The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

I’m up to the Five Mole bosses, all of which are Number Three, which is still a fantastic gag. Earthbound is still a great game.

While I’ve been playing through, though, I’ve really been wondering about the level ups in this game. They seem randomized, something I never really paid much attention to, but it’s coming out now because goodness, Jeff has been getting terrible fucking level ups this time around. I think I had two separate levels where all he got was +1 Max HP. No stat increases, nothing but an extra hit point. He was constantly getting one-hit-killed for quite awhile with updated gear and everything. Paula was a little better, but not by much. I know Ness has always been way more survivable than the other party members, but I just didn’t remember them being such glass cannons. Maybe I did even more grinding in my youth? Who knows!

One thing I know I didn’t use in my youth were Jeff’s gadgets. Last time I played through the game, I discovered the Slime Generator, and how it breaks the combat wide open with how obscenely useful it is. This time around, I decided that I might be missing other things just as awesome, so while I’ve been using the Slime Generator a ton since I got it again (because seriously, it is that good) I’ve been trying to remember to try all of Jeff’s other unique items that kind of stand in for him not having spells. So today I used the HP-Sucker. Uh, it’s no Slime Generator, to be sure. It’s pretty well completely garbage. Very low chance of hitting, and when it does you get like 10 HP. What a waste of a turn. Maybe it’s not surprising that I didn’t discover the Slime Generator so long ago. I seem to recall there’s an gadget that removes enemy shields, though. That one might prove as useful. I’ll try to find it. (I’m not using any walkthroughs or anything for this playthrough. Just pure memory.)

Really, though, Earthbound does have its flaws. The inventory system, while neat, is just so broken. Ness’s inventory ends up filled with so many stupid key items, like the ATM card and Receiver Phone, that you’re essentially unable to actually store anything on him. Still, it creates so many dumb little touches and cute things around it. For example, the For Sale sign. I love this item for no reason. In a game with such a small, shitty inventory, it just feels so powerful to be able to clear room by selling things, instead of dropping them. Find better gear? Sell the old gear immediately! It feels like I’m breaking something, though in reality, I’m actually letting my inventory be cluttered up with another item in the For Sale sign. Still, I always carry it with me. I can’t help myself. Using it to make a little room feels better to me than randomly eating a food item or something.

Anyway, my emulator keeps crashing on me for some reason, which slowed my progress today. Still, I’m going to keep playing. I still really enjoy the game, and if I can push past Fourside, I can finish. I always find that to be the sticking point. Once I get to Summers, it seems like the end of the game rushes to me.

Cut the Rope: Experiments is just more Cut the Rope, and that isn’t a bad thing.

Basically, the Cut the Rope people got tired of giving out awesome level packs for free and decided to make a sequel, to get more money. I’m okay with this: they really, really expanded Cut the Rope, and there is a lot of game there. It’s well worth a dollar. They’re surely going to do the same thing with the sequel here, and I can’t wait. I even splurged and gave them an extra buck for the HD version (which you don’t need to do, as it plays fine without even on an iPad) because I really liked Cut the Rope. Then I dug into this.

The “plot” of this game confuses me. The first game was that you got a mysterious box with a little dude who you needed to feed candy to by solving how the box worked. So you’re the owner of the house, and the Om Nom is just a little dude. Cool.
Now in Experiments, it’s like an alternate reality, where the Om Nom is delivered to a scientist’s house. He seems to be wanting to test the Om Nom’s intelligence. However, who are you in this scenario? You’re not the scientist, because he talks to you and encourages you. Are you the psychic force of the Om Nom, manipulating the contraptions? Are you still the homeowner from the first game? But if that’s the case, why is the scientist testing YOUR intelligence?
Of course, you’re not supposed to care about that. A cute guy wants candy, end of story. You’re supposed to play Cut the Rope.

The action in Experiments is much more fiddly, and I think that’s a good thing. The game has some tutorial levels, but it’s really clear that you should just play Cut the Rope first for the easier levels, and that these are for advanced players. It’s nice that they’re catering to people who bought the first game. The contraptions that each set of levels is based around are also quite fun. Introduced so far are tether guns and suction cups, and they all make for some interesting situations. I don’t remember, for example, anything having weight in the first game. Maybe some stuff did, and I forgot? But weight really plays a big role in these new puzzles. If you shoot the candy with a ton of tethers, it gets heavy. The force of the tether when it hits pulls the candy in its direction. Suction Cups have weight, and if you have enough of them on a bubble, the bubble won’t float up. You’re doing things like attaching and detatching suction cups to swing the candy across the level before shooting it with a tether to make it fall in the Om Nom’s mouth. You’ve also got all the toys from the previous games in play: you’re still cutting ropes, of course. It’s just Cut the Rope: Advanced, and that’s awesome.

Seriously, if you’re new to the game, get the original, or download Holiday Gift to try it. If you enjoyed the original, I think you know if you want to invest another dollar in fun action-puzzles. I did, and had a fun afternoon solving what they have in the game so far, with more to come. Good times.

I really wanted to try WWE All Stars.

This seems weird to me, but I don’t know. The quick look on Giant Bomb just made it look crazy insane and flat-out fun, and I have been subjected to so much wrestling stuff through a certain person (*cough*Joe Drilling*cough*) that I was just really interesting. Luckily, this is exactly what Gamefly is for, so I put it on the list to try it.

Personally, I think WWE All Stars is a fantastic game. There are things to say about it that are negative, I guess. The art style on the characters is kind of weird, to be sure, but I don’t think it isn’t fitting for caricatures of wrestlers. I suppose most wrestling games have a complex character maker mode? This one has a shitty one bolted on. Again, I feel that’s okay, because this is much more a “fighting game” than what wrestling games normally are, from what I understand.

If you come into it with that “fighting game” mentality, which I did, the game works fantastically like that. You have dudes with special moves and combos that you can pick from. The action is very fast-paced and completely ridiculous, with you being able to do things like short air juggles and basically slamming people to the ground so hard they rocket into the air. They’re trying to make the game fun, and less what wrestling actually is and more what the wrestling in your mind would be. It totally works. I dig it.

I did have problems with it, though, which is why I didn’t play very long on it. For people who are actual wrestling fans, or just fans of other genres, I don’t think these would be much of an issue.

The first issue was targeting. You get to do these matches that have more than one other opponent in there. You switch between targets with the right stick. I never got the hang of this. I just found it kind of frustrating. Why couldn’t I just grab the dude in front of me? Plus it seemed to cycle, and it just took forever to change the focus to where I wanted it. I feel like wrestling people probably deal with this all the time, and are used to it. “Full” wrestling games probably have this. It’d be fine for them. It just didn’t work for me.

Still, I could get used to that. The part I couldn’t get used to was how counter-based this game is. Now, don’t get me wrong: an active counter system makes PERFECT sense for wrestling, and adds a lot of skill to the game. But fuck, I am always terrible at games that required timed counters. I tried, I really tried, to counter stuff. But once the opponents got hard enough that I had to counter them to have a chance at beating them? I no longer beat them. I just couldn’t do it. I am not that kind of gamer. That was it.

It’s not a game for me. But it really seems like a fun game. I dunno if I’d pay full price for it, knowing the stupid amount of features that are in the normal, “full” wrestling games? But for a fan who picked this up for like… 30 bucks? That’d be a damn, damn good purchase. It’s exciting and arcadey and I am glad I tried it.

On The Stick did an SNES draft. It was totally fun, just like their NES draft! But it had one huge flaw.
No Earthbound.
Blew my mind. I mean, Final Fantasy 2 is a fine game, but when you’re picking that over Earthbound? You’ve got your RPG priorities wrong. I wasn’t really mad? But the idea of doing a “protest” and replaying Earthbound stuck in my mind. Then I started thinking about the last time I replayed Earthbound, and what a delight it was to revisit it, not being completely useless at RPGs. So I decided to do it. I started playing Earthbound again. Named my party Alex, Cris, Brer, and Ecks, and set out. Then I was thinking about commenting on twitter, but that seemed more a thing to do here. So here I am.

Today I played up to getting the Pencil Eraser. Here’s what I noticed.

The game, as it always has, has a lot of heart, but I personally enjoy the way that the game does the “chosen hero” thing. Buzz Buzz mentions you’re a chosen hero, but you don’t really tell that to anyone, and nobody but Pokey really even knows about the prophecy, though of course that is relevant. At the same time, it’s like your parents always knew. When you head out the door after the meteorite crash, your mother tells you to have a nice adventure. She knows you’re now an adventurer. It’s just kind of accepted. Same with your father. He just accepts you’ll be traveling about to save the world, and makes sure you have the cash for it. It’s like… it’s like Ness had always wanted to be an adventurer, in the same way someone has always wanted to be an artist or something like that, and his parents are ready to encourage him and support him because they know he can do it if he sets his mind to it. It’s just really endearing. You really like your parents in the game. It’s cool.

When you get to Twoson, the game really takes the kid gloves off, though. Even grinding up to the point where I didn’t even have to heal during the Frankystein Mark II fight, the Ramblin’ Mushrooms and Walking Sprouts are just brutal. Hitting your single character with the “Feeling Funky” mushroom debuff and PSI Magnet is really kind of cruel, especially since there’s nowhere to buy better weapons and armor in the Twoson. On top of all this, Twoson is where you get things like the Bicycle, Pencil Eraser, and the Receiver Phone, which basically make Ness’s inventory all but useless and full of key items. You need Paula desperately, if just for the extra inventory space, but they just take awhile giving her to you. Which is weird, because you get Jeff like… immediately afterwards. Well, after his little side thing in Winters, anyway.
In any case, I think Twoson, almost single-handedly, is why I thought this game was so hard in my youth. It just doesn’t let up! Of course, being smarter now, more willing to use PP to kill regular enemies and whatnot, it’s a bit less of an issue, and once you manage to get to Happy Happy Village, the difficulty calms down a bit.

But I’ll have to experience that another day. Time to bed. We make a great team, don’t we? Be sure to turn the power OFF instead of just pressing RESET, alright?

I had heard lots of good things about Age of Empires Online from Giant Bomb, and I wanted to try it. Since it is free, that seemed easy to do! So I went to the website, where I clicked a button that said “Download now!” It downloaded a little thing which, when run, downloaded another thing, and had the game installed, which then needed to patch, but that’s cool! Once it was all patched up, I could play.

I get into the game, and click to start. It asks me to sign in to my Live ID, which I do just fine, but then it asks me for a “Live Access Code.” I have no idea what that is. I go to the main website of AoEO again, and it doesn’t mention anything about an access code. What the fuck? So, of course, I go to the forums, because surely there’s a solution there.

You see, the Access Code is basically a CD key. You get one when you download the game through the Games for Windows Live Marketplace. You can look it up there.

I didn’t get the game from there. I used the button on the website that it was telling me to use very eagerly to try the game. It gave me nothing. When I opened the Marketplace, it didn’t show that I had downloaded AoEO. It didn’t have a code for me. I had to download it AGAIN, though the Marketplace, to get a code to be able to start the game.

Nice going, Microsoft!

(The game’s kind of cool once you get into it, though.)

They mentioned Godville on a podcast I listen to and so I downloaded it. Because I am a sheepfoxbunny who will buy any iOS game I’m told to. Of course, it was free. You can also play it on the website, I guess, but I’ve only really played in the iPad app.

Do you remember Progress Quest? This is basically just Progress Quest. But it’s like… bad. I remember when I first played Progress Quest. I found many of the items and shit funny. Then again, maybe that had something to do with how the game taught me awesome words like Vambrace. In any case, the mechanics within were kind of novel and a solid critique of the time, and I found the writing funny for the bit I played the game.

Godville just doesn’t have that. I mean, I appreciate they’re good enough to give credit where it’s due to Progress Quest on their website. I can dig that. But it’s just not funny. All the monsters and little comments my hero makes just don’t make me smile. They are like, the very worst jokes. They are like 4th grade jokes, and not even dirty ones. It’s really kind of a shame. I hear many of the items, enemies, and so on are made via a player submission system, which is probably why they just aren’t up to snuff. I just really expect more actual comedy from my comedy games.

Godville does attempt to mix up the formula. You’re a god or goddess, so you can send messages to your hero for minute amounts of control. You can Encourage or Punish them. You can revive them if they die. You can shout messages from the heavens at them. You really don’t get to do this enough for it to be engaging, though. The Encourage or Punish just… I don’t know! They probably only affect your hero’s motivations at specific points, but the game doesn’t make that very clear. Similarly, I looked up on the wiki what words made your hero do something, and it is a very small amount! What’s worse, often the hero will ignore them because she’s doing something else, or started an action as you sent the command. You can pay them for more power to give these commands, but eh. I don’t know why you would. They don’t do enough!

I dunno. It doesn’t need much interaction, I suppose, much like Progress Quest, so that’s nice. You can check on it every day or every week, and it works, I suppose. The reward would be looking in on your hero and going “Oh shit, that is one wacky item or skill you’ve learned, hero!” But they’re just not that well written, so it doesn’t give me that.

It’s free. You can try it. But I’m really not impressed with it. Oh well.

Well, last Steam Sale, I bought Atom Zombie Smasher, the newest joint from Blendo games, the guy who did the completely awesome Flotilla. I loved that! I wanted to try this! So I did.

There’s a lot of nice stuff here, but ultimately, I think Flotilla is a superior experience.

Basically, like Flotilla, Atom Zombie Smasher, at it’s core, is one type of combat randomized and thrown at you again and again. You are given an area of city. In this area are Zombies and Civilians. You have to land helicopters and lift out as many good guys as possible, while setting up Marines and traps and stuff to slow the Zombies so you can actually get to the Civilians while they’re alive. The game randomizes the kind of units you can have for each mission. There are some that are super useful, like Artillery and the Marines, but there are some that are useful, but not nearly as useful as other units and make the challenge quite hard if you get them, like Roadblocks. In any case, you set them up before the mission, but some units are active, and you can reorganize and regroup as you play, moving the Marines around, re-aiming your snipers, changing the landing zone of your helicopter, and so on. You can retry as many times as you want, too, so if your strategy is bad, you can adjust.
Sometimes, it’s just impossible, though. Areas have infection ratings, and if you go into a high-infection area with a shitty loadout, you are just kind of all-around screwed. Don’t do something higher than one if you have roadblocks! Just don’t.

The game runs on a scoreboard. Clear an area, and you get points. Fail, the Zombies get points. Infected parts of the map generate points as well every turn, but liberated areas generate points for you. The first to fill up their meter wins. It’s important to focus on keeping the Zombie scoring capability down by clearing out higher-level missions so that outbreaks don’t fuck you over as much. It’s an interesting dynamic, to be sure, and eventually you’re rescuing scientists to upgrade things, and killing Zombies to charge orbital barrages… it’s fun.

Like Flotilla, though, eventually you figure it out. Once you’ve figured out the combat in Flotilla, it’s pretty trivial: you either win, or you are so outgunned you were going to die no matter what, really. Atom Zombie Smasher is much the same way. Once you figure out how to keep the Zombie meter under control, and how to use the units effectively, no encounter is really hard. However, Flotilla was much more random. There were many random events, and several storyline plots you could fall into as you played. The game felt fresher for a ton longer because of that, because I wanted to see all the content. Atom Zombie Smasher advances on a very clear timeline, and that wacky “what’s going to happen?” thing just isn’t there. Once you’ve mastered the combat, that’s pretty well all there is, unfortunately. There are little storyline bits that show up at random, but they don’t swing your game at all. They’re just kind of funny. It’s a shame.

To it’s credit, though, Atom Zombie Smasher has a ton of options to customize your experience. You can make the game super hard, super easy, or whatever you’d like. Would you rather pick units for each mission? You can turn that on. Would you like to take less units into each mission? Possible. There are tons of checkboxes to make it fun for yourself, which I do appreciate and got some mileage out of. There’s also a super-interesting Development Diary that unlocks the first time you complete a runthrough, and it’s cool to see how much work went into this game and how it came to be.

Anyway, it’s a great little indie game by a cool guy. It’s totally worth picking up. But if you were only to get one Blendo game, I would still suggest Flotilla. There’s just more game there. Still, I can’t wait to see what else he makes. He’s pretty awesome.

I think I’ll just continue clearing down my list of topics for awhile… let’s see here…
Okay, Super Stickman Golf. I can do that.

Super Stickman Golf is kind of neat. It basically has absolutely nothing to do with golf. It’s kind of a very strange platformer, and it’s clever, fun, and chock full of tons of content. If that’s your thing, this is a game you should pick up on iOS.

Basically, what you have are platformer levels, from a side view. Your little golfer is trying to put the ball in the hole, of course, but it’s all about traversing cliffs and platforms, instead of the normal “ball control onto the fairway” sort of thing that actual golf involves. There are sand traps, of course, but those are actually more useful than “trap” in this game, because it’s a safe place for the ball to stop without rolling, for example. Water Hazards and similar are as per normal. You try to shoot for the “par” score on each hole, like in golf, though many levels have floating icons that subtract strokes from your score for making difficult shots, so you can try for them, if you’d like, and make Par that way.

To help you, you can pack a number of special power balls with you for each course. The simplest is the mulligan, which just lets you take a shot over, but eventually you unlock things like the Sticky Ball, which will stick to whatever it hits, even a wall, and stop there, or the Ice Ball, which freezes water hazards into a platform. Eventually, it becomes a hard choice. Mulligans are so useful that you want to take a lot of them, but without the special shots, some holes become extremely hard or nearly impossible to do at or under par. The fact that you have to pick them before starting a round really adds a little bit of strategy to the game. I like that.

There are just a ton of levels in this game, too. From what I understand, this game basically has the entirety of the previous game (which is just Stickman Golf), and then two more sets of levels just as long. It was getting fairly hard near the end of the “beginner” courses, so I can’t even imagine how hard it would be once you get to the high-level courses. It requires skill and precision. It’s fun, and easy to pick up and play. The only thing that seems a waste is the multiplayer mode, which isn’t hotseat for reasons I can’t even begin to understand. But it doesn’t matter. It’s a fun game with plenty of shit. Ignore the microtransactions and just play. You’ll find plenty to entertain you without paying for early unlocks.

Let’s see, what’s like, the oldest thing on my to-write-about list…

Oh wow, Dungeon Raid. How have I not talked about that?

Dungeon Raid is an iOS game you should buy. If you liked Puzzle Quest, but wish the outcome of games would be more in your hands, Dungeon Raid is a game for you. While there is no “quest” with a storyline you will skip, Dungeon Raid keeps randomish matching gameplay, but never feels like the computer is purposely screwing you over. Sure, eventually it gets to be a war of attrition that you have trouble beating, but you never feel like “that’s bullshit that the computer just took four turns in a row!” or whatever.

Basically, there’s a grid. This grid is filled with Gold Coins, Shields, Swords, Health Potions, and Skulls, which represent enemies. You pick one piece, and trace your finger along similar pieces until you can’t go any farther, then release to clear all those pieces. Clear gold, and you get gold. Clear shields, and you repair your armor and get “gear EXP” for enchanting your equipment. Clear health potions, and you get healed. The only thing that’s different is skulls and swords. Each skull has HP, needed to defeat it. After you take a turn, each skull on the board attacks you, with damage mitigated a bit by your armor value. Each sword you trace through increases your attack power, so you trace through swords AND skulls, and kill them to get EXP. Sometimes there will be special skulls on the board, which do special things. One “breaks” swords so that the swords stay on the board, but don’t do anything if you collect them, for example. One teleports around. One can only be hurt if it’s not the last skull in your line that you’re tracing, and so on. These bosses give you more EXP, of course.

The only weird part is the level system. You have several equipment slots. Fill up your gold meter, and you’re given a selection of equipment to buy and replace your current gear, which will hopefully improve your character. Fill up your “gear EXP” and you can add an effect to an item you own, like Poison, or +HP, or something like that. Level up, and you can pick a new spell or ability. These do things like turn all skulls into swords, collect all gold on the board, and so on. They’re actually dictated by what class you are, and you unlock more classes as you play through the game. The thing is, what the game offers you is random. If your level up offered you a +Luck stat boost skill one time around, there’s no promise it’ll be there next time. Same with equipment. You can’t count on anything. It’s sometimes frustrating like that, when you want to buff a certain stat and the game just won’t give you the option to.

Still, this is a great little time-waster. It requires focus, but not TOO much focus. It’s not a huge commitment: you can play a round for a few minutes, and pick it up later, and not be lost on what you’re doing. It’s just really good game design, and totally worth the three bucks I paid for it. I’ve stopped playing it now, but I really played it solid for a few weeks when I got it. Do consider it! It’s good.

I beat Red Faction: Armageddon.

Red Faction: Armageddon is not a very good game.

I mean, it certainly is a game. You shoot dudes in it, for example. They are mostly the same like 3 dudes, over and over, but you can shoot them, and they will die. But it’s kind of dumb. There’s no depth to it at all. It’s just going through the motions.

Really, it’s frustrating to see this be the sequel to Guerrilla. That game was the fucking best. Seriously. This is such a by-the-numbers third person shooter with no life to it. It’s sad. Sure, there is destructible stuff, but it’s mostly just kind of window dressing and has very little to do with the actual gameplay.

The game is certainly TRYING to be interesting. There’s an upgrade system that, interestingly, carries over into multiplayer. But instead of the actually awesome team deathmatch with crazy power packs multiplayer from Guerrilla, which I actually played for a few days, this is just horde mode against the same enemies I’ve already killed a million times. So you’ll excuse me if I’m not excited about that. The game also is constantly throwing weird vehicles at you in order to keep the action switching up a bit. This is appreciated, and none of the vehicles were un-fun to use, but they also weren’t very exciting. I often just kind of wanted to get out and get back to using my regular weaponry. There are a lot of guns in the game, as well, but most of them seem a bit pointless. When I played the demo, for instance, I thought the Magnet Gun seemed really interesting, but it’s just so hard to actually use effectively that you just set it aside. You take the Assault Rifle, because it’s good in all situations. You take the Maul, because it’s good for taking down enemy structures. You take the Nanorifle, because it’s very versatile against bigger enemies, in the same way the Assault Rifle is. Then you pick one of the like 5 Heavy Weapons (I picked the Rocket Launcher for homing) and you call it a day. Ammo packs refill ammo for basically anything you have, and the weapons are so general use that there’s no need to have specific guns for specific situations. There’s no reason not to just pick four and stick with them forever. Some guns I didn’t even fire once. There seemed to be no point.

On top of all this, you have some of the most frustrating video game writing I have seen in a long time. Main Character has a computer AI on his wrist, who is an AI, and they have WACKY CONVERSATIONS which contains, seriously, the most CLICHE AND ANNOYING DIALOG I HAVE HEARD IN A LONG TIME. It got to the point that any time they were talking to each other I wanted to rip my ears off. They talk back and forth all the time. It’s supposed to lend the game some comic relief, but it is so bad. The other characters aren’t great either, though they’re around less, so they’re less annoying in that regard. They certainly aren’t anything bordering on interesting. There’s a dramatic death near one of the games like four endings (meaning that it keeps coming to a climax, but then just keeps going like four times, and that’s not a good thing like in, I dunno, Bayonetta) and the only reason I was sad to see that character go was that she was the only thing distracting the main character from talking to the fucking AI at that moment.

I mostly beat this game because it was there, and I was worried about the future and depressed, and I needed something mindless to do. I really wouldn’t suggest anyone else do that. Even if you are in my position, there has to be something better to play. Armageddon is a serious, serious disappointment.