The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

Last night, after having a nice visit with the kitty, who got back from her vacation, I stayed up later than I should have playing Space Channel 5 Part 2.

Why?
Well, mostly because of this.

Because Mamabliss is way too nice, that happened, as something to cheer me up, because I was all… whatever. And that is just so fucking amazing. It put a huge grin on my face.

So how could I not dig out my Space Channel 5 Special Edition discs and play a little on my PS3?

Space Channel 5 is so flawed in so many ways, but it has so much energy and style, I really just can’t help but love it, even now, so many years after the fact, when it’s problems are even clearer. It fills me with so much energy, and puts a smile on my face. If I had the body not to embarrass myself, I’d cosplay Ulala all the goddamn time. I love the games.

Needless to say, I went to bed tired, but very happy. I’m not saying it knocked me out of my funk completely, but… I got a night off. That was damn nice. So here’s a public thanks for an awesome picture. Thanks, hon! You’re awesome!

See, it’s supposed to be like Saddle, but I put LoL in there, because this post is about LoL.
Amazing.

Now that the school semester is over, I’m finding time to get back to playing LoL multiplayer and whatnot, which is lovely. I really do enjoy that game, more than I ever expected myself to when I installed it. It’s probably because I’ve got Essner and Jonathan hooked, so I always have actual teammates to play with. It also helps that I’m actually getting competent with people.

The first character I decided to main was Tristana. She’s nice, of course. I still enjoy her. But I really got the hang of her because she’s the first character where I really learned how to use all of her moves. I could do some serious killing.
Yet, that’s not really my style. I enjoy having a heal. But I never really felt like I was effective with any of the healers I had played, except maybe Kayle, but even then, she’s very “heal herself” focused and not actually for healing a group.

Then I tried Nidalee and fell in love. I purchased her immediately, and I haven’t looked back.

Now, I don’t really care for her flavor, perse? She also doesn’t look particularly cool. But her abilities just fit me perfectly. Basically, she can, when she hits level 6, shapeshift into a Cougar. This cougar has a completely different set of abilities: one created to kill people. As a human, her set is extremely support, although her Javelin Toss can do some decent damage.

This works just perfect for me.

Most of the time, I can be support and defensive. I can use Primal Surge to heal and Javelin Toss to finish off foes. Bushwack is great for tracking traveling foes as well, of course, though it’s never really a big attack. Still, useful. Then, later, when I want to kill something, I can switch to the Cougar. Takedown is REALLY powerful, Claws are fun, and Pounce works similarly to how Tristana’s rocket jump works, in that I can use it to help me escape from situations, which is awesome.

Basically, I know how to use all her moves. I know what they’re for, and most of the time, I can apply them. I feel like I’m doing things as Nidalee, and she fits my playstyle. It’s completely badass. I’m even getting to the point where I can actually hit people with Javelin Toss, which is extra awesome, as I’m not really the best at skill shots.

Yeah, it’s good to be playing LoL again, and now that Essner has a good computerbox and a headset, I envision many more rounds being played. I can’t wait.

One may have noticed that Mother’s Day was last Sunday. After we all had a nice brunch breakfast thing and the grandparents went home, we were left with a question: what should we do? I decided to step up to the plate. “Why not play that Clue game that Mom got awhile back?” A long time ago, after I had shown my Mom Scene It? and she had fun just using the DVD and answering the questions, she saw this copy of Clue the DVD Game in Goodwill or something. She thought “Hey, Scene It was fun, maybe this is fun!” Of course, it doesn’t work without the board like Scene It does, but I remembered it existed. I figured that invoking was a good move: I’m sure Mom forgot she had even got it, and that seems like a cool way to say “Hey, I remember and appreciate what you do.” Additionally, Shauna is a huge fan of Clue, so this was a new variant that she’d enjoy, maybe. So we set up the board, popped in the DVD, and played a family game of this Clue variant.

There were some good things about the game, as well as some bad things. For example, I think it was completely the right move to remove the spaces in between rooms from the board. In this game, you simply can move to any adjacent location. This makes so much more sense: the dice-rolling in original Clue just drags the game out. I also enjoyed having a fourth thing to solve, which was the time of day of the crime. You can still only invoke 3 different things when you’re making a suggestion, so it adds a bit more strategy to the game, as it becomes more complicated to figure out what you’re opponents have figured out due to the larger pool of things to think about. I also think that the DVD adds narrative to a game that could use it, at least for people playing like my mother. One of the new things you can do is “Summon the Butler” who will tell you background information about what was happening when the crime was going down. Adding the additional information through the DVD with particular scenarios does limit the number of times you can play, but also makes it feel more like a mystery, because you can figure out the answer through these other clues, not just with the cards. Finally, I really like how the game puts a clock on gameplay by causing you to have to “turn in” clues to the center of the board periodically. If you run out of clues, you lose, but by that time most of the clues are out in the open, so the game is about over anyway. This makes it superior to, say, Harry Potter Clue, which can just kill you at random for no reason, and leave you sitting there for the rest of the game.

Still, the DVD also adds plenty of annoyances. You have to make accusations on the DVD menu, which is cumbersome and annoying. In addition, messing up an accusation doesn’t end the game for you, which takes a whole lot of tension out of the game. I suppose that is more friendly, but it makes it so you’re much, much more rewarded for guessing earlier rather than later. You also have to constantly play silly minigames on the DVD and whatnot, which really just slows down the game. It doesn’t particularly add much. Special effects when going through secret passages just pointlessly screw up solid strategies of getting where you need to go to make suggestions. Slowly adding the item cards through, once again, summoning the butler is cool, but because of it, there’s little reason not to spend every turn summoning the butler until all the items are out of the Butler pile.

Final random note: the sculpts on the individual pieces are fantastic, which is kind of shocking to me. They have a lot of detail. Like DnD miniature level of detail, or more. They’re really quite impressive.

I think that, in many ways, this game is more friendly than standard Clue. Standard Clue is dated and uninteresting at this point, really. There are much better board games of that sort out there. This keeps the core of what makes the standard game interesting, streamlines in some places, and adds flash in others. That flash is often more annoying than not, but for people like my parents, that’s going to add additional investment in the game, so I think that, for a family play sort of situation, that’s a very good thing. Overall, I could actually see me playing this again with the parents, which is kind of surprising. With my friends who I can play complex board games with? No way. But this is a nice game to whip out when I need something to play with the family. It was certainly worth the, like, 3 bucks my mother paid for it.

This is a review of Battlefield: The Worst Companionship.

Since I bought the PC version of 2 on a whim, I thought I would give the single player a go in the first edition before I went on. You know, for plot relevance, and so on. It arrived from Gamefly, and I played through it. Then I returned it.

First off, it’s clear that DICE needed to get some mistakes out of their system. The controls in Battlefield: Bad Company leave something to be desired. It should really be using the d-pad to select secondary weapons, but instead, it uses some weird-ass ineffective system with the bumpers. I know they fixed this in the second one, because they had it fixed in the demo, which is good. There’s no excuse for that being that way.
The campaign, too, has some missteps. First off, it gives you no achievements for playing on easy, which I hate. Secondly, the checkpoints just aren’t intelligent when you’re looking at a huge area of combat like this game does. You’ll checkpoint somewhere, drive far away, die, and then respawn at the checkpoint, where you already took the vehicle, so you have to walk all the way back to where you died, only to, perhaps, die again, and have to walk all the way back there again. Seriously, it was this sort of stuff that was the majority of the game time, and it really frustrated. They could have at least spawned a little four-wheeler or something for me when I die like that.

The one mechanic I really liked was the syringe. Most games either have health packs, or belong to the “heavy breathing” school of shooter design, where if you are out of fire long enough, you heal. Bad Company splits the difference with this magical recharging syringe. Using it heals you to full, and it recharges to use again very quickly and has no ammo. At the same time, you have to pay attention and switch to it to heal yourself, and do so in enough time for the animation to go off, if you’re in the middle of a firefight. I felt like this was a great compromise between health packs and regenning health. It’s friendly, and low stress, but you still have to think about healing and heal management. “I have time to heal now, so I could heal now, but I’m not hurt much, and if that tank hits me while I’m running across the field I’ll need to heal then, and it won’t have recharged yet. It’s one of the best parts of the game.

Additionally, I saw what the Giant Bomb guys saw in the game. The characters are excellent, and very entertaining to listen to. One wishes they would have even more banter than they do during combat, instead of keeping it mostly between fights. I mean, sure, they’re in serious combat scenarios, they don’t need to be funny then, but more excuses for them to play off each other would have been welcome. I think they nailed the tone and characterization perfectly. I heard it changed a bit in the second game, and that does worry me, but we’ll see when I get to playing the single player of that one.

The multiplayer is similar to the single player. You see where they came from, but after having played the multiplayer in the second game, it’s just ridiculous how much better that is. You have no reason to play original Bad Company multiplayer, except maybe for the achievements. I played a round just for that, and then put it down.

Still, if you’re more hardcore than me and won’t die so much, Bad Company single player is worth a play through. It’s often funny, and has some interesting combat scenarios. It’s all you can really ask for.

WarioWare D.I.Y. was a kind of random purchase. I was all sick and out of it and I just kind of randomly picked it up. However, I have been, overall, very impressed with it. It’s a game that basically requires a community around it to be interesting, and Nintendo makes that has hard as possible to do. But if you do pull it off, it’s quite a lot of fun making things and seeing what other people are up to.

Basically, the game is full of the tools you need to make your own microgames. If you’re an artist (which I am not) you can sink a lot of time into making really great looking assets for the simple, silly little games. Although the DS is not the best art platform, you still have tools basically equal to Mario Paint, with some even more robust, like actual copy and paste functionality. You can make some really cool shit. However, I feel like Nintendo wins in that WarioWare already had a very strange art aesthetic that makes it feel okay to draw shitty art. Even my horrible scribbles fit in, to an extent. I’m not hindered from creating by my artistic talent, which is wonderful.

It’s also wonderful because you can bang out a working little game in a very short amount of time. Maybe 45 minutes or so? Longer if you do a lot of art and the game is complicated. There’s nothing that feels better than having a result from hard work. Creating something feels good. Shipping a game in WarioWare D.I.Y. feels awesome. “I did this! I made this thing!” and then you can play it, mix it up with professional games, and tell yourself “fuck yeah!”

Oh, I suppose you can also create music and comics too. The music creator is, again, Mario Paint Plus, and it works really well. I just rarely want to take the time to just compose music. I’m sure many can have fun with it. The comic creator is… a real missed opportunity. Being able to draw and share these 4koma is a cool idea, but for something like this, you really need a way to export them to the net, way more than with the games or music. If there was a comic viewer where I could link my friends to uploaded comics online, I would actually try to draw more of these. Still, they are kind of fun to do.

There’s some unfortunate restrictions, of course. I mentioned the online, and that is a huge issue. You can only store 2 games, 2 songs, and 2 comics at a time in your “crate” and you have to do stupid friend code exchanges to get anyone else to see your stuff. They have a thing called the “NinSoft” store, where you can connect to the server and download games from the community and “Big Name Games,” which are microgames made by famous and semi-famous game makers. This is an awesome feature, to be sure, and keeps you in quality stuff to fiddle with, but in the end, without having access to a full community, you’re only, at best, going to pick up the game once a week to try those new uploaded games before putting it back down, instead of it being something you can go back to whenever you want and see something new.

Still, if you can actually get a bunch of friend codes exchanged, it’s great to send out a game and then have people try it. It feels awesome. And that’s why WarioWare D.I.Y. is a success. It makes you feel like a programmer without being super complicated. Anyone can do it, and it feels good to. It’s fun stuff. It’s certainly worth a shot, if you were thinking about picking it up.

Remember, this is the day where I take the Spoiler Gloves off. If you care about Heavy Rain Spoilers, come back tomorrow. I’m sure I’ll have some non-spoilery crap for you to read instead. If you read on, you’ve been warning.

SPOILARZ START NAO

If you don’t care about spoilers, or if you’ve played Heavy Rain, I’m just going to start by saying you should play Press X to Jason. It’s a completely awesome and accurate depiction of the start of the game. You can refresh yourself before I go on rambling!

I was not expecting Heavy Rain to be so Saw.
I mean, I guess I should have. It made sense the moment I got into the game. But Saw annoys me, and I didn’t really want to play Saw: the Game. That just didn’t seem like fun.

However, going through the trials as Ethan presented some very interesting decisions on the part of me the player. Basically, I had to decide: was I going to make these decisions as me, or as the character, and if I was going to make them as the character, who was the character?
The part that exemplified this for me, and I assume most players, was the fourth trial, where he was told he had to kill someone. As me, I don’t want to kill anyone. I’m in it to save people. Be a good guy. However, was Ethan? This was a dude who just chopped off his finger a few scenes ago, at least in my game. He barely hesitated. In fact, in the trial at the electric transformer, he briefly considered quitting, but then decided he was all in. At least in my mind. I decided that he, the character, would not hesitate to murder someone to save his son. He was to the breaking point, and he was going to do literally anything. So I shot the guy without hesitation.
If I had made different choices for him up until that point, I know I would have played it differently. I wouldn’t have had that look back, and decided I was too far down the rabbit hole to give up. THAT is where the power of a game like this lies. In changing those perceptions and having the player actual create who the character is.

Another great example: in the opening sequence, I accidentally failed to help my wife carry in the groceries, accidentally did something else before helping set the table, and then failed to kiss her when I was getting romantic. None of these were set, but they happened. Then, later, when I learned they got divorced, or were at least separated, that was some amazing foreshadowing that I did myself. “Woah,” I said, “I really set that up right. There were so many subtle clues.”
Alternatively, Scott being the Origami Killer was not set up at all. I played him as such a nice guy that I was shocked he was the bad guy. My decisions, where he helped each person he came across to the best of his ability, made the twist all the more shocking, though it made complete sense. I set up that surprise, but I could have, instead, set up the foreshadowing that he was evil, if I had played those sequences another way. Either way, I would have had a strong impact on the story, which is completely awesome.

The narrative did have its faults, though. The pacing was horrible. Very often, you jump between characters for no apparent reason. There’s little connection, until near the end, of what each character is doing in the scene before to what a new character is doing the scene after, not even thematically. This makes a really jarring, start stop feel to the narrative, and I’m sure David Cage could do better. Then again, he ended Fahrenheit with a battle against a living embodiment of the internet, so what do I know?
I also didn’t really find any of the characters particularly likable. The only character I really ended up liking was Scott. Here was this nice guy, going around helping people, fighting off dudes and putting his life on the line when he’s chubby and overweight? I thought he was awesome. Then he was the killer. Seems like maybe something should have been put in motion to make me give a shit about the other characters, since they were the real heroes. I dunno.
Finally, there was a complete misuse of fucking in the game. It was completely out of nowhere! I had a chance to choose no, I admit, but I was asked about a kiss. I feel like they would have stopped before they got to fucking, especially since it took them so damn long to get their clothes off. And then, in a game where we had seen both of them naked in the shower, they decide to put their underwear back on after they fuck to snuggle in bed? I honestly don’t buy it. Why would you push the boundaries enough to show man ass during a shower scene just for the hell of it, and then not show anything during the sex scene? It’s kind of stupid.

One Final Annoyance: The ARI glasses. Jayden has to wear a glove to manipulate it, but you see him manipulating things with his non-gloved hand all the damn time during the game. What sense does that make? Why was it so hard to follow your own set of rules? Grr.
Sorry, that really annoyed me.

Anyway, Heavy Rain is not revolutionizing anything. It was an enjoyable experience, and, despite its clunkiness and often horrible voice acting, does manage to have some truly emotional moments. I suggest everyone give it a rent as I did. Still, I doubt anyone besides Mr. Cage is going to make a game like this anytime soon. If they do, though, I hope they work some of the kinks out of the recipe.

I have played Heavy Rain. Tomorrow will be the completely and utterly spoiler-laden review, so if you care about David Cage’s latest opus and haven’t played the game yet, I’d stay away from that one. Today, I’m just going to talk about mechanics.

Specifically, Quick Time Events.

In a game that I am playing specifically for the plot, I honestly have very little problem with the quick time event, especially when implemented how Heavy Rain does it. For the most part, failing a sequence distinctly changes the action sequence and how it’s progressing. That’s awesome. Failing a button press and seeing your character fall down, or fail to block a punch, really heightens the tension. It’s way better than most QTEs in that regard. I feel like it fits the game really well. I don’t have a problem with them being there.

What I do have a problem with is their presentation.

In trying to make things look artistic and cool, David Cage has basically ruined playability. It may seem, initially, like a good idea to have the commands appear, context-sensitively, in the environment. For example, if an object to pick up is on the ground, the command to pick it up appears on the ground. Sounds good, right?
The problem comes when you mix in the dramatic camera angles if the game. If there’s an object on the ground, and I’m far away, the icon is far away too. This means I cannot read the icon to figure out what I have to do, even on my fancy new HDTV that I got to make reading such things easier. Oftentimes, to the game’s credit, it makes sense what I have to do. In the previous “pick an item off the ground” scenario, the action is always moving the stick down, as if reaching down, so if an object is on the ground, doing that will pick it up 90% of the time. Still, in heated, time-sensitive sequences, not being able to read the icons is obscenely frustrating, and causes you to make mistakes for stupid reasons.
This is only made worse by the “thought cloud” mechanic of talking. Your various conversation options spin around the character’s head. If you’re far away, you can’t read what they actually say, and often can’t make out which button does which thing. Often, options you want are behind the character or objects in the environment, making it impossible to read them all. These are some of the most time-sensitive choices in the game, and the game completely impedes you from making them. I wouldn’t mind the little touches, like the options shaking if the character is worried or rushed, if I could actually read them normally. Then it would be part of gameplay, and that’s kind of cool. Since I can’t read them normally, though, it’s all just pointless and frustrating. Ugh.

It’s sad that Heavy Rain couldn’t get it’s key mechanic completely right. It bothered me all the way through my playthrough. Still, it was quite an experience, but that’s all based on the plot, so I’ll save that for next time.

STAY TUNE!

I once saw a link for an iPhone game on FurAffinity.

Now, I tend to have a sort of love/hate relationship for specific “furry” things. In general, I don’t feel like they’re needed. The subculture’s tastes are not so crazy for things outside of fetish sex that it really needs it’s own, say, music, for example. Yet, when I see these links for these “furry” music labels, I have to click on them and see. I have to attempt to figure out how the hell a music label could be that. I rarely find an answer, but it’s an interesting couple of minutes while I explore. (Most “furry” music tends to be chiptunes and electronica, by my research, if you care to know.)
In the same way, when I saw the ad for Mole: Quest for the Terracore Gem, I kind of had to see what it was about. Why would you make a game specifically for furries, and what would it be? It also helped that it was free when I picked it up. That also didn’t hurt.

Still, I suppose I got lucky. Mole is actually a pretty fun game, and if I had spent the 2 bucks it now costs, I probably wouldn’t feel gypped. It would be an easier recommendation at a buck, but it’s a solid bit of momentary distraction.

The easiest way to describe what this game is would be to compare it to Miner Dig Deep, but since that’s an XBLIG game nobody has probably played, it’s probably stupid to make that comparison. Basically, Mole is a casual game of risk/reward. You dig down as the Mole guy, and search for gems and minerals. You only have a certain amount of air, and if you pass out, you lose everything you collected during a run. If you return to the surface, then you bank all your gems and money, and can buy upgrades to your equipment, so you can go deeper. Then you do it all again, and keep repeating until you’ve upgraded enough, and unlocked enough elevator drills that you find during your trips, to dig all the way to the bottom and get the MacGuffincore Gem found there.

Controls are simple. Tap, and Mr. Mole Guy moves there. Walk over some goods, and he picks them up. You can tap on hard rock to bomb it open to get at the goodies inside. That’s basically it. The game is a race against time, but it rarely gets tense. You’re simply trying to maximize your profits per trip. A trip looks like it’s not going to get over 5 minutes or so, (I can get down through all but like two of the strata, and I have enough air for 3 at the moment, so I assume 5 after two more upgrades) making this fine for short bursts on the go when you’re bored. It’s music and podcast friendly, so if you just like having something to mess around with while you listen to such things, this is perfect for that too. It’s casual, relaxing, and non-stressful.

Basically, the fun comes from feeling a plan come together (If I circle down that way, I should still be able to make it back up in time, and I can get that big chunk of minerals I noticed over there) and from the progression. Slowly, but surely, you’re always making progression towards your goal, and that’s something that I can appreciate. Progress is only lost if you play it too risky, but even that doesn’t set you back too much. If you’re not holding back and grinding, you can almost always buy a new upgrade every one or two dives, so you’re always doing better and better. It’s that kind of progress which makes it fun, for me, anyway. I enjoy that sort of stuff. It’s why I played CoD4 multiplayer so much, for instance. It’s just enjoyable to see goals constantly being met. If that sounds like fun to you, then Mole might be a game for you.

As far as the “furry” nature goes, the two characters in the game, the Mole and the shopkeeper, are drawn as furries, but that is it. There’s no weird stuff. It’s really just a game with a couple of pictures that might not appeal to you. They made a little game, and decided that putting that spin on it would get them more purchases. Honestly, I do hope it works for them. Mole is a fine little game, and if appealing to the furry niche works, more power to them.

Yeah, so that was that experiment. It worked out well! Always nice when that happens.

Yeah, that’s right. I’m milking two whole posts out of WET. Deal with it.

If you’ve played Stranglehold, you know it had some great ideas, but they just completely didn’t work. The game got boring as all get out very fast, and the objectives meant to vary the game up just kept you from doing what was cool about the game.
WET is kind of what Stranglehold wanted to be. It’s got hectic, cinematic gunplay with dives and slides all over the place. But what it does is put it into a more entertaining context that keeps you at least somewhat interested.

WET isn’t great, not by a long shot, but it was a fairly entertaining rental, and I enjoyed it as I played through it.

Basically, you’re a chick with guns and access to bullet time who can jump around and shoot people. You also have sword to cut things. Your only defining characteristic is that you don’t take shit from anybody. You heal yourself by drinking whiskey. You flip and dive and slide all around and kill countless numbers of dudes. Sometimes you get on a turmulent. Sometimes, the screen gets all red and stylized for some reason. You shoot some more dudes. This is the whole game.

You get guns that aren’t pistols, but you won’t use them because the pistols are better and the other guns have limited ammo. The pistols just feel right, honestly. I tried using the other guns, I really did, but there was just much more visceral feel to using the pistols.
The game has a weird system where it lets you shoot two guys at once by auto-aiming your off-hand. You can then aim your on-hand at another guy, or at the same guy to kill him faster. This has the comical side-effect of making you way, way more accurate with your off-hand, at least if you’re me. Often, my main hand would fire into space while my off-hand would murder guys alone. Still, it works, and when you’re sliding past two dudes, one on either side, and shooting both of them, the system pays off.

The main thing I liked about the game were the arenas. These were the key elements of the game, where you’d walk into a room, Rubi would look mean, and then you’d have to dash out, block off all the exits, and slaughter everyone in the room. These sequences were what the game was obviously designed around, and they really are a lot of fun. There are always lots of environmental things to jump off of and do tricks from, and you really benefit from planning your strategy before you dash out into the room to keep yourself from getting killed. These set pieces are really where the game shines. It does less so in other sequences, though.

The main reason I loved the game, though, was the music. Take a listen to a sample. This isn’t the same kind of music you hear in every action game. It’s different, but it’s still completely energetic and exciting. I loved it, and I loved moving into new set pieces, because almost every single one of them had their own unique song. This game got the music RIGHT. it really enhanced the experience, and was probably the only reason I finished the game.

If you have a weekend to waste and want to rent a game you can finish quick and have a bit of fun with, WET will do that. It’s alright. It’s much better than I expected. I’d never buy it, but thanks to Gamefly, I got to try it, and it was totally worth my time.

WET is not a very sexy game.

Seriously, with a name like WET, and the B-movie vibe the whole game has going for it, you’d think there would be all kinds of sex. But seriously, it is one of the least sexy games I’ve played in recent memory. It might star a female protagonist, but Rubi is unsexualized, seemingly by design.

First, let’s just look at her design. Here’s a reference photo. On first glance, maybe she seems like a sexy female protagonist. But Rubi is a very dirty person. Perhaps less so in that picture, but in game, her clothes seem caked with dirt. It seems clear that she lives in the middle of a desert junkyard, and it seems like it’s been a long, long time since she washed her clothes. Additionally, and it may just be an issue with modeling of her in-game assets, but it seems like they are stuck to her as an outlet of how dirty they are. They’re a part of her, and she is a filthy person. Her hair, similarly, seems very matted and dirty in game. It’s just not appealing.

There is a scene in the game where she is stripped down to her panties and a t-shirt. If this game was sexy, she would play the level this way. Nay, she would relish playing the level this way. However, Rubi cannot wait to get clothed again. This sequence is maybe 5 minutes long, and she rushes to redress. During the sequence, she is being brutally tortured. There’s no sex appeal there.

There is a scene where Rubi is being hit on by an odd older lesbian. It’s very clear from her body language what she is doing, but Rubi has absolutely no reaction. It’s not one of revulsion, or not being into it, nor it is playing along or being excited. She simply has no reaction whatsoever to these come-ons. There’s no element of sexuality from her side of the scene.

Even her “witty” in-game clips aren’t sexy. I mean, the one that sticks out in my mind is “Say goodnight, Gracie.” I guess I just don’t connect sexiness with George Burns.

All the iconography on the game would seem to suggest that Rubi is sexy. Hell, even the title, which has absolutely nothing to do with the actual game in any way, would seem to suggest that the player is supposed to take that away from the game. But it’s just not there, and it confused me why it wasn’t. It would have fit in the world. Nobody would have batted an eye at it. Were they really trying to make Rubi an actual character, and building that in as a character trait? The mind boggles at the possibility.