The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

I don’t know if I’ve made it clear enough, but I really, really hate pointing the Wiimote at the screen. I hate it with a passion.

This is why it’s so shocking that I enjoy Trauma Team so much. Because I really do. Trauma Team is fantastic.

When I say Fantastic, I mean the gameplay is fantastic. The game gives you the option to basically skip all cutscenes and story bits, and after trying to watch a few, I just kind of had to. They’re cheesy and shit and badly animated. You can tell they were done on a budget. Nothing against that, of course, but it’s just kind of hard to watch.

The gameplay of Trauma Team is both similar and different from previous titles. You’re going through and doing various surgeries and medical procedures. However, Trauma Team mixes it up by having different types of doctors. This actually works really well. The first doctor you play as has the same sort of style as what I did back in the first Trauma Center on DS. However, I then switched to a paramedic, who was just trying to stabilize people on the scene so they could get back to the hospital alive, and had to juggle multiple patients in order to keep them all alive. Then I switched to a doctor doing procedures where lives weren’t immediately in danger, letting me take my time and giving me points for precision. I was shocked at how much they switched it up while keeping the basic gameplay the same. It kept me going for a lot longer than I thought I would playing the game alone.

The controls, too, are rather amazing. Yes, you’re pointing the Wiimote at the screen, but the game takes into account how shitty the wiimote pointer is. As long as you’re trying hard to be accurate, it works. Well, on Intern, anyway. I only played on easy. However, when doing this, the game becomes less a game of accuracy for the most part, and more one of time-management. Should you remove the glass shards first, or suture the cuts? Or are the vitals so low you need to use the green medicine before all that? It’s about striking that balance. As soon as I started playing, I didn’t mind pointing the Wiimote. This is quite a feat. Even games I love, like Shattered Memories, frustrated me to no end with pointing the wiimote.

The main reason I wanted to rent this was Co-op, and I have to say, that came through as well. I even played some with my Mom, and she was getting it by the end. Her main problem was selecting things with the analog stick, because she wasn’t used to using an analog stick, but she eventually figured it out. I just gave myself the more complex tools, and she was draining, lasering, and suturing well enough while I did the more complex processes. She was getting into it by the end! It was neat. It also makes the game more tense, somehow, having someone else there. It’s easier, sure, but going “No, wait, I need the drain!” and calling out requests for help just ratchets up the tension. It’s awesome.

Basically, Trauma Team completely impressed me. So much so that I ordered a cheap copy of Trauma Center: New Blood to go back and play. Considered getting Second Opinion, too, but I don’t think that has co-op, and that’s part of the fun. Still, especially if you have someone to play with, Trauma Team is fantastic. I very much enjoyed myself, even in single player, which I wasn’t expecting. Good job, Atlus!

Random thread on Talking Time lead me to downloading some more iPod games. One of them is called QRank. It is free and awesome.

Basically, QRank is a trivia game. Every day, there is a grid of 20 questions. 8 are 200 point “easy” questions, 8 are 400 point “medium” questions, and 4 are 800 point “hard” questions. These questions are in four categories every day. You pick 15 questions from the grid, and answer them in a multiple choice manner. Many of them hinge around current events in various areas: not surprising seeing as they have to have 20 good questions every day. It uses a point countdown, as a lot of trivia games do, where the faster you answer, the more of the “max” number of points you get. There are also daily 2x and 3x bonus questions hidden on the grid you can answer for extra points.

Then the game ranks you on leaderboards. It uses a friends list, if you want. It also ranks you locally, by state, and globally, using the location stuff in your phone to determine where you are. This works really well. I could never compete on a global level like some people, but hey, there’s a chance I could top the board for Cape Girardeau.

I’ve played for a few days now, and the questions are really good. The difficulties are nicely balanced. Easy questions are fairly easy, Medium is fairly medium, and the hard questions I normally miss, because I am not a trivia guru. I do like how I can strategize because of how the game is set up. For example, if, say, Science is a category that day, I may want to try to find the science question in the Hard questions, because I could probably get that one. If the Entertainment category is around, maybe I want to stay on the easier questions, because if that hard question is about celebrity gossip, I’m screwed.

The real benefit to the game, I think, is that it wants so little of your time. You can blaze through 15 questions in 5 or 10 minutes, no problem, and then the game requires no other input until the next day. It’s kind of like Words with Friends in that way. You enjoy it in small chunks of time, so it’s easy to keep going with it. Also, the fact that it’s free doesn’t hurt. I really enjoy the game, and I think anyone who enjoys trivia would get a huge kick out of it. So download it. And add me. I’m poetfox. Let’s trivia it up! You can trivia my ass.

There’s something inherently appealing about having a huge database of free, custom characters to choose from. I mean, it’s going to be a copyright-infringing nightmare for the people running the game, but it just seems like it would be tons of fun to be able to pick any character you want, and just play. This especially made sense to me in a Mario Kart clone, and so I was pretty excited to get to try ModNation Racers. It just seemed like a perfect fit. It also seemed to have some smart ideas about the various power ups that could make the game a much better racer.

However, I really didn’t find this to be the case.

I mean, it was pretty neat. I was an Eevee driving the Mach 5. There’s nothing at all wrong with that. At the same time, everything else just felt kind of generic. Not bad, but generic. It’s a bit unavoidable, but it just didn’t really thrill me. The “career” mode is pointlessly hard, too, especially if you want to unlock everything. The enemy drivers do not go easy on you. Four races in, and I was having to redo races to even pass in 3rd place. That’s just not what I expect from a Mario Kart clone.

What really got me, though, were the items. I thought they had a good idea with the “boost” meter. You get boost from drifting and other tricks, which you can either use to boost, or shield yourself from attacks. This seems like a great tradeoff to me. However, I found the shield almost impossible to actually use. You even get a warning when something is going to hit you, but if you hit the shield when the warning comes up, it will almost always wear off before it actually hits you. It just seems like they made their timing really weird just to be “hardcore” which just kind of ruins the point of a casual kart racer. At least to me.

On top of all this, I had serious issues connecting to their online servers. Apparently they do maintenance on like… 3 in the afternoon on Friday. That’s a really, really weird time to do maintenance. When I finally could connect, I got dropped from the server every few minutes while trying to look for things to download. I couldn’t even imagine what would have happened if I had gotten into an online race. I wanted to, but I was too scared that it would fail, and the obscene, minute or longer long load times would go to waste. Because let me tell you, this game LOADS. A LOT. It’s ridiculous.

These are the main reasons why I ended up unimpressed with ModNation Racers. It was pretty disappointing, I do admit. Maybe the sequel will be super-great. I’m sure that’ll happen at some point. As it is, though, I really felt like I had more fun with Sonic and Sega All Stars Racing, which is weird to say, but totally true. I’d just suggest playing that, if you wanted a Mario Kart Clone.

Alternate Title: Not Nearly As Justified As Advertised.

All the talk on the Gigantic Bombcast really had me excited for Just Cause 2. As you know, I really liked Crackdown, and Crackdown 2 was kind of a disappointment. (Have I written A reviewish thing about that here? Apparently not. I should. Expect that coming up.) However, people were talking about Just Cause 2 in the same sort of wording as the original Crackdown, with lots of mayhem, completely open objectives, and a grapple hook/parachute combo that really opened the world up. It sounded pretty great, and I wanted to try it. Gamefly let me.

I was really disappointed.

One of the things the original Crackdown did right was making travel fun. Getting from one objective to the next was quick and easy, but it was also engaging, because of those damn agility orbs. Just Cause 2 doesn’t have anything like that. You have this big island, and nothing in between population centers and objectives except a lot of boring trees. Sure, there is a fast travel option, but it only takes you to places you’ve been. If you want to undertake a new mission, you have to walk there, slowly. It is a huge, annoying pain in the ass. About 90% of my travel time in the game was spent moving from one area to another.

When I got to the new area, I was also disappointed. Combat in the game is pretty ridiculous. You can’t shoot very well, and there are tons of guys everywhere on normal. Fun stuff you’d like to do, like silly Grapple Hook tricks, often get you killed. Explosives are scarce until you grind up enough money to buy them from the Black Market guy, and so big explosions are hard to set off as well. In a game where the point is to set off lots of big explosions to create chaos, that’s just kind of weird. To top it all off, the mid-mission checkpoints are often way, way too far apart. I found myself having to replace sequences I beat, again and again, just because the next part was really, really annoying. I put up with that kind of thing in, say, Splinter Cell: Conviction because the combat itself was pretty fun. Just Cause 2 didn’t really offer me that to make up for these shortcomings.

It made me sad that the game disappointed me so much. I had played the demo and found it very fun, but it was in short bursts and they put you in a very populated area where you didn’t really have to travel. There was so much potential for a game where you can wreak havok with a grappling hook and many guns, but it just wasn’t working for me at all. It’s gotten mostly good press, so I’m sure some people can enjoy it, but it really isn’t for me.

On Saturday, I played like 6 hours of Dokapon Kingdom.

Dokapon has always been a game I was excited to really get into. However, it’s not a game for everyone. It takes awhile to really get running, and it’s really a commitment. Many of the friends I’ve attempted to play it with really didn’t enjoy the slow beginning game, and we gave up on it after an hour.

However, on Saturday, Cole and Cara came over, and wanted to play a game. I didn’t really have anything new (I was hoping that Modnation Racers would show up before then, but it didn’t) and I knew that Cara had enjoyed Dokapon in the past, so I suggested we play it.

Cole loved it, and we ended up playing all day.

As we did that, I got a glimpse of how this game really works. It is a game all about the trash-talking. The majority of the fun came from me doing things like sniping people, giving them stupid names, and then constantly reminding them that they have a stupid name. That is what elevated the game from the basic thing on the screen to a competition that was serious and fun.

On top of that, the combat in the game really switched up as it progressed. As you level up, you can really specialize, and do much more in combat than just pick “Attack” or “Strike.” Cole, for example, was doing crazy things by restricting enemy’s actions, while I was just brute-forcing it as a Warrior and Cara was attempting to steal from every monster. I was surprised how it actually managed to keep itself fairly fresh, and also give you more and more control over what you were doing as the game went on.

We stopped for the night after Cara had a rampage of evil. She wasn’t doing very good, so she got a bat over her head, which the game called a “Spirit of Revenge.” I looked up what this was, and apparently this enabled Cara to sell her soul and become a “Darkling” for two game weeks and utterly destroy everything. So I told her this. And she did.

And she destroyed everything.

Seriously, the Darkling is obscenely powerful. It was pretty hard to get going, and she only got the spirit of revenge when she was really behind, so it didn’t feel that broken to me. She was certainly having fun with it. It was pretty neat.

After that rampage, though, we decided we’d have enough. We’ve saved the game, though. Who knows, we may come back to it. I kind of hope we do. There’s still two continents left to explore, and so many more classes to max out with so many abilities!

Basically, I’m glad Dokapon ended up being what I thought it was when I bought it. Good, good times.

Have you heard about Catherine?

Basically, the people behind P3, including such awesome individuals as Shoji Meguro, are making a game for 306 and PS3. It’s supposed to be an action game, and it’s supposed to be “adult” and “erotic.”

And they’ve put out a trailer.

Frankly, I think the game looks fantastic. Little is known, besides that it is an “Action” game, but I have a lot of faith in this team.

While weird and backwards in a lot of ways, Persona 3, 4, and other SMT games have always been very mature in many ways. They tackle interesting issues, and have actually interesting plots. They’re not perfect, of course (Example: Their treatment of Kanji in Persona 4) but they understand they’re writing for a mostly adult audience and they make that work. The problem has always been, in my eyes, that using high schoolers again and again, they’re kept from really tackling more deep subjects. From the moment I played Persona 3, I wanted to play a game like that as an adult, with adult issues and juggling adult schedules. I wanted that very much.

Now, I don’t think this is going to be exactly that. It’s not a Persona game. But it already has the elements. A dream nightmare world where most of the gameplay will probably take place. A real world with obvious elements of at least dating this Catherine character, if nothing else. This could be what I wanted. On top of that, it’s dealing with a very deep subject, one I’ve worked with myself. Sexuality has plenty of interesting ways it could be used in a game like this, and I hope that this game isn’t shy about exploring them.

Again, there are potential worries. Will they be mature enough to make an actual game? Will they treat the subject matter in the right way? Only time will tell. I have optimism, though. Gamers have grown up. Games should grow up in this way, too.

I’m sure I’ll buy it day 1.

Monday Night Combat isn’t just for Monday. It’s for everyday.

Seriously, it’s been a long time since I have played a purely multiplayer experience so polished and perfected. Monday Night Combat is a complete blast, and if you enjoy shooters on the lines and play them on the 360, you have to get this game.

The design of the game is different, but completely awesome. Basically, it’s Defense of the Ancients meets TF2. You spawn minions at both sides, and they move towards your opponents base. You pick one of several classes, such as Support, Sniper, or Gunner, and help push the bots forward to destroy your enemy’s “Moneyball.” You gain money while you kill things, which you use to upgrade your dude, build turmulents, activate traps, and summon additional bots.

What this creates is a setting where, like in DotA to some extent, you can be a huge help without directly affecting the other players. Granted, killing the other team gives you huge advantages, of course, since they are the best defenders. But you can be useful just by keeping turmulents up and going and taking out harder-to-kill bots. It’s objective-based multiplayer at it’s best. In addition, because there are all the bots, when you get into a match where the other team is more skilled than you, it keeps you from dying constantly, because there are other things to shoot at. Avoiding the “Spawn, oh I’m dead” cycle that can happen so often is really appealing.

Apparently the demo lets you play the game online for half an hour. Do that. You’ll know whether or not this is a game for you in that time. But it bet it will be. Because it is simply a blast. I played it pretty well nonstop the few days after it came out, with people and without, and it was fun as hell either way. I want this game on PC, too, so I can buy it again. I love it. The end.

Sin and Punishment: Star Successor is not near as fun as the BDSM romp it could have been. Instead, it’s a crazy shooter based on an N64 game that never came to America! Isn’t that fantastic?

Star Successor is a Treasure game, so I knew what I was getting into: balls to the walls shooter action that was way, way too difficult for me. This is why I gamefly’d it, of course. I can’t enjoy these sorts of games for a long period of time, but I figured it would be a good afternoon of fun. So I set it to easy, and picked the girl who automagically locks on to people, and went for it.

First off, I have to applaud this game for giving me the option of using my Classic Controller Pro. It’s pretty clearly the sub-optimal control vector, as being able to flip my cursor around the screen faster would have been to my advantage in most situations. However, I hate pointing the wiimote at the screen SO, SO MUCH that I really appreciated being able to control it like the old game.
I also appreciated the Easy mode and the auto-lock girl. It made the game much more accessible. With those settings, with practice, I probably could have beaten the thing. Of course, I don’t want to practice, but it’s the thought that counts. The auto lock was nice, as once you started firing on something, you no longer had to aim until you destroyed it. Granted, this could get you into trouble at times, where you want to kill a few little dudes in the middle of killing a big dude, but overall made the game easier. I’m sure hardcore players, who this game is made for, will never, ever use the girl. But I appreciated it.

Seriously, though, this game is insane. It looks very pretty, though very anime, and the huge bosses in this game are just mind-blowing. Early on, you face this screen-filling giant turtle for no real reason, and it really is a fantastic fight. I later fought some magician dude who had like 6 forms, each more crazy than the last. (Okay, the last was, like, a dolphin. So that wasn’t too crazy. The others were, though!) It seems like it’s delivering on exactly what a Treasure fan would want, and I appreciate it for that.

However, this game is fantastically, amazingly niche. People just don’t do shmups anymore, except the super-hardcore. Thinking back to how Nintendo was marketing this as “No, really, we care about the hardcore!” it’s really kind of sad. It doesn’t do what Nintendo was wanting. However, it’s not hiding what it is. If you think you’d like Star Successor, you probably will. It’s well done. It’s just a kind of arcade, completely hardcore game that I just can’t play for long periods of time anymore.

Starcraft II is definitely a video game where you game up all the videos, and then some things explode, and you mine a mineral.

I don’t really know what there is to say about it.

They’ve done a great job retooling the single player campaign to make it interesting, and every level has enough different in it to make it super exciting and fun. The multiplayer is just as fun as it ever was, even though they totally fucked everyone over with their horrible Custom Maps system.

Basically, it’s Starcraft II.

I mean, that’s cool. I’m enjoying playing it with people. But frankly, the single player can’t hold my interest, and I’m not all that good in Multiplayer. I keep teaming with Essner against online people, and he does everything and I, maybe, take out one thing with a Thor or something. Thing as in turmulent, not as in base.

I just can’t get into RTSes anymore. I used to play them all the damn time, and I had so much fun. In the end, though, I think it was almost purely the social aspect. RTSes were one of the few games, back in the day, that I could play with a group. I played Warcraft II and the original Starcraft with Essner all the damn time on dial-up back in the day. I stopped playing them, though. Getting better at them isn’t interesting to me, and it only takes so long to try out the units, do some cool things, and be done with it. I just can’t get excited about build orders.

Starcraft II is excellent. I’m not sad I bought it. I will continue to enjoy playing the occasional multiplayer match, and maybe I will polish off the single player at some point. However, it’s just not really my thing anymore. I’m not an RTS player. I kind of knew that going in, though. I knew this would happen. I just didn’t want to admit it out of nostalgia.

There was a time where Alan Wake was a huge thing. People were super excited about it.
Then like… five years passed.
Then it came out, and I didn’t really hear a lot of excitement or buzz about it. “This is exactly the kind of game I should Gamefly!” I told myself. So I did.
Now I have beaten it.

Alan Wake is a really mediocre game.

Seriously, I go back and forth on being very, very down on it to being kind of eh on it to being all “Yeah, that was pretty good.” It’s such a swing-y game in many ways. When it’s working, it’s very fun, but when it breaks, it’s really quite frustrating. I don’t know.

This is most clear in the gameplay. The combat is decent enough. You shine flashlights on enemies until they pop in light, and then you can shoot a few rounds into them and kill them. You have to dodge enemy attacks as well to survive. When it’s working, it’s a fun variation of normal shooter stuff, and a good time. However, as the game progresses, they start spawning more and more enemies in places where you can’t see them. They sneak up on you and hit you twice, and then you’re almost dead, and one stray smack will finish you off. The result of this is that eventually you get into death loops where you have to go “Okay, this guy will spawn here, have to take him out first, then this guy, then run over here and another guy will spawn, but I have to take out the guy behind me first…” This kind of gameplay is obscenely meta and, frankly, unfun. The game forces it on you, even on the easiest setting, “Normal.” Add to that inconsistent checkpoints that sometimes leave you with having to complete multiple combats before you get another one, and you can see where the combat can sometimes really frustrate.
On top of all this, the game loves to make you repeat the same hour or so of powering up, instead of giving you new toys to play with. Alan is apparently incapable of, say, putting a gun in the pocket of his coat, because he is constantly losing his guns and flashlight. Constantly. Which causes you to basically replay the same sequence where you’re like “Oh, here’s a flashlight, run run, oh, here’s a revolver, fight a little, oh, here’s a shotgun, now I can really fight” every hour. It was a neat trick once, but the game constantly relies on it, and it kind of falls flat. I’ve been told that Remedy’s previous games, the Max Payne games, were the same way. I never played those, though. Maybe someone who had would have been expecting this. I just found it a little annoying and pointless.

The story also has it’s ups and downs. The characters themselves are pretty well fleshed-out and acted. Alan is a fine enough character, and his agent Barry is a perfect example of a comic relief character who is also a genuine character you kind of like. There are also some really cool moments in the game, including an incredibly dramatic “hold this position” battle on a certain farm which I won’t spoil. However, the plot itself just isn’t that engaging. Alan’s trying to get his wife back, and is playing through a story he wrote, sure. But the story is constantly reiterating things you know already, like they were some big revelation, when you figured them out hours ago, and the entire plot is completely predictable. Using the manuscript pages to add background depth and foreshadowing is a decent idea, but it’s also difficult to do well. Some pages work perfectly, while others just tell you things you already know, or ruin intense moments in a way that much, much less effective than just watching them play out. It just doesn’t work perfectly well.

The best part of the game, I think though, were the Night Springs TV shorts. You stumble across Televisions that show this old Twilight Zoneish show called Night Springs. They were live acted, incredibly cheesy, and a lot of fun. I was looking forward to those a whole lot more than the actual plot itself.

So… yeah. I’m pretty negative in this review… it’s a pretty middle of the road game. It’s a rental game. Rent it and enjoy it, but it’s really not worth buying. If I had bought it, I would have gotten “The Signal” DLC story for free, but eh, I didn’t really feel like I missed anything. Besides some Gamerscore, I suppose. Alan Wake. Mediocre. Yeah.