The Giant Beastcast: Episode 292

Merry Christmas

the rubix cube from Flash stream continues

where I am from, chips are crisps and fries are chips

Aw Vinny! We miss you too! Happy Festivus! <3

Love you guys. Thank you for powering me through a rough year.

Vinny needs a hand check from now on.

With Vinny on this one. Love salty crunchy snacks, don't much care about candy.

Of course all those carbs get converted to sugars in your body anyway, so...

I rewatched Home Alone yesterday, has Jeff Bakalar really looks like the dad from Home Alone. I hope he hasn't heard that a million times.

@alex You asked about Obsidian. Right now their smaller project is Grounded and their large scale one is Avowed. That one is further along than the CGI trailer in July made it seem. They supposedly decided to hold off on a gameplay demo due to the pandemic making things fall behind. Xbox supposedly has a big anti-crunch movement, and that Halo Infinite delay seems like it might actually be happening? one can hope.

I don't guess I realized that Alex got married? It's probably been forever, but that detail went over my head at some point.

God damn. Assuming that's a normal sized cube, Vinny truly does have massive hands.

ok i can't listen to the audio version of this, someone is bumping their desk throughout a lot of it and it's so distracting. this happened to the Hotspot last week. please whoever is doing this stop.

@development: I can’t find the pictures so maybe I imagined it, but I swear somewhere there is a picture taken for comical effect of Vinny’s hands holding the Switch Joy Cons. Comment section, please help me out here.

Extreme og Beastcast energy all throughout. Love y'all have a good holiday and thanks for the podcast. Helping me get through working retail on Christmas Eve.

Vinny is more right about the Rubik's cube. yes Jeff it was invented in 1974 so there was one or a few in the world, in Hungary. It wasn't licensed and released in the USA til 1980.

The puzzle Vinny mentioned is the Rubik's Magic Puzzle.

Vinny, your Rubik's Cube conversation taps into one of the most interesting (and to me, haunting) things about why we learn and play games. I'm working on a degree in clinical psychology, so a lot of my thought process comes from that literature. There's this term called "executive functioning," which is essentially our ability to think ahead, anticipate outcomes and consequences, and solve problems. Executive functioning is linked to IQ and all sorts of other psychological outcomes. People with higher executive functioning, I would imagine, are more likely to be able to solve a Rubik's Cube without looking up the "algorithm." People with high executive functioning can solve novel problems with rule sets they are unfamiliar with. Looking up the algorithm, as you described, removes some (not all) of this problem solving element from solving the cube, because you've obtained an if-then rule set from an external source.

That said, a lot of people are perfectly happy looking up the algorithm and doing super fast Rubik's Cubes, while others (I'm guessing significantly fewer people) prefer to solve it without help. I don't know this for sure, but my guess is that this is a difference in what people hope to get out of the experience: Is it the challenge? The knowledge? The result? I don't know.

I think this ties into video games too. I played through Sekiro for the first time recently, and I found myself grappling with this issue quite a bit. That game is exceptionally challenging, and I ended up looking up a handful (or more) video tutorials on completing boss encounters. Before making this decision, there was always this decision-making process that fluctuated daily, probably as a function of my patience and motivation: Am I willing to give up on the experience of learning this boss fight on my own in order to progress? Is that experience valuable to me?

I think this is where we see breakdowns in communication between individuals who like or dislike certain kinds of challenges, the "get good" mentality and such. Not everybody has to enjoy solving problems in the same way, and I want to continue to learn to be nicer to myself when I choose to seek external assistance once I've hit my frustration threshold.

Rambling over. Thanks for the episode!

Vinny's spot on in the Rubik's Cube talk.

Early in my Comp Sci education I had a professor use a Rubik's Cube for a demonstration on general algorithmic process; as solving a cube is (can be) more procedure than puzzle solving. To this day I keep a cube at my desk at work and will occasionally, when I need to reset my thought process, solve through it; as doing so kind of pushes out whatever was occupying the "RAM" in that procedural/algorithmic part of my brain and lets me start fresh at wrapping my mind around whatever algorithm/logic I was working on originally.

So yeah, once you learn to solve a cube, it takes the magic out of it when you realize it's just an easily repeatable series of steps. But going through those steps can be weirdly meditative!

As someone who rarely has time to watch anything live on GB, I would have no problem with going back to prerecorded podcasts especially if everyone involved feels more relaxed and less distracted. Would probably even improve the already great quality overall. But that's just my opinion of course, I listen to them either way.

Funny Jeff raised a question about Disco Elysium. I had recently started it and hoped to dig into it more over the holiday...but with the free upgrade to come in a Definitive Edition, I'm going to hold-off. Kinda wished it could have been a surprise drop this month, but glad to get it anyway. Looking forward to it.

Thanks all and have a great holiday!

Happy Xmas guys. You really earned this one.

Brilliant podcast this week, thanks guys, and Merry Christmas all :-)

Utz hit hard with dip, I'm a fan.

"A Hopeful Hole" was my nickname in college

In a funny way, the reality of the pandemic brought me to Giantbomb more often this year than in recent years past and I couldn’t be more thankful for all of the awesome content the crew has given us in 2020. Thank you everyone and looking forward to many more years to come!

Thanks guys, you've made my holiday a lot more bearable. Love you all!

Of course they have to shit on Cricket.

Can't they leave that sport alone?

I am also a salt person over sweet, Vinny. Though I've tried to cut down on the chips a lot recently.

Also Alex turning green was fantastic

A perfect 2020 ending to the Beastcast. Happy holidays, folks!

"Isn't something coming back...?" - Jeff B

Terrifying, yet hopeful

I might have to fight Vinnie over his Utz opinions.

Spiritfarer has been my slow, calm, 'moment' game I've chipped away at over the past few months. I think I know why those final moments were tough for you. *internet hug* Have a restful holiday Alex.

@neau: I get Vinny's hollow feeling regarding the Rubik's cube solving algorithms. Yeah, there's a certain person who might figure it all out on their own, but I think that's a minority of people since the internet has existed? I feel like cube owners are either little kids who just blindly move it around and make no progress, or teens and adults who just look up the solving algorithms on the internet and then they can solve it as a party trick.

It reminds me of the whole Chinese room thing in AI. Vinny is following all the cube algorithms to solve it, but does he really have any understanding of the puzzle or is he just following instructions blindly that happen to produce the correct solution?

Like Jeff B says, I feel like it was marketed as some kind of Gordian knot to confound you, so I guess it's up to the individual whether they want to figure out the ways to manipulate the cube all on their own, or simply look up how people have been doing it for years and years.

Another thing is learning a game that is hundreds years of old like chess, go, etc. On the one hand, you could try to just learn the game on your own, but it's a tall order for yourself to expect to cover hundreds of years of chess strategy development with your own trial and error against a friendly opponent in your friend or family group. At a certain point you're just saving yourself years of fruitless, slow progress by just reading even a few basic books/guides on openings and general strategy.

Utz Crab Chips are one of America’s great chip flavors. This Utz dissing is wild.

....do they make chips out of any other potato than russet? Because that seems to be the standard for like lays, ruffles, etc

I could not find those utz russet chips. Fucking scalpers. 😔

Thank you guys for being so flexible this year and still delivering some of my favorite content of all time! I think we can turn the lights off on 2020 now, and push all the terrible memories of this year into Jeff's hopeful hole and perhaps 2021 will better than ever (maybe like Jeff's new mailbox). Happy New Year folks! See you on the other side.

I’m with Alex for once lol. Fuck Amazon I’m keep that shit. If it from a small business or person I’m sending it back.

Avowed is Obsidian's next game. Can't believe these guys didn't know about that. It's a first person (massive)open world rpg, set in the same universe as the Pillars games. Out in 2022 is my best guess.

I loved that flat Rubik's thing!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubik%27s_Magic

I was able to solve it in seconds at one point.