lylebot

"Naive" is a word I would use to describe a negative outcome that easily could have been foreseen but was not planned for. Like, say, starting up a Patreon assuming you'll get 12,000 followers in a week, then just getting a handful and having no backup plan.

It is not a word I would use to describe a positive outcome that was not foreseen and therefore not planned for. Like, say, starting up a Patreon assuming you'll get a few hundred or thousand followers over several months and thinking you'll need to have a day job to support your family, then getting 12,000 in a week. This is in fact the opposite of naive.

I've been catching up on the Bonfireside Chat backcatalog (a podcast focused on Souls games from the Duckfeed team mentioned above). It's different from the Beastcast but scratches a lot of the same itches for me. May start listening to their Watch Out for Fireballs to help fill that void too.

It should be increased. I would pay it even if I only listened to the ad-supported versions of the podcasts.

@crashman06: you get used to it. I started listening at 1.1x, the sped up to 1.5x, and now listening close to 1.8x (it’s an adaptive speed-up that reduces space between audio and varies the rate depending on density of audio). It doesn’t sound distorted to me at all.

The main problem for me is that when I watch the videos on 1x, they sound soooooo sloooooooow. After listening to the podcasts, Jeff sounds like an old grandpa on the videos to me now!

Au contraire, some of these debates are great precisely because Brad is normally so far on the "don't give a ___k" side that when his strong opinion side comes out it's like a great mythical beast awakening and taking flight. MGS4 vs GTA4 and Skyrm vs SR3 are the two that immediately jumped to mind when I saw the poll question.

10 years go by and things change. I became a subscriber about 10 years ago, and in the time since then, I've bought a house, gotten married, had three children, bought another house, changed jobs, and heck knows what else. Still happily subscribing, even though these days I mostly just listen to the Bomb/Beastcasts and don't have much time for any of the premium stuff (don't feel like I need to for the $5/month to be worth it). I'll probably keep subscribing for as long as it's an option. Different strokes for different folks :)

There's a spectrum. I don't really find the Beast crew to be very negative, even Jeff Bakalar's "Grinch"ness comes across as mostly joking to me. Maybe as a 40+ dad myself I'm just on the same aging borderline Millenial/Gen-X wavelength as them.

I do find Jeff Gerstmann to be kind of negative as a rule. But:

This is a great point. Titanfall 2 is a game I wouldn't have touched with a 10-foot pole if it hadn't been for Jeff's raves. And I loved it.

I think I found Giant Bomb because Todd van der Werff recommended the podcast in some AV Club round-up article. I remember one of the first videos I watched on the site was the GotY Skyrim video---I recall them seeing a giant clubbing a bear or something way off into the horizon, and the guys all cracking up. That year I was traveling between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh a lot, and I spent most of my transit time listening to all the archived episodes of the Bombcast. I've been a paying subscriber since then, longer than I've been married, and still listening every week :)

I am aware of and have enjoyed Galaxy Quest on more than one occasion, but I didn't get "Alexy Quest" until it was explained in this thread. I thought it was a Sierra adventure game reference, but I couldn't understand why or to what exactly it was referring. (Maybe that shows my age? But those Sierra games aren't *that* much older than Galaxy Quest.)

I have a huge soft spot for fighting games even though I suck at them. Probably a holdover of years of playing SF2 and all its variants through high school.

I’ve literally platinum’ed Skullgirls and Guilty Gear while absolutely sucking at both. That’s how much I enjoy them.