Giant Bombcast 03/29/2016

How DARE he talk about gameplay elements of this month old game he's playing.

Honestly surprised Dan has any knowledge of B.F. Skinner.

Watched the whole stream, got nothing done all day. Worth it.

Nobody used the "Six-Axis" in an argument to say the PS3 was better...

I'm with Dan. I don't agree with him that Super Mario 3D World is separate from the lineage of 3D Mario platformers but if they just gave me another great 3D Mario game with cool, unique levels (think how huge they could make them now that the tech has come a lot further) with awesome art and challenging platforming, I would be on board. I've loved every flagship Mario game that Nintendo EAD has developed from when I was kid to now as an adult.

Dan seemed to be the most gung-ho about VR, so hearing his comments on the Rift here are really revealing.

If Brad puts the break music at the end one more time I'm gonna find that boy and fuck him up.

Super Mario Sunshine is incredible

Jeff's pervert improvs are the best thing. Every time.

Escape from Monkey Island had bad tank controls, some tedious hard puzzles ( i remember navigating a swamp on a raft for way too long) and the artstyle was probably not great for people that grew up with those games. It was this early blocky 3d style.

That said, it was my first monkey island and i thought the voice acting, the overarching style and the writing were well done.

It made me go back to the old games.

Jeff's computer really couldn't handle VR? Random searches on google seems report people saying i5 2500k is serving them well. I have the same CPU, but I guess by the time VR is established it would be time to upgrade a full PC.

Hard boiled eggs taste great with ketchup if hot sauce is not available. At least for me anyways. Ketchup with scrabbled eggs is a little gross.

The high scrutiny Jeff and Brad have for sequels to 2D and 3D Mario games is a wonder to behold. I can understand where they are coming from when I consider how lengthy and monumental Mario's legacy. While there are other long-running or large series in video games (e.g. Final Fantasy, Call of Duty, Assassin's Creed), I see most of them getting less of a time-and-day with Jeff and Brad than the Mario series.

I'm with Dan on this matter as I would love for the rest of my life to have another well-crafted and high quality Mario platforming game every couple of years.

In both in-game sprite and in instruction manual style concept art, baby Yoshi has shoefeet

For most of my life I thought Parity was Parody, because Americans often say Ts as Ds. I sounded like an idiot for like 10 years.

Always take things said by the press with a grain of salt and never buy into the hyped until you have had a hands on with the product in question.

as someone who lives in new zealand i will fight drew in real life. our accent is shit but still

Still not up on iTunes as of 2:36 AM central time on Wednesday. Sheesh, looks like I'll have to download it here.

Personally I loved it. But I'm also a sucker for tropical settings, weather, and aesthetics (in real life and in video games). There were definitely some bugs and camera weirdness since they rushed it to meet a summer release date, but it's still a solid game overall.

Anybody got a link to that Cyber Trump Youtube thing?

UPDATE: found it!

I think it's more that they're gung ho about the technology, not so much the demos. There's always been the idea that the technology works, so hopefully in the future there will be software that takes advantage of it and introduces this new medium to a wide audience. Nothing in the official Rift store seems to do that.

The games press in general does tend to hype up the industry they cover a lot more than you would expect out of "journalism" (though this is enthusiast press, not political or even technological journalism), but I feel like Giant Bomb's coverage has mostly been "This demo was cool because the technology works!" not "This demo was cool because that was a good game!"

No email jingle and pause music at the end, this podcast is out of control.

VR will never be anythying when we have games like rise of the tomb raider, witcher 3, and those 4k beautiful graphical ENB worlds are going to be WORLDS better than VR ever will be. I can't take a low resolution world when I'm living in a high resolution reality.

Jiff

About old PC prices, here is 1998 dream PC with $5900 price tag:

Jiff with the RJD2/Blueprint reference seconds into the podcast, never ceases to impress.

I'm guessing it's because the VR games are good at using all available cores. I switched my i5 2500K for an i7 4770K a while back and in normal operational use there is not much difference in speed. But there definitely is a benefit in game that are good at using both physical and virtual cores.

But of course its also a matter of what graphics card is paired with the CPU. So it might also just be the bottleneck.

@eribuster: Mario games generally get a free pass from year to year. Mario Kart while fun has essentially been Mario Kart for years now and it continues to get positive scores. Mario Tennis has just been Mario Tennis. The dozen or so Mario Parties.. Nintendo keeps remaking the same games over and over again to the same puzzling high acclaim. I never had a Nintendo growing up so I don't hold the franchise in particularly high regard or anything. I played Super Mario when I was a kid and thought it was fun, but it wasn't any more fun than Contra or Balloon Fight at the time. So maybe thats why I look at these games, Mario Maker especially, and think "really? It's 2016 and everyone is this excited to play a two decade old platformer again?" I dunno. If they re-made some of my childhood favorite PC games and didn't particularly change them all that much I might bite the first time but not like the 7th time around.

Didn't the Dark Souls statement say the multiplayer was not up in the international versions only? I think the Japanese version has all the pvp and invasion stuff woring.

The Japanese version on PS4 DOES have the servers online, i have been seeing player messages and getting invaded since the JP launch.

@gilby: Budget Cuts looks awesome but it's not out yet. Apparently they are shooting for end of the year release.

For applying thermal paste LinusTechTips recently make a test video about different methods. Summary, don't use waaay to much or too little and it doesn't matter. (https://youtu.be/r2MEAnZ3swQ). Correct amount is about the size of a pea.

I'm also surprised that the CPU is struggling. I've been playing the Valkyria alpha on my ancient i7-970 and gtx970 on DK2 with no problem. The Valve and 3d bench tests suggested I should be fine for VR. So there might be something weird going on with Jeff's system.

@johnymyko: Fear not, i'm sure Destiny's got another box coming out this fall. The most interesting thing about Destiny and the Division as an MMO player is that its like game journos are just discovering the genre, since the time investment is a lot lower in these games.

wth are you talking about? He talks about gameplay.

@humanity: I had a NES as a kid and really only played SMB3. It was and still is a great game, but I liked things like Contra (or as I knew it Probotector) and Ninja Gaiden a lot more. I think Mario Maker looks like fun, but I don't think I'd like to play it now because all it seems to have become is about levels that are about perfect execution and exploitation of Super Mario World mechanics.

I went back years ago to try out some DS mario game and didn't really care for it. I still like SMB3 over them all. And I've never held any of the Mario <whatever> series. They're not particularly great games at wouldn't get half the attention they get if they didn't have the license attached to them. I know that's a bit of a weak argument because they do have those licenses, but I'm just talking from a game play perspective. I can absolutely see why people who love those characters might enjoy those games but it makes someone like me, who has no love for those characters, have a really hard time getting into any of those games.

By contrast to Mario Kart, I don't hold any of the Sonic All Stars characters in any regard because I never owned a Sega device, yet I still really like playing Sonic All Star Racing because it's a good kart racer with fun mechanics and great levels.

Has spoiler culture gone too far? :P

I'm recovering from a minor chest cold/bronchitis. Laughter is still kind of painful, but damn if watching that clip wasn't worth it...

I don't know what he's talking about either but that doesn't invalidate anything. If a story can be spoiled, gameplay mechanics can be too.

Mario Galaxy 2 was a masterpiece.

3D World was ok.

There's room for more masterpieces.

I agree 100%. As a matter of fact that's exactly how I'd phrase it even. I have to wonder if this will hurt big game site's reputation with more entrenched listeners, because I've never seen so many sites be this evangelical about something they knew so little about to the point of being antagonistic to the audience, to immediately turn around as soon as they had hard data. You should always take opinions with a grain of salt, but my grain just turned into a gram.

How can wrestling be like 50% of your life but think 300 sucks ass and was over the top and trying to hard!?

That movie is basically history mixed with wrestling. "This is Sparta" seems like the greatest wresting move of all time.

You guys are fucking crazy, to shit on Dan, Mario sunshine, galaxy etc. while gushing over call of duty and destiny last year. Hilarious

It seems more like they were expecting some of those demo experiences to actually turn into games, and not just continue to be demo experiences when released. They still are really big on the technology, but don't recommend buying one until the software is actually there. I don't see how that's a big contradiction, as Dan said on the podcast: When the technology was new he didn't demand more than a short tech demo, but when they're actually asking you to spend $600 on a finished product you would want more significant software to be available before you spend that money.

There is definitely a disconnect that happens when you're in any field for a long period of time. Very often they will be surprised and dismissive when people act skeptical towards games that didn't receive a lot of official coverage. It's easy to think the general public is being too needy or wanting too much info when after a demo behind closed doors you get to talk to the people actually making the game face to face and ask a bunch of questions - most of us sitting behind the computer screen only seeing the stuff that game sites put out don't get the same benefit, and we don't get advanced review copies either.

I was very much the same way when I worked in the "movie industry" and saw all movies for free, in private, ahead of time. Back then I also thought everyone was being way too critical over small details and never understood why someone would say "oh that movie isn't worth my money" because to me it was just 12 dollars. I would forget that it's a 12 dollars that I would spend once every 6 months, but the other 30 movies I'd see throughout the year would be completely free.

Same thing seems to have happened with VR. You get a lot of enthusiastic demos, you get hyped, you want the tech to succeed and this is your job after all so spending $600 on a VR headset doesn't seem crazy when your work will benefit from it. The Bomb guys are generally immune to hype, but every once in a while it can get the best of us.

As a Canadian: all dressed chips > ketchup chips.

@mnzy: The Oculus thing he had with Palmer Luckey isn't there at launch, probably because the motion cobtrollers won't come out until August or something. If he had said that he didn't believe in the technology anymore I would agree that it's a contradiction, but right now it just seems like there's absolutely no software at launch that interests him or the others. He did admit that the 1500 dollars or whatever number was a tid hyperbolic :p