The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

Monday Night Combat isn’t just for Monday. It’s for everyday.

Seriously, it’s been a long time since I have played a purely multiplayer experience so polished and perfected. Monday Night Combat is a complete blast, and if you enjoy shooters on the lines and play them on the 360, you have to get this game.

The design of the game is different, but completely awesome. Basically, it’s Defense of the Ancients meets TF2. You spawn minions at both sides, and they move towards your opponents base. You pick one of several classes, such as Support, Sniper, or Gunner, and help push the bots forward to destroy your enemy’s “Moneyball.” You gain money while you kill things, which you use to upgrade your dude, build turmulents, activate traps, and summon additional bots.

What this creates is a setting where, like in DotA to some extent, you can be a huge help without directly affecting the other players. Granted, killing the other team gives you huge advantages, of course, since they are the best defenders. But you can be useful just by keeping turmulents up and going and taking out harder-to-kill bots. It’s objective-based multiplayer at it’s best. In addition, because there are all the bots, when you get into a match where the other team is more skilled than you, it keeps you from dying constantly, because there are other things to shoot at. Avoiding the “Spawn, oh I’m dead” cycle that can happen so often is really appealing.

Apparently the demo lets you play the game online for half an hour. Do that. You’ll know whether or not this is a game for you in that time. But it bet it will be. Because it is simply a blast. I played it pretty well nonstop the few days after it came out, with people and without, and it was fun as hell either way. I want this game on PC, too, so I can buy it again. I love it. The end.

Sin and Punishment: Star Successor is not near as fun as the BDSM romp it could have been. Instead, it’s a crazy shooter based on an N64 game that never came to America! Isn’t that fantastic?

Star Successor is a Treasure game, so I knew what I was getting into: balls to the walls shooter action that was way, way too difficult for me. This is why I gamefly’d it, of course. I can’t enjoy these sorts of games for a long period of time, but I figured it would be a good afternoon of fun. So I set it to easy, and picked the girl who automagically locks on to people, and went for it.

First off, I have to applaud this game for giving me the option of using my Classic Controller Pro. It’s pretty clearly the sub-optimal control vector, as being able to flip my cursor around the screen faster would have been to my advantage in most situations. However, I hate pointing the wiimote at the screen SO, SO MUCH that I really appreciated being able to control it like the old game.
I also appreciated the Easy mode and the auto-lock girl. It made the game much more accessible. With those settings, with practice, I probably could have beaten the thing. Of course, I don’t want to practice, but it’s the thought that counts. The auto lock was nice, as once you started firing on something, you no longer had to aim until you destroyed it. Granted, this could get you into trouble at times, where you want to kill a few little dudes in the middle of killing a big dude, but overall made the game easier. I’m sure hardcore players, who this game is made for, will never, ever use the girl. But I appreciated it.

Seriously, though, this game is insane. It looks very pretty, though very anime, and the huge bosses in this game are just mind-blowing. Early on, you face this screen-filling giant turtle for no real reason, and it really is a fantastic fight. I later fought some magician dude who had like 6 forms, each more crazy than the last. (Okay, the last was, like, a dolphin. So that wasn’t too crazy. The others were, though!) It seems like it’s delivering on exactly what a Treasure fan would want, and I appreciate it for that.

However, this game is fantastically, amazingly niche. People just don’t do shmups anymore, except the super-hardcore. Thinking back to how Nintendo was marketing this as “No, really, we care about the hardcore!” it’s really kind of sad. It doesn’t do what Nintendo was wanting. However, it’s not hiding what it is. If you think you’d like Star Successor, you probably will. It’s well done. It’s just a kind of arcade, completely hardcore game that I just can’t play for long periods of time anymore.

Starcraft II is definitely a video game where you game up all the videos, and then some things explode, and you mine a mineral.

I don’t really know what there is to say about it.

They’ve done a great job retooling the single player campaign to make it interesting, and every level has enough different in it to make it super exciting and fun. The multiplayer is just as fun as it ever was, even though they totally fucked everyone over with their horrible Custom Maps system.

Basically, it’s Starcraft II.

I mean, that’s cool. I’m enjoying playing it with people. But frankly, the single player can’t hold my interest, and I’m not all that good in Multiplayer. I keep teaming with Essner against online people, and he does everything and I, maybe, take out one thing with a Thor or something. Thing as in turmulent, not as in base.

I just can’t get into RTSes anymore. I used to play them all the damn time, and I had so much fun. In the end, though, I think it was almost purely the social aspect. RTSes were one of the few games, back in the day, that I could play with a group. I played Warcraft II and the original Starcraft with Essner all the damn time on dial-up back in the day. I stopped playing them, though. Getting better at them isn’t interesting to me, and it only takes so long to try out the units, do some cool things, and be done with it. I just can’t get excited about build orders.

Starcraft II is excellent. I’m not sad I bought it. I will continue to enjoy playing the occasional multiplayer match, and maybe I will polish off the single player at some point. However, it’s just not really my thing anymore. I’m not an RTS player. I kind of knew that going in, though. I knew this would happen. I just didn’t want to admit it out of nostalgia.

There was a time where Alan Wake was a huge thing. People were super excited about it.
Then like… five years passed.
Then it came out, and I didn’t really hear a lot of excitement or buzz about it. “This is exactly the kind of game I should Gamefly!” I told myself. So I did.
Now I have beaten it.

Alan Wake is a really mediocre game.

Seriously, I go back and forth on being very, very down on it to being kind of eh on it to being all “Yeah, that was pretty good.” It’s such a swing-y game in many ways. When it’s working, it’s very fun, but when it breaks, it’s really quite frustrating. I don’t know.

This is most clear in the gameplay. The combat is decent enough. You shine flashlights on enemies until they pop in light, and then you can shoot a few rounds into them and kill them. You have to dodge enemy attacks as well to survive. When it’s working, it’s a fun variation of normal shooter stuff, and a good time. However, as the game progresses, they start spawning more and more enemies in places where you can’t see them. They sneak up on you and hit you twice, and then you’re almost dead, and one stray smack will finish you off. The result of this is that eventually you get into death loops where you have to go “Okay, this guy will spawn here, have to take him out first, then this guy, then run over here and another guy will spawn, but I have to take out the guy behind me first…” This kind of gameplay is obscenely meta and, frankly, unfun. The game forces it on you, even on the easiest setting, “Normal.” Add to that inconsistent checkpoints that sometimes leave you with having to complete multiple combats before you get another one, and you can see where the combat can sometimes really frustrate.
On top of all this, the game loves to make you repeat the same hour or so of powering up, instead of giving you new toys to play with. Alan is apparently incapable of, say, putting a gun in the pocket of his coat, because he is constantly losing his guns and flashlight. Constantly. Which causes you to basically replay the same sequence where you’re like “Oh, here’s a flashlight, run run, oh, here’s a revolver, fight a little, oh, here’s a shotgun, now I can really fight” every hour. It was a neat trick once, but the game constantly relies on it, and it kind of falls flat. I’ve been told that Remedy’s previous games, the Max Payne games, were the same way. I never played those, though. Maybe someone who had would have been expecting this. I just found it a little annoying and pointless.

The story also has it’s ups and downs. The characters themselves are pretty well fleshed-out and acted. Alan is a fine enough character, and his agent Barry is a perfect example of a comic relief character who is also a genuine character you kind of like. There are also some really cool moments in the game, including an incredibly dramatic “hold this position” battle on a certain farm which I won’t spoil. However, the plot itself just isn’t that engaging. Alan’s trying to get his wife back, and is playing through a story he wrote, sure. But the story is constantly reiterating things you know already, like they were some big revelation, when you figured them out hours ago, and the entire plot is completely predictable. Using the manuscript pages to add background depth and foreshadowing is a decent idea, but it’s also difficult to do well. Some pages work perfectly, while others just tell you things you already know, or ruin intense moments in a way that much, much less effective than just watching them play out. It just doesn’t work perfectly well.

The best part of the game, I think though, were the Night Springs TV shorts. You stumble across Televisions that show this old Twilight Zoneish show called Night Springs. They were live acted, incredibly cheesy, and a lot of fun. I was looking forward to those a whole lot more than the actual plot itself.

So… yeah. I’m pretty negative in this review… it’s a pretty middle of the road game. It’s a rental game. Rent it and enjoy it, but it’s really not worth buying. If I had bought it, I would have gotten “The Signal” DLC story for free, but eh, I didn’t really feel like I missed anything. Besides some Gamerscore, I suppose. Alan Wake. Mediocre. Yeah.

A few days ago, I finally played through all of Alien Swarm, the free co-op game that Valve put out that involved shooting a bunch of aliens.

BUT WAS IT WORTH THE COST?

Oh yes. Completely.
I would have easily paid 10 bucks for this game, although in that case, perhaps a few more missions would have been nice. But seriously, Alien Swarm is very polished and a lot of fun. If you haven’t gotten some people together to play it, you really should.

The game is a top-down shooter in the twin-stick style. Of course, you don’t control it with a gamepad, even though I’d like to. You use the cursor you move around the outside of your dude and walk around with the WASD. That’s completely functional and works perfectly fine, of course. It’s just something I don’t prefer. Doesn’t affect the game in a negative way, though, even for me. You run around and shoot these people. There are a variety of different weapons and a variety of different classes you can be, each of which has slightly different loadouts and skills. The most important of these classes are the tech, which can hack open doors, and the Medic, which, oddly enough, has access to healing equipment. The other two classes, Officer and Special Weapons, don’t really seem all that different, from what I’ve seen. They just shoot some stuff, with Officer being a bit more well-rounded stat-wise and Special Weapons having access to a few bigger guns.

The way this game switches it up from other games of its type, I feel, is that you really have to manage your ammo and fire. Most shooters from a top-down perspective like this are “fire like crazy and kill everything.” In this, you have fairly limited ammo for most guns, so you have to make sure every shot counts. You also have friendly fire on, so much like Left 4 Dead, you have to actually pay attention and make sure not to catch a friend in the sweep of your flamethrower, for instance. This gives it a more different feel, and makes it feel much more like a squad-based FPS. That’s fun times. Of course, the new perspective makes me even worse at the game. At least in a FPS I feel like I know when I’m going to friendly fire. I feel like I have much more control over it. In this game, I either get so ancy about friendly fire that I barely shoot at all, or I force myself to shoot, and have many friendly fire incidents. I’m sure if I practiced a bit more, that would go away. But it is just the sort of game where I’m not used to be cautious and calculating, and it does affect my play. Doesn’t make it any less fun, though.

Seriously, the game is pretty amazing. It has Steam Achievements and persistent leveling to unlock new guns, which is nice enough that you can unlock everything in a few run-throughs of the game: hitting max level isn’t impossible. It uses the same PC lobby system that Left 4 Dead uses, so you get to bypass a lot of PC bullshit to get into co-op games, which I always appreciate. It’s just a really, really polished product, and totally worth your time. They could have easily charged some money for this, but instead they gave it away for free, with the complete source code out there on the web for full mod-ability. It’s great. Glad I’ve played it and enjoyed it.

We drafted Magic 2011, the 12th edition that comes out in 2010 today. In a surprising upset, Jonathan was the complete loser, and everyone else tied for first. (This is the problem with a four-person Round Robin tournament, though it’s not like we particularly care.) Everyone actually had a really well-done deck this time, even if we teased Spants on kind of falling into his. (He opened like 3 huge White bombs.) Once again, this is kind of strange, as normally one person has one deck that is just far and away the best. Everyone was rocking different strategies, but everyone had a pretty functional deck that held it’s own.

The draft itself was fun, but it really made me think more about how much I like what they’ve done to the core set. I have made many a joke about the horrible naming of the new core sets, but I think they’ve done a fantastic job. No longer is the core set just the place where you get the expensive dual lands you need. They’ve stepped up the kind of cards they put in there, and started creating new ones for it. They’re still less complicated than the other sets, but they are much, much more dynamic than playing with the old core sets.

In fact, what you end up with is a strangely “pure” Magic experience. When playing in block, the game is normally about trying to exploit the various specific mechanics that only exist in that block to your advantage. When you do that, you lose a little something. You lose a bit of what made Magic cool in the first place. These new core sets feel more like playing Magic back when I started. The game becomes less about getting the most of certain toolsets and keyworded cards, and more about monsters banging into each other, and making sure you have everything in the proper ratios to make that work. There’s enough variation and strategy to keep it interesting, but it’s much more “Magic how you remember it” and less “Super-boring simple Magic.”

In a world when I don’t play Magic much, and don’t have a lot of time to devote to deck building, I find that really cool. There’s still plenty of other cool Magic things out there, of course. But that’s pretty neat.

Even if I poke fun, I approve.

Harmony of Despair, or High of Definition if you’re so inclined, is a lot of fun. This is despite how poorly put together it is.

Basically, you gather five other people, who pick a Castlevania protagonist, and then run through stages together in a sort of boss rush. The whole thing is timed, so using teamwork to get all the chests and use all the machinery you need to defeat the boss really helps you get done quickly, as well as take the boss down without casualties. Then you go ahead to the next level and do it again. As you play through, you pick up food that gives you permanent increases to that character’s stats, as well as level up their abilities and skills in a way appropriate to the games they were in. For example, Soma must still kill enemies to collect souls to use, while Jonathan has to, once again, use his subweapons over and over in order to upgrade his proficiency in them.

This is all well and good, but it’s unbalanced as fuck.

The five playable characters just aren’t equal. It is such a pain in the ass to collect and level up Charlotte’s spells that you can’t do them during a normal run, for example. You have to level them up to have her be a useful character, but you can’t take the time to level up her spells with other people around, because they’ll either kill the enemies or you’ll just be bringing down the whole team. This means you have to grind in single player, which is much less fun, in order to be effective. At the same time, Shanoa is just obscenely the best character, due to her Magnes glyph. She can use this to go into areas that no other character can reach. She’s the only one with a movement power like this, and oftentimes having a Shanoa or five on your team can make a run go a whole lot better. The other characters fall somewhere in the middle of this scale.

In addition, as I mentioned, the game really isn’t fun by yourself. Sure, there is a single player mode, and you probably could beat all the chapters, if you had the skills, but it’s obvious the game was designed with multiple players in mind. Enemy HP and stuff scales for more or less players, but not enough to make it really viable as a single player exercise. No, Single Player is just there to let you grind skills, as, unfortunately, you just don’t get powerful enough fast enough. Important spells and items have very, very low drop rates, and you’ll have to run through again and again just to pick up the stuff you need in Chapter 2 to make Chapter 3 easily doable. Eventually, you even have to kick up the difficulty to get good drops anymore, which is understandable, but annoying for someone who isn’t hardcore like myself.

All these complaints are completely legit, but I find myself constantly going back to it. The basic Castlevania combat and increasing your skill set is just lots of fun, to the point where something phoned in like this still is enjoyable to some extent. And, as per usual, adding more people makes a mediocre game great, and if you can get a game going with 3 or 4 friends, it is a complete blast. I just wish more balancing thought had been put into the characters and such. It’s so close to being great. As it is, it’s just good, but if you have the money and love Castlevania-style action, I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.

I’ve been playing Persona 3 Portable, so I was once again struck by the most amazing of battle themes. No, not Mass Destruction. After the Battle, the fight victory music. Maybe this sounds weird, but this is by far my favorite bit of music in the game. Give it a listen while I ramble about it for a bit.

I feel like this little song is a success on so many levels. It fits perfectly with the whole music themes of the game for one. It has the sort of hip, pop-y sensibilities of the rest of the game in the guitar bits that come in after a little bit. It’s also completely functional battle victory music. But I feel like it does more than that. I feel like it reflects the themes of the game in general.

Most RPG victory tunes are extremely happy. I mean, you know, like, the classics of Final Fantasy. These songs say, “We did it, we won, everything is awesome now!” It’s a celebration of an accomplishment. Ironically, any single battle in most of those games ISN’T an accomplishment, even though it treats it like one.

Persona 3 takes a more sinister take. It’s darker. There’s a bit of that “we won” excitement, eventually, but that isn’t where it starts. It starts with a very dark little melody and goes downward. While Final Fantasy is trumpeting the victory from the heavens, Persona 3 is saying, “This is only the beginning.” The fight is over, but the battle has yet to be won. It’s pessimistic, like most of the game it’s around. Because, let’s face it, there’s always going to be another encounter. There’s always going to be another fight. The game knows it. It uses it.

I just find that refreshing, I guess. It’s different. This is the track, more than anything, that sticks out and stays with me from that game. (Well, besides Mass Destruction. Nobody can escape the BABY BABY BABY BABY BABY!)

I’m like “You know what gamez are fun to play with peoples who maybe don’t know so much about games? Rail shooters.” So I used my awesome Gamefly powers to Gamefly up a copy of Dead Space: Extraction for my Nintendo Wii.

We played it for an hour or two, and then I sent it back.

It’s obvious the people who made Extraction had good ideas and high hopes. They were looking at the Wii, and how shitty actual shooters were on it, and they thought, “Hey, we can make a light gun shooter that has depth like a regular shooter! And tell a story!” These sound like great things, you know? In reality, though, it just ends up being really stupid.

First off, the storytelling just isn’t compelling. This is mostly because you almost always have a target icon on the screen while people are talking. So you do what anyone would do. You flail it about on the screen, and fire shots near people’s heads that they ignore, and generally completely break immersion. I don’t often say this, but a cutscene would have been much more effective during these sequences. It’s also extra-annoying when you’re character looks around, because he almost always isn’t going to look at what you actually want to look at, which is the powerup in the corner of the screen.

Speaking of powerups, the game rewards you mashing the A button constantly to try to grab things completely at random. I got way, way more ammo that way than actually attempting to pick up ammunition. This is yet another annoying thing you do during boring story bits that just completely breaks it apart.

Basically, what I’m saying is that it’s a huge, huge mistake to let you fire your gun at all in these sequences. The targeting thing is huge, and a big distraction, even during actual gameplay. Putting it up there when I’m supposed to listen to people talking just makes me want to shoot people in the head. It’s not a good idea.

The actual shooting isn’t bad. It’s normal light gun fare. But when you have to go through all these talky bits that constantly break up the action so much, there just seems to be little point to going on with it. You can have the same fun faster by booting up House of the Dead: Overkill. You’ll actually laugh at the little tiny bits of plot in that game, too.

They tried with Extraction. They really did. But the game was just boring. You pick up a light gun game and expect to shoot things. Exploration where you aren’t actually exploring just isn’t any fun. Not being able to shoot things isn’t any fun. It could have been a lot better than it was. I didn’t feel bad sending it back.

The thing that really kept me going through most of Dragon Quest 9, though, was the story.

Now, one might thing one can’t have a super-deep story with a party of completely created people. I agree that this is a challenge of sorts. Having that character customization is important to the gameplay, but you can’t completely forget the story. The choice the designers of Dragon Quest 9 went with was to have a bunch of little tiny stories going on that you are on the fringe of in each town you go to. This worked fantastically.

Dragon Quest has always had a knack, at least since I started playing it, of doing very simple, straightforward, but touching stories. Each town in Dragon Quest 9 does this rather well. Since you are an angel who, for the most part, exists to do good things, going into towns and attempting to fix what is wrong there is really easy to narratively justify. The game itself takes plenty of time to flesh out the characters in the towns as well, and make them complete people of a sort. Sure, eventually you’re going to have to go into a dungeon and fight a dude. That’s just the kind of game it is. But at the same time, you’ll be, at some point, helping a husband grieve by showing off the good he’s done and playing detective at a school. These things really do work. They straddle a fine line between cheesy and simple, and pull it off. They were enjoyable to experience.

At the same time, the whole concept had, for the most part, run its course at the end of my 49 hour run through the game. They were classy enough to know when the story couldn’t sustain itself any longer, and let it come to an end. This is something I completely, fantastically appreciate. So few things know how to end.

Of course, it doesn’t really end. There is an insane amount of post-game content in the game. It’s just nothing I care to dive into. All the quests in the game were overwhelmingly annoying. All incredibly luck-based for the most part, or just flat-out time consuming. There are surely some interesting ones, sure, and the treasure maps are interesting as well. But even those require a lot of grinding to be relevant. To get good drops, which is the point of them, you have to beat them over and over and over. That just isn’t my bag. More power to people enjoying it though! Me, I am going to move on to something else… like… a game I’ve already bought two copies of and just bought a third copy of. Yep.