Almost positive @jerf is thinking about Busy Town by Richard Scarry near the end of the show. Though it is a worm with the hat on his head and not a snake.
edit - ...And of course he remembers it after I write this. A+
@jerf needs to stick with the frog tattoo. The collective is the Crow and the Croak. The crows are harbingers of doom and the croak comes in and finishes the job.
I've really mainly seen three scenes floating around twitter for the dialogue and honestly only one of them do I find to actually be annoying to me (the one included in the trailer late last year). I want that game to be good and it does feel like ever since that first preview where people came away uneasy about how they were portraying Frey set everything in motion in a way that they never recovered from. To be fair, given the sound of the reviews, those concerns weren't unfounded. It still sounds like it is fun to play though if you detach from the story so I'd like to try it eventually, but not for full price brand new. Hopefully it isn't too much of a deterrent to prevent Square from taking more risks in the future.
@glots: Played a decent chunk of Ghostwire earlier this year and am planning on going back to close it up shortly. It's not a bad game by any stretch, but by-the-numbers is certainly not wrong. I am with Jess in that the marketing led me to want more weird and creepy horror adjacent trappings to it and while the set up and enemies fit that, the moment to moment gameplay really doesn't. So while there is nothing actively bad about the game (combat does get better as you unlock more tools) it feels like a lot of potential wasted on a cool setting and core idea. Enjoy it enough to go back and finish it, but any kind of sequel would definitely need to re-examine the boilerplate open world trappings.
@rlatham: I feel like they (Bakalar, Grubb and Jan specifically) have made it a point on several streams to say they wanted to elevate creators that they think were doing cool things to help give them some exposure. Whether that ends up being long term, short term or total one offs that don't catch on with the community is to be seen, but as far as the "brand" goes Giant Bomb was always about more than just video games when it was founded. The Sausalito crew would constantly deviate into movies, food, energy drinks, music let alone some random streams of just absolute nonsense playing around with the tricaster in a similar vain to Windbag (minus the need for narrative continuity).
I feel like the "random" stuff faded away a bit when the site moved to CBS so for us old folks that have been here since the late Gamespot, Arrow Pointing Down and Whiskey Media days this may not seem as weird to be on the site, but that may be me projecting a bit.
So, is it video games brand? No, but that's ok. Giant Bomb was created to be about video games and whatever else they felt like doing. This is the same, but with the new crew inviting people they think are doing something cool to be a part of it for a bit. It doesn't impact what the core staff are doing so I am all for it myself.
Love these kind of deep dives on design. Well done.
While I do agree that Ugly is maybe not the right word to convey the issue, I can understand how you would fall back on that word for a quick take when there isn't time to fully explain it like during the VR game trailer stream. The issue really is overwhelming the player with too much visual info that makes parsing the world unintuitive. The game is very pretty, but it's constructed for screenshot and video fidelity. As a result. that impedes intuitive playability in many cases for me.
I bounced off of the first Horizon twice. As someone who has Vinny-itis and feels compelled to collect things if they are there, I got incredibly frustrated doing so. Partially due to having to climb structures that required me to constantly ping my Focus to even figure out where to begin, but also having to use the Focus to even identify what it was I am trying to collect. Compare that to Assassin's Creed (at least the older, haven't played much of the post-Origins games) where they add the Animus digital filter over the chests and collectables so you can more easily identify them without relying on eagle vision all the time. Even when you did need to use eagle vision, it was only for finding the hidden collectables and not for navigating the environment as well so it didn't need to be constantly used. Having to rely on Focus so much really brought the flow of the game to a halt for me and made it feel more tedious than enjoyable.
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