The Giant Beastcast: Episode 279

Violet Jeff

EDIT: FREE VIDEO YouTube is not working

This episode gave birth to a new emoji for chat

What is the controller in the middle of the episode image?

EDIT: after doing some searching I found out that it is for Amazon’s Luna service.

You know more choice for consumers is good and everything... buuuutttt until the ISP situation in North America gets sorted and reasonable speeds + no data caps becomes the norm nation wide streaming services like this feel like a total pipe dream.

Deftones.

New Deftones, today!

@dizzyhippos: Yeah it's going to be a very long time before cloud can be the service and not just an extra part of things.

I miss grease trucks:( but the R U hungry truck i think opened up a shop in NB.

All the information on the Xbox expansion storage here;

https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2020/09/24/xbox-series-x-and-xbox-series-s-custom-storage-solution-primer/

In brief as they alluded to before - can store Series games on an external HDD but not play them. Can store and play everything else off an external HDD.

If Vinny likes building fortifications in AoE it would be fun to watch him play him the Stronghold games and design the perfect defence, since that is the main focus of them. I prefer the first one but people seem to like crusader the most.

Someone clip Jeff saying "The Xbox Series X sucks"

Alex, I hope you’ll be able to do a QL for The Art of Rally. It seems like it’s a fun game, but looking around on YouTube, I really don’t see much buzz around it.

My 2 cents on the pre-order stuff.
How can retailers do this more fairly? Ironically, I feel like Sony's widely panned pre-pre-order registration was a good idea, if it worked the way I think it worked. Just have people register, and do a lottery thing after. I had always assumed that when Sony said they'd "check your PSN account" they just wanted to make sure they weren't giving a PS5 to a bot/duplicate account (i.e. recently created, or zero games/hours played). Seems logical to me. Retailers really SHOULD have done this kind of thing this year to prevent lineups/crowds during a pandemic.

(As for me, I got my PS5 in like 30 seconds on Best Buy Canada because I happened to check it a few minutes after they went live. Great for me, sucks for people who found out later. I didn't try for an Xbox cuz I don't want one.)

I had the same thought process as Abby earlier today. I was thinking about getting a PS5 and just ending up wondering if I should just invest in a VR setup and ditch the rest. (the answer is no, I don't really have the space for it)

This is the most distracted people have seemed during a video beastcast but who knows maybe they were reading the news articles as they were being discussed

If you're looking for VR, I'd currently recommend the Quest 2.

It'll be a bit before you might be able to find one after it launches, but it being a standalone unit for cheaper than any other model, and with a better screen and enough power to match the original Oculus spec, everything moving forward will work with it.

So it'll work with almost everything in the oculus store so far, and for future stuff and other stores you can link to a PC. One downside is that a Facebook account is manditory.

Jeff said "Stadia is expensive"

No, it's not. Stadia is free. You don't have to subscribe to Stadia Pro to play any game you've purchased. Yes, you have to pay money to buy a game (unless you are given a free game code), but once you've bought it you play it for free forever, no subscription required, just a Gmail account. And there are ways to get free games. There have been YouTube streamers showing off the closed beta version of Stadia's Crowd Play, and have been giving away game codes. I won the full version of Mortal Kombat 11: Aftermath with all the DLC fighters. That's my game to keep and play for free forever. I can play it from any Chromium browser on almost any device across the entire world, for free, forever, using any type of gamepad or even just the keyboard.

I'm excited for Luna (and xCloud, and PS Now [if Sony wakes up and does something with that service]), if only so that the real start of the game streaming wars truly begins and forces Stadia to be more proactive about correcting peoples' constant misconceptions about the platform.

Edit: Also should be mentioned that Luna's opening $5.99 price is introductory and will go up (most likely to $9.99) once Luna moves out of beta (and hopefully to more countries than just the United States). Also of note is that Luna will be doing the cable TV model of a subscription service. The $5.99 price will get you access to 50 games that are a smattering of indie titles from various publishers, but larger publishers (only one so far mentioned is Ubisoft) will cost you an extra add-on subscription to play any of their games. So you'll have to pay probably $5-15 more on top of your $5.99 subscription to play the 50 Ubisoft games on Luna. This will add up quick when EA and others also join Luna with their own premium subscription channels. I have yet to see confirmation if you'll be able to pay to buy individual games, or if this will strictly be a monthly subscription game streaming service, which if so will most definitely be way more expensive than Stadia.

Second Edit: I want to thank Jeff for bringing up Stadia every week, and actually giving it a shot, so he has an informed and impressive opinion of the platform. I'm hoping more people will realize that Stadia actually works (if your home internet isn't completely terrible). I'm hoping that Stadia and Ubisoft really push the completely free demo of Immortals Fenyx Rising in a few months.

@peffy: I registered to preorder with Sony, got an Email after the Sony show Tuesday, got in a queue to order on Friday morning, waited half an hour and ordered a PS5, and apparently having PSPlus got me free shipping. I haven't heard anyone on podcasts say they were invited to preorder from Sony, though, I'd think that would be the safest way to insure your preorder doesn't get cancelled somehow.

$220 is too much for any type of storage, but transferring games off a cheaper external USB drive seems like a very reasonable option. It’s weird seeing people pretend like the expensive option is the only option.

@madmatt213: "Yes, you have to pay money to buy a game (unless you are given a free game code), but once you've bought it you play it for free forever"

That's literally not free.

@depecheload: After you buy a game, or get the game for free, it's free to play. Therefore, Stadia is not expensive. You don't have to pay anything to use it.

Am I crazy or is the Spider-Man thing not that confusing at all?

I wish you guys would play around with the show format when appropriate, or include time codes. When the headline of the show is a news story (as it often is), I think the news should come first. Maybe even have the emails first sometimes just to keep things fresh.

One of my favorite episodes of the Beastcast was an episode more or less dedicated to discussing and speculating the potential (or lack thereof) of VR, before any of the headsets had a consumer release. This was back when Austin was on the site; I think it was 2015. Those early days of the podcast were more freeform, and I liked that. It wasn’t just the Bombcast with different people.

Still like the show, but it’s gotten a little rote. I don’t mean to be harsh because I realize the current situation is not really ideal for being creative.

I would def suggest the quest 2 as it's the price of a switch or ps4 digital if you go for the 256gb one. You can definitely hook it up to a pc to play Half Life Alyx, while also giving wireless pc connection a try with virtual desktop. There are games coming out for it every month so it's not like there is the set ones that Jeff looked at during it's launch. Abby would be a great fit for it as she seems more open to vr being a thing vs Jeff who has done the exact wrong thing ,with the episode where he made himself sick, and now avoided it all together assuming the entire mode of video gaming isn't for him.

Also the "ENTIRE" vr community hasn't collective decided the index is the end all be all for vr. it's like a boutique car. it's nice. is it nicer than a honda? yep. is it worth the amount they ask for it? some say yes. but It's also fidgety with it's expensive unique controllers that aren't' as universal as you might hope.

Shout out to Jeff's amazing Spaceballs shirt!

@rafar: Did you not listen to the episode or something?

I think the thing with HDR and pc monitors is that windows support is practically non existent and game support is wonky, ALSO brightness is a big issue, most monitors that do HDR are only 400 nits(sdr tops out at 300) which barely scrapes the bottom of what HDR can do. My monitor does 600 so I can actually see a difference. But it's rare to see them at 600 or higher, and the price goes up very quickly.

But HDR on PC is a joke right now, windows doesn't support it on the desktop so if you engage it everything looks washed out and dull, and some games support it extremely well and some make it a hassle to get it working and calibrated properly.

Is HDR on pc a selling point, not really unless you wanna spend at least $500 and find one that's at least 600nits. Resolution, refresh rate, panel type, response time are more important. Once you move to navigating windows at 120-144htz going back to 60htz feels like slow motion.

All this Stadia talk seems to have convinced Vinny that dumb terminals/clients are a good idea for his kids. I guess they're back in fashion from the 80's now that some places have great internet but now megacorporations are in the loop.

My personal opinion is that kid's should have something physical to tinker with to understand what a computer is like a Raspberry Pi or Pinebook. They can run stuff like LibreOffice and a browser on those and that should be a decent start. Then play games on Stadia or consoles or whatever.

I like how Vinny almost reflexively called Miles Morales 'Mild Morales' at around 1:13:00 😂😂

Is that gonna be the subheader if the reviews score around a 5~6?

@zoofame: Exactly, it's a minefield for people that do research and a quicksand trap for people that don't. I ended up getting a Samsung 27" 1440p 144htz QLED which works great for me. One of the driving factors was that it's actually VESA 600 certified so I know I'm getting decent brightness. I was shocked to see how many makers would say their monitors supported HDR and then to look at the fine print and see the peak brightness was below 400 nits.

And on OLED's I'm staying away from those for monitors until burn in isn't an issue, seems like a desktop environment is the worse case scenario for a OLED lol.

I do not understand how no one at GB has experienced slowdown on Switch Hades. When there’s a bunch of enemies it turns into a slideshow for me.

@schindigg: No, I have not listened to the episode yet.

Apparently, “is Marty soft?” was also an embargoed question since Bakalar never answered that either.

There are true HDR 1000 monitors but they’re expensive.

@haneybd87: It could be that your definition of “slideshow” differs from others. I notice frame rate dips only when it’s a room full of skull spawners AND I have some effect that makes a million of my own projectiles, and even then it’s still playable. Any other room I don’t notice any frame rate issues at all.

@Alex, 👌🏻, mad props on the Sneakers reference. Such a...I was going to say good, but a fun movie.

@bisonhero: Well my idea of slideshow is when you get to sub cinematic frame rates. When that happens it sure screws up my ability to control the game as well as usual. I feel like I have better control over combat on PC. It bums me out that it runs so poorly on Switch because it’s such a perfect Switch game.

Just to justify why I've upgraded and pre-ordered a Series X, I sold my One X for £200 and had £250 in Microsoft Reward points collected over the past two years, so effectively it's a free upgrade.

Also, the thought of playing Cyberpunk 2077 on a Series X with the boosts it is showing straight out of the box just sounds awesome

I agree with Abby Meowscles is extremely fuckable

Jeff's son's stealth fail was the highlight of my day watching this. Also I used to be an Uber driver and I can't tell you how many times I had a car full or 20-something girls leaving a club at 2 am and begging to go through a Taco Bell drive thru. They would always offer to buy me something too.

Jeffery needs a Cloudlifter or Fethead inline PreAmp for his fancy new "everyone has one" Hipster Shure SM7B.