The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

Time Hollow is pretty well exactly what I thought it would be.

It’s an adventure game that’s on the DS. You click on things, and are given descriptions, and you solve puzzles! There’s a story involving a pen that can draw holes in time. It’s pretty well the perfect rental if you’re an adventure game genre fan, and that’s exactly what I did with it. I rented the shit out of it.

I didn’t beat it, though, because it creates several affronts to fun that kept me from wanting to move forward.

One, the entire game is a game of “Find the Cutscene.” You literally have to tap on everything until specific events occur. You can have the solution to a problem way, way before the game wants you to have it, and it will either ignore you, or you will be told you need to come back later, with no real reason given why that’s the case.
Two, the game is full of tiny little miss-able, important items. There are also tiny little things you wouldn’t notice that you have to find to move forward. What’s worse, the game makes a “mechanic” of this, where you have to use the D-pad to pan the screen left and right to see small corners of the scenes for absolutely no reason other than to make the game more difficult.
Three, everyone’s name is an awful clock pun. Every. Single. Name. I could deal with that in a better game, but ugh.

So I sent it back around halfway through. I was having to FAQ my way through it’s generic anime sort of plot, and it just didn’t seem worth my time to keep going. Plus, Gamefly said they were sending me Scribblenauts. Mmm, Scribblenauts.

So yeah, I can’t recommend the purchase unless you are the more die-hard of adventure game fans. But eh, you could rent it if you were really bored. It’s certainly better than, say, Miami Law.

Back on Talk like a Pirate Day, Steam had a sale, as they usually do. What was on sale? Why, only the most pirate-y games! This included The Secret of Monkey Island Special Edition, a game which I had been meaning to pick up anyway. So I did. Then, eventually, I finally got around to playing it, even though I have two whole episodes of Tales of Monkey Island sitting there, unplayed! I am so awesome sometimes.

So how was it?

There were some weird decisions made in this game. They decided to re-draw all the graphics, but not re-animate them? They just redrew the frames. So although the art looks great, it also animates like shit. They then decided to totally re-do the interface on the PC version (mostly to make the XBLA version easier to play, I’m sure) which made the game actually harder to play, just so they could fill the entire screen with graphics. I mean, yes, the whole SCUMM interface is pretty archaic, but there were multiple puzzles that were made HARDER by the new interface, just because there was a time element and it was so cumbersome to interact with. I actually had to hit F10, which switches the entire game back to the original graphics (a nice touch) in order to complete these puzzles. That’s kind of bullshit.

Still, it was great to visit a classic, and see where this series I love quite a bit came from. I had tried it a long while ago, back on a Monkey Island Collection disc, but I just couldn’t get into it. I need voices in my Adventure games! I just suck like that. Luckily, Lucasarts did a great job getting everyone they needed to get in on this game, and it sounds great. Although I do have to admit I was surprised to learn that I agree with Chris Remo on the voices. In this early game, Guybrush was not, by default, a lovable cartoon character that is voiced so well by Dominic Armato. Depending on what you chose, he could very well be a very serious guy. There are almost always options for being an actual swashbuckling adventurer as opposed to a comedy guy, something that’s mostly gone in something like Curse of Monkey Island. As such, Armato’s voice does potentially detract from the game a little. Not enough to ruin the fun, but it’s interesting to note. I could definitely see how someone who played the original back in the day might not like it.

Those are pretty well the only drawbacks to the game, though. The game, while old, is still amazingly clever. Even though Insult Swordfighting had been iterated on several times in future games, the original was still quite a lot of fun and funny to read. The text in the game is very strong comedy, and there are only one or two bullshit puzzles in the whole thing, and those I solved with just a couple of presses of the new in-game hint system, which does a pretty good job of keeping you from having to go to a walkthrough if you’re stuck.

So yeah, I totally got my $5 worth. As Guybrush says at the end of the game, Never pay more than $20 for a computer game. So I didn’t. If you’re in the least interested in the history of the series, you owe it to yourself to pick it up for $10 or whatever. It’s a good time. Now here’s hoping they get Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge Special Edition underway at some point. Cause once again, I’d love to play through it and see more history, but damn. Voices, man! I need voice acting!

I think I’m almost more savvy a consumer. Almost.

I remember back in the day, when I was working as a janitor and was getting paid to essentially play GBA and read Manga, and I’d buy so much Manga. So, so much. (Now I’m down to Yotsuba!& and xXxholic. And, I guess, Hourou Musuko, though that isn’t translated officially so I’m not buying it, perse. Oh, how I’ve changed.) I’d walk into Waldenbooks and they would have a sign that said “Buy four books of manga, get one free!” And I’d do it. Every time. Even when I only had, say, 2 titles I wanted. I’d buy five. Every time. I couldn’t pass up the deal, even though it was a shitty deal, and I was getting books I didn’t really want. I was awesome.

Now, Toys R Us and Amazon are both having Buy 2, Get 1 Free game deals, and I keep looking and looking for what to buy, and I can never find three. Instead of just buying something I didn’t need, I have, gasp, not purchased any games.

I’ve worried somewhat, since starting Gamefly, that I haven’t really cut down my game purchases THAT much. But then, when things like this come along, and I realize all the titles I could buy are all titles I was just going to rent, and there’s no good reason to change that plan? That really is like… $100 or so I’ve saved. That is savings. I am saving. I am doing better.
Probably.

Man, I continue to feel like I got really lucky having gotten into the Lucasarts adventure games and such. Every time I really get into looking at these Sierra adventure games, I go “Man, I am so glad I never tried to play one of those.” Well, okay, I tried to play the time travel Space Quest, but that went really shitty, so… makes me glad I didn’t continue to try.

Anyway, I watched a pretty good LP of King’s Quest V awhile back, and it made me feel the same way. This post is mostly to say, hey, feel free to check that out here. It’s pretty good.

But yeah, goodness. Some of the stuff in that game? So completely dumb. And I understand this was the start of games that had voice actors, but goodness.
Goodness.

Maybe if I’d been with King’s Quest the whole time. Maybe. But man, that game…
Just watch it, and be amazed at how random and nonsensical it is.

I do feel kind of bad, though. I saw a link to this LP in the thread for Sky Render’s LP of the game, and it’s probably going to make me not read it. Sky Render has done some awesome LP’s of this series of adventure games, called the Kyrandia series, that I didn’t even know existed. He’s pretty awesome. So you should give his LP a look, too. Or at least go back and read his other ones. They’re also worth your time.

Jonathan bought Virtua Fighter 4 on a whim, once it came out in its cheap updated form back in the PS2 days. I was kind of astounded by it. The original Virtua Fighter, which is all I’d really played, was silly and stupid. I mean, it looked like this. It’s not something to inspire confidence. So when I found that, at some point in between, Virtua Fighter had become this crazily technical thing, filled with amazing depth without involving any sort of “super moves” and was incredibly fun to play. On top of that, they had created this thing called “Quest Mode” which made single player play amazingly fun.

I had been meaning to try Virtua Fighter 5 for awhile now, because of that. It came in from Gamefly, and I gave it a go. My verdict: More of the same, though that’s not a bad thing.

Seriously, I’m not a hyper-technical person with this stuff, but I could see very little difference between Virtua Fighter 4 and 5. I mean, sure, the graphics looked better, and there were a couple new fighters, but it was essentially the same game. You still had the completely excellent Quest Mode, where you run around to virtual arcades to fight the virtual people in them to win tournaments and increase your rank. You still have the large amount of character customization, so you can really make your character look different and unique, and where the better costume pieces are awarded through play, giving you a nice Skinner box to keep going. Especially now that I have an Arcade stick, I was having a lot of fun playing it.

In the end, though, I didn’t decide to keep it. There is just no competition for the game. I wasn’t about to be anywhere near good enough to complete with the people online, who are surely only the hardest core of players at this point, and although I might have gotten Jonathan into a match or two, none of my other friends would really be into a fighter that technical. So I decided to save my cash and send it back. Probably a smart move, what with me deciding to give in, support Tim Schafer, and buy Brutal Legend on the 13th.

Still, Virtua Fighter has one of the best single player experiences of any fighter. I enjoyed Quest mode while I played it, (which was just about to the point where it started being too hard for me to win. I suck.) just like I did last time. At the same time, if you’re going to play it single player, I don’t know if there’s really a lot of reason to get 5 over a super-cheap copy of 4 Evolution in a bargain bin somewhere. They are just so similar because 4 was polished to near perfection. It would definitely seem hard to move from that without completely changing the game up, you know? So instead they just added more costumes, a few more characters, and more pretty. And I guess that’s alright.

While waiting on students in the lounge of the office (which is basically a very small room which has a couple couches in it) I got back into playing Rogue Touch, for lack of anything better to do. That inspired me to go to my office computer and install Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup on it, for whatever reason. I guess to sap my productivity? I have no idea.

Needless to say, I suck at it.

I don’t know. Whenever I play these sorts of games, I always want to be a healer, or a mage of some kind. I pick these classes knowing good and well that I am going to go Kamikaze at some point and die immediately, because I’m a mage, and I have no armor, and I suck in general anyway. So after playing a couple of deaths like that on my office computer, I decided, fuck it, I’m going to actually accommodate my urges. It’s nothing but Hill Orc Fighters from now on.

Strangely, though, that hasn’t seemed to improve my effectiveness much at all. The top of my leaderboard is still a birdie healer, much like I kept running at home when I tried the game. I guess it’s not surprising that the class I played like 30 rounds of would be the one I would be best at, but at the same time I totally forgot how to call in divine favors so I wasn’t even using the healing powers of my healer. Also, I accidentally killed something while praying to my pacifist god and made her mad at me, so, you know, I was pretty well playing the worst healer ever. Yet, I still did better than all of my fighter runs thus far. Who the hell knows.

I mean, I’m not all that good at Roguelikes. I figured out Shiren pretty decently, and made it to the last area a few times, though never cleared it, but that’s about it. I’ve never made it out of the first strata of Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. I’m under the impression that there are like 15 areas and I have to pick and clear like 7 of them to get plot coupons to clear the game? But as I’ve said, I’ve never seen past the first, so… yeah. I’m doing pretty awesome. Don’t want to brag, but, you know, I’m pretty well the best. At being awful.

Still, even when constantly losing, the game remains fun. It’s certainly helped by the fact that, as long as you’re using tiles, the interface is so, so much more useful than, say, Nethack. If you’re looking to try one of these hardcore roguelikes, I really can’t recommend Stone Soup with Tiles enough. It plays like someone gave a shit about interface. It’s wonderful.

But yeah, so that’s what I’m doing instead of the tons of homework and grading and whatnot I should be doing in my office. Exciting, no?

So, as of iPod Touch firmware update 3.1.1, my beloved Mahjong Mobile no longer works. It crashes on startup. What’s worse, the program has apparently been completely removed from the app store for some reason, so it seems unlikely that it will ever be updated. This really makes me unhappy, honestly, but, especially seeing as Saki just ended and thus pushed my Mah Jong lust to new heights, I attempted to find another understandable Riichi Mah Jong game for my iPod.

Unfortunately, I could only really find one. Most of the others I had looked at when I got Mahjong Mobile seemed to have disappeared! It seemed my only real option was Simple! Jong Touch. But it was only a buck, so I felt little hesitation in trying it.

Simple! Jong Touch is a completely adequate single-player Mah Jong game. The interface works fine. It’s not quite as slick at the sliding bar in Mahjong Mobile, but since it’s on its side, it’s easy enough to tap the tiles you want, and then you just tap again to discard. I haven’t made any mistakes in that regard yet. It also has all kinds of options on rules, if you know enough about Mah Jong house rules to have preferences in that regard. So, you know, it seems to work pretty well.

The problem is, where Mahjong Mobile was completely aimed towards a more casual effort, Simple! Jong Touch assumes you know Mah Jong backwards and forwards.
Mahjong Mobile only shows you options when you can do them. It puts up useful markers on tiles immediately discarded so you can learn to track the pond better. It breaks down how everyone who goes out scores in pieces, tells you what their fan was and so on, so you can try to figure it out.
Simple! Jong Touch does none of this. When people go out, you see the official name of the hand and a score. That’s fine, but again, the foreign words that make up the names of the hands aren’t helpful in me figuring the game out, because they’re just nonsense to me. It also displays buttons for basically everything you can do in the game all the time. Even if you have an open hand, it still offers you the option of calling Reach constantly, for instance. You can also call false Tsumos and Rons all day long, and the game penalizes you according to the rules. This is probably preferable for higher-level players trying to train and remember the things they need to while actually playing at a table, but since I still haven’t completely gotten all the rules to the game down, this just makes the whole experience less fun.

So, basically, I really hope that Mahjong Mobile gets updated again so I can play it. Still, if you’re some actual person who plays Mah Jong, Simple! Jong Touch seems like a pretty solid buy, especially with that dollar price tag. I think Mahjong Mobile was worth the $3 I paid for it, but I can see someone not needing all the helps I want as I figure it out, and just wanting the most Mah Jong for their dollar. Simple! Jong Touch can give that to you.
And hey, at least it’s not another stupid Mah Jong Solitaire game. (Not that I dislike Mah Jong Solitaire, it’s just, seriously, you can’t even find anything about the actual game under the millions of shitty Solitaire games.)

A long time ago, on some podcast or something, John Davidson, whom I like quite a bit when he talks in a podcast, mentioned a game called Miami Law, which he described as some weird mix of Phoenix Wright and a light gun shooter for DS. Feeling all empowered by the fact that I now had a Gamefly account and could rent horrible games, try them, and then immediately send them back, I put it on my Queue. Then it showed up the other day.

The most hilarious thing, and the first thing I noticed, was that, if you click on Extra in the main menu, you can play Sudoku puzzles and Texas Hold ’em. Is this relevant to the game at some point? I have absolutely no idea. But the idea of “We’re making a casual game, casual people like Sudoku and Texas Hold ‘Em, right? Then just throw some in there” makes me giggle.

Now, let me be the first to say that, honestly, this game is not a bad idea. Mixing up a mystery with some touch screen minigames honestly seems like a great combination for a nice casual game. There’s nothing wrong with the concept. The execution, though, is pretty bad.
The game can’t decide if it wants to be controlled via stylus or the buttons. If you use the buttons, it’s awkward, because the set-up of the menu is designed for the stylus. But when you press something with the stylus, nothing happens. You have to double-click on all the menu options to get them to do anything, which is completely stupid. That got annoying really quick.
On top of that, the actual gameplay is extremely trial and error. When you’re given decisions, I hope you pick the right one, because otherwise, you just lost! Granted, there’s a little thought bubble on the bottom that tells you what the character thinks is the right choice. Most of the time it is! But that just creates other issues, in that you never feel like you’re actually doing anything in the case, since your decisions do not matter.
The first time I was given a decision that matters, I got completely confused as to what the game wanted me to do. I had four suspects I had to get information out of. I could “Use Force” to pull my gun on them, but then I’d get scolded. Even “Using Force” on every person didn’t make anything happen, nor did talking to everyone and looking at everyone. I couldn’t move away until I figured out who had the information I needed. If I “Use Force” a second time against any of the people, I lose. I had no clue what the game wanted me to do. It went back into the Gamefly Envelope.

The presentation is both good and bad. It has this weird half-anime art style that works for some characters (like the male lead, named Law, because someone could not resist being so fucking clever) and then totally falls apart and looks freakish on others. (like the female lead, Sara, whose face just seems like someone inflated her eyes way too big) I think it would have worked a lot better if they had just gone with the more realistic style they were leaning for, especially since the target audience for this seems to be the same kind of people who bought Brain Age and also like CSI or whatever.
The writing, though, was actually decent, from what I read. I mean, it’s not great, and it certainly seemed constrained in some scenes to make it “acceptable.” (I mean, Law is running around with this drug ring who is killing all kinds of dudes. They are going to use harsher language.) It’s passable, but it’s certainly not worth fighting through all the constant Game Overs for no reason.

Anyway, I still think the idea was solid, and it was kind of fun to fiddle with for an hour or two, but it’s heading back to Gamefly. As much as I was thinking about it, though, and how much I’d actually LIKE an interactive story like that. I think I’m probably looking all the more forward to renting Women’s Murder Club: Games of Passion at some point. That’s got like… a guy who has written a book before behind it, right? And Nintendo First Party support? Surely it’s going to be everything this game isn’t. Hopefully.

Your game runs in an operating system called MICROSOFT WINDOWS.

Therefore, your game should run in a window.

Your game is meant as a form of entertainment. Therefore, I should be free to consume your game content ANY WAY I DAMN WELL PLEASE. If this means I want to watch twitter while I play, and have your game in a window so I can, then you need to fucking deal with that and make it happen, instead of gimping your game and making it so it only runs full screen, in the wrong resolution, so I can’t even fucking play it.

Ubisoft, stop making PC games. Just stop it. Stop making PC games until you are serious about this bullshit.
Just stop making PC games.
Stop it.

Why do I even buy PC games anymore? Bleh. It is literally throwing my money away. THROWN AWAY. Because only little indie companies actually give a shit about programming their games in a way that works, apparently.

So, Red Faction: Guerrilla may be one of the best games of the year, hands down.

I mention often that, when I play open world games, Crackdown has spoiled me. It’s “missions seamlessly in the world” without having to pull up an instance and the intense, enjoyable level of power you have as you play make it a joy to play, and I just hadn’t seen another game that gave me that sense.
Until now, of course.

There are instanced “major” missions in Red Faction. There are two reasons why this doesn’t bother me. One is that the majority of the missions, called “Guerrilla Actions,” are seamless, just like in Crackdown. You walk up to a building, and you hear over your headset “Oh shit, the EDF are coming, you have to defend this point!” and then you defend it. Or you jump in a car, and Mason goes “Oh, this has one of those special transponders Sam was wanting” and then you instantly are in a race mission to get the vehicle back to base. You also have compounds of enemy forces that need destroying that are just out in the overworld that you can tackle any way you want.
Even when you get into the instanced missions, they do them right. They are significantly varied from what you’re doing in the normal missions. They follow a stronger narrative than the rest of the game, and while you could really care less about the narrative, it at least gives a purpose to them being instanced. And they’re fun. A lot of the instanced missions in games like say, Bully, just weren’t fun to me at all. So that certainly helps.

Red Faction really nails the power thing, too. I can only speak to the game on Casual, but on Casual, you are a walking badass. A one-man wrecking crew. Every time you slam your sledgehammer into a building and whole walls fall down, it feels CRAZY good. You have a playground of different weapons at your disposal, just like in Crackdown, and you can do a lot of different things with them. The Nanorifle is an obvious favorite, able to eat through walls and melt people, but just about all the weapons are fun as hell in their own way. You can blow up buildings any way you want! And the game is all the better for it.

On top of the fun single player, the game has plenty of value. The online multiplayer is extremely solid. Damage Control, the mode that was in the demo, is an awesome variation of the “control point” mechanic that plays into the game’s strengths of destroying shit very well. Siege and Destruction play up these strengths similarly. Siege is a mission-objective based mode where you take turns attacking and defending, trying to protect or destroy a base and turn it to rubble. In Destruction, there is one “VIP” on the team, the Destructor. He gets points for his team by destroying buildings. The rest of the team tries to kill the other team’s Destructor, or protect theirs, or rebuild buildings so that your Destructor has more to demolish. They’re both completely awesome, playing into the game’s destructive strengths to feel very fresh and new. The game also has a level up reward system stolen from CoD4, and is all the better for it.

The real multiplayer highlight, and the reason that I bought this game from Gamefly instead of just renting it, is Wrecking Crew, a hotseat offline multiplayer. You’re given a playground, and weapons, and have to destroy everything. Then you pass the controller to the next player, and they try to beat your score. It is so much fun, especially since you can see what strategies the people who went before you used, and try to improve on them, or just throw them out if they don’t work. So much trash talk has occurred around this mode, and my friends, or at least Essner, were getting so into it, I couldn’t help but keep the game to keep access to it.

So yeah, everyone should play Red Faction: Guerrilla. It just came out on PC, if you’re that kind of person. There are so few flaws in the game, it’s hard not to recommend it. It is an open world game done right, and I loved every minute of it.