Zeusthecat

I've come to despise the Giant Bomb E3 and trade show podcasts. There is something incredibly off-putting about hearing a bunch of game developers being interviewed at the end of the day when they are all half drunk and slurring their words. And especially when they interview super annoying people like David Jaffe and Palmer Luckey (and to a lesser extent, Leigh Alexander, but I'll give her a little bit of the benefit of the doubt since she was obviously incredibly drunk in both of her appearances). I think hearing intoxicated people talk on a podcast can totally be an entertaining thing but it's pretty damn cringeworthy on these trade show episodes.

So there's a weird thing we started doing in the Zeus household. At some point awhile back, I randomly started saying certain adjectives twice instead of once. I thought it was hilarious because I'm a big dumb idiot like that (and because children are easily amused) so I kept doing it and before long it became a common quirk that my wife and kids all eventually picked up. If you have kids, I recommend giving it a shot! Call your wife an old old woman or call your husband a gross gross man. Adults may roll their eyes at you but I promise your kids will love it.

I finally got around to logging in to GTA Online on PC and did my character transfer. So now I have a level 104 character with all the properties and cars and whatnot that I had amassed on the PS3 version. Really cool that they supported those character transfers and knowing that I wouldn't have to start over makes it much more likely that I will get back into this. But I was quickly flooded with popups about heists and VIP shit and all this other stuff I can do and I got scared and logged out. There's so much to do now and it's terrifying and I have no idea where to begin. Also, this is fucking nuts: http://www.polygon.com/2017/2/7/14541254/gta-5-sales-75-million

I think I've got my following and auto-hosting up to date with everyone up through elvaq. If anyone doesn't see me following them let me know and I'll make sure to add. I managed to check out a few of Badfinger's streams as well as Billthecat, Feeona, eRonin, and kickinthehead. I've enjoyed everything I've seen so far and you all are doing a great job. And I hope to see more floating cats in Badfinger's Crusader Kings 2 streams because floating felines are fucking fantastic. I would love to put my schedule on that calendar but unfortunately, I think it would be tough to adhere to a schedule with a specified start time. I'm almost getting to the point where I feel like I can commit to consistently streaming every Friday and Saturday evening (with some Sundays thrown in as well) but start times for me will vary from 8PM to 11PM depending on what's going on with the wife and kids. Dad problems...

For me, I think there is also an appeal to games that go super far in the other direction, like Kerbal Space Program for example. If you really boil it down, each planetary body in that game is insanely huge and sparse, which you would think would make it a prime example of an open world game that is "too big". But because of the way that game is designed and what it tasks you with doing, that massive scale makes for a much more engaging experience. It might not be the strongest example since calling KSP an "open world game" is a bit of a stretch but there are times for me where "too big" actually feels like a positive rather than a negative.

Check out my sweet away screen.

Is that... a barnacle penis?

Well this cheered me up for some reason.

You know, there is this super awesome really good open world game called... Minecraft! Seriously, Minecraft is the best. I'll take every possible opportunity to remind everyone in case they forgot. Which, speaking of completing games, I never did "complete" it. Damn Ender Dragon still eludes me.

"Yeah girl, I'm hung like a barnacle." Hmm, that does have a nice ring to it. Do blue whales get barnacles on their balls? Icky!!! "Yeah girl, I've got barnacles on my balls." Also has a nice ring to it.

Wow, that is tiny, relatively speaking. I wonder how they got those measurements and if a blue whale's balls have ever been captured on camera. So if a blue whale is about 80 ft on average, and their penises are about 9 ft on average, that makes their penises about 11% of their total height. And if I'm 6' tall and my... well shit. Are we measuring from the base here?

Do male ocean mammals have balls? And if they do, how big exactly are a blue whale's balls? I'm asking for a friend...

I've definitely started to get more irritated by minimaps lately too. As much as I loved GTA V, it sucks how much I had to stay glued to the minimap to make sure I didn't miss some critical turn while driving at high speeds. So much gorgeous detail and such a huge world and I'm just spending all my time looking at a tiny corner of the screen. For some reason though, I don't feel like I had that problem at all with Final Fantasy 15. It has a minimap but for whatever reason, I felt that I only ever needed to glance at it occasionally. Something about that game made it a little easier and more intuitive to learn the lay of the land and it had the added benefit of displaying the quest or waypoint marker in the world with a distance indicator. Dungeons, on the other hand, definitely required a little more minimap staring to work your way through the branching paths.

Not sure if anyone has asked about this but is there a way to attach new images in a private message? In this post, for instance, I have that little bar on the bottom that says "Drag files here to attach, or choose files..." but in PM, that is nowhere to be found and the only option is to click the "Insert other media" dropdown and enter a URL or select a previously uploaded attachment. From what I can tell, the only workaround is to open another tab, start making a post in another topic, upload the images, and then tab back to the PM and insert the image by clicking Insert other media->Insert existing attachment and finding it in your little gallery thingy.

I played all the remasters last year and loved all of them, including the first. I've always been a sucker for cinematic games though and find it pretty easy to push through mundane combat stuff so I can be rewarded with cool new cutscenes and story bits.

God, I can't get this thought out of my head of some random family in New York with a bad water leak calling a plumber and having Mario show up tripping balls on mushrooms and smashing everything in their house trying to jump on imaginary goombas while mumbling incoherently in a vague Italian accent. If this ends up being the premise behind Super Mario Odyssey, I take back every negative thing I've said about the Switch.

Destinations looks really cool and it's free! Here is an RPS article that gives a decent overview of what it is and what you can do: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2017/02/03/destinations-vr-review/ (side note: it bums me out that Alec Meer is such a damn VR curmudgeon but the fact that he said anything positive at all about this tells me it might not be half bad)

I honestly think the driving through the countryside is kind of a strange choice but hey, this game is a beautiful combination of strange choices anyways. I do wonder though: Are they going to overhaul the driving controls? Right now it is designed to more or less treat the road like a railroad track and I don't think those controls would work at all for off-roading. Will this mean Ignis can automatically drive you right up to any destination instead of to the nearest point on the road? Will the car be able to go anywhere a chocobo can go and will it render chocobos useless? Can you run over people/monsters and go on a rampage through Lestallum? And for the record, I really really like Prompto. I never get tired of hearing his enthusiastic remarks and his voice actor really did a great job.

Did anyone else end up playing this game and enjoying it? I just hit the 142 hour mark last night and I fucking love it. Of course the middling second half of the story is a distant memory at this point but generally I think it's fantastic and the end game is probably the most engaging of any Final Fantasy I've played. I'd say this is probably my third favorite Final Fantasy behind 6 and 10.

Huh, well that is certainly anticlimactic. I guess I can kind of see the logic behind "he is in a setting that is underground so let's make him a plumber" but the "Let's put him in New York and he can be Italian" is random as fuck. In a good way of course.

Watching the Super Mario Bros cartoon as a kid, I just thought they were from New York.

I'm sure this has been asked before but when exactly was it established that Mario was Italian?

I actually did go through the campaign again on PC somewhat recently and was tempted to jump back into GTA Online. According to the Rockstar Social Club, I put over 170 hours into GTA Online on the PS3 and that was well before heists or any of the other recent cool stuff was added. I may boot it up again soon to take advantage of the character transfer and check out some of the new stuff.

I'll be honest, I kind of dropped off awhile ago and probably haven't listened to an episode in a good several months. That said, you guys were my introduction to video game podcasts and will forever hold a special place in my heart. I still count your original 50 episodes as the some of the best gaming related content I have ever consumed. I kind of had a sneaking suspicion that this was starting to become less of a naturally enjoyable thing and more of a chore as time has gone on and I don't blame you for wanting to shift focus. Maybe I'm off base here but it kind of seemed like as each of you moved away from game journalism and into game development, that initial passion just kind of slowly fizzled out (that and being on the journalism side of things probably didn't require nearly as much extra work on the podcast side since you had to play a ton of games regardless). Which, if that is the case, is totally understandable. I wish you all the best with your future podcast endeavors and I hope you are able to get back to talking about whatever you guys are passionate about. Unfortunately, I'll probably be bowing out since I'm all about video games and don't really have any interest in most other media. But thanks for introducing me to podcasts, to video game forums, to this community, and to fucking LucasArts adventure games!

One year later... we are still going strong in our new world. We took a break for a few months for a crazy Overwatch binge but have recently gotten back into the swing of things since that Minecraft itch needed to be scratched again. We spent a few nights roaming around and filling out maps in search of a jungle biome and after coming up dry, we decided to put a halt on our various operations, strip ourselves down to the bare necessities, and travel through the nether with materials for a nether portal so we could seek out a new land to start fresh. We could have just started a new world but I think this is a much more interesting and exciting way to start over and we don't lose all of the history that we have woven into our world over the last year. We are also trying to stream the whole thing moving forward which has been a lot of fun. I hadn't streamed in a couple years and it was cool to see a follower or two from back then pop back in to say hello and watch for awhile. I managed to catch a highlight of a particularly good sequence of events that happened as we finally found our end point in the nether and built our portal to come out into a new area. It's a little bit on the longer side at 20 minutes so I'll put it in a spoiler tag so as not to be too bothersome. Also, apologies for me constantly looking over at my laptop. I'm hoping to get a second monitor hooked up to my PC to make it less distracting to interact with Twitch chat.