The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

Some people on Talking Time were talking about Tiny Tower, a game coming out, and they were like “I’m so excited and it will be good because it’s by the people who made Pocket Frogs.” That video looked good, and I had seen Pocket Frogs a lot on the iTunes store, and it cost nothing, so I gave it a download.

Holy shit, Pocket Frogs.

Pocket Frogs is basically frog-based Viva Pinata, only a bit more straightforward. You get frogs of different patterns. By breeding them, you create more frogs. You can breed two frogs together that you have tamed and are in your frog habitats, or you can go hunting for frogs in the Pond minigame and sex them up. New frogs are born, and you can mate them, or sell them for coins. You buy new habitats for your frogs, special breeds to play with, and decorations. As you breed more frogs, you level up, and unlock more complex frog types. You can play little minigames with your frogs to make them happy, if you want, and win prizes. Mostly, though, you’re trying to breed expensive frogs to sell for capital, and frogs to match up with daily challenges and so forth in the game.

The deal is that it’s microtransaction based. You can buy stamps to make items you buy or send to friends show up faster, or potions to make your frogs mature and be happy faster. If you don’t do that, everything takes a set amount of time to happen.

Personally, I love that you have to wait. It makes the game a very low time investment. I check on my frogs like once or twice a day to breed some new ones, make some money, and so forth, and then I don’t have to worry about it. Things don’t go bad if you don’t check in. There’s no punishment for playing slow. It actually kind of rewards you for it, because you aren’t pressed to spend money. It’s pretty fantastic in that way. It’s a complete game without spending tons of cash. I love that. That’s smart microtransaction design, and I appreciate it.

It’s free, and it can be a timesink if you really, really want to maximize the value on all your frogs. (I don’t.) But it’s really cute, and a great time without spending any money. I’m poetfox on Plus+. Friend me and send me a frog or something! I’m really enjoying it, and it really makes me look forward to Tiny Tower, to be sure.

Crysis 2 is a game with guns. You fire these guns at both humans and aliens, and then they die.

Crysis 2 is a mediocre game.

There are a lot of things about Crysis 2 that are alright. The controls are solid, and the guns, for the most part, have a fantastic feel to them, something a lot of games get wrong. Even the wussiest pistol feels cool to shoot in the game, and that is to the game’s credit. Sneaking around with the stealth on is fairly easy, and can make you feel fairly powerful, though you do have to try or you will get caught. The first few wide open areas you get into are kind of cool. The game realistically keeps one in the chamber if you reload early, which was a shock when I realized it and a nice touch. It’s very pretty to look at.

I think that’s about all I thought was solid about the game.

There are two main problems with the game. One is the encounters. The combat encounters in this game get stale fast. You are a fairly powerful individual, as you should be, since you’re in a powersuit, and the designers quickly realized they had no good way to challenge you. Thus, enemies start being able to sap your suit energy, either through SMGs that fire ELECTRIC BULLETS or a little EMP shockwave that some of the larger tanks have. The SMGs are just annoying, but they do take away what makes the game feel unique, which just feels kind of stupid of them to do. The EMP shockwave on the alien tanks is just a huge clusterfuck. You have to sneak behind the big tanks to do any damage. (You can deal more damage to all aliens by getting them from behind, but for the big tanks, it’s required, not just a good idea to move forward quickly.) To sneak behind them, you must stealth. But they can knock you out of stealth with that EMP blast whenever they feel like it. It’s really, really frustrating. The “tank” enemies, heavily armored aliens, are also annoying because they just take so much ammunition to kill. It’s ridiculous. After about the halfway point of the game, Crysis 2 is throwing these enemy types at you CONSTANTLY, attempting desperately to make a combat scenario interesting. When it’s not doing that, it’s setting you up for stealth kills on a ledge, but once you snipe everyone and jump down, it spawns a million guys, making your stealth useless. It’s frustrating.

The other main problem is the plot. Now, it’s a shoot-guys game, so plot isn’t important, but goodness, it shoves it down your throat. I could live with that if it wasn’t so stupid. Your character has no connection to anyone in the story being told. He knows no backstory, and it’s never explained why things are happening. He’s just there, going through multiple MGS4 Microwave sequences because people he doesn’t know are telling him to in his ear. These people in your ear betray each other, and keep switching around, but it means nothing, because you never really understood what any of them were trying to do, so you have no investment in who is giving you commands. One minute, the marines are helping you. The next, they’re shooting you. Why? The game certainly doesn’t do a very good job of attempting to explain it. I guess there’s one bad marine? I think I kicked him out a window. I have no idea. Again, either let the story go away, or make it interesting. Don’t shove it down my throat and then make it not make any sense. From what I’ve heard, the story is still completely disconnected if you had played Crysis. It’s insane.

Both of these things are bad, but when you add it to the fact that this game is easily too long, you have a recipe for mediocrity. From about the halfway point on, I kept thinking “this game doesn’t have anything else to show me, I must be in the endgame,” but I wasn’t. It just kept going, and spawning more and more horrible encounters and having more and more cutscenes that were completely disconnected from everything. Bleh.

The base mechanics are fine, and the game looks pretty gorgeous, but it does so many things wrong and, at the end of the day, having a button that makes me as invulnerable as I normally am in a video game doesn’t actually make you feel badass, it turns out. Give it a rent like I did, if you want to try it, but I don’t really understand who would truly enjoy this game. At best, it’s a passable shooter that’s pretty.

When you read a name like DEATH RALLY, well, you assume you will have DEATH and also RALLY. You also assume you’ll have an experience that is EXTREME, or X-TREME if you prefer.

I don’t know how X-TREME it really is, but it’s not too bad of a game.

There’s some comic-book style story when you start the game. It’s got good production values, but for the most part, you’re just racing, so it’s not really important. Still, it sets the tone for the game as being an incredibly polished and flashy-looking game for the platform. This is a top-down racer, like, say, RC-Pro-Am or, say, Rally King. Something along those lines. Of course, this is a DEATH RALLY so you’ve got a car equipped with guns and various other weapons, and can simply explode other racers instead of out-race them.

Frankly, I really appreciate the controls in this game. They realized how frustrating it would be to have a gas button on the touch screen, so instead they have a fairly large virtual analog stick that does gas based on how far you move the stick to the edges of it. It works way better than having a gas button, especially with this sort of top-down game. There’s also a big button to fire your weapons, but that button is only for your special weapons. Your basic machine gun always fires if there’s something vaguely interesting in front of you, so you’re never having to hold down the button. That’s just smart. There’s also two different camera modes. I find camera mode two, which keeps the orientation of your car set and rotates the track, to be WAY more usable than the default, which keeps the camera angle on the track set, but maybe it’s different for different people and I appreciate having the option.

In each race, there is a bunch of other racers, one of which is the “boss” who is likely going to win and who is hard to kill. You get money based on how many people you kill, where you place, and whether or not you took out the boss during the race. You can use this money to repair your car (which is never very expensive, so you’ll never be able to NOT repair your car, even if you get last place) and upgrade things such as your car’s armor, handling, and top speed. You can also upgrade the various weapons on your cars. These special weapons can be moved between cars, but things such as armor enhancements are on a per-car basis, so if you’re planning on doing a lot of car-hopping, it may be better to focus on your weapons first. In general, I find it extremely hard to win races just racing. I’ve done much better trying to explode all the competition so that I’m second place by default, because there’s only two cars left alive. Still, sometimes in spite of myself, I drive really well and win without much carnage. I suppose it’s good the game gives you the option to do things either way.

While you drive, you pick up “parts” of additional courses, cars, and weapons, which eventually unlock as you collect them. The game also has a big meter of your overall completion collecting all this shit on the main menu, so you know how much there is to unlock. There aren’t a ton of courses, but there are a decent amount, and the game uses mirrored versions of them all as well, for more variety. The developers have also put out tons of free updates with more new cars and courses to unlock over the life of the game. Since I bought it, they’ve put out at least one major update, and I know there have been several in the past before I bought it on sale, so that’s awesome that it’s being supported.

If you like those sorts of old-school, top down racers, Death Rally is an easy sell. It’s really polished and a lot of fun. I’m not sure if it’s worth the premium otherwise. It does eventually devolve into doing the same sorts of races over and over to collect more parts and money to upgrade again and again, which is fun in its way, but it doesn’t feel like it’s for any real purpose, just generic completion’s sake, which doesn’t engage me for too long. Still, it was totally worth the dollar I paid for it at the time. I’ve enjoyed myself.

And rolling right on into Back to the Future Episode 3: Citizen Brown.

I dug this one.

While the idea that most of the nation would be normal while Hill Valley is turned into a police state powered by Doc Brown’s ideas is a bit far-fetched, there’s no doubt it’s super-cool. Having Marty deal with completely alien versions of his family, girlfriend, and so on is also just a fantastic premise for puzzles and dialog in the game. I’m there.

I do have to say, though, that the number of “markers of the timeline” Marty is carrying around with him at this point is getting pretty ridiculous. He has 2 newspapers and 2 photographs, and that is the vast majority of his inventory for most of the game. How many of these things is he going to have by the end of the season? I know that’s all part of how Back to the Future shows this stuff off, but seriously, they are the vast majority of his inventory. It makes it hard to do interesting puzzles when you only have one inventory item that isn’t one of these space-fillers.

Anyway, the only real issue I had with this episode was not being able to see the puzzle pieces. Maybe I get what I wish for, where I was like “Man, these puzzles are so puzzles!” last time around, but I just completely failed to find the components to two of the big puzzles in the episode. Once I knew, for example, that you could interact with the statue in the park, it was immediately obvious what I needed to do, but I had no idea I could do anything but look at the thing. At least the goals and hints this time actually stayed focused on things that I hadn’t already done, which helped with these blind spots of mine.

The part I found most hilarious in the episode was Marty attempting to explain why all the time travel was a force for good in the world. He was having a difficult time explaining why going back to assure his family’s success while fucking over the Tannens as being a force for anything but his own personal gain. It was a very nice reference to the sort of “plot hole-ness” of the films while not totally breaking character or turning to the camera and winking at the audience. I liked that very much.

Anyway, the next episode set-up has me a bit worried that it’s going to be almost a reprise of the second episode. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or not. I mean, I trust Telltale, of course, but they do make mistakes. I suppose we’ll see what happens when I actually get to playing it.

Gamefly sent me Monster Tale.

I had heard a lot of good things about the game, as well as a lot of reservations, sort of like the previous game from that group, Henry Hatsworth. Still, I enjoy Metroidvanias and I wanted to give it a go, so rent I did!

I sent it back after about 2 hours of play.

I don’t know, it just seemed… bad. All the pieces were there. I was leveling up my little pet and he was evolving into different things. I was wandering around a map and getting abilities that let me access new parts of the map. Stuff was happening! Metroidvania!

However, there were just little things that bothered me.

The map design was really boring. Over on the Video Games Hot Dog, they talked about how the game was not designed in a smart way, where getting a power up opened a path that slid you back to where you were supposed to be, or took you along a route with a lot of new stuff to pick up. It was literally designed to have you go to one end of the map, then go back to the other, then go back to the first place. They said this, and within my short time playing the game, I was already seeing this. Traversing the map wasn’t fun on it’s own. That made me not want to keep going.

On top of that, the combat was kind of stupid. Enemies either took one single hit, or 5 million hits, and there was seemingly no in-between. This made said backtracking even more tedious, which was really unfortunate.

I put it down after a play session, and as I thought about it more, I realized I’d have to force myself to pick it up again. It’s not a bad game, perse. It has the elements of a game, and it doesn’t feel like it controls like shit or anything. It just wasn’t bringing anything special to the table. I was hoping for charm to really carry the game, and it just wasn’t there. Oh well.

Finally, due to a really complicated series of me feeling like shit, I got back to Back to the Future! This always happens with Telltale games. I’ll play the first episode immediately, then not touch them again until they’re almost all out. Oh well.

Episode 2, Get Tannen!, was kind of a letdown.

Some of the design decisions they made to make the game “easier” to understand for non-gamers really bothered me. Mostly the movement. The game revolves around the Hill Valley town square, much like all the movies and such. It’s a three dimensional space. However, the game basically has this space set up as a straight line. There are invisible paths that Marty has to follow as he walks around. This makes it so that you can never use the straightest line to get from one destination to another to cut down on travel time. This is really frustrating after awhile. I didn’t notice it in the first episode because of Cara’s influence, which is fine enough, but goodness.
The other big problem that stuck out to me was the “Goals” thing. There was a long time where the “Goal” the game was showing me was something I had already accomplished, which seems… stupid, since it could have been telling me something else I should have been working on. Kind of defeats the whole purpose of having it!

The plot, too, was just not very exciting. None of it didn’t make sense, you understand: it’s a fine premise that Marty’s grandpa would get killed due to what happened in the first episode, as well as Kid Tannen going free and changing the future. Having to change that is all well and good. However, it really was interacting with the same people in basically the same locations as the first episode, which was really sort of a shame. It felt like some of the earlier Sam and Max episodes in that respect, where they added one new location and little else to the overall formula. Telltale had mostly gotten away from that, I thought. It was a bit of a letdown.

Finally, and I know this is just kind of a contradictory thing, but many of the puzzles in the game just seemed too… puzzle-y. In the first episode, there was only one puzzle that was really an adventure game puzzle. Everything else was more talking with people and making stuff happen, which fits more with the property and more casual aim of the game. There were many more adventure game puzzles here, and some of them just screamed of puzzle. The box of sheet music in incredibly plain view just yelled out PUZZLE and I found myself solving it before I even knew why I needed to. That’s just really unfortunate.

I’m being a bit hard on it, though. It’s not that bad, perse. They did make you feel more like a time-traveller, as you get to jump around a bit in time (not freely, but when the story dictates) in order to make the changes necessary to fix what was messed up in time, which is cool. The voice actor for Marty is still pretty amazing as well. It just wasn’t a very strong second episode, is all I’m saying.

Dragon Age II is really great.

By breaking the storyline into three distinct time periods, Bioware has managed to create characters that grow and interact with each other in cool, realistic ways. It is really rewarding to see your party members’ stories unfold, instead of just your own. It’s even more rewarding to see your party members interact with each other, both in your party and outside your party, in realistic ways. It makes them feel like actual people, instead of just pieces to use in combat.
One of the best examples of this that I encountered was with Aveline. I had given her a shield as a gift, and I got attacked for it. See, I had sold Aveline’s dead husband’s shield earlier, because I had a better shield for her. I thought nothing of it: it was just gear. Aveline, however, was unhappy I had gotten rid of such a sentimental piece of gear, and that I was now offering her something else. This blew me away. This was a realistic reaction to something I was doing in the game. It was fantastic. Dragon Age II is full of little moments like that.

The other thing that really appealed to me is how well-written the side-quests were. I went into the game planning to rush and “only do the interesting side quests.” However, every side quest had voice-acting, decisions, and long-reaching changes on the storyline. I enjoyed doing things like taking over and taking care of a mine over the course of years. They were all interesting, and I did them all. Compare this to the bullshit “checkmark on the box” sidequests from Origins, which weren’t interesting at all. They really did a good job making their optional content feel as important as their non-optional content, even if it wasn’t quite as epic in scope.

On top of all that, they also managed to fix a lot of the common problems with the relationships in the game. Again, having these relationships play out over a period of time removed a lot of the problems. I moved in with Merrill, who I was sexing up, and thus had an actual relationship with her, instead of a fuck before the final battle. The fact that the climax of the relationship with a touching kiss before running in to fight one final time actually made it mean a lot more. Sure, a lot of the “flirting” dialog options were still fucking terrible, but at least they’re still moving in the right direction.

Really, though, the big moment that really got to me was, super spoilers, Anders blowing shit up at the end. I was really frustrated and betrayed by that. I knew he was up to something stupid, but taking out my chance to negotiate made me pissed at him. I told him to fuck off. However, what truly showed me that I cared about his character, and felt betrayed by him, was when he reappeared in the little prep room for the final battle. I was so pissed that he returned after I sent him away, and that was because I felt a level of connection to the character. I told him to fuck off again, and he left. It was fantastic.

Seriously, the story and characters, the reason I play RPGs like this, really were top-notch for the most part. Little touches, like which sibling living being determined by your class, so you have a better selection of party members to choose from, is also fairly brilliant and adds replay value. It’s not a perfect game, but it was a lot of fun.

Yeah, Dragon Age II is a pretty fun game in a lot of respects.

Dragon Age II is really awful.

If you’ve heard anything about this game, I don’t need to tell you how insane it is that there are like 6 maps total in the entire game. You are constantly retreading the same ground, over and over again, with the game calling it a different place. It’s pretty insane. The fact that the game even highlights this with an achievement, rewarding you for walking through the same cave map 10 times, adds an extra level of crazy to the mix.

That’s really just the beginning, though.

The loot in this game is completely fucked up. You get “vendor trash” items that just flood your inventory and you sell for cash, which is fine, I guess, but most of the gear you pick up is similarly useless. Most members of your party have armor or weapons they won’t part with. You can’t change their equipment, besides maybe their accessories. The only character you can completely customize is your own and, well, since you’re only one of three different classes, the gear for 2 of those classes becomes completely useless. If you’re a mage, and find some bitching warrior armor, you might as well just sell that shit immediately, because it is a useless piece of junk. Even most of the gear you pick up that you could use is a waste of space. There’s no strategic trade-offs of buffs. It is either clearly worse or clearly insanely better than what you have equipped. Add to this the fact that you get so much money in the game and have absolutely nothing to spend it on, and you have a gear system that’s really useless.

The story just decides to fall into tiny pieces at the end of the game, too. Nothing that happens makes any sense at all, because they’re trying to desperately to only have to design one series of end game bosses. No matter what you do, or what decisions you make, you have to fight the same two end game bosses, and that makes what decisions you make in the story feel completely useless. It’s a really stupid end to a fairly decent story.

What’s worse, that stupid end reflects extremely badly on Varric, the character, because of the pointless wrapper narrative of the game. Varric is supposed to be a great storyteller, but he couldn’t spin the ending into something more interesting? I guess he’s not as great a storyteller as the game makes him out to be. It’s jarring when the wrapper narrative jumps into the game, because you will play for hours and hours without it having anything to do with anything, and in the end, it makes absolutely no important contribution to the overall story. If you’re going to do something like that, go all out. This game doesn’t, and it hurts for it.

Yeah, Dragon Age II is a pretty fucking terrible game in a lot of respects.

As per usual, I pick up games on the iPod that people randomly mention are free when they are free. A few weeks back, I picked up a game called Dirt, which has indie art game written all over it. I’m going to discuss it today, spoilers and all, but if you want to know whether you should buy it for the buck it currently is, I would say no. As a free flash game or something, I’d tell you to try it, but I can’t say it’s deep or cool enough to be worth money when you can get so many better games on iOS for that price. Still, I did play it to competition and it was probably about an hour and a half or two hours spread out over a couple 15 minute play sessions over some weeks I didn’t feel bad about spending, so, you know, decide as you will. I will also say, though, that it makes a horrible iPad game, because you have to constantly rotate your device. I ended up playing it on my iTouch because of this.

In any case, spoilers start now.

You’re a cat skeleton with boots. You can dig in any direction, which is cool, I suppose. Rotating the device changes the gravity, so you can essentially dig up or down or wherever you’d like by turning the screen around. Basically all you do is explore this underground area like this, digging away dirt and seeing what’s there.

As you search, you find weird background and items, as well as gems. The only real HUD element is a pause button, which brings up a list of gem types and a goal number. Once you collect a certain number of gems, stuff happens, with the prompt “Dirt is starting to remember.” You know, the spoiler stuff.

It turns out each gem represents a member of the family that Dirt belonged to. Once you hit the first couple of milestones, each with a talking centipede who speaks for each of the characters in their color text, you are told, by death, to dig to the surface, where you see the family over your kitty cat grave. This basically made me go “Aww, but that’s short and kind of lame.” But then I realized I had new gem goals.

From then on, each gem goal will create a room where you will see a picture from Dirt’s happy home life. You’ll see how the kitty cat related to everyone in the family, and then, finally, you collect enough to find Death again, who tells you it’s time to go, and you start falling forever, watching scenes of the kitty cat wasting away and dying. Eventually, you hit the beginning of the game again, since the game started with “You are Dirt. You’ve been falling for days.” There you go.

The game is taking itself seriously, but it’s choosing a really mundane topic. Yes, the little girl in the family is sick with something, and Dirt is a good companion, but for the most part, you don’t learn anything unexpected about Dirt. Dirt is just a cat with a terrible name. In addition, there just simply aren’t enough little doodads and backgrounds to find in the game world in general. They’re really cool to try to piece together what they are at the beginning, but eventually you start seeing the same stuff over and over again, and it loses its mystery. Finally, the art just… isn’t great. I mean, it’s certainly better than I could draw, and the sprite art of the actual gameplay is fine, but all the art of the flashbacks and stuff just doesn’t do it for me. It doesn’t feel professional, and it hurts any level of attachment you could potentially have with these characters. It’s unfortunate.

This is a good try, and a good start. Digging around and exploring is great! I just felt like it needed a few more passes to be truly meaningful and effective. It has all the mechanical elements it needs, but I just left not feeling much for anyone. I wanted to finish it to write this review, not because I was engaged. Oh well.

Dungeon and Coin is a trap.

I was preparing that list of iOS games yesterday, using the Appshopper site, and they had an ad on the side for a game called Dungeon and Coin. I thought I remembered hearing about this game somewhere, and it was free, so I downloaded it. Then, it consumed me.

Thing about those coin-pusher games. You know, the ones Essner can’t play enough of every time we go to Lambert’s? Picture one of those, only when you make coins fall down in a certain place, it spins a slot machine. This slot machine picks magic spells for attacks on enemies, who die and throw orbs and goodies on top of the pile of coins, which you can push off to collect and make more happen. You can use your coins and items to unlock new spells, new wheels on the slot machine, and so on. When you aren’t playing, you will build up about 35 free coins over time. You can buy more, of course, but really, I always won enough that I didn’t feel like I’d ever have a need to do that.

Seriously, though. This game is just fucking AMAZING at mesmerizing you. Shit is always happening. Spells are going off, throwing coins on top of coins, making them all bounce, and you’re getting combo bonuses for knocking several orbs off of the play area at a time and your little wizard is throwing magical spells and oh shit, a minigame just started and a big chest just appeared and pushing that chest off the side makes a bunch of little chests appear and OH SHIT, I JUST GOT A JACKPOT, WHAT DOES THAT MEAN, I DON’T KNOW, BUT THERE’S A JEWEL NOW, GOTTA GET THAT JEWEL! It just keeps going and going. It’s relentless.
At the same time, it’s mostly going without your input. You can drop coins where you want, sure, but you normally have so many that you just flood an area with coins and make more push off. It kind of lacks the actual tenseness of “I have two quarters, can I win this?” that an actual coin push machine has. It’s just bells and whistles going off constantly. It’s Peggle’s Extreme Fever without having to win at a game first.

It’s free. Try it if you’d like. But even though I’ve probably put like 3 hours into this stupid thing at this point, I want to say that you shouldn’t play it. It’s really just not a game, perse. Still, it’s free, and it’s not restrictive enough to really force you to do it’s microtransactions, so there is that.

Just… man. I can’t believe I’ve played this game so much. Goodness.