The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

My latest Gamefly rental and playthrough was that of Prince of Persia. Not the old one. The new one that they decided to just name Prince of Persia. You know, the baby game where a magical girl saves you every five seconds so you don’t die? That one?

It was a pretty damn fun game.

I mean, sure, it was shitty of them to lock the real ending behind 10 dollars of DLC. (which I didn’t even try for) Their combat system could have used a significant amount of work, seeing as it was extremely repetitive, and repeating 4 extremely similar bosses over and over certainly didn’t help that.

But it was fun. Really.

I’ve talked before about how awesome it is to play a game that is just fun, and doesn’t try to be retardedly challenging or whatever. That is pretty well exactly what Prince of Persia is. You are never in any risk of losing any more than maybe a minute’s progress at any point in time. You can just sit back and enjoy jumping like crazy along walls and swinging from poles and all that stuff. If you miss a jump, no big deal. You start back the last time you were on solid ground, and besides one or two locations, the game is smart enough to give you areas of solid ground at regular intervals, so you never fall too far behind.
The game also does characterization mostly right. Although it would have been better to have the conversations happen while actually playing the game, the conversations between the Prince and Elika are quite entertaining. They have a very nice, fun banter going, and you’ll listen to them because they’re so much fun. What’s more, the animations also do a very good job of conveying their relationship. Having the Prince excuse himself as he moves past Elika on a ledge or pulling her up on his back as he scales a wall is just these little simple things that make them seem a bit closer. I think it’s rather neat. Add into that the cliffhanger ending, which is handled with game mechanics in a very clever way, and you have some fairly solid, if not particularly deep characters. They’re a lot of fun.

Overall, though, I’m glad I never bought Prince of Persia. I think I might have been a lot harder on it had I paid $60 for it or whatever. But it is a damn fun experience, and it is completely worth your time to play.
Unless you’re, I dunno, someone who demands that every game be like I Wanna Be The Guy. Then you’re probably out of luck.

I like music game.
There is music game on iPhone.
Music game is called Mevo and the Grooveriders: Galactic Tour.
It’s good.
Buy it.

…

Okay, fine.

So, this game came out on Steam, and it was called Mevo and the Grooveriders. I was interested, because it’s a music game, and I am a person who loves their music games, but unlike most good indie games, I heard absolutely zero buzz around this one, so I gave it a pass.
Then, John Davidson aka “The reason I still listen to ListenUP”, talks about Mevo and the Grooveriders: Galactic Tour on the iPhone. He says it’s some sort of Mario platformer with music and it’s good. I go “hm” and then promptly forget about it.
Two days later, I open up the app store, and there it is on the front page. And it’s a dollar. So I buy it.
The next day, I get to work way too early, so I boot it up in front of the time clock.

It’s really fun stuff.

The game is really simplistic. Mevo, the little red dude, walks and jumps his way across this platformer world. When he gets to an arrow, you push it in time with the music. There are only two kinds of arrows. That’s basically it.
But man, they use those two arrows beautifully. Across the five levels currently in the game (Apparently it started with three, and they’ve added two more with free updates, claiming that they will slowly add all the content from the PC version) hitting the buttons in time gets to be quite the challenge. There are difficult rhythms, but the best part is that the rhythms themselves make sense, and don’t seem like they are cheating just to up the difficulty. They fit pretty well perfectly with the songs.
And the songs! They’re completely original compositions made for the game, and they’re quite good. You can’t help but nod your head in time with them. This kind of solid indie soundtrack is exactly what an indie music game needs. It’s great. Of course, since it’s a music game, you can’t listen to your own music while playing. Normally that pisses me off in an iPod app, but this is for a good reason, so I let it slide.

The biggest worry is the fact that there are no buttons for you to hit on the iPod, and this is a game designed around buttons. The game would still probably control a little better with physical buttons, as it would be easier to hit very rapid combinations with tactile feedback. However, you couldn’t ask for better virtual buttons. They are perfectly spaced so you can have a thumb on each and hold the thing and they aren’t all picky, so they respond very well. So have no fear there.

Basically, even with just five levels and three difficulty settings, this is a great $1 buy. If they do put in all the levels from the PC version, it will be an amazing $1 buy. If you like music games at all, you really should probably pick this one up. You aren’t going to be disappointed by it.

There hasn’t been a game I’ve bought that’s been more of a hit than Dominion. And why shouldn’t it be a hit. The game has a completely genius design based around building your deck while you play, and is incredibly easy to pick up while being strategically interesting and fun all around. It really is a winner.

So, of course, when I heard about Dominion: Intrigue, the stand-alone expansion for Dominion which can be played alone, or mixed with the cards from the original set? Man, I was right there. Pre-ordering it was basically the reason I ordered the Big Box of Board Games.

It didn’t disappoint.

Even though Dominion: Intrigue is Stand-Alone, I really don’t think it works very well as an introduction to the game. There are no simple cards, because the simple cards are all in the normal Dominion. However, that doesn’t mean this isn’t a good expansion and game. Far from it. I think it’s completely worth the title of Dominion’s first expansion.

Options Options Options seem to be the name of the game with the cards in Intrigue. So many of them, like Ironworks, Steward, and Pawn, present a choice of many smaller effects instead of one big effect, like most of the cards in the base set. This allows them to fill the roles of some of the more necessary cards from the base set, while still playing fairly differently. Pawn, for example, is just a really great card all around, letting you choose 2 different options from the list of +1 card, +1 buy, +1 action, and +1 gold. The correct choice is not obvious as many times as it is clear, and I think that’s really great.
There are also a lot of twists on other cards. Wishing Well was quickly my favorite card from the new set. This card basically works like Village, but has a luck/guessing aspect to it, in that if you can correctly guess the top card of your deck, you get to draw an additional card. That kind of guessing is just fun. Shanty Town also fills that Village role, but with an interesting twist: You always get +2 actions, but you only get +2 cards if your hand doesn’t have any actions in it besides the Shanty Town you just played. Trying to set up chains with that card is additionally fun.
There are also some really painful new attack cards that run the game out incredibly quickly. Saboteur is just completely and utterly mean. It makes opposing players flip cards off the top of their deck and trash them, adding in a lower-costed card. This is devastating if someone flips over a Province or something. (This happened to Spaeth. Totally dicked over!) The Swindler card also has opponents flipping over the top card of their deck and trashing it, but instead, the player who played Swindler has to replace the card with one of the same value. Lots of dicking potential here, but at least your Provinces are safe, being the only card worth 8. Still, that kind of constant trashing makes the game end much, much faster!
The real power cards, though, are the hybrid Victory point cards. These cards have an additional affect, as well as being worth points. For example, there is absolutely no reason why everyone won’t buy out the Great Hall deck if it’s in the game immediately. It is just so good. Harem is also extremely powerful, and I found myself picking that over a similarly-priced Gold every single time. At first, these cards seemed TOO powerful, but the more I think about it, the more okay these sorts of cards are. The game is designed so you just don’t play with card types you don’t like, and since buying them out ends the game quicker, putting a single card out there that’s higher valued than other options makes the game end significantly faster, affecting gameplay and potentially making the powerful nature of these dual-natured cards less impactful.

Still, though, if you like Dominion, buying this expansion is a no-brainer. Mixing these new decks in with the old will provide tons more entertainment, not to mention that if you mix them, there are now rules to play with 6 players, which is always welcome. I mostly just worry about Dominion: Seaside, the non-stand alone expansion coming out later this year. Is the well deep enough to support another 26 Kingdom decks? We’ll see. I’ll certainly be there day 1.

Awhile back, I ordered a big box of board games. They have arrived, and we are now playing through them and enjoying them. Etc. So here is some of my first impressions of the games within said big box.

One of the games I bought almost completely on a whim was Race for the Galaxy. I didn’t know anything at all about it, besides it was a card game (which is a huge plus in my book) and that several people on Talking Time seemed to like it. So some days ago, when the box came in, we busted that sucker out and gave it a try.

Damn, this game is complicated.

This is not a game you get right on the first, or even perhaps the second gameplay session. Each game card is partially COVERED in obtuse symbols. Each player is given a full page cheat-sheet for these symbols. Depending on differences in coloration, cards might play completely different. Some elements of cards actually don’t matter unless you add in an expansion set, but are just there in the base set. It’s really weird, and not for the weak of heart. This isn’t a game you’re going to be teaching your non-gamer parents or anything.

Still, once you start to get into it, the game starts to show off its fairly clever mechanics. The main idea of the game is that there are 5 phases to a turn, and each player picks a phase to get a special bonus in, in secret, at the start of the turn. The catch is that unless a player picks a bonus for that phase, it doesn’t happen. So if nobody picks the Explore phase bonus, no player gets an Explore phase that turn. This means it’s actually impossible to play all 5 phases in a turn, since there are only 4 players, max. It’s pretty interesting.

The other thing that I find interesting is the fact that the cards in your hand are both your money and your options. (options, options…) You have to discard cards to put things in play, but then you’re also throwing away things you can do… it’s a pretty solid way of making a currency without having another currency. (Though they then kind of throw that out the window with the “Goods” thing on Planets.)

Anyway, this game has a huge learning curve, but already, by the end of our second game, we were starting to get the hang of it. I think in another game or two, this will be really fun. We’ll have to see how it goes, though. Such learning curves can really kill the game, but it’s clear that underneath it, there is a really clever strategy game here. Hopefully we can find it.

Gears of War 2 ain’t nuthin’ special.
It’s the same game, with the same ridiculous dialog, and essentially the same weapons, with some new locations, new gimmicks, and new plot that doesn’t make any fucking sense. It’s completely from the “longer, better, more bad-ass” school of game design.

But you know what? That’s pretty alright.

Due to my new Gamefly subscription, I put some of the co-op games I’ve always meant to play on there. I wasn’t going to play through them alone or more than once, but they would be a good ride. Gears 2 fell under this, and it was the first game I got! (Of course, unluckily, RE5, another co-op game, was the second game I got. I didn’t need two co-op only games, Gamefly!) So I sat down with Jonathan and Spaeth, alternating, as I played through the whole game, shooting some dudes from behind cover and yelling out my witty catchphrase, “Eat shit and die!”

It’s a fun time. The co-op is well-enough designed, and the base shooter gameplay is still as good as it ever was, because it is exactly the same as in Gears of War. The “we’re separated” sequences are shorter, to minimize frustration, which is nice, and now your AI partners can revive you, which also helps lower the difficulty. The way you and your co-op buddy can pick different difficulty levels is also appreciated. Jonathan picked Hardcore for most of the way through, since he played through Gears multiple times on higher difficulty levels, while I just stuck with Normal for the casual fun I wanted. We died just about the same number of times, so the difficulty system must have been doing something right.
There are many more “gimmick” levels than before, and while some suck or are kind of annoying (It’s just frustrating flailing around on a Reaver where you can’t hit anything) I’d say the game is probably better as a whole for the changes in pace. It is certainly a longer, and more complete game than Gears 1.

But yeah, the new adjusted Locust gun is pretty neat, and the Flamethrower is pretty fun… but it’s just more Gears. If you get this, you know what you are getting into. The only thing I’m sad about is that I didn’t get to try Horde mode before I sent it back… but RE5 is awaiting for my co-op time, and I wanted to get something more single-player oriented… like, say, a little Red Faction: Guerrilla. So into the mailbox it went.
Fun times, though. Fun times.

Sometimes I have my moments where I realize “Holy shit, I really am the sort of person who has a degree in English.” Mostly, these come in the form of inspiration for English Major-y papers, where I look at something and realize I could analyze it in a way where I could add in research, over-explain it, and then get myself some A’s or whatever. I realize that I could write a paper about a text that would fit right in with all of the scholarly articles I have had to look at in my college career. It’s kind of weird when I do it, as I’ve always thought I wasn’t the sort to WANT to do that, but at the same time, I suppose I have developed some skill in it.

Most recently, I was watching Endurance Run: Persona 4 and I realized there was an extremely good paper in there.
Of course, I’m not going to write the paper. So I’ll just sort of summarize my thesis here, I suppose.

Basically, there is something to be said, culturally, about the main character in Persona 4. The protagonist is your classic jRPG silent protagonist, but he also has a special power that other characters in your party don’t. His guiding Tarot card is the Fool, 0, and as such he can make multiple Persona and switch between them at will.
Personas are “facades that help you overcome life’s hardships.” They are your personality, and how you deal with things. All the characters in your party have them, and they reflect the person that the character is. However, with each Persona comes certain strengths and weaknesses, represented by the normal elemental Rock/Paper/Scissors that you see in such games. Because each other main party member is stuck with their one persona, which is their personality, they will always have weaknesses. The Protagonist does not have these weaknesses, as he can switch away to Persona who are strong against certain attacks to protect himself, not to mention have access to a much wider variety of attacks. He is a much more powerful character because of his lack of one distinct personality.
However, this ability comes at a cost. Like I said, the protagonist is your standard jRPG silent protagonist. You are given choices to make, but for the most part, they are empty choices. There is nothing the Protagonist can do to affect the world, or to make choices or changes in his life. Because he is not a distinct character of his own, his life is not guided by his choices, but rather guided by those around him, as well as a mysterious voice that tells him he’s tired and so on.

Hopefully you see where I’m going with this. There is something to say, culturally, about Japan, or at least the creators of Persona 4, considering the ability to be a non-entity, and move between personalities at will, to be a good thing, and to mean you have greater power. The game seems to promote losing your self-identity. That is… not something I really agree with. But damn, it could make a good paper. Surely there are Japanese cultural studies that I could pull in as well, to give additional real-life analysis. It would be one hell of an English Major paper.

Man, I’m kind of lost, though, aren’t I? When I’m thinking about these things in my free time? I am pretty clearly going to be an English major forever. Heh. Oh well.

On a whim, as I do, I picked up a game because it was cheap. (Only $2.50!) It is called Chains. This is its website, but don’t buy it from there, because even if the sale I bought it during is off by the time you read this, it’s still going to be cheaper on Steam, where I got it.

It is a small game, but a really great game.

There are many things that Indie games try to do. Many try to be artsy without being fartsy, but do tend to be a little farsty. Still, art games can be cool. I mean, I loved the shit out of The Path, for instance. But there is yet again another angle where indie games can go: Taking an idea, and exploring it completely. Putting time and effort into a concept that no big developer would try, just to see where it would go. That is what Chains is. I like it.

At it’s heart, Chains draws a lot of it’s gameplay from a Sega Swirl or something of that nature. You’ve got these colored balls. You click on one, and drag a “chain” along to other balls of the same color. If you chain at least three, the balls disappear. That’s basically it.

What happens, though, is that these balls are physics objects. They fall from the sky, into various stages. (There are 20 in the game in all) At first, you are tasked with just clearing them, but soon, the objectives begin to mix themselves up. Instead of clearing X balls, it suddenly becomes “Make a Chain of 40” or “Go for 5 minutes without 10 balls dropping off of the board.” Again, these challenges soon become old hat, but then the stages themselves start to change from simple containers to machines. Keeping balls from falling out of a cup is easy, but keeping them from falling off of the board when they’re sitting on top of timed pistons that send them flying every 10 seconds is much more difficult. They even add a completely new mechanic, that of “colorless” balls that you have to apply color to in order to solve puzzles.

That’s what makes this game a joy to play. Every stage is an extra layer of complexity upon what the last stage showed you. It is constantly building, more and more, and pushing this very simple mechanic to its extreme limit, and I love it. It’s fun to play, as most puzzle games are, and it’s always exciting to get to a new stage, look at it, and go “how the fuck am I supposed to do that one?” and then figure it out. It does require a little bit of fast timing and twitch reflexes in some stages, but most make for a very relaxing, mind-taxing kind of experience. It’s just really neat.

Would I have paid $10 for it? Probably not. I only have like 2 stages left. Would I have paid 5? Probably. And am I extremely happy at $2.50? Hell yes. Chains is an example of indie games done right. If you like puzzle games, you really should pick this up and try it. I think you’ll enjoy it. And to the developers: This is BEGGING to be on iPhone in some fashion. It would control perfectly on there. Make it happen, and make yourself some money, okay?

Speaking of board games, we managed to get in another exciting game of Arkham Horror on the 3rd! Yay for Arkham Horror! This impromptu match against Eldritch forces pitted us against Glaaki. Luckily, we weren’t too afraid of some crazy lake slug, so we dug on in.

Essner, of course, started out the night on the right foot by drawing out, with his uncanny ability, the researcher with the amazing rack, Mandy Thompson. How he can constantly draw his favorite character is beyond me. Spaeth also got lucky and got the gangster, which is the character he always wants to play. Shauna, the newbie to the game, got the author, Jonathan got stuck with Ashcan Pete, and I ended up deciding to go with Dexter Drake, magician extraordinaire.
Our starting gear was… so so. Besides the gun Spaeth started with, nobody really got any weapons besides Shauna, who got a rifle. I had Shriveling, of course, because Dexter starts with it, but I also had a spell I had never had before and was interested in trying out: Alchemical Process. This spell basically let me spend a sanity to gain $3 bucks. I abused the hell out of that spell, buying me a magical sword and such… and driving myself insane because of it at least twice.

So I didn’t do much, besides using Call Friend to draw Spaeth, who somehow had like 16 bucks (thanks to him getting “untold riches” from a mysterious power… those untold riches being $8) and was up in Dunwich, to the Merchant District Streets to deal with that horrible Mad Bomber rumor where you have to pay like $4 an investigator to dispel it. Money is not easy to come by in this game, and you couldn’t let it lapse, because then every investigator would get an injury and a madness. It is a really shitty rumor. Anyway, I helped out with that, but spent most of the game in Arkham Asylum. I didn’t even go to a dimension once.

Still, Jonathan, Shauna, and Essner -REALLY- stepped it up and basically won the game for us. Somehow, they sealed like… every damn thing, even with Essner constantly getting really shitty items. (I gave him my magical sword to make him feel better, but I don’t think he put it to good use.) Glaaki was also having bad luck. He only had about like… 6 doom counters on him when Shauna sealed off the final gate and won the game. The only real threat to us was the fact that we were in Act II of the King in Yellow, and had no real weapons to fight Glaaki had he been summoned. If we had drawn The Next Act Begins! we would have been fucked. But we didn’t! We won! And the world was safe from crazy mutant slugs yet again.

People on Talking Time think it’s crazy that I am missing several of the Arkham Expansions. Granted, I would enjoy having them, but damn… they are kind of expensive. Instead of those expansions, I can buy several new games with new, neat experiences, which is what I did during the purchases described yesterday. Don’t think I didn’t debate picking up Innsmouth, Kingsport, and Black Goat of the Woods while I was picking out my board games! But in the end, Arkham is plenty in it’s current state. I may pick up another expansion at some point in the future, but we’ve only played like… 2 games since I got The King in Yellow. Things are still fresh. When it needs some jazz, then I shall expand.
Plus, some of those new investigators are crazy powerful. Power creep, anyone?

After, what… months? Month? We finally managed to schedule another play session of high-level DnD campaign. And man, it was an epic one, lasting into the wee hours of the morning and being entertaining! Maps that spanned literally every doodling surface we had! Puzzles! Destroying priceless art! Me having like a million action points and then not using them! Madness!

As we started exploring the temple that we got into last time, we realized it seemed very badly constructed (“I know it’s not a perfect hexagon, but I’m not redrawing it,” Jonathan said) and since there was another temple just right next door, we assumed this must be the beta test temple. I mean, obviously. Just, you know, to give the builders an idea of what the real temple will be like, and test a few things…

So yes, Templ(beta) was filled with many golems. Golems are the magical robots! And Liendshauf (I don’t know how to spell your German character name, man, back off!) found a remote control, and used it to bash many priceless works of art. We also found a rock, which Jonathan represented with a Dire Badger. “That is a very dire rock.” “That’s it. It must be a dire rock. It’s got those spikes all over it.”

The Dire Rock was a very formidable foe.

In any case, the whole building was based around some puzzle ACTION where this crazy system put up barriers to block our path that we could only switch when we were all in certain rooms, and we had to figure out how to traverse the whole temple (or templ, if you will) to get to the bottom. It was actually a pretty well-designed puzzle. I have to give Jonathan props for that. Then again, I was distracting everyone by telling jokes about how “I can’t use this key to open the door! I have to insert the key into the door! That’s like raping the door!” “But look how sluttily the door is dressed!” “Dammit, it is asking for it, isn’t it…” (I don’t think Shauna liked that particular joke. I blame Jick for making me make rape jokes.)

There were also some combats.

The first combat was against a whole bunch of Manticores. In searching for an image of a manticore on his iPhone (for Shauna did not know what a Manticore was) Spaeth came up with this image. That seems like a pretty good representation of the battle.
Or not.
Well, okay, basically, we all ended up clumped in the corner of this library except Spaeth, who charged right in. So he was basically being attacked from all sides while we all lobbed ranged attacks and heals in there. A highlight was me moving into position to use a bit of Magic item that heals 1d6, and got attack of opportunitied for like… 26 damage during the move. A good tradeoff, there!

There was also a very dramatic boss battle against a Mummy who may or may not have been a Werebear. He was a total dick, because I tried to talk to his spirit, being a Shaman and all, and he just punched me. It was probably because he was some sort of Ioun spirit. I decided that Sehenine didn’t much care for his stupid ass or stupid religion!
Spaeth was Immobilized for like… this whole fucking battle, so we basically were having to use all our teleporting skills and such to get him into position, seeing as he deals fucking Sicknasty amounts of damage and we needed him. The boss had some really crazy high amounts of damage dealings as well. We were getting hit for like… half our HP. Lucky that 3/5ths of our party are healers then, huh? It also helped when I used my newly gotten utility power that lets me teleport people to switch places with my spirit companion to yank our Cleric out of the way of a particularly intense attack that would have downed him. (Sorry, my highlights are the things that I did that were awesome. I am biased.)

All in all, it was a damn, damn fun time, and just goes to show how much of a shame it was that we don’t manage to get our schedules working to make that happen more often. Hopefully we can get back together soon. Templ RC 1 is waiting for some exploring!

I never played or had any need to play the original Mercenaries. It didn’t seem like a game I would enjoy at all. Mercenaries 2 was originally skipped for similar reasons, as well as due to their completely scary-ass box art. I don’t want to play as that guy. I don’t even want to have anything to do with that guy. It was never on my radar.

But Crackdown had weakened me to the whole open-world concept… and then I went and enjoyed Far Cry 2 so much, once I got it figured out…
So I was weak, and when I saw the game new for $10 in the Toys R Us clearance rack, well, I couldn’t pass it up. Especially since I had been jonsing to try Red Faction: Guerrilla. Here was a cheap replacement I could play until that game dropped in price! Perfect.

I fear, though, that Crackdown has really kind of ruined me on Open World games.
Crackdown was brilliant for many reasons, but one of the things that I don’t think is immediately apparent is that it didn’t have “missions.” Sure, you had a list of people to kill, and you had to eventually go kill them. But there was no “start” and “stop.” You just went for them if you wanted, or you didn’t. The game didn’t load an instance to give you a very guided experience that goes against what an open-world game actually does, you know? This is why I didn’t like Bully, and Mercenaries 2 is no different. There are all these missions (well, they’re called “contracts”) that you take on and have to do. What’s worse, the game doesn’t really penalize you for dying in the missions, letting you just retry them, but if you die outside of a mission, it costs you money and you lose all of your guns and are left with just a pistol. It is actively de-incentivizing you to explore, and instead to just take your helicopter to the next mission point and do the next mission. So you’re pretty well stuck in these missions, and the open world is just some pain in the ass to travel through to get to more missions. Sure, there are things to find in the world (such as large pallets of money that people are keeping in the middle of fields for no sane reason) and little tiny sidequests to take on (the factions point out “High Value Targets” you can capture and buildings you can raze for additional cash) but when you’re risking having to go through the pain of getting yourself re-equipped if you fail, it just doesn’t seem worth doing half the time.

Still, the gameplay itself is not bad. You can pick from three different Mercenaries, not just the one on the cover (although he has arguably the best perk associated with him: quicker regenning health) and then you run around, building your PMC and managing your relationships with these factions in order to get to the final boss and murder him for shooting you in the rear. The gunplay originally feels a little weird (the guns aren’t super-accurate, besides the sniper rifle, and it seems to take multiple shots to take someone down and you can never get ammo for it outside of buying it and air-dropping it to yourself) but I found myself quickly getting used to the fact that it’s nowhere near one shot, one kill, and that you just have to spray enemies for a little while to take them down. This does give you a really go reason to rush in and use Melee a lot, which is a one-hit-kill. (I think it knocks them out, actually, but same difference. I also think my Melee skills were improved by picking the girl Merc, who has a faster run speed so I could rush machine gun turmulents and whatnot and melee the gunners easier) You can buy and helicopter in vehicles and weapons and whatnot, but I really don’t know why you’d want to. It doesn’t really feel good to do so. Air-dropping in a box of ammo doesn’t feel more badass than murdering someone and taking their ammo, so I don’t know why I would, and I have yet to find a specialized weapon so good that I wouldn’t just use the rifles most of the generic enemies drop. There’s also no real reason not to just steal cars as they drive by if you need a vehicle, so I’ve never found a good reason to air-drop transports, either. I don’t know. For being what I assume was the core mechanic to make this game feel different, it doesn’t actually feel very useful. The only thing I really use is calling in the Helicopter for quick transport to other places on the map. There were, however, some missions where I would get free “call in the troops” air-drops, where I could call in helicopters that would drop in 3 grunts to fight for me? That felt pretty awesome, and was a great way to divert fire from me. I think I can buy those, too. Maybe I should be buying a bunch of those and using them more often.

The one thing that I actually really like about the game is that it makes no pretense that you’re not a bad person. There are pickups all over the map, as I said, but they aren’t normal video game collectibles, where it’s okay to take them because they are there just for you. You walk up to a fuel tank, and it says “Steal Fuel.” And you steal it. If the owners are around, they shoot at you. It’s a little touch, but I rather liked that. You just take it. If you’re taking a faction’s stuff, and they get pissed at you, well, just donate money to their war fund until they can’t ignore you any more. You do what you want. You are a very bad person, and not for some noble goal. You just are. I dunno, it’s refreshing not to have some bullshit explanation for every damn thing, and just let it be what it is.

But yeah, I don’t know. Mercenaries 2 is not a perfect game. If I had paid $60 bucks for it, I would probably have been displeased. But the basic elements that make open world games great are hiding in there, and it can be a pretty fun time, if you let it be. It is sure as fuck worth the $10 bucks I’ve paid for it, and after the like… two days straight of playing it, I’m pretty sure I’ve gotten my money’s worth.