The HotSpot - Episode 394

Looking good folks.

Brad certainly turns on this fan

one of my favorite parts of every episode of the hotspot is seeing Jeff improvise the introduction and everyone else's reaction

They touched on something today that I noticed a while ago, it led me on a downward spiral thought rabbit hole of horrible things in the future, of games (everything else is all good. nothing's wrong). The idea of appreciating the in game DLC option on the main menu. Its really disheartening to me that this is something that I have come to recognize as an extra "hey guys and gals, we hear you" quality of life touch from the developers. If this stuff didn't become so convoluted out of major corporations not being bothered and instead running "lean" operations, things could be much more streamlined. I am worried.

I wish there was a device called "phone", it can send/receive call or text. That's it, no more user features. Then you have a world of options for choosing your "companion device", which would pair to your "phone's" service connection. The "phone" is free and comes with your plan. The "phone" is just large enough to use comfortably, without being so small its easy to lose.

Vinny's kids playing marbles is my new favorite saga of quarantine

Ummm @jeff there's a playlist of full Zillion episodes with english subtitles on youtube.

Damn, @vinny, I still have that PAX 2006 Archon shirt (and still wear it kinda regularly because it held up super well).

I bought noita after watching Jeff's stream and got the same mods aswell I'm not big on roguelikes but I'll play them if theres ways to make the progression easier to experience all the content.

I live in Japan and holy shit I would pay A LOT for a Giant Bomb umbrella to use around here

@takayamasama said:

...until it gets left behind in front of a Lawson and stolen :/

@harperdc: oh no with my luck I'd leave it at the train station....again....

Noita is a fabulous game/engine. Can't blame using some helper mods, it is also brutally difficult and awfully quiet about all its mechanics and secrets. The game's wiki is super helpful too. I enjoyed the purity of working out what I could by myself for a long time though if you're willing to die for your exploration and experimentation. Like Jeff said in his Party of One, those moments of discovery are juicy. Watching others find them for the first time is dope. New spells, mechanics, combos, areas. Would love to see Vinny and others play it!

I bought Maneater for $27 a couple months ago on psn and I was refunded the $27 when it went free on plus last month.

@vinny The PS4 camera is stereoscopic. The PS5 is not. (As far as I know). I offered to send @brad a headset but he said he has a WMR one which made me cringe quietly. They are very out of date and the literal worst controllers on the market universally.

I still want to walk you through setting up a headset at your place with the setup you have and not having to move anything or make more room. It can be done.

Vinny Make a T Shirt quilt out of the shirts

Zillion the anime is good. It gets better as it goes along for sure. Once they basically introduce sub-bosses that are part of the narrative, it's great. The episode with Champ where he squares off against one of them is my favorite.

BRING BACK THE FLIGHT CLUB SHIRT!

Yes, this definitely does take you to that GOTY 2020 home page:

https://www.giantbomb.com/game-of-the-year-2020

On some Waypoint podcast I remember Patrick recounting how Rorie would keep telling him “those hot dog shirts are just not selling” and I thought it was hilarious cause I can just imagine Rorie saying that.

I’d get some GB merch but I’m not living in the states at the moment and - no fault of their own of course - the international shipping is abysmal. In my situation shipping costs are usually equal to the item itself. The awesome Beastcast mug is equal to a full priced game for me when all is said and done. It’s a shame. The t-shirts I’ve always thought were pretty bad apart from the Whiskey Media family shirt but I’d still like to get at least one Giant Bomb thing to wear here and there cause I do love the site.

serial experiments lain is a fascinating artifact from a place in time, i'm glad it got a shout out

I’d say the iPhone SE is worth it only if you NEED to be on iOS. Seeing how Vinny said he was open to a switch to Android, he could’ve done so much better for the price.

It is very possible to complete the entire Hitman trilogy in under 30 minutes with a silent assassin rating on each level. Non-Silent Assassin speedruns just don't interest me, the fun is in doing it as quickly and cleanly as possible.

I know the Explorer is far from the state of the art, but I find VR headsets are very much a case of you don't know what you're missing -- without a better headset and controllers to compare it against side by side, it does the job fine.

That apple didnt fall far from that tree w/r to Jeff's kid.

Hearing them talk about their past merch makes me salty all over again that they never made a proper pre-order run for the challenge coin. Just two limited number sales that went live when Europe was sleeping and was sold out within the hour.

Is there any way to sub to this on spotify?

VR Dump, feel free to move on :)

The new PS5 camera doesn't work the same as the PS4 camera in a number of ways. There's different FOV on that thing, so just using it as a ps4 camera would mean the tracking would be off as all hell, cause the devs do customize the tracking sometimes. Let's say the camera for the PS5 is like 15% wider, that would mean that you're going to get tracked fairly well in the center, but as you move to the side you're essentially moving at a faster/slower pace however that works out. Say you lean, the first 5 inches are reasonable, then you start getting more or less "acceleration" on your head movement as you get further and further into the edges. Moving your head in game at like a 1:1.2 ratio or whatever is a pukefest. Shit must always be 1:1.

That, coupled with the fact that the PS5 is getting either NO VR at all, or they're getting VR that doesn't use that fucking camera EVER AGAIN. Adding support for the new camera would just be a waste of time. I'm not even sure Sony actually wants people to buy more PSVRs to be honest. There are serious limits to what PSVR devs are allowed to do on the PS5. They can add dynamic resolution cause that benefits the pro, and the PS5 is a hella-pro, so the dynamic resolution helps way more on the PS5. That is all they can do according to sony's rules. No Man's Sky got such an update recently, and the game looks way the fuck better on a PSVR on PS5 now. Like night and day. Same with Dreams which already had dynamic resolution. On a PS5 it just looks sharp as fuck.

But yeah, no PS5 PSVR games are going to be made as things stand now. All devs have packed up their shit and moved on to Quest which is just absolutely fucking dominating right now. There are so many people playing multiplayer games right now, it's finally actually possible to play video games when I wanna play video games and not have to wait until primetime so I can find like 7 other idiots online... The past 3-4 months have been amazing for multiplayer VR, there are like 4 FPS games that always have players online now, and it's just the best. Contractor$ all day long baby! It's a shame Sony just ditched the whole thing like a hot turd just as it's actually kicking off..

The PSVR is a PS4 device, and that's the end of the story as far as Sony is concerned. Consider the dongle their only effort to apease the PSVR crowd. You can't use the dual sense controller in VR either for the same reason, devs would have to recode a lot of shit.. Not to mention the fact that the Dual Sense can't be tracked the way the DS4 was.

The next VR headset from Sony will likely be standalone maybe with the possibility of wirelessly connecting to the PS5 (And maybe PC even). Standalone is the future, so Sony might as well make a PSPVR to knock out Facebook instead of making a straight up console-requiring PSVR2 that won't hold a candle to the universal cross platform headset that the Quest 2 is.

I loved my PSVR, haven't touched it since I got my quest. Fuck cables and all that shit. Fuck PC's and the god damned jank they bring. Standalone is 100% where it's at. I'm in VR in 5 seconds, PSVR took me a solid 1-2 minutes every time I wanted to do jack shit. And that was the days where the sun didn't light up the back wall to the point where my tracking was 100% unusable.. Plus like 30 sec to a minute of loading.. SSD in the Quest and the small texture sizes means levels load in like 10 sec. I'm playing probably 5-10 times more VR today than when I only had the PSVR.

Anyways, Sony doesn't care about VR right now, that's why they didn't give a shit about supporting any of the new PS5 hardware. It's not even a consideration.

Funny hearing them joke about the PS4 being some old quaint thing now... The PS5 might as well be a leprechaun to me. :P

Don't you also have to run the PS4 version of Hitman 3 in order to run the PSVR version on PS5? So if you want to go between VR and PS5 version you gotta keep both versions instaled... Or did they fix that?

Phones were a mistake

dude I need an umbrella. Please do that, it will be the first merch I've bought in years.

Yeah, Hitman speedrun-esque runs have always been a thing, not just with this new one. The custom contracts you can create have always had a time limit modifier feature.

100% with Alex - I want a damn headphone jack. I even was gifted bluetooth earbuds this Christmas, so I don't need one anymore, but I still want one. I still have an iPhone 6S because I want a headphone jack. But like Vinny's was, my phone is clearly dying.

I just bought an iPad partly for watching videos such as GB videos. It’s much bigger and much better for doing that than my phone, which is a big phone.

If the pandemic happened 15 years ago it would have been much worse because the internet infrastructure wasn’t there to support working from home the way it is now. So many more companies would have just told their workers they can either come into the office, or they would be fired.

Char, like Shar. Not Char like Charmander :)

@nickm: Only if you’re just comparing raw numbers and price points without giving any deeper thought to how it all actually ends up working in real life performance. You’re not going to beat Apple’s custom chips and superior OS for the price of the new SE. (superior in terms of utilizing the hardware efficiently, more secure platform, ease of use, etc. I don't consider the customization and open ended nature of android to be superior in any way)

@sambatime: meh. The chip is good, yes. But is being able to run games well really that important? Real life performance is not about that. What about the battery? Screen? For that price you can get a phone with a high frame rate oled screen with 5G and a massive battery and a great camera. These are things more important to your day to day. iOS used to be superior maybe 4 years ago or so, but now they’re playing catch-up. I’m still waiting for some features for this 12 Pro that I used to have on Android. Not features as in, “I made my icons look like pretty flowers”, but stuff like proper multitasking, that affects phone usability in a major way.

Haha, Jeff at the end trying to sneak in some soundboard.

Feel like the GB guys have been saying for the last ten years they've been thinking of getting off the apple phone ecosystem.