The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

Sonic Colors has a fucking FANTASTIC soundtrack.

Let’s just listen, okay? Here’s Tropical Resort Zone, Act 1. Great surf rock kind of stuff. Then here’s Tropical Resort Zone, Act 2, which subtly changes the song a bit, while keeping the same themes. Act 3 changes it a bit more significantly, but it’s still the same theme, and still awesome. Then, of course, in the Sonic Simulator, we get an 8-bit version of it.
The music just keeps going like that, and is really fantastic! Even the opening theme, which is horrible in that normal Sonic way, is also really catchy. The soundtrack is spectacular. I love it.

The presentation of the game is also pretty awesome. The storyline of the game is very tongue-in-cheek, and it completely works. It’s still for kids, of course, but it also is constantly recognizing how stupid Sonic plots are to a more adult audience. Sonic will go destroy a boss, and Tails won’t even notice. “Oh? That’s cool I guess. I was doing something else.” Eggman talks about how he “always says” that his plan will let him rule the world, but he really means it this time! I had heard about this before playing it, and was afraid it wouldn’t work, because they’d be “trying to hard,” but they do pull it off.

Even gameplaywise, the way the game has short 3D sections before swapping back to 2D for the more intense platforming works in ways that previous Sonic games in 3D simply haven’t. It provides a fairly good platforming challenge before sweeping you into beautiful-looking 3D sections, before going back to platforming challenge. Plus, it’s actually fun! Some of the Wisp colors are more fun than others, but most let you do some really interesting stuff. Blue Cube is probably used the best that I saw, simply because it lets you swap rings and blocks like a Mario P-Switch, which lets you get to new areas on a time limit.

Yes, this is by far the best Sonic game I’ve played in years. It’s genuinely fun. I didn’t beat it, though, because it does get a bit cheap in later stages. This wouldn’t be a big deal if I could retry forever, but the game still uses lives, like a dinosaur. After 4 tries, I have to restart the whole stage. Some stages are short, and this isn’t a big deal, but at least one or two in every zone are very long, and the idea of replaying them again and again quickly got old to me.

So I returned it. But damn, if you want a Sonic game that doesn’t suck, Sonic Colors on Wii fits the bill. It’s pretty good. I hope they learn from that and make another game that improves on this formula even more. A Sonic Colors 2 could be a genuinely great game, instead of a pretty good one with a fantastic soundtrack.

It’s Steam Sale season again, and once again I am simply overwhelmed with how many Steam Sale games I pick up and then never play. Well, I’m going to try to start turning that around. I’m going to give some of these cheap Steam games a short shot, and see how I feel about them. Then, I will write about them. It’s the perfect plan! Probably. I’m pretty sure it’s something like the perfect plan.

Anyway, Magnetis is 50 cents on Steam right now. That’s cheaper than most stupid iPhone games. I had to pick it up and try it.

The problem a lot of “speed” puzzle games have is that they’re always in the shadow of Tetris. Tetris is just so fucking good! How are you going to make your game better than Tetris?

Magnetis is not better than Tetris, but it certainly isn’t bad. Mediocre, maybe, if you have that Tetris puzzle game itch, and have 50 goddamn cents, you might as well pick it up.

Basically, the field of play is a little circular conveyor belt. If you keep holding one direction, the cubes on the belt come back around the other side. From the top, two-cube sets drop. You can swap the order of these two cubes as they drop. There are three types of blocks: generic, grey “conductor” blocks, left side magnets, and right side magnets. The idea is to connect two magnets of the same color with connector blocks to clear them.

Play starts out really slow. You have to “level up” a few levels before the game starts throwing you magnets of a second color, and it’s kind of nap-inducing until they do. Once a third color appears, though, you get fucked pretty quickly. The difficulty comes with accidentally filling a whole row. Conductors slowly disappear, but if they’re hooked to a magnet, they disappear even slower. If you fill up a row, that row is kind of lost for a long, long time. This is how you can accidentally fill up the whole screen and then lose.

There’s nothing wrong with the game, as I said. It just doesn’t have that constant “searching for the pattern” quality that awesome games like Tetris Attack has, nor a set strategy that you’re desperately trying to keep going, like the gameplay of classic Tetris. You’re just not thrown enough different types of blocks to really make you juggle, and when you are, the small field of play just isn’t enough to handle it, or so it felt to me. Then again, I’ve only played a couple of rounds. Maybe I don’t “get” the game yet.

But no, seriously, the game is fucking 50 cents. For 50 cents, this is a solid little puzzler. There are better out there, of course. I mean, if you have an iPhone, Drop7 is currently a dollar, and you can’t go wrong with that. But if you want something Tetris-y, then hey, give it a shot. I mean, it costs less than a can of soda, for fuck’s sake.

Having been to a bar recently, for some reason, I can promise you that I know what they’re all about. The thing that they are all about is “spot the difference” picture games on little touch screen machines on the bar, right? Now, what would you do if I told you that you could get this experience, on your iDevice, and not have to go to a bar?

You’d be excited, of course. Potentially. Heh.

Every so often, I look at the “newly free” tab in my Appshopper app to see if something pops out at me. Awhile back, something called Battle Spot made me decide to download it. I don’t know if it was the extremely cute panda or what, but hey, I gave it a try.

It’s really not bad! If it’s still free when you see this, go grab it. It’s just a spot the difference game, but it’s a solid implementation.

There’s two different modes, a multiplayer and a single player. The single player just sets you up with a time limit to find the five differences in each picture before throwing you to the next one. You want to finish as many pictures as possible to rack up a high score. Simple stuff, really.

The multiplayer, though, is weird and kind of crazy. You can do local multiplayer with people close to you, or do random or set up matches online. You’re both given the same picture at the same time, and whoever spots the most differences first, wins that picture. It’s pretty frantic, especially with someone not there, because you are in such a rush to find the easy ones before they can key them in. It actually works pretty well!

Granted, I’m not a huge fan of this sort of game, but from what I understand, hidden object games and the like are really, really popular, and this would be a great game for someone who likes such things. It’s nothing fancy, but it works. It has some really weird music, though. You’ll probably want to turn that off. Heh.

I think it’s no surprise that I love Rocketcat games. I’ve enjoyed everything they’ve put out so far, and that trend hasn’t stopped with Hook Worlds. (I realize now I never wrote a review of Super Quick Hook. It’s fantastic. Buy that too.)

Basically, Hook Worlds, for a cheap cost, takes the gameplay of the more robust and adventure-like Hook Champ and Super Quick Hook, and dilutes it down to a really solid arcade experience. It’s an expanded version of the “Avalanche” and “Eruption” modes in Quick Hook. You will always die at the end, but you have to go through randomly-generated landscapes, hooking and swinging and attempting to stay ahead of danger. It’s a fantastic introduction to their games and it’s only a buck. If you never knew if you’d enjoy their grapple-hookin’ stuff, this is a great intro. If you want a more robust, more hand-crafted challenge afterwards, pick up one or both of their other games, and enjoy that.

Even within this simple game, though, they’ve really mixed it up. The “worlds” refers to the various different game types. You have “Curse of the Watcher,” which stars the father of the heroes of Hook Champ and Super Quick Hook. It’s fairly similar to how Hook Champ plays, so if you had always wished that Hook Champ had an endless mode, this would be it. “Bounty Gunner” is the second world, and it stars one of the DLC characters from Hook Champ, Zelle. Instead of having rocket jumps, Zelle instead has a gun. Her stages have many jump pads that throw her into the air, but she also has enemies about that she must shoot. Her points come from the number of ghosts and other enemies she shoots down and collects bounty money from. Finally, there’s Cybergnome 202X, which features a crazy gravity-flip instead of a jump. You can end up hooking on the floor or the ceiling. It’s hard and pretty insane to wrap your head around. There’s also a secret fourth world that was unlocked for early purchasers, and will be unlocked later for everyone else. It’s basically the first world again, only harder and with retro Atari-style stylings. A nice addition, since World 1 is actually fairly easy. (Then again, maybe I have some hookin’ skills after having played the first two so much.)

This game is an amazing value at a dollar. You still have all the hilarious dialog like the other games, and plenty of unlockable hats and hooks (though they are much harder to unlock, being purely based on reaching various scoring levels, rather than building up currency like the other games). If you own a device that can play it, and like action games, you really should purchase it. You’ll have fun. It is fun!

I really liked Costume Quest, and I don’t care who knows it! Thus, when I heard that Costume Quest was having some Christmas-themed DLC, well, I kind of wanted in. So I spent my money and bought Grubbins on Ice.

The DLC does a couple of smart things. For one, the DLC has save points. There are these little phones about you can use to save, which is fantastic. I don’t know if they patched them into the main game, but they should have. Makes the game much more enjoyable to play, because you can take smaller chunks.
Secondly, it does what a DLC should do. It gives you more quests, more costumes, and so on. The new costumes are cool enough, but I mostly used my party from the first game, save the Yeti outfit you get near the end, since that one has an in-combat power that’s too powerful to be without.

Mostly, though, it’s just more Costume Quest. It’s not even particularly Christmas-themed, besides the fact that there is some snow around. Basically, since you kicked the ass of the bad guys from the first game, a new bad guy, Araxia, is attempting to take over the monster world, and has kidnapped Lucy. Therefore, you attempt to lead a revolution to overthrow him and save your friend. Still, the basic gameplay doesn’t change. You go from door to door to “drum up support” for the revolution, which is basically trick or treating. The characters even say as such. You also have to solve some troubles for the various monster elders, but besides a maze that requires you to use all your costume powers, it doesn’t really get very different from the base game.

Still, the dialog continues to be fantastic, and the combat and such are as fun and charming as they were in the first game. It’s also interesting that the game ends on a cliffhanger, suggesting additional DLC for later, which I’ll probably be on board for.

Yeah, it’s really more of the same. You really have to judge for yourself whether or not 5 bucks is worth it for 2 more hours of Costume Quest. I thought it was, and I was pretty happy with my purchase, but without the real holiday appeal like the first game, I couldn’t blame you to give this a pass. It doesn’t reinvent the wheel. It’s just more. I found it fun, though.

I recently played through the Battlefield: Bad Company 2 single player on 360! “But wait,” you may say, “don’t you own Bad Company 2 on the PC? I remember you mentioning something about the multiplayer.”
You are totally correct, I do own it on PC, yet I rented it on 360 to play the single player.
Yes, I’m not completely sure why I did either.

Still, I’m glad I finally played the single player, because it was FANTASTIC. Seriously, it makes Medal of Honor look like a fucking joke. I had fun the entire way through. You should play it.

The cast from the first Bad Company are back, and they’re still pretty funny! Granted, you have to seek out the funny conversations in this game. They don’t happen unless you dilly dally about going to objectives. But seriously, they’re hilarious. Just take a look at these. Amazing. The characters in this game are just fantastic, seriously.

Those characters are backed up by some really great gunplay. Basically all the control issues from the first Bad Company have been completely fixed. The game controls great, has good checkpoints, and gives you a variety of great weapons. Granted, it got rid of a lot of the uniqueness, too. You no longer can drive vehicles on big, open areas. You only do those in set sequences. Similarly, you have the standard “heavy breathing” healing method, instead of the syringe from the first game. This, especially, is a shame, because that was one of the coolest, more unique elements of the first game. Still, it’s all updated and it all works great.
As far as the guns go, I like the “supply drop” system they have in the game. Basically, like the first game, you unlock guns as you go along. Only now, whenever you read a supply drop, you can request any weapon you unlock. This lets you adapt for whatever situation is coming up. Enemy armor? Grab an RPG. Need to be close and personal? Grab and assault rifle and a shotgun. It’s a really friendly system that rewards you for seeking out more guns, so you can unlock them. It’s great.

The plot itself was not… great? But it was a plot. Things were connected together based on this silly fake EMP-type weapon that you end up stopping. You have a sense of progression, certainly. It’s serviceable. It works.

Playing through this game, I’m mostly just amazed at how good it is. The multiplayer is fucking fantastic as well, and this single player component is actually quite fun. Bad Company 2 just did not get as much praise as I feel like it should have. So I’ll give it some more praise here. It’s a fantastic game, and it’s probably kind of cheap now. If you want a shooter, and haven’t played it, pick that shit up. You’ll be thanking me.

Medal of Honor is hell of mediocre.

I mean, I don’t even know what to say about it, really. It was mostly a game of shootdudes or guyshoot, but was very, very vaguely based on reality. You play as these “tier one operatives” who have unlocked beards or something, and you play levels that seem very disconnected, very same-y, and are fairly uninteresting. Then the game kind of ends.

I have one rememberable moment in the game. There is a sequence where the game tells you lay down covering fire on a turmulent, and for the first time in game history, actually means it. You can’t just kill people. You actually have to cause a distraction for your teammates. That was pretty neat. Otherwise, I can’t really remember any moment in the game. Seriously.

Any variety in the game is kind of killed by the way the ammo system works. You can constantly ask your teammates for ammo, as long as you keep the guns you start with. This gives you 0 incentive to ever switch guns, which I found really frustrating, especially when the game gave me an LMG. I’m not an LMG sort. This system was pretty stupid. Sometimes they won’t give you ammo, and sometimes they will. It’s only if they perceive you need ammo. It’s dumb, and it keeps you from enjoying any sort of weapon variety, or from using the weapons you like most.

The game also likes to be really stupid with its objective markers. There was one time where I had an objective of “destroy an anti-air emplacement.” There’s the little symbol telling me where the objective is. Cool. It’s super far away, I can’t see, so I shoot at the objective marker, thinking the game would be sane. No, actually the emplacement is like, down and to the left a significant amount. I eventually squinted it out and found it after dying like 4 times. Way to be game! Way to be.

I mean, I guess I shot some dudes? I didn’t try the multiplayer because of the online pass bullshit, but the single player is really forgettable. If you really want to play through a shooter, play through something like Singularity first. Or CODBLOPS, since I’m sure that’s probably at least a bit more memorable. I don’t know. I can’t recommend Medal of Honor.

Yet I played all the way through it. I am so weird like that.

Have you played One Chance yet? Go ahead and give it a go, then we’ll talk about it. I’ll wait.

You played it?

Good.

On the Jick and Skully show, Jick said that he thought the way that the developer actively doesn’t want you to play the game a second time is “really cool.” Or something to that effect. That’s certainly what sets this game apart, I suppose, from other games of its ilk. You can’t go back and play it again. Feel free to try, but without actually working at it, there’s no way to restart.

I suppose that does say something, I guess, about how your own actions can’t be rewound like a video game. At the same time, there are only a few very binary decisions in the game, so it really kind of lessens the impact to some extent. I chose to work hard every day but the last, where I gave up and spent time with my daughter. It really seemed to be the only way to go for me. I suppose other things might have been fine options for other people to do, and I saw that there were options, but I didn’t really feel like I could make them. Maybe you made different decisions.

Still, I guess I’m just not struck by something like this, because when I play a game with multiple outcomes, my initial reaction is to not WANT to play it a second time, because it belittles the experience by letting me see the systems. For example, watching my brother play through Mass Effect after I had beaten it kind of cheapened the experience for me, as it let me see how tricksy the game had to be to give you the illusion of choice. I certainly don’t want to replay Mass Effect 2 for that reason. I understand that some people would, but I’m not that person. So the fact that this is a game that doesn’t let you restart doesn’t really affect me. Hell, I wouldn’t even had noticed if I hadn’t heard discussion about it after I played it.

So… yeah. I guess it didn’t affect me as much as other people. I felt my interaction to be so limited that many of the things happening didn’t affect me as much as some other sorts of art games. If you’re someone who wants to see every possible outcome, maybe this would affect you more? Who knows. It’s an interesting little tidbit, anyway.

Do you remember Yaris? Man, what an abysmal game. How about Doritos Dash of Destruction? Passable, but not great. These tie-in free XBLA games have not had a good track record.

However, I’m here to tell you that Doritos Crash Course is actually fairly fantastic, and totally worth a download and quick playthrough. It’ll only take you maybe an hour to enjoy all the content, but it’ll be a good hour! It’s a lot of fun.

The premise of the game is a game show along the lines of a Takahashi’s Castle or that new show I’ve heard of called Wipeout. Your avatar is a contestant on an obstacle course, and you have to run and jump your way through to the end and try to get the best time you can.
What this amounts to is a fairly well designed bit of speed platforming. You have to dodge timed traps and use conveyor belts to your advantage to get past obstacles, all the while trying to go as fast as possible. There are tons of checkpoints, so it never really gets frustrating, even though some of the later challenges can get a bit hard. There are three locations with five levels each, and they’re all pretty fun.

This is a great use of Avatars, mostly because they actually took the time to animate them well. They don’t seem plastered in in this game. They seem like they were actually made for this game, which is huge. I hadn’t seen that before. It was cool to see my avatar, rocking her Grant City PD shirt as she died over and over because I suck at platforming. It works!

Other than that, though, this is nothing you haven’t seen before, and there are plenty of better platforming challenges out there. For example, Splosion Man, which I’ve been slowly working through. But for the price of free, the game is totally worth letting yourself get distracted with it. The Doritos branding is only in the title, and not really anywhere else, so that’s not obnoxious. It’s even smart enough to have integrated friend leaderboards to maybe help you eek out a few extra minutes of free fun. The content runs out before it gets boring (unlike Dash of Destruction) and I had a good time all the way through. It has some sort of multiplayer too, though I haven’t tried it, but hey, that also might be fun.

It’s a fantastic little game that actually might be worth a buck. But it’s not. It’s free. So just download it already. At least you’ll have fun mining for free achievements.

Thanks to the super-cool dudes at On The Stick, I played Castlevania: Lords of Shadow. Now that I’ve talked about the gameplay, I get to talk about the plot. So, I suppose, this is spoiler territory if you care. Consider yourself warned.

—OMG SPOILARZ—

Poor Patrick Stewart.

There is so much bad monologue in this game. Every level opens up with some, and Patrick Stewart reads all of it, and it’s all terrible. I mean, my good buddy Patrick Stewart (yes, I have to write his whole name out every time) does his best, but man. Man. It was painful to listen to, because I know he can do better. I want him to make good money, of course, because he deserves it, but man. Man.

Basically, one Gabriel Belmont has had his wife killed. He’s a member of “The Brotherhood,” an organization that seems to exist mainly to have it’s knights die in places all over the world so that there’s always a corpse with a power up or background info around any adventuring location. He gets told that the world kind of sucks because of the Lords of Shadow by some dude named Zobek, who is Patrick Stewart, and that if he fufills some prophecy, and kills them all, then hey, maybe things will get better. This involves a mask for some reason I was never clear on. Oh, and Gabriel is also told he can revive his wife this way.

It’s not very deep, and there are no real twists and turns. Okay, there’s a twist, but it’s not a REAL one by any means. Basically, Zobek is the third Lord of Shadow in disguise. Or something along those lines. That’s just kind of lame. Also, I guess he used mind control to make you kill your wife, and that makes you unable to go to heaven? Something like that. In any case, no real surprises. Side characters appear, and are gone next level, and you don’t really give a shit about them, even when they die heroically. Even when you kill Pan, the person you probably interacted with the most, it doesn’t really mean much, because half the time he’s just a plot contrivance to get you to a new-looking location. One of which is the land of the dead. I think? I got a bit confused as to why I was where in the end, I admit. It just wasn’t interesting enough to keep my attention.

In the end, Patrick Stewart, now a guy in a dumb mask with horribly stupid-looking animation, talks for awhile, and then suddenly Satan appears for some reason. Satan is the last boss. He is by far easier than many other bosses in the game. Satan is kind of a pushover. You kill him, and he’s kind of gone, and there’s no reason for any of it. Somehow, though, this brings the plot to a close.

There are credits.

Then there’s a scene where, in modern day, Zobek goes to see Gabriel, who is still alive, and tells Zobek to call him Dracula. He then falls out a window.

What the fuck.

This event makes no sense at all. Zobek was killed by Satan, so why is he there? Why is Gabriel suddenly a vampire? Especially considering he doesn’t look anything like all the vampires I killed in the game. Is this supposed to set up a sequel? How could it? Does this relate to actual Castlevania canon in any way? I know enough to be perplexed at the very notion that it might. It was a pretty scene, I guess, but it’s disconnected from literally everything else in the game, and that’s the last thing they leave you with.

Yeah. the story in the game is kind of a clusterfuck. It sucks that games just can’t hack it often in that regard. Luckily, you can mostly ignore it, but especially with the production values on the game, it would have been so much better if there was something to care about. Oh well.