The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

One of the Free Apps things mentioned one day that Backbreaker 2 was free. I seemed to recall Backbreaker being a big name attempt at sort of recreating NFL Blitz, and that sounded like an entertaining little game, so I picked it up. Why not? It was free, and while I don’t give a shit about football, I did enjoy Blitz, so who knows?

It’s not really anything like a game, really.

Backbreaker 2 seems to be two minigames that are vaguely football themed. You make a little football dude with some very limited options. (But it does put your name on the back of the jersey, so that’s kind of cool.) Then you either attempt to make touchdowns, or tackle people making touchdowns. Both games are basically the same. You use tilt to move your dude around, and to its credit, it responds pretty well. If you run over colored parts of the field, you get extra points, but you’re mostly trying to dodge defenders and get to the guy you’re trying to tackle or the endzone. In the standard mode, you also can “Showboat” and “Super Showboat” for lots of points, but that slows you down a lot, so you have to decide if you’re safe enough to do it and for how long, which I suppose adds an element of strategy to scoring points? Something like that. You can also spin or sidestep with buttons on the screen.

That’s really it. There is “Endurance” and “Challenge” modes, but I see no difference between them. I guess Endurance will continue forever if you don’t fail? I don’t know. There’s also a huge ad for some XBLA Backbreaker game every time you turn the game on, so that’s fantastic.

I can’t complain, as it was free, but this really wasn’t what I wanted. I wanted a silly, fun Football game. I could see a game with heavy hits like Blitz that I played by drawing plays on the iPad or something. I envisioned a game that was way more than this is. It’s just a high score fest, and since I give no shits about football, it really doesn’t have any appeal with it’s theme to keep me coming back. I wouldn’t tell you to pay money for it, even if you were a football person though. There has to be a cooler, actual football game on the service. I just don’t claim to know what it is.

I listen to all those Asymmetric podcasts, and one of the games I’ve heard them mention over and over was Gemcraft. I didn’t know much about it, but I guess it was a flash game they really enjoyed, and it got mentioned a lot. One day, I noticed it was on the App Store. Gemcraft HD! I decided to give it a try. High definition crafting of gems! What could go wrong?

Nothing, really. It’s a fine tower defense game.

There’s a map with maps on it you play tower defense on. When you get there, you tower defense. But where the twist comes in are the gems. Appropriate, no? Basically, towers, which sit on the side of the path and shoot, and traps, which sit on the path and attack people walking over it, are powered with magical gems. These gems have properties, like Splash Damage, Slowing, Poison, or High Crit Chance. You have to build the tower or trap, but then you also have to buy a gem to put it in. These gems affect what kind of towers you have. Since the cost of building a tower increases with each one you build, making the towers you have better is of the utmost importance. Upgrading a tower simply requires putting a better gem into the tower. You can simply buy more expensive gems, if you want.
However, what makes it interesting is that you can also combine gems to level them up, Horadric Cube-style. Two gems of the same level can be combined to make one gem of one tier higher. What’s more, it’ll have properties of both gems. So if you combine a Poison and a Splash Damage gem, you’ll get a more powerful gem that does both. You can basically make towers that are jacks of all trades as you upgrade, having a little of all abilities, or focus just on certain ones. It’s a bit of strategy that makes for a nice Tower Defense change.

As you complete levels, you unlock new modes on that map, which is nice. You also gain skill points you can use for overall growth of your character, letting you lower the costs of towers and whatnot, which is appreciated, though not particularly overwhelmingly important, from what I played. There are a ton of levels and modes, too. This was a dollar well-spent, if I actually worried about amount of content.

In reality, though, I found the game really damn hard. Because you can mix and match your towers so much, and can’t cover your ass by building lots of towers, it makes figuring out what to build really hard. I quickly got to the point where I simply wasn’t mixing my gem types together enough, or was building just one too few towers, because I thought I needed to save my money to upgrade gems quicker. I understand that’s the strategy, but after the first few levels, you start to not have any margin of error. Maybe people who beat the flash games would be prepared for that, but I kind of wasn’t. I enjoyed making all sorts of weird tower combinations, but the game quickly told me I needed to min/max, and I wasn’t quite sure how.

I do have to say, though, that the fact that you can turn the game up to 3x speed, if you want, is a fantastic addition every tower defense game should have. Makes the game so, so much better to play. Being able to pause and issue commands was nice, too, though that’s not as required as the speed thing, as I could see why a developer wouldn’t want you to be able to take action while paused.

There is a shit-ton of tower defense here for a dollar. If you want some of that, go for it! If you enjoyed the Flash games, I’d think this would be a good way to give back, too. If you don’t like tower defense, though, this sure as hell won’t sell you on it. It’s a twist that makes tower defense much more finicky and such. I enjoyed it, but I put it down when I hit that wall. Got plenty else to play instead.

Alright, so I finished off Double Visions, the fourth episode of the Back to the Future episodic video game saga of video games. It was most certainly an adventure game that I played!

I would like to first start out that this is the first episode I didn’t complete in one session, so it’s the first time I’ve seen the little cute, subtle thing where when you reload the game, it shows you the date in the time stream you’re currently in. You never really jump around enough in the game for that to matter, but it’s a nice little touch.

Anyway, there were puzzles, but I want to talk about the plot.

I actually love where this went. It was so easy just to let Alternate Reality Doc be normal Doc, and forget about that, but they really put that into the plot. Although on board, in the beginning, how Doc slowly begins to doubt that this meddling is doing the right thing is fucking PERFECT. It adds some depth to all the fucking about you’re doing. It also forces Marty to make some interesting character decisions, when he has to basically tell Doc that what he’s doing is what he’s going to do, regardless of this new version’s wishes. It is just so telling of the subtext of these movies, where they’re all worried about fucking up the time stream except when it benefits them. To see them split on an issue was actually fairly meaningful and an interesting plot hook.

Similarly interesting was Emmett’s realization that Marty basically used Adventure Game Shenanigans (TM) to fuck up his relationship with Edna. So often Adventure Game Shenanigans (TM) basically go unpunished and unnoticed in an adventure game world. It was cool to have Emmett, a smart dude, put two and two together and realize how much Marty has been fucking around with his life. Of course, they end up buddies anyway, but at least there was that moment that Marty has been up to some serious fiddling in people’s lives.

Puzzle-wise, there was nothing too bad in all of this. The game did a kind of annoying thing where it would show you several items that are obviously puzzle items, but not let you get them until a little later. There was also this little light in the Delorian that basically signaled “Hey, you haven’t completed the puzzle you need to do before you send that item forward in time!” which, as someone who thinks about how games are built, was really, really fucking obvious to me. Maybe the target audience wouldn’t have caught on, though.

Anyway, on to the last episode whenever I get to it. Whee!

Many people on my twitter were always going on and on about how great Saints Row 2 was. They are super, super excited about Saints Row The Third. Having taken a look at how utterly ridiculous and stupid the game could be, I figured maybe I was missing something. I Gameflyed the second game to try. (Which was extra silly, as I own the game on PC due to some Steam giveaway.)

While I see the appeal, I didn’t get very far.

First off, their dedication to character customization is refreshing and enjoyable. I had a lot of options, many of them stupid, but it’s a pretty stupid game, so that’s cool. I only wish I could have customized my character’s clothes more without going around and shopping. I understand that’s one of the benefits of exploring, but I’d rather have a ridiculous badass right out of the gate, you know?

The story involved my character, which was nice, but was also stupidly “gansta.” It just seemed like someone who had looked at that culture in a movie and tried to replicate it. Which is fun in its own stupid way, I guess. It fits with how I’m doing minigames like driving around to brutally assault people in a cop uniform for a reality show, or riding a four-wheeler while on fire that makes anything I touch explode. I suppose it fits into that world, to be sure.

In the end, though, man, I just couldn’t keep playing. The fact that I couldn’t just start a mission whenever I wanted to really bothered me. I didn’t want to have to drive all the way across town, back to my home base, to start another mission. Traversal is boring in open world games. That’s the worst part! And it seemed like Saints Row 2 did nothing to mitigate that.

I saw what I wanted to, and got out. I can see why people would really love the game. It tries to basically take how people ACTUALLY played GTA3 and make it a game which supports it all the way. I’ll probably try The Third, certainly, but it’s not a game I am in demand for. I just can’t stand the boredom in between fun in games like that. I really can’t. Oh well.

Bulletstorm. The storm of bullets. Storm of the Bullets in the Bullet Storm. Penises. Bulletstorm.

For one, I feel like playing Bulletstorm right after finishing Shadows of the Damned did Bulletstorm a disservice. There was a game that stuck the landing on every single dick joke it dropped. It just worked for the crazy world the game was taking place in. Bulletstorm… well, it doesn’t, really.

The main problem with Bulletstorm is that… well, okay, there are a few problems with Bulletstorm, but one of the biggest hurdles you have to get across to enjoy the game is to understand that Bulletstorm believes it is telling a worthwhile and interesting narrative. Compare this to Shadows, where you have characters who are ridiculous, but real and true to who they are in the world they are. Bulletstorm thinks the story of Grey is interesting, when in reality he is Steven Blum who should be shooting people with crazy weapons and making dick jokes. It doesn’t understand that a player wouldn’t give a shit. The fact that it takes a long while of gameplay, going through story, before you have all the toys and fun things that make the combat in Bulletstorm actually fun is just flat-out stupid. This is a game that sells itself on letting you do stupid shit constantly. Why they tie your hands and keep you from doing as such for so long is really beyond me.

Once you get past that, though, the combat does feel a bit different and pretty fun. However, the weapons just aren’t badass enough. I don’t know. When the game doesn’t give me a reason to switch weapons, I won’t. The fact of the matter is that the Shotgun and Sniper Rifle are basically the best choices in the game. The Sniper Rifle has these guided bullets which are pretty fun to use, and is the option to go with when people are far away. The “charged” shot, which shoots basically a guided grenade, is also fun and effective for dealing with groups. When people are up close, you switch to the Shotgun. Because the game has so many environmental spikes and stuff with which to kill people, the Shotgun’s ridiculous knockback is more useful than your kick to impale enemies and deal with them quickly. On top of that the “charged” shot just flat-out kills the “tank” enemies in one hit. With those two, you can deal with any situation. Sure, there’s a gun that shoots drills, and a explosive bola launcher, but why would I ever use that when the other weapons solve my problems easier? I just feel like the only reason they gave me to work with the other weapons were to unlock the other skillshots, but you get so many points to buy shit that you only would even think about doing that if you’re a completionist.

The game made me laugh at times and was, overall, an enjoyable experience. I don’t regret playing it in the least. But it really seemed like a proof of concept that fell short of the mark. It should have been balls to the motherfucking walls of action and ridiculous nonsense, but instead fell into horrible video game plot traps and not enough weapon variety to really engage. If Epic knows their shit, Bulletstorm 2 should be damn fun. But who knows? That’s the company that claimed I would care about the death of Domwife. So they obviously don’t “get” how stupid their stories are. We’ll see though, I guess.

Back in the crazy days of Christmas, I got Shauna a copy of Mystery Express. She’s a huge Clue fanatic, and I figured a more complex version of Clue might be up her alley, or at least might be something that we all would enjoy playing together, so she could be included. Unfortunately, we never got around to playing it until Sunday, but hey, we finally did, and it was pretty neat.

The main difference between Mystery Express and Clue is that there are more than one copy of each card. Figuring out who did it and so on requires you to figure out which card there is only one of in circulation, instead of which card is missing. This means just because someone shows you a card doesn’t mean you can rule that out. You really have to attempt to pay attention to where all the cards are moving between players and figure out if that card you saw was the same one you saw last turn, or a different copy. It makes things much more complicated! It also means you need to take way, way better notes than you ever do in Clue. You need to keep track of things, and it’s not easy.

The cards get shuffled around by the various activities in the train, which each player activates by spending time on them. There’s one that makes everyone but the player who started it reveal a card to everyone, there’s ones where you swap cards with other players, there’s ones where you force players to all show you a different type of card, and so on. Of course, the super best one is to brown bag it, where a player hides an incredibly intricate luggage piece in one of their hands, and you have to pick which one it is in. If you win, you get to steal one of their cards at random. If you lose, you lose time. (That’s not actually the best one. It’s the most silly one.) The conductor is also in various places on the train, and if you do an activity associated with those places, then you can also trade a card from your hand with one that the conductor has in his “hand” on the board.

Really, the most crazy part is determining the “time” of the murder. The time cards aren’t like other cards, and during set points in the game, you flip through this deck of time cards (which have three of each time, except the correct time, which has two, unlike the other categories) and attempt to remember. These cards are hard to read: they’re analog clocks with no numbers on them, and the person dealing gets to choose how fast or slow the cards are flipped through, meaning if they’ve figured out the time, or don’t give a fuck, they can screw everyone else over and just flip super fast. I thought this part would be horrible, but it’s actually not THAT bad. You just really have to pay attention.

Honestly, that’s what I like about this game. You really, really have to pay attention. Clue, in a lot of ways, works on autopilot. You cross things off when you see them, and you make sure you show the cards you’ve already shown to everyone else to limit the information they have. Since Mystery Express has a discard pile, where once you’ve shown a card in a turn, you can’t show it again, you really can get lots of information out of people if you pay attention, remember what cards you’ve seen from them and what they likely got in a trade, and take good notes about where cards are. Of course, if you don’t, you’re completely lost. But it adds much more strategy and thinking to the game, which I really appreciate.

Shauna, of course, won our game, because she is the master of Clue. I thought it was going to come down to the tiebreakers, which are guesses everyone fills out before the final turn, but no, she just flat-out won. I thought I was in a much better position than I was, but I ended up guessing on a few things based on what I had seen the least. Seemed safe, and it got me the Modus Operandi, but it did not work for the location, which was one card I had seen a million times, but had been the same card flashed at me over and over again.

The remaining questions are those of theming. Why, for example, is one of the possible motives “Unknown”? You really couldn’t think up another motive? I guess that’s true because “Greed” and “Money” are separate motives as well. Spend some more time brainstorming these things! Also, passengers getting on the train after the murder happens have clues. Where did this murder actually occur then? Was it really on the train at all? This is the other great Mystery of Mystery Express.

Seriously, though. If you like Clue, I would recommend the game. It’s solid, and requires more actual detective work in your thinking.

Shadows of the Damned is a damn fine game, and honestly, it confuses me that it’s gotten so little press. Here you have one of the kings of ridiculous Japanese bullshit, Suda 51, joining forces with the guy who made Resident Evil 4 to create a Suda 51 game that is as silly and awesome as Suda does, but is actually fairly enjoyable to play. And they did it. That’s exactly what Shadows of the Damned is.

It’s also a game where your main weapon is called the Boner, which upgrades into the Hot Boner, which you then use to shoot a “sticky Hot Boner payload.” So, you know, there’s that.

Basically, you’ve got the main character, Garcia Fucking Hotspur. (Yes, his middle name is “Fucking.”) He’s a demon hunter, and he’s off doing his thing, but unfortunately all his demon hunting pisses off Fleming, the main underworld dude. So he kidnaps Garcia’s hot girlfriend, and Garcia has to go to Hell to save her and shoot like a million dudes.

The game basically controls like an improved RE4 or 5. You can shoot while moving, but it really doesn’t affect combat THAT much, as you can’t aim worth shit while you’re aiming and moving so it’s to your benefit to stand still. You get three weapons, a pistol (the Boner I was speaking of), a machine gun (the Teether), and a shotgun (the Skullcussioner). They upgrade themselves throughout the game, with the Teether eventually becoming The Dentist and having homing shots, and the Skullcussioner becoming the Skullblaster and letting you shoot a gigantic grenade skull, but those are basically your weapons. But that’s okay. Those are basically the weapons you’d be using in a game like this anyway! Plus, you still have some upgrade fun with the red gems you get, which you can use to upgrade each weapon how you see fit, so the game isn’t completely devoid of getting better weaponry.

Really, though, the game is sold by the tone the game sets. It makes terrible, terrible dick jokes all the way through, but not only do you believe these are the sorts of people who would be making such terrible jokes but you also feel like they’re just incredibly appropriate for running through this version of hell. Everyone isn’t spouting out jokes. You totally believe in them saying what they’re saying. It’s awesome that way.
The reason you buy it is because the voice actors for Garcia and Johnson, the talking skull who becomes all your weaponry, are both fantastic. They sell every fucking ridiculous line. Listening to them is the key joy of the game. There are even these children’s storybooks about the origins the bosses, and they read them out loud to each other, and comment on them. There’s no action during these. They’re just reading. But it says so much about both characters and they’re so entertaining, you don’t even care that you’re listening to a storybook. (And if you do care, they are completely optional.) Seriously, hearing Garcia chuckle at the parts where people get killed, because that’s the funny part, is completely accurate to his character and grin-inducing.

There are some parts of the game involving the damaging darkness mechanic that get a bit annoying, sure. I’m also really annoyed at the achievements. There are achievements for getting certain numbers of kills with each version of each gun, but in the beginning, they’re all pretty awful, and it makes sense to stick with the Boner. Since you can’t downgrade them, you’re just shit out of luck. It also doesn’t do the thing where it gives you the lower difficulty achievements for beating it on higher settings, so while I beat it on Normal, I’d have to beat it again on Easy to get that achievement. None of these are a good reason to keep yourself from playing a fun and funny game. It’s entertaining and kept a smile on my face the whole time. Suda deserves your money for his brand of crazy. If you like RE4 and penises at all, you should give this a go.

Oh fuck, Tiny Tower.

Tiny Tower came out, and I have been playing this bullshit NONSTOP. It’s so fantastic, and free, and you should get it.

Basically, Tiny Tower is Sim Tower meets Farmville. That makes it sound not great, but it’s better than that.

I’ve never played Farmville, but here’s what I know as the bad parts of Farmville: it constantly hassles your Facebook friends, and if you don’t constantly check in, you not only don’t gain benefits, but lose the work you’ve done. To be efficient, you have to pay money, as well. Lots of money.

Tiny Tower doesn’t do that.

The only real interaction with your friends is that you can look at their towers and compare them. That’s cool, and no hassle involved. While you do gain benefits by constantly checking in and restocking your businesses, if you let it set for an hour, a day, a week, you don’t lose the progress you’ve made. What you’ve stocked doesn’t go “bad.” You just aren’t slowly accumulating wealth. When you come back and play again, nothing will be fucked up. Also, there are plenty of ways in-game to earn “Tower Bux,” which is the for-pay currency. It makes it so you can’t do every single thing without paying, but if you prioritize, you can do some of the stuff you’d like. It makes it so the game is fun without paying money, which is really a flaw of a lot of these sorts of social games that I’ve seen.

Really, though, the game has a lot of style. It has a pixel aesthetic that works, and isn’t just used for nostalgia’s sake. It’s exciting to see what crazy new businesses you’re going to open, as you don’t get to choose. You just pick between 5 areas: Food, Retail, Service, Creative, and Recreation, and the game builds you one at random. You may get a bar, if you build a Food place, or you may get a Frozen Yogurt shop.
You can earn extra Tower Bux and get bonuses if you put the various “Bitzens” into their dream jobs, as well, though you have to build apartment floors for them to stay in so they can work in your building too. They all have stats relating to the five different types of businesses: put more skilled people into jobs they like, and they restock and sell product faster, so you can build more floors, so you can build more businesses, so you can make more money to build more floors, and so on.

It’s addicting seeing your little empire build up, and after you get going, there’s very little maintenance, just a few button presses here and there, with sporadic decision-making moments of who to employ where and what to build next. You are constantly checking in, if you want things to build quickly, but you don’t have to.

I love it. It crashes whenever I open the game outside of wifi, because it can’t connect to Game Center, but other than that? Awesome. Way better than their previous game, Pocket Frogs, and Pocket Frogs is pretty sweet. If you don’t hate this sort of game in general, at least give this one a try. It’s a fun time. Also, add me and let me see your tower. I’m poetfox. I have a paintball course on like floor 16.

Words with Friends was all like “We have a new game called Hanging with Friends!” And I’m like, “Words with Friends people, I dislike that Zynga bought you, but you’re still like, one of if not the best multiplayer game on iOS. I will try your game.”

So I did.
It’s kind of a buggy mess.

The game itself is solid design. It uses the same asynchronous multiplayer sort of style that makes Words with Friends so fun. Basically, you’re playing Hangman that way. Only, if course, people aren’t being hanged. They’re holding balloons that pop. But still. Basically, you draw a bunch of Words with Friends tiles, and build a word. Your score for the word goes into a meter that fills up. When you fill it up, you earn 20 coins! In any case, you then send your word off. Your friend gets the word, and tries to guess it, Hangman style, with number of guesses based on the size of the word, (More letters equals less guesses) with the last vowel in the word always automatically revealed. If they fail, they lose a balloon. If they win, they don’t. Either way, they send you a word. It keeps going back and forth until someone loses all 5 balloons.

For each round, you get 3 hints you can use. “Suspects” highlights four letters, one of which must be in the word. This is by far the most useful. “Extinguisher” labels 4 letters that aren’t in the word for you. This rarely hits the letters you are thinking of picking, and tends to not be useful. “Revive” essentially gives you one extra guess, as it “undoes” one wrong guess. You get one free use of these a round, but can “buy” additional uses for 20 coins.

Buying those uses is the one thing that seems a bit silly, though. It just seems like it would be worth your time to play a lot of games with randoms that you aren’t trying to win to build up coins to win the games you care about. Of course, this will be mitigated once they get the coin store in the game, where I assume you’ll be able to trade all these coins I’ve been stockpiling for little avatar things and whatnot. That’s what I hope anyway. I don’t get the coin thing.

The real problem with the game, though, is how glitchy it is. There are serious bugs in the game as it is. You press buttons, and nothing happens. You ask the game to show you what another player does, and stuff just doesn’t show up on the screen. It’s even stuff like your little avatars showing the “happy” expression when something bad happens. It’s really silly. I mean, clearly, they’ll patch it at some point, but it’s on the verge of unplayable at the moment, which is a shame.

Eventually, this game will be great. Hangman is a much more even playing field game. It’s fun regardless of skill level, whereas I can see some people being turned off to being utterly crushed in Scrabble, as I am over and over with some people I play Words with Friends with. Still, it’s got a free version. It may be worth your time to try. But maybe wait until they patch it once.

Rage was one of those iOS games that people wouldn’t shut up about how pretty it looked. “Man, it’s like a real game!” they said. The last game they said that about was Infinity Blade, which I scoffed at, until I played it, and then I had a decent amount of fun. So, you know, Rage was a dollar so I decided to try that too. Why not, right?

Rage is certainly a game.

Well, okay, I will say this about Rage. It proved to me that motion controls for a shooter actually work on iOS. I would have never thought it! But I turned it on to try it, and it actually seems like a legit way to play. After you get used to it, it makes whipping around quickly to hit multiple targets way easier than using a virtual thumbstick on the screen. It’s totally something you have to get used to, but I understand now why people would want it as an option.

Now the game that you play that way? Mm.

Rage is essentially a light gun game. You have several stages that your character walks through without you really controlling where he goes. You shoot at mutant to kill them, while picking up bonus money, health, and ammo. You can also shoot targets for more money, and dodge rocks enemies throw at you with a dodge button. You go for high score, and that’s about it, though I suppose there is a bit of a challenge surviving all the way through a level your first go-round on not-easy.

There’s definitely a little bit of finesse, I suppose. You have three weapons: a shitty pistol that has unlimited ammo, an assault rifle that looks like an AK-47 that can fire fast but only has marginally more punch than the pistol, and a shotgun that reloads slow as fuck but can kill most enemies in one shot, especially if it’s to the head. You have to balance finding ammo with shooting, and not go all trigger happy, because the pistol is not great to be stuck with. I actually started starting some runs out using the pistol, just to build up a surplus of ammunition for the other guns before I started really getting swarmed near the end.

Still, in the end, it’s kind of a light gun game without the visceral, fun feel of having a light gun in your hand while you play. Which does make it lose something. There’s also this announcer guy who they obviously think is supposed to be funny or endearing but really kind of falls flat, as far as I’m concerned. He’s like Mad Moxxie, but much less cool. I kind of wished he’d shut up after awhile, and then I remembered I could mute my iPad! So there’s that.

Anyway, it is a nice showpiece for how pretty 3D graphics on iOS can be, but it’s really just a little high score game to build hype for Rage. Which is weird, since who knows when that will be out and Rage has been out on iOS for awhile now. If you’re desperate to shoot things on iOS, I suppose there are probably worst uses for your dollar, but I wasn’t too impressed with it. Once I saw all the areas, I was kind of done.