The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

I am a fool.
It is amazing to me how much enjoyment I am getting out of my Gamefly subscription, and so ridiculous that it took me this long to try it.

I mean, I’m a gamer. I enjoy playing the various vidjeo gamez that are out there in the world. But most of all, I want to be involved in the video game conversation. I want to have opinions about games, and be able to talk about them with some level of authority. This means I want to play most games that come out, even if only for a few minutes, just so I can have that experience.

Before, a game came out that I wanted to try, I would either buy it day one, which is really a waste of money, especially with a game I just want to try and not, you know, know for a fact I want to play through and beat, or sit there and wait to waste 20-30 on it some other time. Either way, chances are I would get that game, play it for a day or two, and then something else would distract the shit out of me and it would just sit there.
Compare this to Gamefly, where I can hear about any game I’m even vaguely interested in, put it in my Queue, and get it, play it for half a day, hate it, and immediately send it back without feeling badly at all. I get to try so many things at the fraction of the cost. And if a game really does catch me? I can buy it at a reduced price, or I can just keep it and play all the way through it. It works so well, and it should work so well, and it kind of blows my mind that it took me this long to try it.

Of course, there are downsides. I’ve always rather liked the fact that I have what basically amounts to a huge lending library of games that people can come over and borrow. I like being able to provide that service.
But man, the money. The money I am going to save. Just think of the money. I’ve already started holding myself back on some games. I mean, some are inevitable. But I’m pruning down what games are must-buys. It feels so good.

Oddly enough, it feels so good.

Excitebots is pretty cool.
It just frustrates me.

The game concept is solid. “How about we make a racing game where getting first place is less important than what you do in the race?” They asked this question, and they came up with a game where everything you do, from solid turns, to jumps, to spinning about, to crashing your vehicle, all earns you different numbers of stars. At the end of the race, it’s the one with the most stars that wins, not the one in first place. Granted, winning the race gives you a hefty star bonus, and that shouldn’t be ignored if you want to win. But it’s less important than what you do in the race. Much less.

It does some really crazy things, too. Instead of standard attack items, when you hit a present box, sometimes you’ll get a tambourine, and have to tap out Shave and a Haircut to get a nice star bonus. Or you’ll grab a dart and have to throw it at a target as you drive past. Question Marks on the field make hills appear out of nowhere, or a set of bowling pins ahead of you that gives you stars if you drive through them for a strike. It’s these crazy mini-games in the middle of races that make the races themselves exciting, not to mention how much your little robot bounces and flies around constantly. It’s a lot of fun.

But when I have trouble beating the second to last course of the second set of races, something is wrong. This is a Wii game. It should have a hard difficulty mode, but it shouldn’t be so hard that I have to try a long race a number of times in the double digits to beat it. It should just be fun, let me play, and unlock things. If I don’t win, who cares?
But this game cares. And it makes me unhappy. I wanted to see it all. But I have no want to perfect my skill at this game. I just wanted to play stupid racing game for awhile. The fact that it doesn’t support 4 player split screen means I want to play it even less, because I can’t drag a nice group of friends over to play it.

No, this game has some really great ideas, but it doesn’t really know what people want in difficulty. Okay, not what people want, what I want. So I’m pretty completely done with it.

It’s frustrating when such a nice, core casual experience goes sour like that.

I’ve said that I’m a fan of the animes that involve Mah Jong. For whatever reason, these shows continue to be mind-blowingly entertaining to me. But it’s only so much fun to watch a game being played, even if it’s being played intensely dramatically. Eventually, you want to play it yourself. But damn, Riichi Mahjong (the Japanese variant used in all these shows) is very complex, and whats worse, it’s almost impossible to find a place, in English, to play it, especially against a computer. (Seriously, you Google Mahjong, and it’s all Solitaire. All of it.) I tried the main online Japanese site to play Riichi Mahjong, called Tenhou. But there’s a big language barrier to get into games, not to mention that games on there are played with an incredibly strict time limit. Like, discard in 10 seconds or we discard for you. Completely not conducive to learning the game.

But I didn’t let that deter me. If I wanted to learn the game, I needed to play it, and that required some little tiny portable game. What better place for such a game than the iPod Touch? So I poked around, and looked what Riichi games there were on offer. Most were all in Japanese, and the rest were Solitaire or shitty. But there was one game, simply called “Mahjong Mobile.” The description in the app store is some incredible engrish. “And the slider is done in the tap and the tile is discard.” Intense. But I don’t mean to make fun of this guy. What’s important is the English in the game, and it’s completely correct and understandable. His app is totally worth the 3 bucks if you want some Riichi Mahjong practice.

The previously mentioned slider is actually, from what I hear, a very nice innovation. Since so many tiles have to be on screen at a time, it can be difficult to actually tap the tile you want to discard. The solution Mr. Matano came to was a slider, which you move along the bottom of the screen. As it moves, it points to the various tiles. Tap the slider to discard the tile it is pointing to. Simple.
The game also has many features perfect for the English speaker learning the game. For example, it lets you use the “American” tileset instead of the traditional one. This one is so much easier to parse because, instead of having the symbols on the tiles, which is especially hard to figure out in the Character suit without experience, it just has a little symbol for the suit and the number of the tile. So much easier to figure out and read at a glace. It also does the thing (which I hear hardcore players don’t like, but I appreciate) where it labels all discards that come from a draw as opposed to from their hand. The tiles players threw away immediately, in other words. This is a huge help in learning to read player’s ponds to figure out what to discard. I’m still rubbish at it, but it’s nice.

But yeah, it’s a solid game. It’s all understandable, so I can tell what it’s saying when it’s trying to tell me I don’t have enough fan to actually call Ron or Tsumo. It gives a results screen that can help explain what fan you have and such so you can figure it out. Sure, it isn’t as good as some sort of dedicated tutorial, but it’s a nice trial by fire, and since I don’t really give a shit if the computer embarrasses me and beats me, I’m having a good time learning it, playing a few hands here and there. It’s also a very podcast-friendly game (although it does the annoying thing where it shuts off the sound when you boot into it. But you can pull up the music controls in-game and just start it back up.) which I always appreciate. It doesn’t have many bells and whistles, but it’s a very solid program that sets out to do one simple thing and does it very well. I can highly recommend Mahjong Mobile to anyone wanting to try the Riichi rules out. It’s fun times.

Mirror’s Edge was a game that was kind of exciting to look at from a distance. Here was a game that not only looked unique, but was bringing mechanics you just don’t see anywhere to the table: first person parkour. Oh man, new and experimental, exactly what gaming needs, right? I mean, it’s going to be a bit rough around the edges, but it’ll still be fun, right?

Mirror’s Edge is not a game that likes you.

Maybe it’s because I’ve played Prince of Persia so recently, but this game just doesn’t want you to play it. Sure, Prince had some missteps. Combat wasn’t interesting, for example. But it also wasn’t frustrating, and the actual action of running, swinging, and jumping was completely enjoyable, if a little on rails.
Mirror’s Edge doesn’t let you get any fun out of running fast and making cool jumps until you’ve practiced and run through the level a time or two. Getting into a new area in Mirror’s Edge is mostly fraught with confusion about deciding where to go. This is supposed to be fixed with Runner’s Vision and the B button, which gives you a hint, but the hint just makes Faith look in a random direction and is completely useless, and Runner’s Vision only seems to highlight things when I don’t need it to. So many times I had no fucking idea where to go, and the game did absolutely nothing to help me. Even with a FAQ open, it was hard to figure out. I hate that.

But not running blazing fast all the time, that could be forgiven if the game would actual focus on that. That’s its appeal, and that’s why you want to play it. But the game has all kinds of arbitrary fight scenes where you have to use intense precision timing to disarm foes and then gun them down with horribly-implemented shooter mechanics. Hopefully you do them perfectly, because even on easy, I died constantly. Easy was supposed to make the combat easier, and yet I would fail time and again. I can’t imagine how pointlessly hard it is on other difficulties. To make matters worse, the checkpoint system is so bad that, even if you manage to survive one of these gun-firing combats, if you fail the jump right after it, which you might do, depending on how complicated it is, then guess what? It’s time to re-do the fight.

It was in just this situation, in the 7th level, that I said “Fuck this noise” and sent it back to Gamefly. I don’t need games that frustrate me. My leisure time need not be filled with things that make me angry. So fuck you, Mirror’s Edge. You had so much potential. Come back when you want to entertain me, eh?

Thanks to Pepsi, I have like a million Wii points (okay, as of this writing 8700) so I decided to spend some on a game or something. Cause, you know, what else am I going to do with them? I want to save some for the new Pokemon Mystery Dungeons and Pokemon Scramble and, of course, Cave Story, but I’ve still got plenty. Might as well enjoy something, right?

So I jumped into the painfully-long-named Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a Darklord since I had heard some pretty decent things. Those decent things were pretty correct, but man, it’s a little harder than I had hoped.

First off, I just want to say, and this is kind of a stupid problem, but I am really unhappy to find I was playing a character. The game is called “MY life as a Darklord” and the whole game mechanic is very abstracted. I expected to type in a name, and have little minions talk to me through the television screen and whatnot, but instead I get to play as this annoying girl. Yay.

Still, it doesn’t really affect the gameplay, which is quite good. The game is a Tower Defense game, because you are defending your magical, evil, flying tower. It uses some ideas from traditional Tower Defense, and is very similar, as you’re setting up things ahead of time and letting them happen, but it is very much its own thing, which I appreciate.
Basically, you build floors to your evil tower. Each floor type has a different evil artifact which can give various effects to the floor, such as dealing damage to adventurers who enter it, or protecting your monsters. Then you summon monsters onto the floors to fight the adventurers. They have a simple R-P-S system in place for weaknesses and strengths of these monsters: Melee beats Ranged, Ranged beats Magic, Magic beats Melee. Etc.
So, okay, you’re setting up “towers,” essentially. Big deal, right? Well, what makes the game interesting is how adventurers climb the tower. They show up either individually, or in parties, and try to scale to the top to break the Dark Crystal. When a “good guy” gets to a floor, they will turn on their combat timer (which is different for each time of adventurer) and then get into combat with the monsters on that floor. After the timer runs out, then they scamper up to the next floor. The catch is that only one adventurer can be on a floor at a time. So if another adventurer, done with a battle, tries to climb up to a floor where his buddy is already doing battle, he just skips it and goes right on to the next floor. So when a party of three adventurers rolls in? Well, I hope you have a lot of floors, because they get to skip quite a few of them.
It’s this mechanic that really makes the game feel unique. If I put a lot of monsters on a floor, I can deal more damage to the adventurers, but their combat timers stop when attack animations are going off. That means I can stall people on the floor for a long time if I use a quick monster that attacks many times for little amounts of damage, but that can also be a hindrance, keeping the adventurer from moving on while three of his buddies skip the traps on that floor. It’s actually quite a lot to have to try to juggle.

What gets me though, is the game’s difficulty. It is pretty brutal. You really have to learn exactly what types of adventurers are coming on a level and how to stop them, or you will, very quickly, continue to fall flat on your face. I’m already having trouble and I’m not very far in the game. I suppose I could buy some of the $60 (!!) of DLC for this $10 game to make it easier, but… no. That’s retarded. Extremely retarded. At least the obscene amounts of DLC in My Life as a King (which I still need to try sometime, too) gave you more and more stuff to do in the game the more you bought.
Then again, I plunk down money every month for IoTMs that make KoL easier. But donating for something in a free, indie game made by a small company just has significantly more feelgood value than giving the Squenix behemoth money for content they didn’t put in the game.

Still, I think it’s a fairly neat game, and if you’re the kind of person who likes trying many different things to figure out how something works, you’ll probably love this one. I honestly just kind of hope they port this to the iPhone. It would work really well there. The way the tower gives the game a vertical look, especially. And surely Squenix wants that money! But who know.

So, Telltale sent me an e-mail saying that the last episode of Wallace and Gromit’s Grand Adventures, the Bogey Man, was out! And as I’m downloading it, I’m like “Wait a second, I never played the third episode.” So I did. It’s called Muzzled!. It was fun. I also got bonus points for spotting Jake Rodkin of Idle Thumbs fame in the credits.

But yeah, I’ve talked in previous Wallace and Gromit blog posts about how Telltale tends to have a very clear act structure. However, I was kind of sad that they dropped actually pointing that out in this episode. I thought it worked very well just giving in and bringing attention to it during The Last Resort. There’s nothing too out of the ordinary from the act structure in this one, besides one or two deviations, or at least things that I noticed.

First off, the other two games had you starting out as Wallace, in order to complete this or that to, you know, set up the wacky situation. This dispenses with that, and you only control Wallace in the third act, which is kind of interesting. It works, of course, but I’m always more of a fan of controlling someone who can tell me helpful and hopefully humorous things about what I click on, so I’m not always a big fan of using Gromit the whole time. So that’s a deviation. There’s also a fairly big deviation story-wise, in that there is a villain in this episode. That’s not a spoiler or anything, it’s, you know, kind of completely painfully clear the first time you see him, not to mention the title of the episode is Muzzled!. This too, is an interesting deviation, because suddenly the puzzles revolve less around dealing with Wallace’s wacky hijinks and more around, you know, normal adventure game stuff. It’s a nice break, but perhaps not as true to the source material.

In any case, the main thing I wanted to point out is that there is a very clear example of the game training me for later. A good example of what I’m talking about would be Portal. It trains you to deal with future, more complicated situations, by starting you with easy situations, and then introducing an extremely similar, but more complicated one, so you can see what else you can do. This is the first time I can recall a Telltale game really doing that, and awhile it’s not going to go unnoticed by anyone, the fact that the solutions to the puzzles in the first act become the building blocks to solutions in the second act lets those puzzles be a little bit more complex, which is certainly appreciated.

Still, the lack of Wallace for most of the game cuts down on the amount of dialog. I mean, I don’t doubt that it takes a lot of hard work to keep the game working as intuitive as it is without a protagonist that can talk, but at the same time, I really do take these Telltale episodes as interactive little TV shows or whatever. I really am mostly there for the dialog, as the puzzles can be fun, but are rarely so awesome as to carry it by itself. So I worry this one might end up being the weaker episode of the set. Still, it’s certainly fun. More fun than, say, the Bone games.
(Aside: Along with my purchase of Tales of Monkey Island, I got any Telltale game free. Well, the only one I didn’t own was The Great Cow Race, the second Bone game. I’ve tried to play it, I really have, but it is so painfully obvious how far Telltale has come. Their games are so much more polished, and so much more fun, and the fact that I’ve never read Bone makes me have basically 0 interest in what’s going on. So when I say this is the weakest of the Wallace and Gromit games, it’s still much more interactive, well-paced, and fun than that. Probably better than many of the first Sam and Max episodes, too.)
So yeah, play it. And I’ll get to The Bogey Man soon. Maybe. You never know.

So my latest Gamefly conquest was Punch-Out!! (the two exclamation points are important, apparently) the sorta-remake sorta new game for the Wii.

Note that I didn’t even try the motion controls. Just the first match with Glass Joe showed me that it would be a tiring and inaccurate exercise that I wanted nothing with. I played it NES style, all the way.

And man. For all the talk about “looks good for a Wii game” that people throw around, Punch-Out!! looks gorgeous. I’d be completely happy with graphics like these on the 360. The characters are so expressive and alive, and they get all injured and everything… it is just fantastic to watch. It just goes to show you that a good visual style trumps millions of polygons any day. At least in my opinion.

As far as the gameplay goes, though, there isn’t much to say. If you’ve played the original Punch-Out! then you’ve played this game. It controls exactly the same, and it handles just as wonderfully. I haven’t played the original in long enough to remember, but from what I’ve heard, the various boxers you know and love act similarly to what you remember, but are different enough to still challenge. In the end, though, it’s one part puzzle, one part memorization, and two parts reflexes. There’s always that time period of figuring the boxer out, and what you have to do, and that is certainly fun. But in the end, it all comes down to training yourself to make those dodges at the right times.

It’s because of those reflexes that I didn’t “beat” the game. I mean, I beat the game. I beat Mr. Sandman, I got myself a Title Belt. But then the game throws out “Title Defense Mode.” This is a great idea: it’s the same boxers, but their weaknesses are gone, or modified. Title Defense Glass Joe murdered me completely. Granted, it was clear that I could beat him, if I kept at it. I knew it was possible. But I also knew that, a few fighters down, would come a boxer that I could not beat without so much frustration and memorization that it wouldn’t be fun.
So I let Glass Joe keep the belt. The guy deserves a break.

In the end, I’m very happy to have gotten to play Punch-Out!!. It really is a lot of fun, and fans of the old school game really should give it a shot. But unless you really, really, really enjoy memorizing these fights, or are just, I don’t know, much much better at your reaction time than I am, this is really a rental. A really, really awesome rental, but a rental none the less. I rented it, I’m done with it, and I am happy.

Gods, just look at this shit. How can I wait for Beatles Rock Band?
HOW CAN I WAIT?

It’s just going to be so intense. So intense. So intense.
I apologize for the excitement, but it is endless.

But man, it just opens up a whole new can of worms. After watching that video way more times than was healthy, I went into a happy dream world of September 9th (Okay, probably more like September 11th, (NEVAR FORGET) since I’m going to be getting it from Amazon.) where I am rocking the shit out with my friends and then, it hit me: Are my instruments up to snuff?

I mean, I own at least 4 plastic guitars. But my GH2 one is broken, Essner keeps claiming that my Rock Band one is broken too, though I don’t believe him. My GH3 wireless guitar has this battery that is never charged and fills me with anger, and my drum kit… well, I’ve had to replace the pedal on it again, and it’s probably going to break again, and if we get back into Rock Band really hardcore, which I hope happens with the Beatles coming out, I just can’t believe that the drum heads won’t break again either.

Basically, it comes down to the fact that it would be nice to have a new Drum Kit and a new Guitar. But is that really worth paying $250 bucks for the big pack? Man, I don’t know. And the individual Beatles guitars, though really fucking cool, are $90 by themselves. I have to keep my mind on my money more than ever before. That is a lot of cash.

Just got to stay positive. Of course everything will work. It’ll all be fine. And if it isn’t? Stores are desperate to unload all of these plastic instruments. Surely I can find a cheap guitar somewhere or something. It won’t be as cool as the Beatles replica guitars, but what are you gonna do.

But seriously, man… I have to keep waiting for this. No fair.

So, did you hear? Magic 2010: the 11th Edition that comes out in 2009 is out! In 2009! Already! Wow! So, you know, that means we’ve gotta draft it. I mean, we just had to, right? So last Tuesday, we got to it.

I walked into the draft claiming I was going to force Black for no reason. Jonathan was claiming he was going to force opening three Planeswalkers. We all claimed that Justin Spaeth was going to take all the Lightning Bolts. (Gods, seriously, I am so pissed at Wizards for reprinting that card. Ugh.) Two of these things came true. Jonathan only opened one Planeswalker.

But seriously, I’m not too sure what I was thinking. Spaeth opened his first pack, and announced his rare was Royal Assassin. Obviously he is going to be running Black, and he did. It was really kind of stupid for me to force Black. And yet, Doom Blades, Tendrils of Corruption, and Assassinates kept getting passed to me, and I couldn’t let them go. Even though I was joking, I ended up forcing Black.
Still, it worked out well for me. I ended up B/u with a huge amount of removal. Sure, I was counting on a bunch of small fliers to get my damage in and whatnot, but eh, such is a tried and true Black/Blue strategy.

And it worked really well, actually. I was kind of a complete dick to everyone, removing thing after thing. Bam Bam Bam! I did some major ass-kicking. Jonathan was having some serious Mana-flood issues that really kind of ruined his surprisingly strong-looking mill deck unluckily, and so I beat him easily. Spaeth’s Black/Red deck gave me some trouble, but in the end I managed to get enough evasion to defeat him in some tense rounds. Essner was the only one I didn’t best. He had too much lifegain for my little creatures sneaking in after I murdered things, and always managed to turn the game around after I had him down to like three, and then he regained some life… it was unfortunate.
So I went 2 and 1. But oh well, I was sort of the winner since I tied with Spaeth, and I beat him. Or so we said. We don’t care too much about wins and losses. (says the person who just spent several sentences talking about wins and losses.) It’s all about building that deck and then seeing it actually work well. In that case, I completely succeeded. The deck really felt like a well-oiled machine. I did a great job this time around.
Almost makes me want to build a deck like it. But that would really get me hated right off the table.

But yeah, Magic 2010: the 11th Edition that comes out in 2009 really does seem like a pretty neat core set. The new stuff keeps it fresh, and it really seems designed for more interesting draft play than previous core sets. Previous core set drafts didn’t seem nearly as dynamic and action-packed as this one did. They tended to be more of a plodding forward kind of game without big swings. In that regard, I pretty well think this set is a success.
Then again, I’ve only played one draft. Who knows. Heh.

I was so excited about Tales of Monkey Island. So much so that I threw down my $35 the very day it was announced. No waiting. No nothing. Then what did I do?

Why, I waited most of a month before actually playing the first episode, The Launch of the Screaming Narwhal, of course. C’est la vie.

BUT HOW WAS IT?

Telltale has its own brand of humor, and while I’ve always enjoyed it, it is different than that of Monkey Island. So there was a little worry there. I feel like what ended up was a little mixture of both. It feels like Monkey Island, in no small part due to the vocal talents of Dominic Armato, who is still wonderful as Guybrush. His delivery and most of what Guybrush says is spot on. Completely spot on. Everyone else is a little more Telltale than Monkey Island. Still, I didn’t mind. I very much enjoyed all the humor.

It was also obvious that they kicked the puzzles up a notch from their normal fare, as well. This… I liked less so. Normally I rarely have to look up a solution in a Telltale game. At most, I look up a hint for one puzzle. I looked up three different solutions to stave off frustration in this episode. This didn’t ruin the fun, as I do it for the conversations and whatnot, but man, I wasn’t expecting that. One puzzle, especially, I know I NEVER would have figured out without looking something up. Not going to spoil anything, but it was just so non-intuitive.
I mostly blame all of this on the hint system. Normally, Telltale’s hint system is really good. At the basic setting, if you’re standing around in one place trying to solve something, your character normally throws out humorous little quips that give you hints. I appreciate that. But it just seemed weirdly balanced in this game. It kept CONSTANTLY giving me hints on the treasure maps, which I needed no help with, and giving me no hints at all on the puzzles I was stuck on. Something seemed off. But hopefully they’ll get that fixed in the next episode. They’re good at that.

But seriously, the Treasure Maps. I have to agree with the press’s take: There was absolutely no reason to pad out the game length by making me solve multiple maps like that. That was pretty silly. I mean, I don’t mind it being the little separate minigame outside the game for little downloadable prizes? I think that’s a neat idea. But I didn’t really need to do that twice. Wandering about in a maze once is enough for me, thanks.

But yeah, Monkey Island is back in a wonderful way, thanks to Telltale. Pretty well the only way it could be better is if they spend obscene and non-sensible amounts of money on 2D animation, and somehow got Tim Schafer and Ron Gilbert back to write the whole thing. But those weren’t going to happen, and I’m okay with that. I very much look forward to the future episodes. (Even if it’s kinda bullshit you can’t buy these episodes a la carte… doesn’t affect me though.)