The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

I bet when you ask a wrestling fan what they want from a wrestling game, they would say they want all the moves, a hardcore fighting game where they can do everything from the show.

They’re wrong.

The wrestling part is such a small part of wrestling. The vast majority of these shows aren’t the fights. It’s the soap opera. It’s the backstage plots, the betrayals, the trash talking.

I don’t claim to know much about wrestling or wrestling games, but I certainly haven’t HEARD of a wrestling game that really covers all that backstage drama stuff. With TNA Wrestling for the iPhone and iPod Touch, that is the majority of the game. And goodness, it’s pretty darn awesome.

I’m sure if I were a fan of TNA Impact! I would probably love this game even more. It certainly seems to have a full list of people whose names I should know, who I can either insult, fight, or team up with and befriend. I mean, I don’t know these people, but it seems to have everyone, and after you beat them, then you get their signature move to use in the ring, which would please fans, I would think.
However, I can only look on the game as a fan of dialog-driven RPGs, and as one of those, this is by far one of the best gaming experiences I’ve had on my iPod.

You start the game by making your wrestler. There’s not an overwhelming amount of customization options, (You can only choose between three facial portraits, for instance, though they change color based on what you’re wearing, your hair color, etc) but you can choose all your colors and what kind of things you’re wearing, and generally make your guy look unique. I picked a really creepy picture, and created Taco, a wrestler with green hair for the lettuce, a yellow wife-beater and boots for the shell, and a pair of pink briefs, for this spicy hot nature. I then jumped into a world of wrestling and intrigue!

The majority of the game is conversations, which are very important. There are branching paths depending on your choices. You often have at least 3 dialog options any time the game stops you. Every time you say something, you get general XP, as well as experience in one of two areas: Face, where you are the kind of wrestler who the crowd loves and works the crowd to your advantage, or Heel, where you’re a villain character everyone loves to hate. These unlock various “Crowd Support” powers, depending on what you level up. You also gain new wrestling moves in the ring from your general experience.

The combat itself is completely turn-based, and is oddly kind of similar to Fallout. Every turn, you have a certain number of BP. You spend these BP on various actions. Slapping someone only costs one BP, but if you want to clothesline someone, you spend a BP to run and bounce against the edge of the ring, and then another to slam into them. As you level up, you unlock combos: lists of moves that, if you do all of them in a row, you do a special finisher. These start out simple, like grabbing someone’s head and slamming them to the ground, but end up, towards the end of the game, being things like throwing people out of the ring and then jumping off of the ropes onto them. Each of these moves requires a kind of “quicktime” event of sliding your finger about or pushing a virtual button. They work well and are pretty fun to do. (and having to hit two buttons at once for “Eye Gouge” is just too awesome.)
To counter these moves, each wrestler gets three “defenses” per match. These are gone once they are used, but can be regained with enough crowd support, though they can only be recharged once. Avoid simply makes you run out of the way, avoiding an attack. Counter turns an attack against your opponent, and Reverse not only turn the attack against your opponent, but ends their turn, even if they still have plenty of BP.
At first, you’ll feel like there’s no way you can lose. That would be fine for me, since it’s a pretty casual experience. But you soon figure out that there is much more strategy to it than you would first think. If you don’t use your defensive moves correctly, you WILL get schooled, and it quickly becomes very important to use your turns pumping up the crowd to use your crowd powers. It gets surprisingly tough. I kinda liked that.

What’s mostly entertaining about the game, though, is the dialog. I don’t know if wrestling is normally this bad, but EVERYTHING in this game is so ridiculous and stupid, it is hilarious. I constantly found myself laughing at the absurdity of it all. There’s something special going on when someone threatens to take you down with his special move, “Defribri-see-you-later”. The writing was entertaining. Oh yes.

So yeah, I have completely gotten my $5 bucks worth out of this game. It’s of a solid length, and it is funny and a lot of fun. Granted, it didn’t work for me immediately, but after some help on that front, I have absolutely no complaints. TNA Wrestling is a very easy recommendation.

So those Tyrants who write for 1up are calling Zen Bound THE game for the iPhone. I don’t know if I would go quite that far? I kinda doubt it’s going to define the iPhone and iPod Touch game space. But one thing is for sure: it is a DAMN good game, worth every bit of $5, and if you’re someone with a compatable device, you should probably buy it.

Zen Bound is actually a pretty hard game to describe. It’s a game about wrapping rope around wooden sculpture, like the website there says. But that sounds incredibly boring, doesn’t it? The game is anything but boring. It’s a calm, slow and casual paced puzzle game, basically, which tests your spacial reasoning and is really geniously designed.
The goal is to wrap rope around a figure, having rope touch every bit of it (which makes it change color) and then get the rope to a final nail in order to tie it off and complete the level. There are 3 levels of complete for each level. The first goal is incredibly easy to get to, and the second isn’t too hard to reach if you’re actually trying, but the third always comes at 99% wrapped, and that’s where the challenge comes in.
Basically, the rope is attached on two ends. One is tied to the figure, and the other is attached to an offscreen “spool” or whatever. That means, as you wrap, you can’t go under anything, so you actually have to plan out what you’re doing so the rope you already have wrapped around doesn’t block you from getting into the crevices and such of the figure you’re working on. You have to plan ahead in a way you don’t expect when you first pick up the game.
The game basically starts very Zen, and very casual. The shapes are easy, and you’re just having fun wrapping rope about. There’s no challenge. Before you know it, though, you suddenly hit something you don’t get 99% on the first time. The game is kind of sneaky like that. The challenge ramps up in a very hidden way, and once you hit the actually challenge? You’re hooked. At least I was.
It’s also important to mention the controls. They are instantly understandable to anyone who has used an iPod Touch for 5 minutes, and work so well, you don’t even think about them. You rotate the wooden figure with the normal finger motions, and you can adjust the angle of the rope with the accelerometer. This is a game incredible suited to its medium.
The only real problem with this game, though, is the fact that it destroys the battery. I’ve not played many iPod games that were too intense before with the graphics. (WordJong is not very taxing) This game is very visually compelling and physics-oriented, and because of that, it uses a lot of processing power. Playing this game and listening to a podcast, as I mentioned in the last blog entry, I burned through my battery in a little over an hour. I can’t even imagine how screwed that would make someone who was actually playing on a phone. It’s something to think about if you’re going to play in long sessions.

Still, this game is pretty well the best iPod gaming experience I’ve had so far. It makes me want to pick up the other critically acclaimed iPod game, Rolando, and see if it’s just as good. I’m sure it is.

But yeah, go buy Zen Bound. The developers are nice, too. They responded to my e-mail in like an hour. It was fantastic. And I want Cinnamon Beats. So give them money to finish it. The end.

So, I don’t know if you listened to the last 1up Yours, (even though it seems like Listen UP is the exactly same show only it doesn’t have Shane) but if you did you probably heard Luke Smith and John Davidson talk about, what else, an iPhone game. Mr. Davidson likes talking about those, and dammit, I appreciate it, because there just aren’t any good ways to get information about iPhone games. Parish’s iPhone blog is a good help, but at the same time, he’s talking about all things Mac related, whereas I want mostly just an app review portal, you know?
Anyway, so they bring up what they’ve been playing on their iPhones, which is WordJong: Daily Challenge. I’ve heard of the WordJong before, back in the EGM Live days, when they made fun of the DS release, and then found out it was actually kind of respectable. I’m still wanting more killer apps on my iPod, because I find myself playing games on it in between classes all the time, so I snapped it up for $5. It was a good choice, because it is a damn good word game. It’s probably not worth the full price DS release, but it’s hard to pass it up as a $5 download.

The game basically is what the horrible title suggests. You play MahJong solitaire, but instead of the normal tiles, the tiles have letters on them. You have to spell out words, trying to spell long ones to score more points, all the while having to adhere to the rules of what tiles you can use in MahJong, as well as having to clear every last piece from the board. This is made easier by bombs, which can destroy a single tile. You can only hold one bomb at a time, but if you don’t have one, you get another one every time you spell a 5 letter or longer word. Of course, blowing up tiles gets you no points, so it’s perhaps better not to rely on it.
Obviously, if you have no love of word games, this is completely not the game for you, but it’s the perfect game to pull out for 5 minutes if you enjoy word-based action. There is a new puzzle every day, and that puzzle is the same on every copy of WordJong, so you can compare scores with friends. Each puzzle ramps up in difficulty like the daily crossword puzzle in the newspaper. Monday’s score to beat is easy, and then each day gets harder until you reach Sunday’s impossible number.

I agree with the Luke and John that the game desperately needs an online friend leaderboard so you can race for high scores against your friends more easily, but other than that, it’s really hard not to recommend. This is exactly the kind of experience I want on my iPod: a relatively fast, easy to grasp but decently deep little game. If you have an iPhone or a Touch like me, you should really give it a purchase.

…oh my, I just learned there’s a free online version on their website? That’s awesome, although the rules seem a little different. Instead of bombs, you earn wild tiles, which aren’t in the puzzle itself this version. But yeah, that’s great. Just go check it out and try it for yourself.