mean, alternate present is a good time travel trope, but they don't do much with it. My favourite part of Part II by far is the end when a Western Union guy shows up in the middle of the road in the rain with a 70-year-old telegram from Doc that he was told to deliver to that exact spot in 1955; it's just a fuckin' baller moment. Part III is better because it's just a fun Western.

"Oh, that's Rip Torn" is what I thought when I saw the podcast image

The thought that the 'that's how we Prey' joke is going to go unnoticed by many...

Do people who never saw the 90s go back and study it?

@puchiko: this is very good.

I already sent Alex an email but it must be Yakuza Palooza!

"J'Yakuza!"

"This Is What You Get For Fuckin' Around with Yakuzas!"

"Would Y'all Kare for Zome Yakuza?"

"The Unites States of Yakuza"

Obligatory Simpsons Reference:

"Forgiveness, Please!"

Yakuza-Laylee

Various thoughts as I listen to the podcast

Your experience with Home Rental stores should be weird, because from my understanding the predominant use of Home Video Rental stores was for laundering money. You keep a ridiculous inventory that is impossible to track and constantly gets lost and almost all your transactions are in cash. Suppose you sold $100 worth of illegal things. You put your $100 into the register or safe, then take said $100 out and say, "we 'lost' 4 copies of Beetlejuice, I need to take money out to 'order' new copies." Now you have a clean $100.

While I'm sure there were some legitimate video rental places, and that the big chains that came along were probably legit on some level, it's just as likely that pizza joint that added video rentals was doing it to cover up much more interesting sales they were doing besides pizza. Dan's right though that in the vacuum of blockbuster going under, weird new rental places have cropped up. You could say that these are capitalizing on a disequilibrium in terms of online capabilities across geography and demographics, and filling an obvious gap caused by the collapse of big chains.

OR

It should be noted that it probably isn't a coincidence that you're more likely to find these places in parts of the country where from meth and heroin are popular. Family Video (which is what I think Dan was talking about), the largest and last remaining of the chains is probably legit, because like K-Mart it is in the "own land" retail industry, and not the "sell or rent things" retail industry.

Speaking of things that became other things. "Kevin Can Wait", the CBS show based on Vinny's life, is filmed at the old aircraft factories in Bethpage, NY, which is where they built the Apollo lunar modules. Once an important manufacturing hub, Bethpage produced $0 in manufactured goods in 2012. Just like how the naval yards in New York are now a Wegmans and hipster apartments, the buildings were converted back into studios just a few years ago. The reason CBS films the show there is because Kevin James said he wasn't going to move, and if they wanted him to do a show, they had to find a studio he would commute to. The current showrunner is also a podcaster, and I think he has a weekly show on NPR.

Konami's TMNT games for the NES are classics. The original, while brutally difficult, has excellent music and graphics, features everything you want from a Turtles games, and had early light RPG elements for an action game. A vary ambitious game with, that achieved good things with a branded license, weighed down by just an incredible difficulty curve massively ramping up at the second level.

I was just playing it the other day on a modded NES Classic. The controls also aren't too bad compared to say, Ninja Gaiden 1. Obviously the later arcade games are all classics, but having also just played the NES port of the Arcade games, those don't age well at all (Unlike Turtles in Time, which is excellent).

May 5th is 97 days away, to put that in perspective, E3 is 136 days away. Bethesda and Nintendo have been acting very weird on their media and marketing strategies lately. They probably know what they're doing. I wouldn't mind more commentary on this stuff, especially like, what is Bethesda doing with Nintendo.

The trick to children's board games is to remove elements that prolong the game for their own sake, such as "go back to the start" or "go backwards" mechanics. This makes some games unplayable, and that's a good thing.

As for brand issues. You people are famous. Obviously you're not "checkout line noticable" famous, so I can see why it still doesn't feel real. I hate to say this, but the actual intellectual skill of "critically assessing video games for the purpose of determining consumer satisfaction" is far less important than "being an (internet) celebrity." I'm sure you guys know that.

I can watch anyone play Contra or Megaman; hell, I can go play those games right now. What your customers pay money for is your personality, your ability to perform on camera, and your large professional knowledge you're able to weave into these podcasts and videos to give perspective to news and games. I realize you're in a weird spot, because you're transitioning from videogame journalists to VideoGames.com Pundits, but at a certain point you'll realize it's not any different from any other pundit who transitioned from journalism. You have more in common with Bill O'Reilly or Sean Hannity than Bill Whitaker and Steve Kroft. I know that frustrates Alex to no end to hear that, but people pay money to see you guys as basically pundits.

I'm not saying you can't have some standards, but people recognize that the pundits are allowed to sell out. In fact it is usually necessary in order to obtain access or influence. We are approaching some corporate cyberpunk future where all of the internet is just sponsored partnerships and there is no difference between marketing and news. I'm just trying to say in this dark timeline, it's not only OK to sell out more, I think it'll be one of the few ways individual entertainers in the industry can survive and grow their brand.

I'm just saying that if in 2 years, Nuke.Com is 24 hours of Fallout 4 streams for Bethesda's upcoming port to the New Nintendo SuperSwitch, and hitman.cool is elusive target videos of Brad and Vinny hunting uploaded copies of themselves in Season 3... it's not Back to the Future 2 levels of terrible.