Episode 476 - Strapped Up With That Glintstone

We've got a chock full episode for y'all this week, from Rob wondering about one of his recent purchases (Steam Deck) to Rob updating us on an old one (Speaker Update!) We're all still plucking away at Elden Ring, but Rob in particular has a new perspective on his build choice. After the break, we talk about the recent allegations of a union related firing at Nintendo of America, and how even if unionization isn't happening yet, the way contractors are treated may mean it's around the corner. Rob's jumping on to the recent point and click adventure game wave with Chinatown Detective Agency, of which the opening hours left Rob a bit unimpressed with it's puzzles (but to a puzzlemaster, aren't all puzzles simple?) Then Patrick tells us about his time with the Playdate, the new handheld crank-based console from Panic, the company that made that one FTP client back in the day. You know the one, with the little truck? Yeah that one. Stick around after the outro for some musings on US timezones, and how we should all just have our own Time Box (tm).


This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://shows.acast.com/vicegamingsnewpodcast/episodes/episode-476-strapped-up-with-that-glintstone
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I’m so fucking happy that Rob has finally truly found his community in the Carver family. I cannot wait for him to report back from Carverfest.

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Waypoint Radio Episode 490: Rob joins the Carver mafia

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My first Elden Ring character was just a STR build with a strategy of “halberd go in face”. I tried out various status ailment strategies and such but they were all inferior to just more halberd in the face. Sure, I could do a good chunk of damage with bleed every 5 attacks or so using a somewhat weaker weapon but the halberd would do at least as much just with its raw damage in those 5 strikes. My second run is now with magic and that feels honestly not as powerful, does a bit more damage but is very slow and leaves you exposed.

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Cut to three years later and I’m worried Rob will be the heavenly priest-king of this Bob Carver audiophile community and commanding legions of mechs with limbs built out of speakers.

the Carver Log Cabin Retreat is such a wild concept that i feel like i have to experience something like it in my lifetime to just to knock it off the bucket list

Rob, please find a way to convince Vice to have you cover Carver Fest and bring a video team. It seems literally perfect for the kind of video documentary Vice normally makes.

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The concert/disco earplugs are rad and work exactly as advertised. I used to be a drummer and percussionist, and I found them invaluable

They really do work as if you just lowered the world’s volume setting. No muffling or anything like that. The sound passes through a filter embedded in the plug. No idea how it works exactly. Psychic acoustics, probably

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I feel like they might find this intrusive. I’m happy to just hear about it secondhand on the podcast, tbh.

This is my response anytime people say magic is overpowered in (most) Souls games. It’s not that clearcut: it’s a very different playstyle, so it works much better for some people than just using melee weapons. I like playing aggressively in close range, so melee builds generally work much better for me.

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I feel that how sorceries work in Elden Ring is an example of how mechanics in FromSoft Games feed into their roleplaying elements. Sorcery operates on a different plane than other playstyles in Elden Ring, both mechanically and in terms of story. The way my sorcerer melts encounters feels like a part of their character.

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The thing I found with my magic build in Elden Ring (and in Demon’s Souls, where it’s maybe most notoriously powerful) was that there were enough weapons that scaled primarily off Int that despite no investment in Strength/End and with only a bit in Dex I could melee to my heart’s content while having magic as a reliable ranged fallback (or main strategy for big bois). And once I realized that, I decided to never do a pure melee build again. You can have the best of both worlds with magic builds if you plan them a little bit, whereas I’ve always found the main ranged option for melee builds (bows) just feels unreliable and tedious. In Demon’s Souls I went to the Tower of Latria before 1-2 so I could kill the dragon with Soul Ray instead of a bow.

I might be the only one who was very into the daylight savings discussion that happened at the end of the pod because time zones and DST are a personal fascination of mine, but god, I really don’t think people who say “I already wake up in the dark what’s another hour going to do” understand that no, it will affect you. If you wake up routinely at 6 AM for several years and suddenly have to adjust to waking up at 5 AM, that will not happen immediately! Or easily! You might be able to do it, but it will affect you, and on a broader scale that absolutely will have public health effects. We already start days too early, especially when it comes to schools in the US (my high school began at 7:30 AM, which meant busses picked up in the 6 AM hour — which, from a biological standpoint, is atrocious).

Anyway, permanent standard time gang. Oh, and also, the weirdness in Arizona goes even deeper.

  • The basics: the state does not observe DST and operates effectively in Pacifc Time in the summer.
  • But! The Navajo Nation observes DST, so the part that exists within the state of Arizona is an hour removed from the rest of the state.
  • Except the Hopi Reservation, which exists within the Navajo Nation, does not observe DST. So there’s a bubble inside the Navajo Nation that operates an hour behind everything around it.
  • And there’s another Navajo Nation exclave within the Hopi Reservation… that does observe DST.

So you can essentially (edit: but only for half the year), by moving in a straight line through 230-odd miles of land in the American Southwest, move across six different temporal borders, each of which shunts the time either forward or back by an hour. It’s some wild shit.

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Slight sort of correction for the Playdate: Panic technically didn’t make it, at least can’t take full credit. It was designed by the brilliant folks at Teenage Engineering for Panic.