The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

I really debated whether or not I wanted to write about this, but I couldn’t stop thinking about things I wanted to say about it, so we’ll go ahead and talk about Flexible Survival.

Flexible Survival is an Interactive Fiction game. It has some RPG elements, and one of the main mechanics is attempting to find enough supplies to survive. You’ve hidden in a shelter after a horrible, nano-machine created apocalypse. However, you didn’t prepare a lot of food, and it’s going to be at least 30 days before any sort of order is restored to this crazy society. You have to start going out and foraging in what remains of the city you lived in. You seek out new places to scavenge, build relationships, and fight battles and level up. Though still being put together, it’s already really functional. It works, and it’s pretty well written.

It’s also totally about lots and lots of furry transformation fetish sex.

Lose a battle? You get raped. Win a battle? Depending on your current state, you may rape your opponent. Every time you have sex with someone, some of their traits rub off on you due to nanomachine corruption, and those machines are constantly working at your brain, to turn you completely into a feral being of lust. Have too much sex with taurs, and you’ll slowly turn into such a beast. Have too much sex with the opposite sex, and you’ll start to grow another set of genitals. Play with a goo girl? You might find yourself turning into a slime creature.

Most of the time, when you have something like this, it’s purely masturbation material, and usually not that great. It’s not written all that well, or it’s short, to the point, and lacking in world building or general planning. Flexible Survival really doesn’t feel like that. Your body can be in I don’t know how many configurations, and the setup adjusts the various sex scenes to reflect this, and for the most part these scenes don’t jump out as having parts cut-and-pasted in to reflect the current status of your character. They just seem to work like someone is writing them.
What’s more, there really is an actual game here. It’s still being built, of course. Combat is still coming along, and I didn’t really find too big a variety of weapons in its current state. There’s also a Feat system coming that will let you customize yourself even more as you go along. But it’s seriously an actual game. You have to balance searching for neat content and new foes with searching for food and water. There are, from what I understand, multiple endings depending on the state of your character and what you did through your 30 days, and you are rewarded for all the different types of changes to yourself, as well as being good, uncorrupted, and only seeking out consensual relationships. These relationships aren’t necessarily the deepest things in the world, but there’s enough there to make them feel real enough, in the context of the game. You could buy that these people would like to spend time with your character, and aren’t just being items that respond to the command “fuck x.” (Though, you know, they do respond to that command.)

Basically, I am just really impressed. Usually when I see this much work put into a furry porn project, I am partially confused at why this was the thing they spent their time on. But this is, easily, better constructed than some non-porn-y Interactive Fiction I have played, well-conceptualized, and, if you’re into the sort of thing in there, is pretty exciting. I was linked to this game kind of at random, but it really got some claws into me. The extremely NSFW link is right here if you would like to try it. (I put it at the end so you’d be sure to know what you were getting into before you went there!) I personally hope it continues to be updated for awhile. A little more polish all around, and a wider variety of encounters, and you’d really have something special here, if only for a fairly niche audience.

I’ve been playing a lot of Through the Ages. Not in like, physical form. Have you seen the prices for that thing? Also, there are so many pointless counter bits to keep track of, that I assume that actually playing the game would be an accounting nightmare. I still don’t understand all the systems that are running behind the scenes, and I’ve played several games now. Still, once you get the hang of it, it’s a rather fun game with a lot of strategy involved, and I rather enjoy it.

I’ve been playing it on this not very legit-looking website. The interface on the site is kind of awful, but it basically lets you play by e-mail rounds of this game with your friends, and once you figure out how to actually control the game, it works fairly well, when the site hasn’t crashed.

(Seriously, with all the questionable things in the way of me learning this game, I’m amazed I stuck with it and like it as much as I do.)

There are two great things about this game. The first is the wide variety of strategies. You can work on your tech, and out think your opponents. You can work on your military, and conquer your opponents. You can simply build up your culture, and out art your opponents. The best part is, though, that you can’t completely min/max. If you neglect your military, you will be stomped on. If you neglect your tech, you won’t be able to keep up with advances in the arts and military. If you neglect your arts, your people will be bored and displeased, and often revolt, riot, and things of that nature.

The second is the way that you draw cards. Every turn, based on things like what government you’re running, you have a certain number of moves. In front of all players is a bunch of cards dealt out. Each one is in either a one-point slot, a two-point slot, or a three-point slot. Taking a card costs as many moves as the point value. However, after each player’s turn, all cards move upward towards being cheaper, and you deal replacements on the bottom. This makes for amazing strategy. Do you take the card you want now, while it costs you multiple actions, or do you wait to get it for cheaper and hope your opponent doesn’t snag it? You can really plan ahead, and fuck up other players plans, with this setup, and I really like it.

Yeah, I’ve been having a really good time, and I certainly thank Stiv for forcing me into playing. It’s been great fun! In reality, though, I bet it’s less fun, because holy shit. There is so much bookkeeping in this game. But as an online play-by-electronic-mails thing, it’s pretty solid. I do recommend giving it a spin, if you can. Just be prepared for a huge learning curve.

I guess here is where I write about Dragon Age: Origins: Awakening: The Expansion to Dragon Age: Origins: Additional Colon.

I was shocked at how much I liked the original Dragon Age: Origins. I assumed it would be very standard fantasy fare, but Bioware brought some real characters to it, and I was pretty connected and involved in the story.

On top of previously mentioned stupid design decisions, Awakening totally failed to do any of that.

I mean, there was nothing offensive about Awakening or anything, but I was basically given a bunch of characters I didn’t know (I never really used Oghren in the main game) and not given time to get to know them. Unlike the characters in Origins, which were given time to break out of their cliche status, all my party members in Awakening stayed right in there. Flirty mage? Sure. Elf who hates humans? Why not. You just didn’t get any time to know these people. They were much more “roles to fill your party with” than characters.
The only one who stood out, simply because he was from the main game, was Oghren. Although, yes, he didn’t have much dialog in this either, you could see his depth even in what they had there. I had to admit, he was pretty awesome. Obviously comic relief, but pretty funny comic relief at times, and he has some depth to him. But again, he’s comic relief. There was nobody like Alistair, Leliana, or Morrigan to be both really seriously deep and really awesome.

The missions and combat were basically the same as before? Thankfully they didn’t do anything to really piss me off for “variety” like the fade puzzle bullshit from the main game. They added some more skills and stuff, including some options that made my Bow user less shitty, which I appreciated, but it didn’t really change my main strategy any. The boss at the end looked suitably bad-ass and boobful, of course, but fighting her wasn’t really a big deal. It was just a thing. (Granted, I was playing on easy… or so I assumed. I imported my save and it never asked, but that save was on easy, so…)
The most interesting parts of the whole thing just didn’t have enough time to work properly. Stealing the upgrade mechanic from Mass Effect 2 for Vigil’s Keep was a great idea, but I didn’t play the game long enough to think of it as “home,” so I didn’t give much of a shit if it got destroyed or not. Similarly, the plot points about stealing Grey Warden blood to give the Darkspawn free will could have been cool, but it just kind of gets thrown in there without much setup or payoff. It’s just a thing.

I don’t know. I’m pretty glad I didn’t buy this expansion. Playing through it wasn’t a bad experience, as I said, but it’s nothing at all like the awesome of the main game. I also don’t think there’s anything in this that anyone worried about not having the whole story for Dragon Age 2 will need to play, though I guess we’ll find out. Maybe the free Darkspawn thing will pay off in that game somehow? I have no idea. We’ll see what Shepar…. Hawk has to deal with when I get around to the game. The final word on Awakening, though? I’m unimpressed.

I buy many trivia games. Scene It!, Buzz!, I even bought that Trivial Pursuit game. I love playing trivia with my family and friends, and I have been trying to fill a trivia-shaped hole in my heart for awhile. This is because Jellyvision hasn’t been making You Don’t Know Jack games for awhile.

But now they made another one, and it reminded me why Jack is, hands down, one of the best gaming experiences you can have with your friends.

It is seriously like they haven’t been gone for all these years. The game immediately opens, just like the old games, and the game flows almost exactly the same as well. The best part is: all of it totally still works. All of the banter, all the jokes, all the fake commercials. They are all still completely hilarious, even today. Every episode is a finely crafted experience, and you get 73 of them at the budget price of 30 dollars, or 20 on the PC because there’s no online play.

How have you not bought this yet?

There are a few small changes, but I really think they are for the better. The new Jack adopts the now more-popular style of “everyone answers, and the faster you answer, the more the question is worth” format of most recent trivia games. This is great because it, of course, keeps people like Essner from completely dominating the game and lets everyone participate more. With no keyboard, the game also loses the Gibberish Questions, but lets face it: that wasn’t really the most fun category anyway. Dis or Dats and the Jack Attack are still in play, though.

On top of that, there are tons of new features. All the new question categories, like Cookie’s Fortune Cookie Fortunes with Cookie “Fortune Cookie” Masterson and It’s The Put The Choices Into Order Then Buzz In And See If You Are Right Question, are both hilarious and interesting in their execution.
By far the best addition, though, is the Wrong Answer Of The Game. Every game is “sponsored” by a fake sponsor, who has chosen one wrong answer to associate with a “fabulous” prize and $8000 dollars. These answers will be thematically related to the sponsor. It’s devious, really: a trivia game trains you to lock in your answer as fast as possible, but $8000 is a huge amount of money in this version of Jack, and can easily swing the game in your favor. You’re then forced into the tough choice of trying to pay more attention to the answers, and link them with the theme, or assume your opponents won’t find the Wrong Answer of the Game and just play normally. It’s shockingly strategic, actually, and by far the best “Holy shit!” memorable moments I’ve had while playing have been based around someone finding the Wrong Answer when everyone else missed it and the reaction that ensued.

This is as near a perfect trivia package as you could want. The game even supports the Scene It! buzzers, making it very parental-friendly as well! If you like trivia at all, and I do mean even the least little bit, you owe it to yourself to drop the 30 bucks on this game and pick it up. You will not be disappointed.

You Don’t Know Jack is so, so fucking amazing. Play it. Own it. Enjoy it. Do it now.

On the night of Valentine’s, I got a call from Essner asking me if I wanted to go to this release night Marvel Vs Capcom 3 tournament thing. I said yes, because, I dunno, it’s the sort of thing I said yes to, and my copy didn’t show up early. We went, then, to the Wal-Mart to play in this thing.

Of course, it looked, for a long time, that we were the only two people who were going to play. A Wal-Mart employee, and myself. Eventually they got the system set up, though, and Essner and I just started dicking around with the game. It was a ton of fun! Soon, another employee who got off of work who was a comic fan jumped in, so we had a three person “tournament” on our hands.

I started out really strong. There was awhile there when I was playing as Chris and was kind of unstoppable with him. I was also getting some pretty good hits in with Felicia as well, which surprised me. As the night went on and we stopped dicking around and started the “tournament” proper, though, I had lost my advantage. I didn’t know the moves, and when I am clueless on moves, but almost know them, and face people who are doing more button mashing? I lose every time, because I focus on trying to execute moves I don’t know. Of course, it also hurt that Essner knows just enough to supplement his button mashing with well-timed specials, making him hard to read.

Essner ended up using a lot of Dante and Iron Man, which served him well. Although I didn’t play as either, Dante seems both really good and really fun! He’s got a nice variety of very flashy attacks, and a bunch of different types of projectiles so that you never know exactly what he’s going to throw at you. Iron Man is Iron Man. Since none of us figured out how to super-jump, Unibeam was pretty godly. I couldn’t, say, cancel it with Chris’s gunfire. I knew I needed to super jump over it, but I couldn’t pull it off.

Other guy (I think I might have heard his name, but I don’t remember it) was a big Captain America fan, and actually got to be pretty damn solid with Cap by the end of the night. His play with the other characters (Deadpool and Spidey, mostly) couldn’t really cut it, though, especially not in the face of Essner’s well-timed beams and button mashes.

Anyway, it was decided that we’d all have two “lives” and the last one with a life left would win a free copy of the game. Once we started this tournament part, Essner didn’t lose once. I had a very close loss against him, if I recall, but basically he just steamrolled us all, and scored himself a free copy of the game. A game he wasn’t planning on buying, since all the play of it he’s going to do is probably going to happen at my house, and I already have the limited edition coming in the mail, but hey. That’s pretty cool, and it had a special cover art, so that’s nice.

After the tournament, the manager, who is not a gamer but recognized Ryu and Chun-Li and probably played Street Fighter back in the day, picked up the controller to play one match, and completely creamed Mr. Other Guy, laughing his ass off. Basically, the manager kept summoning in support characters, which we hadn’t really been doing the whole time we were playing, and the Other Guy had no idea what was happening and wasn’t blocking.

Anyway, it was a very interesting experience, and I got to dick around and see how badly they nerfed Tron early. (Seriously, the new command for her dash is going to take a LOT of getting used to, as it’s the key to Tron being any good and it’s much harder to pull off.) I also got this poster I hung up in my office. All in all, a fun time, and soon I’ll get to start working with MvC3 for reals, so that’ll be fantastic as well!

Essner decided we should go to Lambert’s for no reason, and I decided eh, why not? That meant we had a very long wait ahead of us, so I busted out an app I had grabbed for free awhile back: Movie Cat.

Basically, Movie Cat is a movie trivia game. You get 9 “lives,” which represent how many incorrect answers you can get. The different difficulties make you lose different amounts for a wrong answer. On medium, for example, you get one “grace” wrong answer before losing a life, though it does cost you points. The idea is to play all five rounds without losing all your lives, and score as high as possible. Fairly straightforward.

They’ve got a pretty solid mix of categories here. There are several standard trivia categories, like “Award-Winners” and “Chick Flicks,” but there are also categories like “Cat Chat,” which shows you a section of a script from a film, “Dressing Room,” which shows you cat-ized versions of costumes from a movie, and the one I thought was the most clever, “DVD Chapters,” where you have to guess what the movie is by the titles of the chapters on the DVD release. You have to complete 5 random questions to move on to the next round, but you have three “shuffles” per game, where you can draw different categories for that round, if you don’t like what’s up there.

Essner, the movie buff, seemed to think the questions were fairly easy. For me, though, who doesn’t have a mind like IMDB, I thought the questions were of a fairly good difficulty level, having both fairly easy questions and fairly hard ones. I have had trouble getting through all five rounds sometimes. Essner, of course, could breeze through them, no problem.

The only flaw I can find with this app is that it’s single player trivia. I find trivia to be a multiplayer event. That’s why I liked QRank so much: it made it multiplayer by having all your friend compete on the same set of questions. Even if you wanted to compare Movie Cat scores (you can upload your results to Facebook, if you’re that kind of person) you can’t compare them in a meaningful way, because the questions are always randomized. Still, if you like movie trivia on the go, this is by far the slickest and most complete product I’ve enjoyed on iOS. Of course, my only comparison has been the Cash Cab game, which is alright, I guess, but the interface is kind of shitty and it isn’t great. Movie Cat oozes polish. It has that going for it.

Would I pay $2 for it? I’m not sure. I don’t think I would play it a lot alone, which makes that 2 dollars something probably better spent on another iOS game or two. That’s completely personal, though. If you want a trivia experience on your iPhone, especially movie trivia, this is one of the best I’ve seen by far. It’s a quality product that I have certainly had some fun with.

I have been playing Dragon Age: Origins: Awakening. In this game, you recruit a party member called Justice. He was a warrior. I had been running a two Warrior, one Mage, and me Rogue setup in the original game, so I was needing another warrior to duplicate that. I was glad to pick him up.

As I do because, I dunno, I feel like having a streamlined experience and I am playing on easy anyway, I used the Auto-Level to level him up. He learned some kind of buff, and the computer automatically set up tactics for him to keep this buff up on himself. So far, so good.

Justice casts this buff. When active, this buff causes a tiny explosion/whoosh of air thing to ripple out around him about every three seconds. This makes a fairly loud and annoying noise. He always has this buff up. The only way I could not have him have this buff up is to control him manually or rejigger his tactics so he does not cast it, but if I did that, then he wouldn’t be buffed, and I don’t want that.

I walked around with this noise for like 3 minutes, and I had to remove him from my party. The noise was driving me crazy.

Great fucking job, Bioware! You succeeded in making a character nobody could ever actually use. All because you attached this ridiculous noise to that buff. Fantastic. I don’t understand how playtesters wouldn’t have realized how annoying that noise was. Was the game not tested with Justice in your party?

I don’t know. Mind-blowing stuff, and now I’m down a warrior. Oh well.

Bayonetta is a game where I can tie an angel up in chains, bondage-style, and tease her until she cums, which causes her to explode in a shower of blood.

Bayonetta is a game which ends about 14 times, the last one being an incredibly long and detailed dance sequence.

Bayonetta is a game where the main character has her own sitcom-esque theme song.

I love Bayonetta so much.

The entire game is a fantastic ride. It’s constantly getting crazier and crazier. Each fight is more ridiculous than the last, and you can’t wait to see the next crazy thing the game throws at you as you play through. Some games have a problem where you see the cutscenes, and you’re like, “I wish I could do that instead of watch it.” Bayonetta doesn’t have that problem. You can and DO do all the ridiculous bullshit in the cutscenes. It feels so good. It’s hilarious. It’s pro-sex. It has an amazing main character who is so over the top with her sexuality that she goes all the way around from being an object of lust to being simply a total badass. She is every single fetish all at the same time, and embraces them all, and somehow it completely works and makes her seem a stronger woman for it. I have joked about her being a great role model, but seriously, she totally is. She paves her own path in life, embraces and enjoys her primal side, and through it all is a generally good and heroic person, even if she tries to hide it a little.

On top of all the craziness and awesome character-ness, you have a really well constructed action game. Apparently it’s very challenging and skill-based at higher difficulties, which is awesome! I’m glad it’s there to appeal to those people! But they’ve also done a fantastic job at making it accessible. I played through it on Easy (Automatic), and it makes the game so fun without having to learn tons of combos and time things just right. Basically, the game will mix up combos from what you’ve learned if you tap out the simplest combo with a button. You still have some control: the weapons all do different things, so you have to think about what you’re equipping, and the punch and kick buttons are based on different goals as well. But just by hitting kick a lot, you throw out a variety of the most badass-looking combos. But the combos if you go punch are different, and you do need to mix and match. You just don’t need to memorize. You feel very powerful, but not in a boring way, as I’ve heard it described. It’s a blast, especially if you’ve ever looked at high level play in these sorts of games and wished you could get things that cool to happen.

Bayonetta is a fantastic game. I mean, I haven’t even mentioned the many crazy pointless Sega references, all of the horrible one-liners… there’s just so much to love. It’s kind of a shame I only got to it a year late, but trust me: it’s an experience not to be missed. It is a fun, fun ride. Play it. Enjoy it.

Little Big Planet 2 just came out!

So, uh, I rented Little Big Planet for the PSP.

I had basically just wondered what the fuck this was. How would it even work on the PSP? It was a mystery! So I went to give it a go.

First off, this game has some seriously technical weirdness. First thing it does is tell me to turn my PSP’s wifi off of “power save mode.” I have no idea what this is, but I have to quit the game to check. I look all over the options, and can’t find anything like that. I eventually just ignore the message, as I don’t know what the hell it meant.
Secondly, this is the first PSP game I’ve ever played that required an update, a process which I had to quit out of the game to do, which was also baffling.

Anyway, it’s kind of appropriate that my PSP was acting even more like a PS3 for this miniaturized PS3 game!
I kind of hate Sony’s tech sometimes.

The game itself, though, is impressive and fun. The built-in levels are all new, and, personally, a lot more fun, because all checkpoints are infinite life checkpoints, unlike the bullshit in the original game. This really cut down on frustration. The bullshit lives were why I never actually beat the original’s campaign.
For the most part, it really looks like Little Big Planet as well. There are only two planes in this version, instead of three, but in some ways that’s actually better, as the levels are much less confusing because of it. I never completely bought the planes thing. When they worked, they worked, but it seemed like so often they didn’t! They didn’t bother me here, though.
The levels themselves are nice and varied as well. There’s a chase sequence stage that’s pretty cool, and some very puzzle-y levels that are quite clever, from what I played. There’s also a ton of “cute” racism! Everyone loves that, right?

I logged onto the Playstation Network to see what kind of levels I had access to… there were some! But the method of playing them was cumbersome. I had to download the files to the memory stick. I couldn’t just pick them and play like on the PS3. I didn’t really try out the building tools, because if I was going to build something, I’d try it on the PS3, you know?

I guess that’s really my thing. It’s a very well done game, but for most of it, I admit I was just kind of wishing I could like… export this level pack into Little Big Planet proper and play it that way, with access to all my costumes and co-op and such. The new levels are nice, but this game isn’t something that a LBP fan needs to have. They already have what they need, you know? I guess it’s for people who don’t have a PS3, of which there are some? I suppose those people exist. But to get the most out of the game, you’d need to be in wifi range, so…

I don’t know. It’s a mysterious game. Not bad. Pretty fun, really. Has all the charm of its big brother. At the same time, I’m unsure who would rush to buy it. I’m not sure who would need it. It’s a strange little game. Hmm.

I’m currently enjoying the shit out of Bayonetta, a game I am a year late getting to. I’m sure I’ll ramble more about how fantastic that game is later, but the more important part is… well… I don’t feel like I’ve missed anything.

I’ve passed that hurdle.

I’m sure I’ve talked about it before here. I really want to be involved in the gaming discussion. It’s something I like to be able to do. That pushed me to buying a lot of games in the past. I had to get this or that game in order to talk about it right when it was happening. I needed it to be relevant.
Because of that, going back and playing older games, like Bayonetta, was always an issue. There was something new I had to focus on, and even if I played it and enjoyed it, there was always an air over it of feeling silly for waiting so long, or feeling pressured to move on to something new.

I’m not feeling that with Bayonetta. I’m just enjoying the shit out of it. And similarly, I’ve become really interested in Dead Space 2, but I find my general reaction to be “that’s going to be great when Gamefly sends it to me in a month or two.” It’s okay. That’s fantastic.
I don’t know. I’m not completely out of the video game conversation. The games I really, really will want to talk about, I am going to still buy. Like, say, Marvel Vs Capcom 3. No way I’m not buying that, and that is a game I would feel left out of talking about. Most of these games, though, I totally wouldn’t. They’re fun, but they’re not those key games that I obsess over, and thus I don’t need to have them day one. Plus, when I do want to sample, I can sample, and send the games back the moment I am tired of them. It works so much better that way than paying for this stuff.

And now it feels better, too. Fantastic. I’m proud of myself. Well, a little bit, anyway.