Unprofessional Fridays: 11/17/2017

Is Matt Rorie ok

Yes, of course he is. Why would anyone think he's not?

Fuck, years later and I still can't get enough of Brads hair

Thank god. Tonight was getting dull af.

@sirpsychosexy: Years? Has it been years? Every time I see his hair it's revelatory.

Jan Ochoa with the "bespoke show notes." Well done!

It is interesting watching other people play Wolfenstein. I constantly used the dash attack and combat executions in the game when I could, which saved me a ton of ammo, and often one-hit killed the enemies without armor or finished off the armored guys after their armor was whittled down. It looks like the football character needs to be played a similar way. I'd be curious to see how much it balances around the specialties of the three characters.

I like how Brad seems to be all for playing the Battlefront II campaign after hearing it's 4 hours while on the podcast saying he likely won't have time to play Night in the Woods after being told it's about the same length

FWIW, I’ve been playing Mario Maker the last couple weeks and haven’t had any network problems (US east coast).

"You died."

The network issues in Super Mario Marker really bummed me out. I can only hope it is only temporary.

Also, seeing Jeff light up to play the game again and watch Ben play is just really nice.

12/15/2017 possible 24 hour extra life stream by the west coast team in-studio is the best news I've heard all week!

Jeff's hidden smirks when Ben dies are so good.

I guess I need to go back and watch some of these.

Yo Battlerite is actually really good. It's the followup to Bloodline Champions (a fairly successful game) and is like if mobas, WoW arenas, and fighting games had a baby.

odyssey not all that tbh

Jan when?

Anyone else having problems playing the videos on iOS? The keeps saying loading and its stuck

Jeff mentioned maybe some streaming next week, I wonder if we'll get some JarTime soon :O

"L-U-M-O-N-E-N-L-O-L-U-M-N-M-O-N-E-N-I-N-N-L-O-M-N-O-N-E-N. What is Lumonen?"

I think Rorie is broken.

I hope Jeff streams some Funky Barn soon since he keeps teasing us with that WiiU.

game audio seems way too loud, can barely hear them speak

I was wondering what problems Giant Bomb had with the combat of Wolfenstein 2.

This video makes it abundantly clear. They're bad at it, and it kind of seems like it's just plain bad with a controller.

I'm a little behind so I just posted about this on the Bombcast thread, but Getting Over It looks like a much more refined version of Sexy Hiking. Which is a good thing, as that mechanic was never explored elsewhere.

Edit: And of course it says that onscreen, so I get to be the silly person who comments while watching instead of waiting until the end. Well, at least somebody remembered that game and liked it enough to remake it.

Jeff getting frustrated in a game is one of the funniest things.

I'm going to agree with Rorie; Super Mario Odyssey is a great game and all, but I'd rather be playing something else.

holy shit Jeff's "this is Burnout's Revenge" joke is spectacular

Jeff's experience during the 100-Mario challenge reminded me that I didn't actually like that game very much. So many bad levels.

Seeing Mario Maker made me realize that having it on the Switch would mean playing a couple levels every night before bed.

And that NSMB has some solid mechanics and a decent art style, they just need to change it up with new levels and music to make it feel fresh to me. ALL new.

The hammer-and-a-pot game reminds me of Hammerfight. Not that it's really anything alike but Hammerfight is fun and also based on funny physics. Except for the damned ringing ears effect it feels great (make sure your mouse sensitivity is high enough though)

Breaking Ben

@xbob42: They really do throw a dozen enemies at you from all directions, which is amazing as you're dual wielding a shotgun and the diesel or kampfpistol, sprinting around, minimising exposure etc.. does seem like the controller would limit you a little.

@rorie It is called chocolate gravy. My mom and sister make it and it is amazing. It sounds gross, but it actually works. I myself don't know the recipe, but it was passed from my grandma to my mom to my sister. It seems to be a regional thing here in the south. I grew up in the Arkansas river valley area and I would say probably 50% of the people there had heard of it.

Mon Martha

sexy hiking is a great game by the way -- and free! highly recommended

"What makes Wolfenstein good" is apparently – and my own experience so far confirms this – everything except the gameplay, which for a video game is a bit of a problem.

I found it tricky on a PC, too, until I kind of embraced the Tao of Blazkowicz. There's a section early on (you probably know the one, it has "Stall the Nazis" as its mission objective) where you have to hold a point. And in most games, when you hold a point, you don't move around a lot, you use cover, that sort of thing.

I got my ticket punched in that area so hard that I considered dropping the difficulty level.

Then I started actually running around. Nazis all graduated from the other stormtrooper marksmanship school, and hey, they're not hitting me! And that mission, and from there on, got a lot better.

This is something the game does not teach you about, and it's a real failing of the game. By no means enough to bring the game down for me, and it also does look rougher on a controller, but it is something that I don't think is unfair to talk about.

I think that the gameplay ranges from okay to really good once you get the rhythm and the feel of the game down pat. From about the halfway point onward, I had a pretty good thing going (and I'm sure there are other ways to go but this is pretty much what I learned from playing the game):

- The checkpoint system will sometimes put you into a spot where you gotta be the SUPERHOT guy to escape, but F5/F9 work, if unlabeled, for quicksave/quickload.

- Stealth: SMG with the suppressor. Pop some heads.

- Once you break stealth, and you probably will, never stop running. Move broken-field and keep going. You can pause around corners, but that's usually just time to lie in wait.

- Don't double up on the same gun when dual-wielding. (You should always be dual-wielding unless in stealth.) You run out of ammo too fast.

- My go-to party platform was the SMG in my right hand and the SCHOCKHAMMER (it is Hat Law that the name be capitalized at all times) in my left. Normal Nazis got bullets, armored Nazis got shotgun spam.

- Really big Nazis called for special help. The Dieselkraftwerk (go team Wyatt) lets you boop twenty grenades onto a big dude and blow them all up from cover before you go solve some Nazis' breathing problems. But those are infrequent enough that I usually had time to plan that out.

- The Lasergewehr is the most satisfying gun I have ever used in a first-person shooter. I deemed it to be used at all times when available. BWOOOOOOOOOM.

I have a sneaking feeling that a lot of the gameplay criticism comes from its poor onboarding process (see my previous comment about stalling some Nazis) and that maybe it's tuned more for mouse-and-keyboard shenanigans than controller shenanigans.

Why does the description imply something other than Jeff playing Mario Maker for almost an hour.

I just noticed that Rorie has Euler's Identity tattooed on his arm.

@afashionablehat: Things became more enjoyable once I figured out to dual wield complementary combinations of weapons (shotgun on left and machine gun or assault rifle on right became my go-to combo) instead of the same gun doubled up, but in my opinion there's a lot more wrong than just the onboarding process.

The game wants me to move fast but in the middle of battle I have to stop running in order to stare at a very specific point on a shelf or table and, if I'm lucky, a prompt will appear to let me pick up some ammo or armour before I've been shot to death. Why is switching guns so slow? Why do I continue to take damage during melee kill animations? Why do I get stuck on the scenery so often? Why do I get so little feedback about which direction I'm taking damage from?

I also found the encounter design to be dreary and the level design to be mostly appalling – there's no notion at all of leading the player in the right direction with lighting, colour, movement, sound, or sight lines. I just walk around in circles until I stumble across the path forward, or click the (unfit for purpose) objective hint button repeatedly.

I finished the game this evening, and I'll say that I did have a lot of fun in the Venus level – the way forward was always much clearer in this section, the environments were a nice departure from dystopian greyworld, and the enemies were easy to spot (this game is mostly soldiers in dark grey uniforms standing against dark grey walls in poorly lit maps).

I don't mean to shit on your enjoyment of the game. I'm glad you had fun with it, and I did too at times. I see a lot to like in it, but in my opinion there's an unforgivable number of really obvious failings with the gameplay.

Super Bunnyhop has a pretty good video on the game, and he talks about switching between controller and M+KB. The game is significantly easier with a M+KB, and I think the difficulty was tuned with that setup in mind.

I didn't have too much trouble with a M+KB setup on Bring 'em On, though there were a couple notable sections that were more difficult. Part of the problem is that the game kind of has an inverse difficulty curve and it gets much easier after the halfway point for a number of reasons. FWIW, I don't think I ADSed more than once during the campaign. Always be dual-wielding, don't stand still, don't get flanked, and don't try to melee in the middle of a hectic firefight. Doing these things makes the game a lot easier. The SMG suppressor upgrade is also super useful.

I 100% agree with rorie at 1:07:10. Yes, Super mario odyssey is boring, and it sucks that he has to quietly whisper it.

Because the video is nearly two hours long.

@anarchovelo: i get what you mean but i think on the podcast they where talking about what has to get played before goty podcasts and he wouldn't have enough time to get night in the woods finished by then. where as battlefront 2 was short enough that he might play it at some point but not for goty. personally i think he should play night in the woods regardless of if it can be finished before goty cause it's just a good game.

@docporpoise: this is a very fair assessment that i wasn’t able to make due to being in a very bad mood at the time of that comment. I do think he glossed over the fact that ben said he finished the game in a day without realizing he meant with many hours in between. Also if he just doesn’t feel like it’s his type of game that’s totally understandable as well.

matt likes the worst games

Watching this makes me realise how much I dislike the art style of the New Super Mario Bros series. It looks super cheap to me.

A+ UPF though, Rorie is always appreciated.

Truth. (I wish this would actually play from 1:28:40 forwards...)