clagnaught

Fuck. Just heard about this. This really fucking sucks. I feel terrible for Jason and Jess.

Destiny. I played that pre-alpha beta and was intrigued by it, but I knew the state of that game before I picked it up. I had a backlog of Bombcasts, so over a week I got caught up to speed and found out what a mess that game is. Even with changes to the game, I was soured enough that I never bothered with it.

Years later, I was talking to a guy who worked at Walgreens about how Armor 2.0 was going to really improve Destiny 2. That conversation lead to me picking up Destiny 2 right before Forsaken came out.

I still play Destiny 2 to this day. I just checked and I have 1,000+ hours into it, making it my most played game ever.

With that there is an element of sameness.

The example I think of is with Bethesda, I feel like I have seen their games before, because I played through Oblivion, Fallout 3, and Skyrim. I haven’t played one of their games in a decade, but I still feel like I’ve been there, done that. (Although I kinda want to play New Vegas…)

In general, I like when stuff advances. Metal Gear Solid 1 through 5 are all different, even if they are in the same mold. It’s interesting to have different styles and mechanics over the years. Even MGS2 and MGS3, which both play and look very similarly, are pretty different. You could almost make the case that they have a different mood with them.

In reality, my answers probably say more about how I feel about those games than anything else. Like there are some games I would gladly play every 2-3 years if they kept coming out, even if they are largely similar.

When Ellie says "Everybody I cared has either died or left me..." gets me literally every time. Every time I play the game, anytime that clips shows up.

Other games made me have the feels. The endings to Persona 3 and 4. When Jesse dies in Final Fantasy VII Remake. Route E in Nier: Automata. The ending of Life Is Strange. By the letter of this topic thread, I think The Last of Us is the only game that has made me cry, and for whatever reason it's this scene in particular.

How about "Pentiment is a narrative, medieval murder mystery from Obsidian Entertainment"?

My local Best Buy had Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne on sale a week or two before it was supposed to come out. My brother and I kept doing double takes. Sure it enough it was the real thing, and not a pre-order copy or anything else. We bought it and started to play the campaign. We at tried Battle.net mainly to see if it worked, but that wasn't live at the time.

I think that's the only time that's happened to me. There may be a time where a retailor delivered a game one day early or something.

My go to answer for a long time was Firaxis makes an XCOM style game, with the cast of Overwatch. Essentially XCOM with more movesets and abilities (Maybe that’s what Midnight Suns will be? I still haven’t seen any gameplay of that yet, so I have no idea)

This is really sad to hear. Kevin Conroy was the definitive Batman / Bruce Wayne.

I think the problem with Twitter imploding is there isn't a great alternative for it. There's a ton of video game people on the site from developers to streamers to journalists to voice actors to various fan accounts. The situation is many people are already there and you can follow everybody from Giant Bomb, Polygon, or whatever other sites you follow, or all of the actors you like, or the makers behind your favorite games. The problem is you need something equivalent (which for Twitter is primarily text and basic video and image uploads) and convince everybody to leave. If only 10% of the people moved over to <New Social Media Platform> it just wouldn't be the same.

Speaking for myself as an example, I'm in security. One of the main things abandoning Twitter is more so for that and not people at Giant Bomb, Nextlander, or wherever else. Within security, there are people who are subject matter experts on exploits and vulnerabilities versus forensics versus social engineering versus malware, etc. etc. It's one of those things where you know of enough people from all over the place that it's quite valuable to keep track of what people are saying when something big happens. People tend to post stuff like that more so on Twitter than something like LinkedIn, which has to be a job recruitment and networking platform on top of other things.

With security, there's other stuff out there from LinkedIn contacts and groups, Discord servers, mailing lists, but it's just not the same. Being able to see something from any security person is a lot better than going off into a random Discord server. I don't keep up with a ton of social network stuff, but I think that's why something like Mastodon won't work.

Who knows, maybe Twitter will crash so hard Elon will sell it to get it off his hands and somebody will have to un-fuck what he did. Maybe Twitter will just die and everybody will have to go to TikTok, which has it's own problems.

I've scaled down my social media presence a lot in recent years, but I have a feeling this might be the thing that kills all social networking usage for me. The only exception is LinkedIn, which mainly feels like a failsafe in case I ever get laid off and I need to network with people quickly to get a new job.

Nextlander basically only talked about Gerstmann when he left Giant Bomb. In terms of collaborative stuff, Nextlander has a tier that grants access to yet another podcast called Never Been a Better Podcast, which is basically a reunion of the Beastcast. They were rotating people out, although the last time they got everybody on one show (Vinny, Alex, Austin, Abby, Dan, Bakalar). It isn't video game related. It's just people talking about stuff like Dan's basement snake adventure, ghost stories, mecha, etc. One thing with that is it's only once a month. I think that works out in it's favor. If it were more recurring, people would probably just chat about their past week and rehash stuff they already talked about elsewhere. On the other hand, right now the topics are all over the place and more reflective or nostalgic. Aside from that, it's the one off streams like Splatoon, Neon White, and last year's Extra Life.

I ran into a similar issue once upon a time when I had a job where I could work by myself in silence for like 90-95% of my job. That's actually how I found Giant Bomb. I needed another podcast. My problem was a little different. There were too many podcasts and there was so much stuff to listen to I got fatigued at a certain point. Even though I was just listening to podcasts, I got tired from hearing people talk so much. It especially hit me when people would talk about the same games across all of those different podcasts.

At a certain point I accepted that I'm not going to listen to everything. Like to this day, I've never listened to Gerstmann's new show, despite listening to them for over a decade on the Bombcast. I would probably like the Fire Escape podcast, but I just don't have the time. All of my podcasting is divided up between Nextlander and GIant Bomb. In the rare event I try something else, I don't stick with it or play catch up with one of my main podcasts and just never go back to the new show.