The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

There is one thing I’ve been doing all day for several days, and that thing is playing Words with Friends. Please note how awful that title is. Words with Friends. Ugh. It sounds like you’re about to confront your friends for something they did wrong. It’s… pretty terrible. However, it is actually a well-implemented Play-By-Email style Scrabble Clone for the iPhone. I’m enjoying it a lot.

I learned about the Words with Friends phenomenon (okay, it probably isn’t a phenomenon) from Cara, who was playing it with her aunt as we sat down to take our awesome final. The final consisted of having lunch, good conversation, and, as it turned out, playing fake iPhone Scrabble, because I downloaded it immediately onto my iPod Touch and had at it. See, the main feature to this game is that it has a fully-featured free version, so you can just tell anyone you want to download it and play with you. This is a really effective feature. The free version isn’t a demo. It’s the full game. The only difference is that it pops up an ad every time you make a move. However, there’s nothing stopping you from immediately hitting the home button, backing out of the program, and not looking at the ad at all. If you are monetarily challenged, you’ll have no problem dealing with these ads and having a good time. Still, they annoyed me, so I splurged and spent the 3 dollars on the ad free version. I didn’t mind: even though the company that made this game obviously had no idea how to title something, they still made a game with a great interface that works very well for a game you play slowly over the course of a day or two.

Basically, you set up anywhere from 1 to 20 games running simultaneously. As I said, it’s done in a casual “play at whatever pace” style: You play your turn, and then it sends a push notification to who you’re playing, who can respond whenever they want. Then you get a push notification, and so on. This works extremely well for Scrabble, especially since it’s often a game where you’d like some time to stare at the board and evaluate your options, options, options. This also works surprisingly well with my iPod touch. When I’m at home, not doing anything, I’m in Wifi, and I get these notifications, so I can play. When I’m out and about doing things, I’m not in Wifi, so I don’t, but they’ll be waiting for me when I get home. Granted, the game can’t entertain me during boring parts of life that way, but it actually still works fairly well when not always connected, like when you’re on an iPhone.

The game lets you challenge Twitter and Facebook contacts, as well as type in usernames on their little service. It also has a matchmaking thing for play against random people, because random people are your friends whom you want to Word with, obviously. You can leave messages after every move to gloat or just talk, and when you finish a game, you just hit the “rematch” button and start a new one with your friend again, immediately. It’s pretty well everything one could want from a mobile, online Scrabble game, and it’s available for the price of free.

I’d have a hard time not recommending that you download the free version. If you enjoy playing it and hate ads, feel free to throw some money the developer’s way, if you want. But you don’t have to to have a great time. If you download it, face me. I’m, shockingly, named poetfox on there. We can words. With friends. All day long. Perhaps.

I guess at some point I played Ratchet and Clank Future: Tools of Destruction.

I was really kind of unimpressed. Back a few Christmases ago, Jonathan got me Ratchet and Clank: Size Matters for the PSP, and that was pretty great. Since I hadn’t played one of these games before, the shooting and stuff was really kind of novel and fun. I blew up a bunch of things, and tried a bunch of weird weapons. It was pretty neat. Near the end of the game, though, I got to a boss battle that I just couldn’t handle, and had to put the game down. Up until then, though, it was fun times.

However, I didn’t really realize a couple things about the game, since I hadn’t played others. For one, I didn’t realize that the incredibly disjointed and almost nonsensical plot of the PSP version was actually accurate to what the full console releases had. I felt like stuff had gotten cut out to fit it all on a UMD or something, but no, Tools of Destruction has the exact same lack of plot. You’re just going to incredibly random locations for no real reason to shoot people, and it never really tries very hard to explain it. There are some cutscenes, where people talk, but there might as well not be: they don’t say anything that clarifies anything that you are doing. This was really disappointing to me. People throw around terms like “Pixar movie” when describing the style of these games, but there’s nothing about them that connects with that at all besides a vague art direction element.

I also didn’t expect the big games to be so dead-set on giving me huge areas with no guidance that I have to stumble my way through. Because it was on the PSP, there were no big arenas in Size Matters. It was one straightforward shot. This worked well, and Tools of Destruction works well when it is following a linear path, shooting dudes as well. When it gives you bigger, exploratory areas, though, the game completely falls apart. The controls and the map system were not designed for this kind of gameplay. There’s no guidance on where to go, and some of the jumps you have to make are not very clear. The whole reason I sent this back to Gamefly was because I got into one of these exploration sections and, even after consulting a walkthrough, I had no idea where to go. It was infuriating.

Eventually, though, I did figure it out, only to get into a Clank puzzle section in which I was given no guidance at all. I was told that Tools of Destruction was a “reboot” so the series would be friendly to newcomers, but the game assumed I knew all the, quite different, Clank controls from previous games. Once again, I had to consult a walkthrough just to learn what arbitrary buttons to press to get the game moving again. After managing that, I got a long way through the puzzle section, then died. I learned, then, that I was checkpointed at the beginning, and I had to redo it all.
Fuck. That.
I sent it back to Gamefly.

So yeah, I guess I didn’t really enjoy Tools of Destruction too much. Which is a shame, because it was yet another PS3 game that had gotten great buzz and I was really looking forward to trying. I don’t know if I just have a very thin skin for not knowing what to do now, or what, but I just can’t stand that kind of guesswork any more. I have so many other awesome things to do with my limited free time, I see no reason to spend it frustrated at a game that won’t make my objectives clear.

People are saying that Uncharted 2 is one of the best games of the year.
I’ll be honest. I don’t see it.

I mean, you know, everything that has been said about the storytelling in this game? Completely true. The voice acting is top-notch, the characters actually act in realistic ways, there’s great dialog while you’re playing… you believe these characters. Nathan Drake is a pretty likable guy, though how anti-gun he is at the beginning of the game is pretty humorous seeing how many dudes you kill by the end. But those elements, that people point out as being excellent? Are.

The rest of the game? Not so much.
I feel like this game has a lot in common with Brutal Legend because of that. The presentation of Brutal Legend was top notch, but the gameplay was lackluster. This is the same way.

The shooter segments basically work like Gears of War. You’re hopping behind cover and shooting dudes, only you don’t chainsaw them. You can rush up and do a punch combo to take them out, if you’d prefer. The controls, though, feel really weird. I never felt like I had exact control over the shooting, and it felt like the guys took too many bullets to kill. There were these super-dudes covered in armor with big helmets that you can only kill in an efficient manner by shooting them in the head. They’re really annoying. It’s all passable, but nothing special.
The one interesting decision I think they made is that Nathan can’t carry many bullets. You only have enough bullets to reload your gun twice, at most, at any time. It really makes you scavenge for ammo, which is a different feel than something like Gears. You often had to debate whether to run out of cover to get more ammo or to switch to your pistol to finish people off, which is cool. I did like that.

The real part where the game falls apart for me, and for some reason, this is what people say they like the most about the game, is the platforming. Nathan Drake has the best grip of any person ever, and has to climb every wall forever. You often have to traverse terrain like this, scaling walls, leaping from roof to roof, etc.
There are two main issues with this. One, the game is almost always one or the other. You have to platform for a long period of time, then you have to do nothing but shooting for a long period of time. The game would have been much better had they mixed it up a bit more than they did. They could learn from Arkham Asylum.
The real main issue, and the reason why I got so frustrated that I sent the game back, is that the game gives you very little indication of what you’re supposed to do. You’re given a goal, and no clear way to get there. The locations look fairly realistic, so they’re lacking markers that jump out at you to say “climb here!” The characters in the game, whom you’d think could give you hints with the good dialog, are useless in these sequences. In fact, most of them start with Drake saying “how the hell am I supposed to get up there?” This frustrated me to no end. He’s supposed to tell me so I could do it! There is a hint system to help you go where you need to go, but you can only activate it when the game thinks you’re lost. Making the game think you’re lost basically involves setting the controller down for a few minutes. It’s stupid. Once you find the path, it’s not like there’s any challenge in it, either. You just move on a linear path forward. These sequences really got to me.

On top of it all, the game is kind of stupidly hard. There are five difficulty levels. I picked Easy, one up from the easiest setting, and I died constantly. I picked Easy so grenade launchers wouldn’t cheaply kill me in one hit out of nowhere, thanks. I just wanted to play through the story everyone was saying was so good. But no, they had to make the game stupid hard.

So I sent it back right at the end of the game. I really don’t get Uncharted 2. If you enjoyed it? Wonderful. Good for you. But there was so much bullshit annoyance in the game that I just can’t really recommend it that highly. Obviously it just wasn’t a game for me.

For Droib’s birthday, I was attempting to think of something cool to get him. It was then that I remembered that, at some point this year, Droid was in the market for filling up some shelves with some good board games. Now there was an area I knew about! We had also, in our youth, played hours and hours of Risk at his house. So I went out and, with some funding help from one Justin Spants, acquired Risk 2210 A.D. for him, since everyone has always said it is the best variant of Risk created yet. I hadn’t played it though. However, we got together on Friday night to give it a try.

First off, let me just say where I stand on standard Risk: it’s not very well designed. The first few turns are fun stuff, but after that, the game gets boring and stupid. I don’t think we’ve ever actually finished a game of Risk. It’s just too much of a pain to do so. There are also some constant strategies that are always brought to a Risk table, for better or worse.

Risk 2210 addresses most of those concerns. First off, because the game is always only 5 turns long, it keeps the game confined to the turns that are interesting, keeping the game from going on for hours and hours in wars of attrition and rolling that nobody really cares about. Secondly, the fact that you have to mark four random territories on the board as “nuclear wastelands” at the start of the game really changes how the board, whose land spaces are pretty much the same as regular Risk, play. In our game, for example, large portions of Asia were irradiated, and the other wastelands were blocking passage into Asia. This made Asia way, way easier to take and defend than in a normal game of Risk, and thus way more viable, which was interesting. Next time, something else will be more useful to hold because of those areas. I really like that.

The other things Risk 2210 adds to make the game different from the normal Risk experience are also fun. You have commanders, something taken from Lord of the Rings Risk which is a very welcome addition, as those are quite fun. However, you have five different types: Diplomat, Land Commander (or Landmander, as we called him), Naval Commander, Space Commander, and Nuclear Commander. Each type lets you use a d8 instead of a d6 in certain situations that are pretty self-explanatory. Are you fighting at sea? The Naval Commander would give you a bonus there, and so on. Having a commander on the board lets you buy and use their Commander Cards, which do different things related to their specialties. Each deck is shuffled and random, but since each Commander has a different style of ability that you know beforehand, you really can plan your strategy more than you can with some cards of this type in other Risk variants, which is really cool. You can build Space Stations to fortify specific areas and let you send troops to the Moon. Oh, and there’s a separate Moon board to take, and underwater sea colonies to conquer. You also get to bid resources on when you take your turn, which is a great mechanic. Do you save your resources to buy more Commanders and commander cards, or do you really want to get in there and go first?
Honestly, though, it’s just Risk, in the end. You still point at places on the board and roll dice over and over again to whittle down armies. But as I mentioned before, that only gets boring when two players are crazily fortified and there’s no chance for people to swing from the bottom to the top. Since the game only lasts 5 turns, and there are so many more options than in a normal Risk game, it really keeps the fun going all the way through.

Here are three strategy tips for when you play. 1) People seem to forget to look at the Moon board. If you can sneak some troops up there and take one of those continents, that could be a huge help. That was what I did, and it let me manage to win. Somehow. 2) You want to go last on the last turn, so you can be completely suicidal. It doesn’t matter how many armies you have when the game ends, just how many territories, so a suicide run is very effective! This was the other reason I managed to win, even though I was in bad shape for most of the game. Bid to make that happen! 3) If you add magnets to your game, this is what happens.

I think I picked a pretty good game to get for Droib. We had a great time playing it, and hopefully we can play it again sometime. What people were saying was completely right: this pretty well is the best variant of Risk I have played, and I have played quite a lot of them. If you’re going to play any kind of Risk, I would very much suggest this one.

Through Kale’s way-too-niceness, I have had a copy of Borderlands on the PC for awhile now. Sunday, instead of doing my homework, for instance, I played Borderlands for like four hours. This has been happening for awhile! The reason is because the game is fantastic.

Now, this isn’t fantastic like, I dunno, Red Faction: Guerrilla is fantastic. It’s not a one-player game in any sense of the word. (Brer will try to tell you otherwise, but I think he’s a little crazy in the head. I’m sure it’s passable as a single player game, but that’s not the appeal.) No, this game is awesome like how, say, L4D2 is awesome. (Which I guess I need to write up, too. But I’d like to beat the last campaign before I do that!) This is just a fantastic multiplayer game. It is action-based, so you’re always doing something, but it’s slow-enough paced to facilitate talking, if you’re into that, and with its RPG mechanics, you are always making some progress, even if you’re failing, so you never feel like you’re wasting effort. It’s just really great.

The center of the game revolves around Diablo-style loot. This mechanic is just as addictive as ever. They’ve done a pretty good job of making every individual gun you pick up look slightly different, even though they fall into 7 or so categories. (Shotgun, Repeater Pistol, Revolver, Sniper Rifle, Combat Rifle, Submachine Gun, Rocket Lawnchair.) Even within these categories, though, you have sort of… subclasses. For example, in Combat Rifles, you can find burst fire weapons, assault rifles, and even some actual machine guns. In Repeater Pistols, you can find Automatic Pistols as well as normal ones. In any case, even though you’re probably never going to keep a weapon based on looks, it’s nice that when you get a new gun, it does look different from the one you currently have.
At the same time, many weapons have special, unlisted abilities. These are shown through cryptic messages. These actually work really well, as you just HAVE to equip them to figure out what’s up. I had a sniper rifle with the message on it “FOR THE MOTHERLAND!” It turned out that ability made pulling out the weapon and reloading it lighting fast. I could reload faster than I could fire the gun. It’s neat.

There is also plenty of customization of the characters and character classes. There are only 4 classes, and each one has three skill trees, which, over the course of the game, you will probably master one and dip into a second one. This gives you a decent amount of build customization, but the genius thing they did was to have items called “Class Mods” that you can find in the world. These actually change your class title and give you very specific attributes. They really change how you play. For example, Kale and I are both playing Soldier class characters, but our characters play completely differently. I focused on the healing and support tree of skills, and he focused on the damage tree. He is using the “Support Gunner” class mod, which lets us all regenerate ammo, while I’m using the “Leader” class mod, which gives us all extra experience and lets our abilities recharge a little faster. As such, even though we are technically the same, we play differently enough to be distinct, which is awesome. There are plenty of other class mods for Soldier we’ve found that we could be using as well, such as “Shock Trooper,” which makes us a Shock-element attacker, or “Tactician,” which helps the team’s shields recharge much faster, but we’re pretty happy with what we picked. Still, even an entire party full of Soldiers could have a lot of variety, and that’s pretty awesome. Of course, each other class has their own set of different class mods to choose from, so each other class is just as customizable. And since class mods are simply an equippable item, if you need to “respec” to be a better member of a different team, you just have to change your equipment. It’s well thought out.

Basically the only thing I don’t like about the game is the vehicle stuff. That kind of sucks. Luckily, the game forces you to only use the vehicles to get to the next “dungeon” or arena of combat, and will block off places with barriers so you have to get out. It’s not that big a deal. It is kind of annoying, though. Still, one minor complaint in a great game.

Yeah, Borderlands is pretty much completely awesome. It’s certainly one of the best Co-op experiences of the year. If you like Co-op, there’s no reason for you not to own it at this point. I wouldn’t necessarily suggest the PC version? It’s pretty clearly a 360 port, though it plays just fine on PC. (The water effects, for some reason, are totally glitched. Most of the time I can’t see water when I play. This is a minor annoyance and doesn’t really affect fun at all.) It’s just, you know… split screen is awesome, and the 360 version has it. If you have gamer friends, you should play the game. You really should.

While walking through Best Buy before the giving of the thanks, I was going through the PS3 aisle. See, I was sure there were more PS3 games I should pick up, now that I had one. It was there that I passed a big box labelled Buzz! Quiz TV!. I knew this was the old version for PS3, as I had watched an excellently entertaining Giant Bomb quicklook of the new one. It didn’t seem like a great game, but still something my friends and, more importantly, my parents could get into. I’m always on the lookout for games I can play with my parents. It looked like the perfect thing to play over Thanksgiving!
The kicker, though, was the price. The boxed set with all the little Buzz controllers was on clearance for $30. That’s a value. I bought it.
Obviously, I was sick in bed over Thanksgiving, and we really didn’t get to play it then. But I have gotten some games in since with the parents anyway.

The game itself is, well, a trivia game. It’s fairly straightforward in that regard. Some of the categories, however, do rely on some gamer skills. For example, there is a category called “Pie Fight” where you have to time button presses to take out other opponents. For a gamer, it’s not hard to time this to take out who you want. My parents, however, had great trouble with it, and it is perhaps a round that is a little less casual friendly because of it.
The other major complaint is simply one I have with a lot of games nowadays. The text in the games is fairly small, which is an issue when you’re trying to read answers quickly. Again, I didn’t have TOO much problem with it? But my parents often had trouble figuring out what the answers were. There really is no reason that text couldn’t be bigger on the screen, as there is a lot of empty space.

The buzzers themselves, when compared to, say, the Scene It! buzzers, feel really cheap. I mean, they’re not bad. They haven’t fallen apart or anything? But they lack weight that makes them feel like toys. They also give the impression of being complex to set up. They aren’t really that bad, but since they have to do this weird wireless syncing thing (as opposed to the simple RF of the Scene It! buzzers) it feels like a pain to get them going. You certainly have to devote some time to setting them up, which you never had to with the Scene It! ones, and there’s no way to know which controller is the “first player,” etc, until you’re setting up the game and see which one responds to which. The tiny USB dongle seems much easier to lose than the RF receiver for the Scene It! buzzers as well, which is something to think about.

Overall, though, I think I am totally getting my $30 worth from the game. It’s really hard to mess up trivia, and Buzz pulls it off fairly well. Still, if you aren’t finding a copy of Quiz TV! in a bargain bin somewhere like I did, it would probably be in your best interest just to get the new one, Quiz World. From that quicklook, it certainly seems like the more polished product, with less bullshit round types, not to mention that people like my parents would get a kick out of Buzz saying their name in game. That’s a benefit that I think could probably be overlooked, but shouldn’t.
But yeah. Buzz! is pretty nice. Now I just need to find a set of wired PS2 Buzz Buzzers I could buy for cheap so we could play the game with 8 players.

Some people just want a hardcore experience. Some people just pine for a time when you had to play sections of game over and over again in order to memorize and master concepts. They just get off on that feeling of mastery, that feeling of doing something perfectly and knowing that they are basically the gods of this or that discipline.

I’m not one of those people.

I mean, I can enjoy a good roguelike, say. But there’s a distinct difference between a roguelike and what I am talking about here. In a roguelike, things are always randomized. You aren’t memorizing locations, you’re learning a set of skills that applies overarchingly, and having to make decisions based on those skills on a regular basis.

The kind of game I’m talking about, like, say, Demon’s Souls, is not like that. It’s about learning the mechanics of the combat, yes, but it’s also about memorizing that there is going to be ambushes here, here, and here, and I need to fire a spell blindly down this way because a guy will pop out, and so on and so forth.

I mean, Demon’s Souls has some great production values. It’s dark, but it looks awesome. It’s got some really creative ideas about what an online game should be, and it has an interesting mythology going over it at. But when I got it from Gamefly and was playing through it, I couldn’t help but feel like it was just memorization I was going through. Sure, I was slowly figuring out how to kill enemies in a more efficient manner, but mostly, it was figuring out exactly what enemies were going to attack when through trial and error. I worked hard to memorize the first little dungeon, and kept plugging at it until I reached and beat the first boss. Then, looking at the other levels and knowing I’d have to do it all over again, I immediately returned it. I just couldn’t take that. Plus, I had just gotten my physical body back. Might as well leave while I’m on top and alive, hm?

For people who get off on the concept of mastery, and I know they are out there, Demon’s Souls is probably the greatest game to come out in a long time, and I’m very happy for them to get to play it. But these days, I set games to Easy or Casual and just want to experience them. There were some cool experiences in my time with Demon’s Souls, running across a bridge while being attacked by guys on all sides and a dragon doing fire-breathing bombing runs being one of the neatest ones. But I just can’t take the frustration to see more of that. I want relaxation from my games.

Such is the magic of Gamefly, though, that I get to approach it that way. Try it and get it out of the way. I wanted to try the game, and I did. I’m glad I did. But now I can move on to other things.

I am now someone who owns a PS3, and so there is now a wealth of old PS3 exclusives for me to go back and play! So I put a bunch of them up on my Gamefly, and the first one to come in was inFamous, Sucker Punch’s super hero open world game. Note the very important spelling as inFamous, with only the F capitalized. Very important, apparently.

Haven’t not played Prototype, I can’t make any statements on that now old debate. But this certainly did seem the better game, and it certainly was pretty solid. You don’t really expect it to be a 3rd Person Shooter when you go into it, but even though you’re throwing lighting bolts, that’s totally what it is. It pulls all of that off pretty well, too. There’s no problems there. You feel just about the right amount of super-powered and fragile, and you eventually get some good movement things going.

But there are two main reasons why I only beat the first island of the three before returning the game, and that’s the incredibly badly handled morality stuff and the repetitious nature of the game.

First off, that Penny Arcade Comic? It nailed how stupid these “moral” choices are. They are so heavy handed and so… dumb. Even the more interesting ones are ruined by the main character going “I could do this… or I could do… THIS WHICH IS EVIL!” in a little game-pausing internal monologue, which just makes the decision seem stupid. For example, early on, there’s a barricade you need to get past with a crowd of protesters in front of it. You can either open fire on the guards from the crowd of protesters, so that the guards focus on the crowd as its enemy, or you can walk in front of them and start opening fire from there, making yourself the clear target. This is a very interesting decision. I could see myself being shocked and genuinely moved by firing from the crowd and realizing that was an “evil” decision. However, without the sense of discovery or actually having power over your actions that the internal monologue outlining the decision takes away from you, it’s ultimately meaningless. All the choices are “Do I want the red powers or the blue powers?” That’s all it is. It’s a really stupid story thing, and honestly brings the game down more than it helps it.

The other thing was the repetition. The game gets into this serious grind. Go do this stupid underground climbing thing to turn power on. Do a mission. Go home. Rinse. Repeat. If the underground missions weren’t exactly the same, maybe that wouldn’t have been so awful, but they pretty well are. After four of those, I was kind of done with those missions forever. The other repetitious part are the side missions. “Just ignore the side missions!” you say. “If they’re repetitious, just don’t do them!” But not doing them is much worse than doing them, because that is how you stop the random enemies from spawning around the city. Each one you do extends the “safe area” where your superpowered heroism has influence. Moving from one place to another with enemies about is VERY ANNOYING. Killing guys isn’t a joy like it is in Crackdown, it’s fairly difficult, and these guys can pot shot you to death and completely distract you. You want them gone, badly. Thus, you do the repetitive side missions, which sometimes have variety, but often don’t, and then you get bored of those too.

It’s a shame, really, because the core mechanics work pretty well. It’s just that the game itself doesn’t offer up enough original content to keep you going the whole time. If you’re someone who wants a game that you can wring all kinds of gameplay out of and get so many hours of play for your buck, I suppose inFamous would help you out with that. These days, though, I don’t have time to put up with that kind of bullshit. I want compact games that are interesting and fun the whole way through. inFamous wasn’t. Still, I’d be very interested in an inFamous 2. They’re set up a very good groundwork here. If they can give things more variety, I would be totally down.

While I was in Arkansas, I needed something to play. I picked up and played most of the rest of the way through Mario and Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Story, a game I had set aside for no good reason. When I got back, I finished it. Now I am finally writing a review for it. Yay.

Mario and Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Story is a great game. A really great game. It’s just held back by a few really, really stupid decisions. For one, there are a lot of little mini-games to break up the action. However, it’s clear they spent less time perfecting those than they should have. Some of them are near-impossible to control, and make you fail constantly. (the nasal passage game is particularly bad in this regard.) Some, like the Revival Boats, are just kind of annoying since you have to do them all the time.
Also, I didn’t technically “beat” this game, as it pulls the same bullshit that all of the Mario and Luigi games have pulled: The last boss has too fucking much HP. I fought the last boss for 20 minutes straight, and then died, and I’m not sure I was anywhere close to beating it. I said “fuck this shit” and counted the game as beaten. I’ve done this on every game but the first, and the only reason I didn’t on the first was because I was really, really bored and tried it like 4 times.

Besides those two annoyances, though, this is by far the best game in the series. The writing is top-notch, and with so much Bowser, who’s character I love in the Mario RPGs, I was grinning almost the whole game. His combat is extremely rewarding, just as much so as that of the Bros, even with just him in it. His touch-screen “minion” attacks are decent. They’re certainly better than the minigames, and they are a nice change of pace from the timed button mashing of the Bros attacks.
The game does so many smart things with the two screens, too. Just little subtle effects, such as when Bowser is walking around when Mario and Luigi are inside him, and you can see the “interior” map of Bowser’s body? It bounces as he stomps about very slightly. It’s a neat effect. They also do some really clever things in the cinemas with the two screens. It’s very clear that they’ve mastered the use of the system since Partners in Time.

One of the best parts, though, is the fan service return of Fawful from the first game. He makes a great, entertaining villain, and I was grinning when I saw him enter the scene for the first time. In the end, he ends up being second-place to a main boss again. but it was fun seeing him come into his own as an evil mastermind.

The game does beg the question, though: How many more star-based MacGuffins can the people at Nintendo invent? The “star cures” you are collecting in this game seem like a huge, huge stretch. Where can they go from there? All MacGuffins must be star-based in the Mario world! This is a potential issue in the future. Might I suggest “Star Map” or “Star Chart” next time? That could be entertaining.

In any case, Bowser’s Inside Story is Nintendo designing for the hardcore at its finest. You really should play it. It feels very fresh from the other games, very creative, and is just a lot of fun. Just don’t feel bad if you can’t beat the last boss, okay? I certainly won’t think less of you.

Mega Man ZX Advent is a game for the Nintendo DS Portable Entertainment System. It is a sequel to Mega Man ZX, which I got for 9 dollars at Toys R Us once. I enjoyed it, as one might expect that a combination of Mega Man and Metroidvania might be enjoyable, but it made some really, really dumb decisions. The biggest one was that it didn’t have a map, so much as a very vague screen that it called a map. This map showed “areas” and where these areas could connect to, but gave you no information about the areas themselves. So while I knew that, say, Area A connects to Area B, it gave me no information about how to get to the exit in Area A that lead to Area B. It was really stupidly hard to navigate without having GameFAQs open with an actual map.

I assumed that, seeing as this was a huge problem, that they would fix it in the sequel. But when I got it in from Gamefly and booted it up, I found out that that is not the case. The map is slightly more useful, splitting the areas up into multiple, smaller areas, but it still doesn’t give you an actual map. You still have no idea where the hell you’re going half the time. To make matters worse, they added some awful, awful voice acting. Now I can hear some really bad voice actors saying some of the really awful dialog that I wasn’t playing the game for anyway. Whee.

The game did some cool things, like letting you turn into bosses instead of just taking their powers, which was a pretty neat idea. But the first time I got lost because the map was so useless, I couldn’t help but say “fuck it,” and I sent it back immediately. Come on, Capcom. You can do better than that. I’ve played games where you’ve done better than that. So, so much potential wasted. Ugh.