Episode 478 - Kirsten Dunst Must Pay

There comes a time when even the most laid-back people will find something that irks them to no end, and Patrick has found that thing this week. Are your monitors level? Are they the right distance apart? Are they perfectly aligned? Probably not, but hopefully it won't be too distracting. Thankfully the news that Sega is pulling old Sonic games in order to re-release them distracted Patrick long enough for us to launch into a conversation about emulation and "stealing." After the break, Ren reports in from the Overwatch 2 Beta currently underway, and finds the changes from 1 deeply underwhelming. Rob's checking out Dune: Spiceworld and enjoying the sowing part more than the reaping. Cado's finding zen in the art of card stacking with Stacklands, a card based rogue-like village builder with chill beats to make small piles of cards to. Then the crew dives into the question bucket to help Ren out with that whole Halo gun situation.


This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://shows.acast.com/vicegamingsnewpodcast/episodes/episode-478-kirsten-dunst-must-pay

Well this is a Friday-ass podcast so far.

On the subject of piracy did everyone else have a wildly mislabeled music library in the early 00’s? For me the first two Avenged Sevenfold albums were attributed to Nightwish. Which led to some very confusing conversations.

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I would like to request a full Be-Good-and-Rewatch-It-style episode for Little Women

I did at one point download a lot of video game music and part of some of the albums someone had just included all the sound effects. So one moment you’re listening to Green Hill Zone and the next is Chun Li getting punched.

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Every humourous song was written by Weird Al. Every spoken comedy bit was performed by George Carlin.

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I’ve never been angrier listening to this podcast than listening to Ren go over all the ways they’ve ruined Overwatch forever. Every choice makes me mad. I stopped playing in 2017 since I had my full and I’ve been looking for my way back in, and it’s just depressing seeing how bad it’s gotten.

That game was perfect in 2016. You could sell that same game, no patches, and call it Overwatch 2 and I’d buy it. I don’t want to play this awful shit they’ve turned it into.

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To this day I always think the Down With The Sickness was by ’Distrubed’ because of the mp3 I got from limewire

I can’t think of a game that’s been harmed more by its competitive scene. Which is particularly annoying because competitive OW is really boring. It’s just a unintelligible mess of characters clipping into each other while surrounded by particles effects.

As they said on the podcast I’d be really interested to hear about communities for online only games that have succeeded long term without constantly caving to the demands of their most hardcore players.

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If Nintendo had listened to their hardcore community every Smash Bros character would play like Fox from Melee, maps would all be flat, and items would be a treasonous offense. It’d be awful.

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I got about a month or two of enjoyment out of Overwatch back when it first came out. My interest in Overwatch 2 stems from this so-called single-player mode. I’m very curious to see what Blizzard would do with a single-player campaign. They’ve never really made one (the Diablo games are hardly single-player the same way Destiny 1’s campaign is hardly single-player)

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Nintendo did listen to their hardcore community. There’s a few Japanese pros who you may have noticed never participate in Ultimate tournaments and that’s because they were hired as consultants on the project, so that bars them from entering competitions for the game.

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I actually really like most of the Overwatch changes and design directions. Role Queue genuinely improved the quality of games. Maybe don’t play DPS so much? I mained Zenyatta until Moira came out, then I mained Moira with Zen/Brigitte as second choice. Changing the health levels and the shield meta wasn’t 100% good, but it did change the amount of time shooting shields and speed up the game, overall I think a positive change. I stopped playing a couple years ago, and Overwatch 2 seems. . . worse. . . but this timeline of changes was pretty good IMO.

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Didn’t expect local Worcester, MA brewery Greater Good to make an appearance via it’s famous (now infamous?) Pulp Daddy: https://greatergoodimperials.com/

It’s a good beer! And I don’t really like hazy IPAs.

The thing that role queue seemed to do though was turn everyone in quickplay into a raging asshole. That’s not hyperbole, I just reached a point with it where I muted everyone at the start of a match because it seemed like anyone who bothered to talk was about to treat this game like their life was on the line. I can’t match that one to one to the way they balanced the game to their competitive base — but the timeline marches up, and it makes sense. The game itself would be tolerable and maybe even fun still if the experience of interacting with other players in a non-competitive mode weren’t actively hostile.

I think the thing I find the most ironic is that at the time when Overwatch came out everyone called it the TF2 killer. Now here we are 6 years later and Overwatch did the thing Valve never did that people gave them a lot of flak for and that was to focus on a competitive scene. And we can see where that has led. So while TF2 has had changes in meta over the years it has never had large community ruining meta shifts that were in the name of the competitive scene. I don’t know how player numbers stack up but the TF2 community despite their complaints about lack of updates do sure seem to be enjoying themselves a lot more.

And I have to ask, was it worth it for Blizzard to do such big sweeping changes in the name of the competitive scene? Is the Overwatch competitive scene even really a thing still? It’s always felt like something Blizzard pumped money into because they wanted a new Starcraft type esport especially after Heroes of the Storm didn’t become that but it sure does not feel like it has come close to being on the same level of a Dota2, CSGO, R6 Siege, or LoL.

I feel like TF2 has proven that not every shooter needs to be about a competitive scene or trying to shake up the meta every 3 months. Sometimes you should just let people enjoy the game.

Early in the pandemic I played a lot of TF2 with friends and it was riddled with bots, hackers, micspamming, and constant racism so I’m very curious about the TF2 community these days. It became a little bit more tolerable once I remembered how to mute voice chat, but the in game text chat was just as bad. When they used to have individual servers, I feel like you were better able to avoid that stuff, but since everything is just quickplay, it’s a lot rougher.

Granted, when i dipped my toes back in during the halloween event last year, it seemed to be a lot better just because the total number of players went up and you were less likely to get the bad actors. And there really aren’t any stakes in TF2 so nobody spends the entire match raging against you for being bad at the game. I will at least give it that.

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/whispers FFXIV…

I’m actually quite pleased that the dev team has consistently resisted the urge to over-respond to anything the community deems as a DEFCON 1 urgent crisis. You can see it in the way they balance classes, deliberately over the course of a few patches, letting the community see the changes at work before further adjustments. It’s also true when there’s a real bug like with the housing lottery recently. Rather than a kneejerk rollback like the hottest of heads in the community have demanded, they tested and retested on development servers before deploying the fix.

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So they still do, they just hid it away in the back and forced quick match to the front. TF2 IMO is very much a game where you have to find a community server you like and become a regular on. Unfortunately since stopping in college I haven’t been able to find a server since then that I liked, I think there is (or was?) a Waypoint TF2 server?

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The uncletopia servers are usually (usually…) full of nice people. I don’t quite have the time to play every day, but I hop on there when the TF2 urge hits.