The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

So last night, we once again had a Beatles: Rock Band session. After the discovery that my USB headset worked as a mic in the game, we then had the ability, between it and my mic stand, to have three part vocals, no matter how many people were playing instruments. So we took advantage of that fact, and Essner, Spaeth, and I sang. Boy, did we sang.

We were nailing Triple Fabs. We were. Not on every song of course. The brown notes on some songs are just really hard to get without really practicing them, because they’re less intuitive. But man, when we hit those Triple Fabs, with me on Lead, and Essner and Spaeth playing Guitar and Bass… when we hit that… holy shit.

As we ended, and they walked out the door, I said “Nailing those Triple Fabs is probably my best gaming moment of the year.” And I meant it. At the very least, it’s clearly the best music game moment of the year. By far.

Beatles: Rock Band fucking rules.

So there is a fighting game out there called Battle Fantasia. At some point, I got it into my head that it was very button-masher friendly. I also got it into my head that it has a bunny wizard. Therefore, it seemed like something I should rent from Gamefly, so I put it in my Queue, like so many other games. Then Gamefly sent it to me, and I played it!

I sent it back the next day.

Battle Fantasia has some good ideas, and is competent in some respects. The visuals are pretty great, actually. The 3D characters look very much like 2D ones. They have a lot of expression and life that way. I could see you mistaking a screenshot as all hand-drawn for a few moments, at least. The characters all have a lot of variety in their designs, which is cool.
The game itself is trying to be a hybrid of RPGs and Fighters. Your characters have HP, and you can see exactly how much HP each attack you pull off does, because the damage numbers come out of your enemy, just like in a jRPG. As you land strings of hits without being interrupted, you “Level up.” If you’re interrupted, then you’re going to “Level down.” Everyone’s attacks do different things and have different powers at different levels, which is a cool balancing mechanism, in theory, especially since most projectile attacks require your characters to be at least level 2, which means you have to get in there and be aggressive for at least a few hits before you can really hang back and turtle.

However, that is also really lame. I was playing Watson, the bunny wizard, and I couldn’t really cast any spells until I got in and did some serious Melee damage. That’s not how wizards work! It felt unsatisfying. It also felt much less like I had any control over what I could do, since so much of the Level Up mechanic involves your opponent and variables around him. Some battles, I’d have no trouble keeping Level 3 the whole fight, and then next round I could never level up for more than 5 seconds. Granted, if I had had some higher level strategy, I’m sure I could have countered the assaults that were keeping me down. But as a new player, the mechanic was just keeping me away from trying things and figuring out what they did. Kind of a downer.
The game itself, as well, was much less button-mashy than I was hoping. Maybe I was hoping for the wrong thing, but it seemed really hard to make anything cool happen without really knowing the combos. I never felt like I was even beginning to get effective with ANYTHING during my few hours of play. I didn’t feel like any progress was being made. Maybe I’m just awful, but at least in, say, SFIV, I can start to realize what I’m doing wrong after fiddling around for awhile. I just never really got the mechanics.

The game has a story mode which is, you know, endless dialog scenes followed by a battle. Nothing to write home about. The arcade mode was what made me send it back, though. The last boss requires a gimmick to complete, using moves I didn’t even know existed. Without this gimmick, you literally cannot damage him. After several failures, I eventually looked up how to hit him, and beat him. But it felt like such bullshit, that I wasn’t really willing to put up with the game anymore.

So yeah, I can’t really recommend the game. Go try BlazBlue instead, or just get Street Fighter IV if you need a fighter. I think it was trying to fill a niche that needed filling, at the time, and maybe if there wasn’t all these other top-quality fighters on the 360, I would have been nicer to it. But yeah, Battle Fantasia is not really worth your time.

So there are some puzzles in Layton and the Diabolical Box about making Tea for people.

I love the game, but these puzzles are kind of bullshit.

The majority of the puzzles in Layton normally have a trick. Many of them can be solved through old school trial and error, but there’s normally something you can find, some trick where you can figure it out without a lot of math or whatever. They’re neat that way. Either way, you feel good when you solve it.

But these Tea puzzles… they aren’t so much Tea puzzles, but trial and error. The people tell you what kind of qualities they want in their tea. If you’re lucky, you have the ingredients that equal what they’re wanting, so you try to make it, and hopefully you get it right. Maybe.
If you get it wrong? Well, then you have to wait an unknown amount of time for them to get thirsty before you can try it again.

Basically, if you know the Tea recipes, then you can match the teas to the people really easily. But to find the recipes, you have to just try things at random. Mix and match. Granted, the dialog that happens when you find a new blend is entertaining, but goodness. You have to go through all this dialog that’s entertaining the first time but a pain the 7th time every time you fail. And again, maybe you don’t even have the right ingredients yet.

I dunno, the game is so classy and good. I’ll gladly tell you how classy it is later. But this particular overarching puzzle is kind of bullshit. I wonder if its reward is actually worth it. I ended up looking up all the blends on GameFAQs so I wouldn’t have to trial and error them anymore.

This is the beginning of what is probably like all kinds of posts about Beatles: Rock Band. Because, hell, I dunno. I’ve got many things to say about the game. And things around the game. Yes.

Anyway, on Thursday I spent over 80 dollars on microphones.
Well, okay, only 50 dollars of that was on Microphones. The rest was on a mic stand. And a fox doll. That last one having little to do with Beatles: Rock Band, but damn, it was right there, in front of the checkout, and I NEVER pass up buying fox plushies and whatnot whenever I see them. I am a simple creature like that.

In any case, way too much money on microphones.

But dammit, the harmony is by far the most exciting part of the game! I sing. I do nothing but sing in these games. And throwing the Harmonies in there just gives me something completely different to work on. It’s a serious challenge, but so far, it’s been BEYOND satisfying when I actually land a harmony perfectly. It feels so good.

So I got enough mics so that I can always do the harmonies. And then I got a Mic stand, so I could harmonize while I play guitar.

That’s something I never really had a want to do with Rock Band 2 and Rock Band. Playing the guitar and singing had no appeal. I’d just do both shittily. But I always want to try the harmonies when I’m playing guitar, automagically. Now that I can, I so, so want to do it. I’ve already tried it with Mom singing lead vocals, and it just worked so well. I can’t go back! I can’t go back.

Rock Band 3 better have vocal harmony. That’s all I’m saying.
It better.

So, you’ve played Ben There, Dan That! You’ve both Ben there and Danned that. So what do you do?

Well, you give a nice indie developer 5 bucks and move on and play Time Gentlemen, Please!

The description on their website there is pretty well completely accurate. Time Gentlemen, Please! is bigger, better programmed with better interface stuff, funnier, and just all around a better game. Not that this makes Ben There, Dan That! any less fun. It’s just clear that, once they realized they had a hit on their hands, they came back and made a much better game in the same world, letting the in-game versions of themselves start to deviate nicely from who they were and become their own characters, and giving the game all the bells and whistles one expects from an adventure game in this day and age. Like, say, nice background music most of the time. Still no voices, though, but once again, the writing does make up for it. Completely.

The plot involves significantly less alternate dimensions than the first game, though keeping things just as wacky: in an attempt to stop coathangers from existing, they’ve managed to get stuck in WWII, where they’ve accidentally given Hitler an army of cloned dinosaurs and a large mecha suit. Maybe that doesn’t mean much, but it actually does mean quite a bit for the flow of the game. Ben There, Dan That! was very much a big collection of silly ideas thrown together with the “alternate dimension” mechanic as an easy explanation to paste it all together. (Again, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t entertaining, just, you know, it was obvious what they were doing.) In this game, Zombie Cow has obviously planned out what’s going on, making a very unified world that feels like a complete space, even in it’s complete and utter weirdness and humor.
There’s a plot, there’s character arcs, everything happens so much better. The puzzle-y bits, too, are more involved and more difficult, if you’re into that sort of thing, but they also seem to have built in much more hints into the dialog to counteract this, so the overall difficulty isn’t too bad.
It’s just a great little adventure game that’s worth your time, and the really cheap price of admission.

Luckily, this seems to have done well for them, which is excitement! They announced that they have another sequel coming, this in a more strongly episodic format, they say. I’m all for more episodic adventure games, and I’m sure I’ll toss them a few bucks when this new endeavor comes out, though I hope it gets on Steam quicker than the originals did. I kinda like Steam a lot. It’s why I waited so long to try Ben There, Dan That, even when I had heard buzz about it before. Then, suddenly, it was on Steam, and there you go. I’m weird.

But yeah, no, I am of the much enjoying this game. Yes.

So I’ve got Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box. It looks so great! I’ve played some of it, and it’s so good! So what do I do?

Why, I buy a completely different pair of Indie games and play those instead, of course. Why would I want to play the awesome retail release I just bought? How silly.

But no, seriously, it’s okay, because these games are great. Best yet, the first one is free, though I got it in a little two pack for the cost of the second one on Steam. It is called Ben There, Dan That! and it is great and you should try it.

The game is a click-’em-up adventure, as Strong Bad would say. It’s obviously made by a low budget team, but they do their best! They don’t have voice work, which is a real shame, and the graphics look a little janky. But at the same time, they’ve managed to cobble their strange art into a very distinct visual style, which is always a plus, and even though I don’t get to hear someone reading it, the writing is pretty damn awesome. I laughed quite a few times.

The story is oddly selfish in its design. The characters in the game are actually supposed to be the two guys making it, completely. There are jokes about how lazy the programming is, and how hard it is to write a good joke here, but eh, they’ll put one in later, and so on. I’m sure this started out as a silly kind of joke project for the guys who made it. Still, it’s hard not to like it, even with some of the blatant fan service to themselves, because it is so well-written and entertaining. The majority of the puzzles are pretty straightforward and understandable, and the nonsensical ones are wrapped up in such entertaining jokes that you really don’t care all that much.

Of course, the best part is, it’s free. It’s worth the day or so it takes to play through it, totally. Download it, try it, and if you like combining items with other items, the mark of any TRUE adventurer, you will enjoy it. Promise. And then you’ll likely drop the five bucks on the sequel. And enjoy that. But I’ll talk about that tomorrow. Probably.

So if there’s one thing I think we can all agree on, it’s that Hitler is a dick. I mean, what’s up with that guy? Seriously. So we have no choice but to blow up his head in a robot body again and again and again. And again. Forever.

But wouldn’t it be better to do it in some sort of Turn-Based RPG?

And so here comes Wolfenstien RPG! To your iPhone! Spectacular Timing!

I’ve been waiting and waiting for this game for a long time, actually. Mr. Carmack announced it was coming forever and ago, and then went and screwed it up by releasing some shitty port of Wolfenstien 3D with shitty controls and going “Oh, we don’t want to confuse people!” Fuck that shit. Nobody wants a horrid port of Wolf 3D, and everyone should want this RPG, because it is awesome.

Basically, the game is set up like Wolfenstien 3D, though with better graphics, and Hitler replaced with some weird guy with a soul patch. So you move around, just like you do in that game, but every step you take takes one turn. Every time you fire a gun? One turn. Enemies work the same way, So you slowly run and gun through the spaces in a turn-based style. Along the way you pick up healing items and syringes which give you various buffs, as can use those to your advantage to make it through all the enemies, and eventually kill Hitler. Or his brother. Or something.

So remember yesterday, when I was talking about how shitty virtual D-pads were? Well, Wolfenstien RPG has a virtual D-pad, and it is perfect. Doesn’t bother you at all. Why? Because it’s turn-based, of course. There’s never any pressure, and you rarely actually need precision. It’s pretty good anyway. But because of that, it goes so easy. It’s not hard to move around at all. The only thing that doesn’t work very well is the swipe to strafe, but since turning doesn’t cost you a turn, you never actually HAVE to strafe, so it’s never really an issue.

The combat itself is pretty simple. You pick a gun, and fire like crazy until the other guy dies, using health kits as needed. You can do some advanced things with dynamite packs and buffing up appropriately, but for the most part, it isn’t needed. It’s a very casual experience. On top of all that, it saves when you leave the game, and you can save at any time. Since the levels are mostly linear, unless you did something silly before you quit last time, you never really feel lost when you jump back in, because chances are, you need to move forward. This makes it an amazing portable game, because it’s extremely easy to play for 2 or 3 minutes, and then get back to something else.

But seriously, there’s achievement-like things in there, if you like those. There’s a decent amount of gameplay and plenty of portability in a game suited very well for the iPod platform. It’s totally worth your money. You really should try it! And then you can wait eagerly for the Doom 2 RPG, which is apparently coming out next year or something. Sure, it’ll probably be similar, but, you know, running through hell: better than killing Nazis? Maybe. Should at least have a bigger enemy variety, anyway.

Because I am a robot, and I buy anything on the iPhone platform that is ever recommended to me, I read this and I bought Zenonia.

There’s nothing particularly off about that review. It’s fairly accurate. But the entire time I was playing away at it, it was hard to do anything but wish for buttons. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve certainly never seen a BETTER virtual D-pad and button on any iPhone game, but that doesn’t make it suck any less.
Add that to the fact that this game is very much a button masher, and you have a recipe for not-as-nice. I’m expected to slam on the attack button constantly, especially as the Paladin class, which is built for survivability as opposed to damage dealing. (And I had to pick Paladin. It had a heal spell. I always pick the one with the heal spell.) But since it isn’t a button, it can be very easy to get slightly distracted, and have your thumb slide just so, and suddenly your character is just standing there, getting his ass beat. Most of the time, it works just fine, but when such errors happen it is really frustrating.
It’s the same with the D-pad. Most of the time, it works really well, and the game is smart enough to have some very minor pathfinding so you don’t have to be extremely precise. (For example, if you are walking straight towards a box that is only blocking one space in the middle of the path, holding up towards the box makes your character go ahead and walk around it) But it’s really easy to slip, and suddenly your character is facing the wrong way when his big attack goes off, making him miss.
You have a hot bar of various abilities you can set on the bottom, but these also pose problems, as the buttons aren’t very big. Setting a move to the slot closest to the virtual D-pad had me turning just as often as pulling off the move, which was annoying. It also normally took me two or three presses to pull off. That isn’t what you want to be happening when you want to heal in the heat of battle.
On top of all this, the menu system uses the D-pad, instead of being touch screen based. There’s no good reason why I can’t drag and drop equipment into slots instead of having to use the D-pad like I’m playing a GBA game. It’s kind of ridiculous.

Still, the only problems I really have with the game are control issues that can barely be helped. The game is pretty deep, and it certainly is engaging. But when it started to get difficult due to the controls, I kind of started to put it down. If you really wish you had a deeper jRPG-style experience on your iPhone, Zenonia will deliver. Just expect to have a lot of frustration with the controls.

People on the Podded Casts had mentioned that Roogoo was not shit. I had played the demo of it on XBLA, and gave them props for trying to create a new kind of puzzle game, but it didn’t hook me. Still, hearing a bit of the hype about it, I decided to throw the new stand-alone version, Roogoo: Twisted Towers for Wii, into my Gamefly queue to see what was up, and if it would really hook me.

I still have to give them props for creating something original, but dammit, they really went out of their way to fuck this up.

Quick description of the game: Children’s shape blocks fall from the sky through little discs with proper sized holes. You have to constantly rotate these discs to get the Star to go through the Star hole, and the Square to go through the Square hole, etc. It’s a different kind of matching gameplay, but still standard puzzle fare, in the end. If you let too many shapes bounce off of the discs and fall into oblivion, you lose the level and have to restart.

It is no secret that I hate with the burning passion of a thousand suns pointing at the screen with the Wiimote. I figured there would not be any of that in this game, besides perhaps the menus. It was a puzzle game where you rotated little discs about. That happens with buttons. I didn’t think it would be a problem.
However, the developers decided that this was a Wii game, so you had to do Wii things. Constantly, little butterflies fly about the screen, and you have to point at them with the Wiimote to catch them in your net. Bosses will do all kinds of things that require you to point at the screen to shoot at them, or will fog up the screen so you have to run the pointer over where you want to see to wipe the screen clean. This is all extremely annoying and extremely frustrating, as you have to do most of this while still trying to play the game normally.

Mixing it up in a puzzle game “story mode” is all well and good, but in the end, you need the basic puzzle gameplay to be there. It needs to be something that I can pick up and play mindlessly for an hour or so while listening to a podcast. It needs to be something that can get me into a groove. All these constant stupid Wii-styled distractions just ruin this for me. I can’t stand it. It just makes the game less fun.

Maybe on XBLA, where the game probably has less gimmicks, Roogoo would be better. However, I would have a very hard time recommending this Wii version to anyone. It just fights you every step of the way. It is unpleasant. If the developers had just tried to make a good game, as opposed to trying to make “an amazing Wii game that uses all the Wii features amazingly!” then they probably would have caught and fixed these problems. As it is, it’s just kind of a mess.

Cthulhu wins.

There, I said it. Are you happy, Great Old Ones? Are yah?

But I suppose I should start at the beginning. Essner was all like “We haven’t played Arkham in forever!” and I was all like “How about Wednesday?” and everyone was all like “That seems like an okay day to play!” So we played.

I ended up playing Mark Harrigan, the soldier. Normally, anyone who starts with a Flamethrower is going to be an asset in combat, but with Cthulhu as the great old one, Mark was really way too fragile with his 2 Sanity. Of all things, I ended up being the main sealer of gates. I got two, and almost had the last gate needed before Cthulhu was summoned to the table. It was kind of frustrating like that.
Everyone did a pretty good job holding their own, though. Spaeth was not completely useless, though he was probably the most! But no, he sealed a gate and did some stuff, no worries. Essner, strangely, barely got into any combat at all, and mostly ran around and sealed things as well, though he stalled on a gate at the Black Cave for like, 4 turns.
Jonathan, though… he got a Healing stone, took a beating, but kept on going and going. He got a madness and an injury, and still managed to kill over ten monsters and close (though not seal) at least 3 gates. He was a monster. Darrell Simmons had never done so much, let me tell you.

The weirdest thing, though, was Cthulhu’s stronghold at Miskatonic U. At one point, the Miskatonic U streets had 6 monsters on it. They just kept constantly piling up. It was a bit ridiculous. It took most of the game to clear them out and get to the gate at the Science Building which had been open the whole time.

In the end, however, we just couldn’t keep the damage up against Cthulhu’s healing ability, even with my Grapple skill. Me blowing 5 clue tokens without a success didn’t really help, either. So, you know, as I said, the world’s destroyed. Yay.

What’s more important, though, was a very significant loss. Molly got into the game box, which Jonathan was leaving on the floor for no reason, and managed to destroy several game pieces, most notably the piece for everyone’s favorite researcher with a nice rack, Mandy Thompson. It was a sad night. We will persevere, though. Somehow, we will continue to fight the forces of darkness.

Somehow.