The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

Cara was all like, “Man, I really want to game! Video game! Games!” and I was trying to think of things she’d like. It was then I realized that she has one of the greatest current gaming consoles: an iPad. So I decided I’d make a list of games she should get in order to get going in gaming. This is that list.
Goals of the list include getting cool games, not spending more than $20 bucks, and also getting a general game education, which is something she seems interested in. Let’s do this! In no particular order:

AppShopper
Cost: Free
Pros: Not a game, but anyone who is serious about iOS gaming needs this. There are so many sales and one day free giveaways on the App Store that it’s really worth your time to tag all interesting, but expensive games in AppShopper and wait for it to tell you that they’re on sale for a buck.
Cons: I find the fact that it dings you on app updates a bit annoying, even after I set it to do otherwise, but it’s a minor inconvenience in a great app and website.

Capcom Arcade
Cost: Free
Pros: A selection of old school Capcom awesome. One of them is Puzzle Fighter, so that’s fantastic. They keep adding more stuff, too.
Cons: Can only play a few times a day without paying to “buy” a game, though I feel that’s pretty fair. Interface to select games is kind of ass.

Word Ace
Cost: Free
Pros: A really brilliant online multiplayer word game. I’ve had a ton of fun with it.
Cons: If you lose a lot, you’ll run out of chips and can’t keep going. Game tries to default you into high-stakes games so you will want to buy chips, which is unfortunate. Constantly has a notification icon I can’t get rid of, which bothers me.

Peggle
Cost: $2.99
Pros: It’s fucking Peggle. Simple, fun, addictive, best use of ode to joy. Can purchase Peggle Nights expansion from the app, if you’d like.
Cons: I guess it’s expensive for the app store? But I mean, it’s Peggle.

Frotz
Cost: Free
Pros: A fine way to play Interactive Fiction on the iPad. Hooks into the IF archive, so you can download tons of games.
Cons: Typing on the iPad is not super great. Interactive Fiction, for all its charms, is super obtuse, even in modern forms of the genre, so it’s not very newbie-friendly.

You Don’t Know Jack HD Lite
Cost: Free
Pros: You Don’t Know Jack is awesome. I’m cheating and putting the free version on the list, but they even update the demo with new episodes every once and awhile. A treat.
Cons: No multiplayer still sucks. Jack is better with friends!

Words with Friends Free
Cost: Free
Pros: It’s scrabble, with the best online multiplayer on the platform, save for Carcassonne, which uses the same sort of multiplayer.
Cons: The ads really bother me, but, you know, you can always throw money at that problem if you want, like I did!

Spider: Bryce Manor HD
Cost: $4.99
Pros: One of the best controlling games on the platform, it’s a ton of fun. You get to explore, you get to master leaping about, and there are challenge modes if you want. What more can you ask for?
Cons: Expensive? I guess? Could always wait for a sale.

Robot Wants Kitty
Cost: $.99
Pros: An introductory Metroidvania game. Not too difficult to build those sorts of skills, but a lot of fun.
Cons: One song over and over forever ahhhhhhh!

TapDefense
Cost: Free
Pros: Not the best Tower Defense game, but a good introduction to the genre and extremely playable for the cost of free.
Cons: Not a lot of challenge variety, but hey, free game, so…

Mouse House
Cost: $1.99
Pros: A great clone of Lolo that I had a lot of fun with back in the day. Puzzle rooms ahoy! No real twitch skills required.
Cons: Controls are a little iffy at times. Doesn’t ruin the game, but could be better.

Cut the Rope
Cost: $.99
Pros: Cute as fuck. Constantly changing up the various toys you’re playing with, but in a way that makes sure you always know what’s going on. Uses the touchscreen fantastically.
Cons: Uh, no idea, really.

Cut the Rope: Holiday Gift
Cost: Free
Pros: A unique set of Cut the Rope levels, for free. Use it as a demo, or enjoy the fresh levels if you already have the rest.
Cons: Even less cons than Cut the Rope.

Super QuickHook
Cost: $2.99
Pros: Amazing arcade action. Charming and funny as hell, with lots of subtle improvements over Hook Champ (which is why I pick it over Hook Champ, though they’re both fantastic) and a nice progression to work through. Super-tight controls. A joy to play.
Cons: For-pay costume DLC? Doesn’t bother me. Maybe it bothers you? I’m looking hard for a con here. It’s a game I love so much, it’s hard to find one.

100 Rogues
Cost: $.99
Pros: An excellent introduction to the Roguelike. The easy mode is perfect for beginners. The normal mode is a solid challenge for roguelike fans. The interface is fairly great on the iPad, too.
Cons: For-pay character classes, though you get two fine ones to start with, so not a big deal. Occasional control problems, even with how good they are. Roguelikes are hard.

You Don’t Know Jack
Cost: $2.99
Pro: Fuck it, I have money left, and this is quality trivia action.
Con: I guess you’re not getting the HD version because that’s more expensive? But who cares, it’s text on a screen and voices.

That’s all I’ve got. I want to, say, put Final Fantasy on there, just for the history lesson and introduction to RPGs, but $8.99? Give me a fucking break, SquareEnix. I also know Cara likes car games, so I’d love to put a driving game on there, but I’ve never played any on the platform, and I don’t want to suggest something that may suck. Also, Cara, I know you downloaded Puzzle Quest when it was free. Play more of that. That’s good shit.

There is a lot of things in Dragon Age II that are awesome. There are also many things that suck. But during my recent play session (involving the end of Act 2, so there are spoilers, I suppose) I was overwhelmed with stupidity.

The end of Act 2 involves a long run through town towards the keep, where the Arishok has held up with his army. There are many battles along the way there, and you meet up with many important people as you go along. You have to talk to the Knight-Commander, and the Enchanter, and all these people, making decisions, and so on and so forth. A lot of tense moments, and cool decision-making. Finally, when you get to the Arishok, you have what is probably the first battle in the game that is actually challenging. It’s the only battle I’ve died on on casual difficulty. It’s really hard! My party was wiped almost immediately.

Every previous boss battle, going into the last cutscene before the battle triggered an autosave, so if I lost the battle, I could try it again. When I went into this battle, designed to be very difficult, there was no such autosave. I died, and the game picked back up with me entering High Town. This was about 15 minutes of cutscenes and dialog ago that I had to play back through.

What the fuck.

I just can’t believe that the designers didn’t think that battle was hard. As I said, it was the first tough battle on Casual difficulty. I can’t even imagine how hard it must be on actual difficulty settings. Why would they not autosave there? This is 40th Day level bullshit, and I thought Bioware was above that.

Again, there is plenty of good stuff in the game. Earlier in my play session, the game really impressed me in it’s attention to detail! But still, this was a really, really stupid oversight that made me waste a bunch of time getting back to the fight, which I almost lost again. Stupid.

There are two kinds of sports games I enjoy: Tennis and Golf. Mario is responsible for both of those obsessions, so blame him. In any case, I watched this Giant Bomb quicklook of Virtua Tennis 4, and the main campaign mode seemed so crazy that I had to give it a rent and a try.

The main gameplay of Virtua Tennis 4 is unchanged from any number of Tennis games I’ve played. You have a few buttons for different types of shots, aiming the ball high or low or whatnot. You do have a power shot, which is strange in a game with real tennis players, but I can’t complain. Your tennis player has a “style” and by following that style, you build your meter which, when full, you can use to deliver one of these special shots. For example, your tennis player may have the style “Strong Forehand,” and when you make forehand hits, you charge the meter. These special shots are not like Mario Tennis ridiculous shots, but are instead a full-power slam, even if your player isn’t in a position to do one. They’re easily returned if someone is expecting them, but you can use them to vary your attacks and get a point in as long as you’re paying attention. All this is fun, if the same tennis game you’ve played over and over. I personally hadn’t played a tennis game since I got Sega Superstar Tennis for like 3 bucks, so I was happy to dive into that same fun gameplay again.

What really sets this game apart, though, is the World Tour mode. Now, I’ve seen a lot of reviewers being down on this mode, but fuck, I loved it. It was created pretty well especially for me, and I really enjoyed it. Basically, the entire mode is a series of board games. There are four boards, one for the road to each major tennis tournament. You move along the boards by playing “tickets,” which are basically cards with numbers on them. You have two hands of tickets: one is drawn at random, and always draws up to three tickets at the beginning of every turn you take. These just have numbers from 1 to 4 and let you move that many spaces. You then have another, supplemental hand of three tickets, which you can buy on “management office” spaces. These can be numbered tickets as well (it’s always good to buy a 1 space ticket, just in case) but also are things like the “Rest Ticket,” which lets you basically create a “rest” space to improve your player’s condition anywhere on the board.
On the board are a variety of spaces. Some are tennis matches and tournaments, of course, but some are training minigames that you use to improve the skills of your tennis player. Most of these minigames are actually pretty fun. For example, there’s a serving trainer where you’re serving tennis balls into a goal guarded by a goalie (which is weird, for a tennis game) and a defensive running trainer where you’re collecting coins left while trying to keep a volley going. In all, there are about 8 minigames, and they switch up enough that I never got bored of any of them. Different types of training helps different skills, so if you really want to specialize, you may have to force playing one over and over again, but I didn’t, and I did fine. There are also spaces where you do things like donate money to charity, or give a tennis lesson to some fans. These spaces, as well as winning tennis matches and tournaments, increase your number of stars. All tournaments have a minimum star rating to enter them, and you have to balance gaining enough stars for the next big tournament with training up your skills and keeping your tennis player well-rested. (If you let your condition get into the red, bad things happen during matches. I only had it happen once, but when I started the match, the game told me my ankle was bad, and occasionally my player would start limping. Not good when I’m trying to return a hard volley! I lost that match, and made sure that never happened again.)
I found balancing playing the board game well, broken up with fun tennis matches, really rewarding. The game constantly unlocks new gear for your tennis player to wear, as well, every time you accomplish something, so you get lots of rewards for doing even silly things, like doing 5 fan meetups and whatnot. Some of this gear is really, really silly, like a big tuna fish for a racket, a jester hat, or Red/Blue 3D glasses, so if you don’t want to take your tennis career seriously, there are plenty of options for making yourself look ridiculous, which I appreciate. There are even special charity matches called “Fancy Dress Party” where you get bonuses for dressing up as ridiculous as you can.

The one thing that just flat-out didn’t work was the game trying to have a story. You constantly get popups telling you what’s happening with your fan club, and conversations with rival tennis players. It was just kind of silly. I would love to play through a tennis story, but that’s not it. When the last person I faced in the last tournament was my original doubles partner I had kicked to the curb long ago (gasp!) I just kind of shook my head. Apparently it was really trying to make something of a story! Who knew?

I wouldn’t pay full price for Virtua Tennis 4 and it’s ridiculous, out of place opening cinematic, but if I had paid $20 bucks for it, I would be EXTREMELY satisfied. This game brings fun arcade actions with an interesting single player mode, and has all the online options one could want. It also has Kinect support, if you had one of those and wanted to fuck around with it. I don’t, and certainly didn’t want to, but that’s a nice bonus if you have one of those things. If you like tennis games at all, Virtua Tennis 4 is a fantastic rental or bargain bin purchase. I loved it.

Wandering about on the iPad, I sometimes come across games that are neat and stuff. Recently I noticed that Enigmo HD was a buck. This, in it’s non-HD form, was one of those early iPhone games that everyone said you had to play, but I had never played it. I thought it would be a good idea to give it a try.

Enigmo HD is really terrible.

In theory, it’s not. The idea is that you have streams of various liquids, and a certain number of tools. You need to get those liquids into their respective bottles as they stream out of the start point by putting things in the way of the stream. There’s stuff like a little tube that makes the liquid shoot out faster, a little trampoline that lets you bounce water off of it, and walls to stop water in it’s tracks. Each of these pieces can be moved and spun about in order to solve the level. That seems like a fine idea for a puzzle game.

However, the controls are complete and utter garbage. I mean, just completely. There is a ring around each object when you tap on it to spin it around and rotate it, but if you tap and drag on the object itself, you move it. However, I would say 90 percent of the time when I went to move one of the objects, it would start spinning it instead. You had to be so extremely precise, you couldn’t actually do it. This just baffles me, as they have this ring on the screen that just tells the player “PUT YOUR FINGER HERE TO ROTATE, OR INSIDE TO MOVE THE PIECE” but it doesn’t actually work like that. Moving the pieces into position is an exercise in frustration.

That could maybe be forgiven if the game wasn’t brutally time-based. There’s a timer ticking down with bonus points when you start the level. I have nothing against bonus points for solving things quickly. However, when that bonus point meter runs out, you lose the level and have to start over. This is a puzzle game, where you want to sit down and look at the level and ponder and think about how to solve it. Having a strict timer like that just goes against what I enjoy in these sorts of casual puzzle games. Add to that how you can’t actually manipulate the puzzle in an efficient way and thus will run out of time and, well, fuck this game!

Enigmo HD is not good! Not good at all. Maybe the original version was less stupid, but this is one of the worst iOS games I’ve played in a long time. I don’t often wish I hadn’t spent a buck on an iOS game, because it’s such a little investment for something I want to try, but this made me feel like I had wasted my money. Don’t touch it.

I rarely remember my dreams, but often, when I wake up slightly, my brain takes some part of a story from a dream and keeps telling it, onward and onward, and I have a hint of what I was dreaming about from that.

Apparently last night I was having a pretty interesting dream, because I woke up remembering a pretty badass premise for an adventure game, which I will share with you now.

I was in a hospital of some sort. It seemed to be a hospital for treating people with various “special” abilities. I didn’t have any of these abilities except one: anything I saw written on an official form became real. The hospital got hit with some sort of supernatural attack, and I was trying to escape because I was trapped in the hospital. However, I kept stealing forms. I’d fill my name in as a doctor on a form, and suddenly everyone would think I was one of the doctors. I’d fill in a form that diagnosed me with other supernatural powers (the one in the dream was seeing the future) and then I had them.

As I woke up, I started to flesh out this concept outside of dream logic. I’d have seen several forms that, basically, I needed to reverse or destroy because someone was using me. I would have seen a form that caused the hospital to be under attack by things like ghosts. I would have seen a death certificate of close friends and family that I would need to reverse. Finally, I’d have to, of course, figure out how to reverse the forms that got me committed to this place in the first place.

I think I vaguely mentioned this yesterday, but low power, high restriction magic is really cool. There’s something awesome about having to take a seemingly narrow-focused ability and use it to solve a variety of problems. I think this whole “form” mechanic really fits that, and my subconscious dream-brain really picked a perfect setting for having a lot of forms lying about to try to play around with. Of course, to be really cool, the game would have to have a lot of forms that did a lot of things that weren’t really important to solving any puzzles or progressing, which would be a potential problem. There could be a ton of different gamestates at any time, and narrowing it too much so there’s not as many gamestate possibilities kind of hurts the fun of the entire thing.

Thankfully, I don’t really have to make this game. But I thought it a neat idea my dream-brain had, so I thought I’d share.

As far as iOS games you should play go, you should probably play Spirits.

Basically, think of Lemmings. This game is that. I even just searched for “Lemmings” on the app store, and Spirits was the first search result.

You control a bunch of little forest spirits. They’re cute and well-animated. They’re trying to get to a little magic vortex. Any plants they touch along the way spring to life. You tap on them to make them change permanently into things, like a vine bridge, or a cloud that blows wind to move the spirits around. Your objective is to get a certain number of these spirits to that vortex, while bringing to life as many plants as possible along the way.

Seriously, it’s Lemmings. But it’s not just a rip-off. It does what Lemmings does well, but it adds its own interesting twists to the mix. Your little spirits are really light, so being able to blow them about with the wind is really a completely different sort of puzzle mechanism than most of Lemmings. Many levels revolve around how they all float naturally. You also don’t have a good way to block the spirits from moving around, a la the blocker role in Lemmings, which makes setting things up often a race against time, more so than I remember Lemmings being, where it was often me setting up a path ahead of time, and then blowing the blocker up to let everyone go to the door.

It’s a loving tribute to Lemmings, looks beautiful, and is a lot of fun in its own regard. If you like that kind of puzzle game, buying it really shouldn’t be something you worry about. Granted, I grabbed it for free during a one-day event, so I get the benefit there, and it is a bit pricy for the app store at $5. Still, it’s the app store. Sales and stuff are all the time. This is a really polished gaming experience that’s worth your time. I’m about halfway through all the levels, and I certainly wouldn’t have regretted dropping some cash on it.

4th And Battery put out a new little free app. It’s called Candy Train: The Train of Candy. (Okay, it doesn’t have the subtitle, but it should.) Since I found Unpleasant Horse a rather fun little distraction, and it had the low entry cost of free, well, I decided I’d give it a go.

I’m glad they opened with Unpleasant Horse.

I mean, there’s nothing WRONG with Candy Train. It is a completely functional game. It’s just very boring. Much like Unpleasant Horse, the gameplay is very straightforward. There’s a little train, and a grid filled with train track pieces. You have to keep the little train going as long as possible by rotating the pieces to keep a continuous line going for the train to run on. If you get the train into a loop, the game will break it after one go round, so you have to keep adjusting the tracks. You can speed up the train for more points, if you want.

What Unpleasant Horse had going for it, though, was that you felt badass. The gore, the music, the expressions on the Pritty Ponies, they all made you feel pretty awesome. Every time you’d slam a pony to the sawblades, you’d be like “BAM! I showed that pony what was up!” The game gave you good feedback for doing well.

Candy Train does not. A point meter increases and there’s occasional little choo choo train sounds. The art doesn’t really pop out at you. You’re driving a train through candy land, sure, but it’s not a particularly badass or cute candy land. It just is. The track turns pink to show you how far you have a safe line going for the train, but the train just putters along and the score number goes up. It’s just not giving the kind of feedback I expect from a game so simple, and certainly not from a Popcap game. It’s just no fun.

Try it, if you’d like. I mean, it’s free. But it’s clear why this game is free: it’s not nearly as polished as Unpleasant Horse, which could have easily been worth a buck if they had, maybe, fleshed out some of the leaderboard stuff from more in advance. I guess that’s why you make a skunkworks team like 4th and Battery: some stuff works, and some doesn’t, but you try everything. Still, I’m not really a fan of Candy Train.

It seems difficult to top this review of Infinity Blade. In fact, I’d recommend you read it first. While not very “pro” on the game, it encapsulates the experience very nicely. So do check that out. Still, I’m going to give some of my own thoughts on it.

I think Infinity Blade is quite a fantastic little game. There are better games on iOS, but few have this level of polish and visual impressiveness, and it’s a fun little diversion besides.

The basic idea is that your father died at the hands of the God-King, and you have to go to his castle and avenge his death. By the end of your journey through the castle, SOMETHING has happened to you to end your journey, and years later, your son comes to the castle, ready to avenge the death of his father, only for some reason he has all the experience and gear his father had. Hm. In any case, as you saw in that review, the game is almost a time loop, of things happening over and over. That means there is little surprise to be had, perse, after the first few runthroughs of the game, but that doesn’t bother me too much. The main point of the game is mastering the mechanics.

The obvious goal of Infinity Blade was the developers trying to make Punch Out!! into an RPG. I think they did a pretty solid job of it. You have to watch your opponent to dodge and parry his attacks, and once you find an opening, you just start wailing on him, just like in Punch Out!!. You have a shield you can use to block attacks, but you only have so much “block energy,” and eventually you will run out if you don’t use dodges. It’s a nice little save for people not good at games, but since you can’t rely on it, I never leveled blocking up, and just focused on learning to dodge effectively. If you put a lot of points in it, though, and kept the “shield” spell around to refill your block energy, perhaps you could rely on it exclusively. I never did.
To mix things up, you have a magical ring, which you can use to cast gesture-based spells, and a “super stun” that will create an opening for you. Both of these recharge over time. Magic tends to recharge much faster, because you can put points into your Magic stat to make it regenerate moreso. They do a good job of making the more important spells have simple gestures, and the more risk/reward spells have more complicated ones. The powerful Light spell requires you to draw a star on the screen, while a simple fire spell just has you draw a circle. I never really felt like the game wasn’t recognizing my spell gestures (except, perhaps, once or twice with Shock, which required me to draw a lightning bolt) and the fact that they take time requires you to really think about whether or not you have enough time in your enemy’s pattern to get the spell off. It works really well.

Outside of battle, nothing much happens besides pretty cutscenes. You can look around the environment in the cutscenes to spot randomly scattered bags of money and health potions, which you can tap to grab, but that’s really about it. It looks impressive the first time you see it, and then you just kind of don’t pay much attention, looking for more money for gear.

What really keeps you going in the game is the leveling system. You have gear: a helmet, armor, sword, shield, and magic ring. Each of these gains EXP, just as you do. When you fill up the bar for these items, they are “mastered,” and you get a free skill point that you can put into HP, Strength, Blocking, or Magic. Leveling up gets you 2 points, so it’s to your benefit to be constantly cycling through equipment, mastering each one, in order to really get a lot of skill points and make yourself more powerful. If you’re a completionist, this game will drive you mad with trying to master each piece of gear, and they’ve been adding more gear through occasional updates.

In the end, the game isn’t the deepest thing in the world. Once you mastered the various types of enemies and their patterns (There are about 5 enemy “templates,” which lots of varying looks for them. One template may be a troll one time, and a clockwork golem the next, but the attack patterns are the same.) the game becomes a grind for stats, and once you’ve had your fill of that, you’re done with the game. Still, that gave me way more replay value than, say, the new Punch Out!! on Wii, and was just about as fun. I don’t know if it was worth the premium it debuted at, but at the 3 bucks I paid for it, I was very happy with my purchase. They even added a multiplayer mode I haven’t tried, and can’t imagine would be all that great, but at least they’re trying to make the game better. If you like Punch Out!! and swords at all, this really is a game you should try. It’s not the greatest thing I’ve ever played, and I would suggest many other iOS games before I would suggest Infinity Blade, but I had a lot of fun with it.

Dead Space 2 is a fantastic game that you should play.

I dragged my feet playing the original until 2 came out, when I started hearing so much about how great it was. The original demo for Dead Space had not really been my thing, but my experiences with RE5 got me to give it a shot. Once I got into it, and started enjoying the customization mechanics and so on, I really, really loved it. Of course I wanted to play the sequel, and I will admit, the sequel was better in pretty well every way. I would still play the original. It’s fun. But Dead Space 2 really refines things into a fantastic game that should not be missed.

The same focus on skill shots is there. They’ve even introduced a new enemy who really makes you focus on that even more: these goo-spitting dudes. When they hit you with their goo, you can’t run. You move super-slowly, so hitting limbs from a distance before you get surrounded becomes even more important, because you’re unable to get away if you miss. They really up the intensity, and the game uses them liberally, which I approve of.

There are new weapons, sure, but the Plasma Cutter remains the best pistol in gaming, or at least close to it. You really don’t need another weapon, and using the Plasma Cutter feels fantastic! They did nerf my go-to weapon of choice from the last game, the Ripper, by making it’s melee range significantly shorter, but it’s a better weapon for it. It makes the alt fire actually have some use, and makes the decision to use it a tough one: you can destroy enemies with it easily, but you have to get in close. It’s much more risk-reward, and is more fun for it. They also tried to make Kinesis more fun by letting you impale people with blade-limbs from monsters and poles strewn about the environment. I have never found throwing stuff in the environment around as a weapon fun, even in something like Half-Life 2, where it was novel, but I know some people do, so I’m sure they can have fun with that. Finally, they changed Stasis to something that recharges over time. It’s really slow in the beginning, but you can upgrade it, of course, and having it recharge makes it much more a part of combat. It also makes those stasis recharge items even more of a waste of space in your inventory, but what are you going to do.

What really struck me about this game is how it wants me to care about it’s characters. It wants me to suddenly care about the protagonist, Issac Clarke, who was just a silent nobody who was good at shooting things in the first game. It wants me to care about the people on the Titan station, and the fate of the world where some weird cult is making a ton of monsters. It really wants me to take this seriously, and I honestly find it laughable. I think my friends on the On the Stick podcast said it best when they said that Dead Space is a “video-game-ass video game.” There is no way this could be more of a video game than it is. The store system, the upgrades, all of these are clearly game systems, and make little actual sense if you tried to put it in a real-world context. Even less sense are the monsters. There’s no way any sort of twisted world would make something die faster by cutting limbs off than by shooting center mass. It is a very game-y premise. There’s nothing wrong with it being so game-y. It’s what makes it fun as fuck to play. But when you have all these things in the game, and then you’re also expecting me to take your characters seriously and be scared by the silly-looking monsters that I have butchered a million times before, well, that’s just silly. I know you have to have some sort of plot, but I don’t think Dead Space 2 went in the right direction with it. I mean, they’re obviously trying to be a “trans-media property” with their movies and comic books and shit, which is why their story came to the forefront. But it’s really silly.

Still, the story makes the environments in this game much more varied, and to great effect. Titan is a city, and as such has a bunch of really neat places to cut the limbs off of monsters in, and I approve of that. They even do some really good stuff near the end of the game that are callbacks to the first. Spoilers, you eventually end up on the Ishamura again, and the only real scares I had in the game was when Issac’s hallucinations made me, for a moment, relive some of the most tense moments from the first game. Good job, Visceral. That worked for you.

I didn’t play the multiplayer, because I have no idea why this game has multiplayer. But there is a ton of replay value in this game. Crazy difficulty modes, new game +, lots of unlockables… if you like replaying games, Dead Space 2 is for you. I don’t replay games, but I appreciate them putting that effort into putting those into the package. It’s neat. Game designers don’t do that shit anymore.

Yeah, Dead Space 2: Fantastic. Probably won’t be my game of the year, but it will probably be in my top 10, certainly. It’s a game purely based around fantastic, addictive mechanics, and does a much better job of keeping the flow going from scene to scene than the first game. This is something anyone who likes to shoot things should play.

Gamefly sent me a double-whammy: Two dead games! Dead Rising 2, and Dead Space 2. Dead Space 2 I’ll talk about later (Spoilers, it’s fucking fantastic) but today I’m going to talk about Dead Rising 2.

I played it for like… 2 hours, and I was done.

Now, first, I suppose I should talk about Dead Rising 2: Case Zero. I played through all that, and got every single achievement. I loved every minute of it. It was a small, constrained experience that let the game emphasize what’s fun about Dead Rising. It was pretty well the exact right length, and I’d urge pretty well anyone who wants to try Dead Rising just to pony up the five bucks for that instead.

I got into Dead Rising 2, and it was constantly talking at me about plot. Not that there wasn’t plot in Case Zero, but it was pretty minimal. Build a bike, get out of the town. It was straightforward. You could skip all the cutscenes and not be lost. Dead Rising 2 started with a weird sequence of you driving a bike around and killing zombies in a competition (I guess this is from the multiplayer competitive mode that is included for no reason) and then you have to run away from an arena, and find Zombrex, and do all kinds of bullshit before you can actually play. It’s frustrating, because all you want to do when you put the game in is go dick around in the new environment. On top of that, the story in Case Zero was simple. A man cares about his daughter, would like her not to die. You liked Chuck Greene in that scenario. This ridiculous “being set up by the media” crazy bullshit really doesn’t make you care about Chuck at all, and the fact that I murdered many, many non-zombies who were looting Fortune City, just like I was, really makes me feel like Chuck is a much less likable dude this time around. Basically, what I’m saying is, I don’t give a shit about the story.

However, the game is mostly story. There is plenty of dicking around to be done in Fortune City, but the game doesn’t really reward you for it. Things like not being able to collect all the silly outfit parts to play dress-up, or being able to store stuff you find for later, really stops any urges a player might have to explore and just see what’s out there. Even the Combo Cards, the things the game wants you to collect and use, are just impossible to actually make use of in a way that’s any fun. It was more forgivable in Case Zero. It was a smaller game, and you had smaller combo options. There are just a ton of them in the full game, though, but you always just use nails + bat over and over, because that’s what’s easily available every time you exit the safe room. The crazy stuff would be fun, but you can’t depend on it in any way.

All that said, for the bit of running around, dressing Chuck up in silly clothes, and fighting zombies, I enjoyed myself. However, after visiting a sex shop, I walked into a building and met a guy with a tiger. I just wanted to see what was in the building. Apparently, what was in there was instant death via a boss battle I didn’t want to be in. I had even managed to make a light saber, but that broke immediately, and then the tiger pounced on me and I was dead. I then thought about having to start over, and looked to the other envelope on my desk with Dead Space 2 in it, and my mind was made up for me. I sent it back.

I don’t know. There is a core to Dead Rising that is fantastic, but it’s just not coming together into a game I want to play. I don’t in any way want to do the cases or see the story, and it doesn’t really want me to mess around. It’s just not a fun thing. More power to people who managed to push through it, but I couldn’t do it. I had more fun games to work on.