The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

So I beat Ghostbusters: The Vidjeo Game.
Honestly, you could probably get away with renting it and then putting in serious time and energy into beating the single player during the rental period. But you should definitely play it. This is how you make a good licensed game, seriously.

The game brings the humor, as you would hope. It’s got all the voices of the cast, which is a wonderful thing indeed. These are things so many licensed games get wrong, I suppose, but the moment you heard they had the original cast, you knew this game was going to get that right.
So the exciting part is that the gameplay stands up against all the writing.
Granted, there is nothing TOO shocking. It’s fairly stock Third Person Shooter fare. (although most Third Person Shooters nowadays steal Gears of War’s cover system, and this has no cover system, so it almost feels a little fresh because of it.) But it’s very solid, mechanically. You get to wrangle ghosts into traps, which is tons of fun, but they also have “Corporeal” spirits to mix it up, which are bound to physical objects, so they can throw a wide variety of enemies at you. Often you’ll get a mix of ghosts you have to trap, and smaller, corporeal minions which you can just blow up with your proton stream without trapping, to make you have to make choices: Do I take out the big threats, or do I try to clear out the area first of the little guys to make trapping the big ghosts easier?

Your Proton Pack has the standard Proton Beam, which acts just like you expect and is a great general-purpose weapon. You can pretty well use it all game, if you want to. But since you are the “Experimental Equipment Technician” you also get a nice selection of upgrades and other “weapons.” (Although I find it odd that you are supposed to be the Guinea Pig testing all these new weapons, and yet all the other Ghostbusters use them, too. Not that I don’t appreciate the AI having the appropriate weapons for the job.) The first thing you get is your “Boson Dart,” which is basically like a rocket you can fire while shooting your Proton Beam. Then you get the “Shock Blast,” which works like a shotgun and feels completely awesome to use, the “Stasis Stream” which freezes enemies in place, the Slime Blower from the second movie, with attached “Slime Tether” which is basically a setup for environmental puzzles, and my favorite named one, the “Meson Collier.” Using the Slime Blower seems a little weak, but that’s okay because it’s useful for other things. All the other weapons have a great feel, and are effective in most situations, though there is always a best one for the job.

Throughout the game, you can also put on some goggles and scan things with your PKE Meter, Metroid Prime-style. Not only does this provide a tactical benefit, as it gives you extra money to use to buy upgrades, as well as tells you what different beams and whatnot a particular ghost is weak against, but it also is another vector for humor. There are multi-paragraph explanations for everything in the game, and they are all fairly entertaining to read. If you scan a ghost, you can be sure that Tobin’s Spirit Guide will have a full write-up of that Ghost’s history. The same if you find some sort of haunted or supernatural artifact. It’s a nice touch.

I played the game on “Experienced,” but I would probably suggest playing the game on Casual. Experienced isn’t hard, but I certainly didn’t feel like I gained anything by the times I had to restart a few difficult situations time and again. I’m just glad the game was smart enough to have a checkpoint before basically every large-scale combat scenario to keep the frustration to a minimum. But yeah, you aren’t missing anything by playing it on Casual, I don’t think. Go ahead and be a wuss.

But yeah, I’ve thoroughly, thoroughly enjoyed this game. It’s helped me realize that, more and more, what I want out of games isn’t difficulty, and it isn’t even some sort of clever new gameplay mechanic. It’s just something that’s purely and genuinely fun, and not frustrating. That is pretty well the exact definition of Ghostbusters: The Vidjeo Game. Genuine fun. Play it.

So Wal-Mart sells “draft packs.” It is three “random” boosters of Magic hidden behind a Foil land, so you can’t see what you’re getting. They are 11 dollars. Buying three packs alone would probably be at least 13. So, you know, a little discount, mixed with not having to run all over town to find enough packs (which is often an issue around here without going to the card store. It’s an awesome card store, but, you know, you are paying more that way) and with a little of the fact that I know two Wal-Mart employees to buy the cards with their discount, and you have the perfect excuse to buy these packs and draft with them.

So that’s what we did last night.

The first thing we noticed is that the packs in there aren’t as random as they might seem. Wizards of the Coast must have printed no less than 4 Billion Fifth Dawn packs, because man, I see them discounted constantly, all over the place, and every one of these packs that we bought had a Fifth Dawn booster in them. They also all contained an Eventide booster. This is better than Fifth Dawn. We have opened so, so many Fifth Dawn packs. Three of the Draft Packs also contained a Tenth Edition booster. For no reason, mine contained a Guildpact Booster instead.

So that was our combination. How did it go?

Jonathan drafted a rainbow deck that did well. We all tried to act shocked. Though the fact that he didn’t win WAS kind of shocking.
Spaeth pulled a Joiner Adept first thing, and then proceeded NOT to draft a rainbow deck for no reason whatsoever.
Essner ran a Redish deck with Nobilis of War to a very complete victory.

And me? Well, I drafted a Mono-Black deck based on Blind Creeper and Seize the Soul.
Yeah, I don’t know what I was thinking either.
I got a ton of recursion, in a whopping three Desecrator Hags and an Exhumer Thrull, but when you’re having to put Dross Crocodile in your deck because you have nothing above a 2/2? Well, you’re not going to do well. So I annoyed a lot with all my recursion, but did little. I managed to beat my match with Spaeth, though, simply based on him being extremely mana-flooded. So I got a pity win, I guess.

Still, Magic Drafting is always fun times, and I have a shiny new pair of Evershrikes that we opened to put into a revamped White Enchantment deck, along with these Celestial Ancients I have sitting around.

I’ve really got to sit down and do some serious deckbuilding soon.

Recently, in searching for a podcast-friendly game (because I so often need those) I’ve been playing Spelunky. I had installed it a long time ago, played like three lives, said “that’s cool” and then put it down. Then I was cleaning up my desktop, and wanted to move the folder I had it installed in to my games folder. “Hmm, but then I’d forget about it” I thought. So I got it set up as a shortcut in Steam. An hour or so later, I was looking for something to do while listening to a podcast, and saw the link, and then there I was, playing Spelunky.

I mean, I’m still a lightweight. I’ve only played maybe 150 lives at this point. But still, I’ve gotten my first shortcut built, and I’ve made it to the ice levels multiple times. (Well, using said shortcut, not from the beginning.) So that’s something! I’m not completely useless!

The real breakthrough was plugging in my SFIV Fightpad. Intense 2D gaming like this was the whole reason that I bought the fightpad in the first place, and it does not disappoint, now that I’ve put it to its first real test. It feels kind of odd in my grip, or at least it did at first. It has a weird shape that I’m not used to. But the D-pad is completely top notch. A good gamepad really, really makes Spelunky a whole lot more playable, and if you want a 2D gamepad and can still find a Fightpad, it comes highly recommended.

Brickroad, in his wonderful LP of the game, mentioned that “life isn’t that important, because most of the deaths are instant.” Maybe once you get the hang of the game, that’s true, but I’ve died so many times from life, it isn’t even funny. I take plenty of damage from enemies because I suck, and I normally end up dying from falling, and then an enemy taking off my last heart while I’m dazed. I die instantly so much rarer than damage from enemies… and it’s not just because I don’t have a good weapon. I have been successful stealing from shopkeepers many times, and I still die, even with a shotgun and jetpack, even. Just lots of stupid mistakes! But then again, that’s what a roguelike game is all about. YASDs.

Still, man, I’d easily pay money for Spelunky. It is a good, good game. I know the internet already knows this, but I’m just making it official. For the record.

Okay, so I’m going to attempt to make a point about vidjeo gamez. Stand back.

Difficulty in video games. On one paw, you have things like this. Horrible, awful things that only exist to be hard and, potentially, drain your will to live. On the other, you have things, perhaps, like this, where perhaps the complains of “OMG for n00bs too easy” are warranted.

Still, I’m so far in the second camp, it’s silly.

I’ve never been into video games for the challenge. I can’t remember a time when I thought a game was too easy or too simple. I don’t doubt it happened once or twice. But no strong examples spring to mind.
Like most gamers my age, I grew up playing games. I played all of the hard games, of course. At the same time, I sure as hell used my Game Genie a lot. So I guess I had more fun when I was jumping over the levels in Super Mario Brothers 2 than when I was trying it for reals and failing. As games matured I found RPGs, and latched onto them. Here was a genre where, much like in the design of the original Dragon Quest, if you couldn’t defeat something, you could overcome it with sheer perseverance and level-grinding. The fact that I didn’t have skills didn’t matter so much. I could still enjoy the game, and I got a little story in there, too. Then came music games into my consciousness, a genre where it’s just all about fun. There’s a challenge element, but you can set it to easier modes and still feel like a rock star, or, more appropriately for my first excursion, enjoy the humorous and catchy rap tunes.

And now, difficulty need not be an element at all in games. It’s so far away from what’s actually popular. I couldn’t be happier. Sure, once I’ve mastered a difficulty in Rock Band, I do kick it up to make it more challenging, but that’s not the real reason I’m playing. I want to feel like I’m rocking out to my favorite songs. Sure, I do enjoy a roguelike now and again, and those are the hardest games out there. But the idea isn’t to beat those games. It’s about seeing the progression of your own skills. I know that that’s probably what everyone does in every hard game. “Yes, I made it X amount farther than last time!” But I don’t know. Most games have the end as a goal. Roguelikes don’t. It, like golf, is simply all about bettering yourself. If a roguelike is worth its salt, you will probably never be able to beat every single run you do. But that is okay.
The point is, games without challenge can be just as fun. I love the crap out of all of Telltale’s adventure games, and they are essentially interactive stories than games. Same with Phoenix Wright, or Hotel Dusk. These are very, very entertaining games! I love the crap out of them. Difficulty isn’t necessary.

In fact, more and more I’ve been doing away with difficulty entirely, and enjoying games more for it. I play too much shit to get stuck on one level and play it over and over. The last thing I want in a game is to die more than once or twice in an area, and even if I do die, I want it to have auto-saved close enough to keep the frustration down. So I pick easy in games, sure. All the time. Games I know I’m good at, I go normal. But there’s no shame in Easy mode. I’m sure I got just as much enjoyment out of Persona 4 playing it on Easy than anyone else did on normal, and it stopped me from getting stuck on the harder bosses.

There was a while where I bought into the hype. That I was getting soft spending my time playing Crossword DS and shit. But just like there are a wide variety of types of things in any media, there is a place for easy, casual, and completely non-challenging games. I love them more and more as I have less and less time to consume things that take awhile to get to the fun, or frustrate me during what is supposed to be my leisure time.

Bring on the tiny, fun, easy games, I say. I will be there to buy them.

(And if this blog post didn’t turn out as imagined, I blame PaRappa the Rapper, who completely distracted me for like an hour as I was looking up a youtube video for that link up there. Damn you for being so catchy! But again, I had fun reliving those games. So who cares. WHO CARE
Also, this is probably why I don’t try to write more detailed blog posts. Yep.)

Rock Band Unplugged has a bad rap, I think. It’s gotten mediocre reviews, and I’m not hearing about a lot of people playing it.

That’s a shame, because it is pretty damn good.

Basically, take Amplitude. You remove the techno music, reduce the number of tracks down to four. To compensate for this (since Amplitude was a game about switching tracks and keeping the plates spinning, which isn’t hard at all with four tracks) you have four buttons to hit instead of three, and you add chords. Then you take songs straight from Rock Band 2, put a Rock Band 2 skin on the thing. Bam. You have Rock Band Unplugged.

Yeah, I guess that doesn’t make it sound appealing.
It really isn’t anything revolutionary or something you must play. But it is just about as good as you can get the rock band experience on the go, and I am having quite a good time with it. On Medium, the button presses are fairly close to what the song is, and it’s challenging without being back-breakingly hard. I’m sure on Expert, I would be weeping.

But yes, I am having a good time. So much so that I have Class of Heroes sitting right here, and I keep going back to the World Tour mode. I’m going to beat Rock Band Unplugged.

It’s main flaw, I think, is the same flaw with the first Rock Band: Small number of songs. Now that I’ve experienced Rock Band 2 with all the DLC and all the songs of Rock Band 1, I never want to go back to playing songs more than once in a session. I want that huge list, and this game just doesn’t have it. It’s got a fairly nice setlist, taken almost completely from Rock Band DLC, but I’m still ending up playing songs twice during longer sessions, which is unfortunate.

The game also has The Trees, which is the worst song ever created by mankind. Bleh.

There are two main complaints about the game. One is that “it doesn’t capture the spirit of Amplitude.” I can’t really argue with this one. Amplitude is a better game. But it’s not portable, and I’ve played Amplitude to death. Heh.
The second is that “it doesn’t capture the spirit of Rock Band.” This is mostly connected to talking about a lack of multiplayer modes. This is a complete bullshit complaint. If I want to play Rock Band with friends, I will, gasp, play Rock Band with friends. I have never, ever played a PSP game multiplayer, and I probably never will. A portable game NEEDS a strong single-player component. Multiplayer is almost always going to be useless, unless it is hot seat. I guess I just don’t know what these people expect. Guitar Hero On Tour was trying to make the game “feel like Guitar Hero” and that gave us this and was god-awful to play. At least this is a fun game, you know? It’s blatantly using the Rock Band name for sales, but it is a fun game.

So much of me is saying “Yes, but, yes, but, yes, but.” That isn’t a good recommendation, I guess. There is a demo, I hear, so I’d download it and try it, if you’re questioning a purchase. But I’m completely getting my money’s worth out of it. It’s a solid game! Not a must-have. But if you like music games, and actually own a PSP, it is worth your time. Yes. Yes it is.

So I managed to play a bit more Killing Floor. It’s still not a bad game. But man, some of the choices still bother the crap out of me.

I mean, okay, here’s Left 4 Dead. Casual is set up for people who have never played an FPS, which is fine. That’s why it’s called casual. If you’re a gamer and you want a “casual” experience, you can play Left 4 Dead on Normal and have a fun, very casual play experience with your friends. You can’t completely zone out, and are challenged sometimes, but are never completely crushed or anything. It’s good times. If you would like to be challenged, Advanced is a decent jump up, and Expert is really damn hard. You have options for how much skill you want involved in your game.
Now here is Killing Floor. The easiest mode is a complete joke. If you can fire a gun in an FPS, you can complete it, no problem. Now, you jump up to Normal. The game is incredibly difficult. Certainly harder than Advanced in Left 4 Dead. You’re lucky if the same team who passed through Easy half asleep could do much of anything on Normal. It’s just kind of ridiculous. I really dislike that about it. Maybe it’s because I’m not playing with a full 6 players, but one of the touted game features was that it scaled based on the number of players, so I don’t really buy that as the reason.

But wait, you say! This is a mod-able game! You can install a mod to make it easier! Say, one that doesn’t take away your money when you die or gives you more HP or something!

Well, I would, but those mods would not be “white listed.”

See, one of the game’s features is a level-able set of Perks. These give you goals to go for, as you build them up, and give you various advantages based on the play styles you like to play. This is a very good thing.
But if you use any mod that isn’t on their approved list (Read: Any that would actually change how the game plays) then Perks are turned off. You can’t gain experience in them. You can’t even use them, I don’t believe.

What the fuck is the point of that?

People are going to grind for levels no matter what you do. People are stupid like that. Put any restrictions in place that you want, people will find away around it. They will sit for hours, boringly grinding away. Look at the Achievement servers on Team Fortress for just one example. There are Perk-grinding servers of Killing Floor set up.
So why, Tripwire, are you keeping me from enjoying the game the way I want? What are you gaining by keeping me from getting levels by playing the way I enjoy? If I want to make the game super stupid easy, or give myself tons of money every level, why do you care? Why do you keep that from being a fun option, or a diversion I can turn on every once and awhile? Why did you make this “whitelist” to keep what could have kept your game going from actually working?

In a single-player experience, I get locking away content. Well, to an extent, with certain kinds of games. Leveling up in an RPG unlocks new spells and abilities. It’s important to the design of the game that that happen, and is part of the fun. This is good. The single-player game can’t exist without it. I don’t mind the developers locking that away.
Now, if, in that same game where I had to slowly unlock things, I go into Multiplayer and I cannot just play the way I want? That’s kind of bullshit. Street Fighter IV unlocks? Bullshit. You’re ruining the fun me and my friends can have. We can’t play the way we want, and it’s your fault. Same with Smash Brothers unlocks. Basically, anything that keeps the fun away until I jump over hurdles is bullshit.
That’s exactly what this whitelist is. Instead of letting me make the game I want, and play it, I am forced to play their game, exactly their way, or they take the toys away. Seriously, why even allow mods if you’re going to do that. It’s like ordering a burger at Logan’s. When they ask me how I want it cooked, and then don’t give it to me that way, I am angry. If they just hadn’t asked, I wouldn’t care. If I didn’t think the game could be modded, I wouldn’t be angry. But it has those hooks all over the game. It can be. They encourage it. But then they give me my burger burnt to a crisp, and turn off my toys.

Bleh, fuck you, Tripwire. Let me play the game I paid for my way.

…apparently I am angrier about this that I thought. Huh.

Are you feeling down? Uninterested? Thinking that the world perhaps just isn’t awesome enough? Just a little?

Then may I present Robot Dinosaurs That Shoot Beams When They Roar.

It’s so short, and it’s so silly, but dammit, it just makes me smile. The idea is awesome, the execution is awesome, the game mechanic of the beam deserves more exploration, the music is pretty intense… this is pretty well the definition of a good flash game, you know? I mean, I might have a few things to say about the guy who made it. He deserves a high-five. Definitely.

So there. There’s a little smile for you on your Sunday, hm? Have an awesome day.

…Roar.

Speaking of games I bought on the iPod for a dollar, let’s talk Star Trigon.

As per a lot of my iPod game purchases, this started with a twitter tweet. Once again, I’ll try just about any game for a dollar, and I had recalled reading about Star Trigon on one of the 1up Blogs, though fuck if I can find the post because 1up’s search is so god-awful. In any case, I bought it. And then never booted it up for days. And now I have.

Verdict: Totally worth a buck.

Apparently Star Trigon is an old arcade game of Namco’s that was made by the Mr. Driller team as some sort of side project. Now, I kind of extremely disliked Mr. Driller when I finally got to try it with a cheap copy of Mr. Driller Drill Spirits. Going fast got you crushed, going slow got you suffocated, and it never managed to get me into that “puzzle game groove” that I can get into with, say, a Puzzle League. I know it has its fans, but it wasn’t for me. Luckily, this game doesn’t carry much over besides the art style, which is awesome, and the air mechanic, which is… an okay mechanic, I suppose.

The game works like this: You’re some crazy space rescue guy. There are these little cute aliens floating in space. You orbit around planets. By bouncing between them, you can form “Trigons,” which are just triangles. Any aliens inside the triangles are rescued. You rescue all of them, you move on to the next stage. Simple enough.

There’s only one thing you can do in the game: Go. Thus, it works pretty perfectly on the touch screen. You just tap anywhere to send your little spaceman flying through space. It is a game of skill, much more action than puzzle. You have to be able to time your little spaceman’s flight to go the direction you want and hit the next planet’s gravity field, and it’s not as easy as it may look. On top of that, you have to complete the level before you run out of air, or pick up more air that the people you rescue drop, and as you keep playing, your guy speeds up faster and faster, making it harder and harder to make the jumps. There’s actually differences in the characters due to this. One has a huge air supply, but speeds up extremely quickly. One has almost no air supply, but never goes to fast. The third is right in the middle of those two. So the character you pick can really change up your game, actually.

It’s all really simple, but honestly, they do a pretty good job mixing it up. As you get going, there are different planet types, like a sun that you can’t orbit and bounces you away, or a poisonous planet that drains more air if you orbit it. There are aliens that require multiple triangles to rescue. All the while the levels are getting bigger and bigger, so you have to balance your air supply and work faster and faster… it’s pretty fun stuff! The levels are short enough that you can knock one out in a few seconds and go back to what you were doing, a good thing to have in a portable game as well.

One thing that really confuses me, though, is that you can’t type your name in in the score list. What? There’s a high score list, which is good for arcade games of this type, but you can’t enter your own name, it just lists the character you used. I want to at least know if I beat my friend whom I handed my iPod to to try it, you know? That just seems kinda odd.

Still, it’s a solid, well-rounded experience for a dollar, I think. I’m sure if you were a fan of the original game, it would be worth more, as it seems like a pretty solid port. (Again, hard to mess up a game that only requires one button, eh?) But I feel like I’ve gotten my money’s worth in the couple hours (read: probably barely 2 and thus qualifying for the word “couple”) I’ve played today, and I can see me playing it a bit more. At least until I beat all the modes. (There are four “difficulties” but which are actually sets of stages. I wouldn’t mind seeing all of them.) But again, it’s not hard to make a game worth a dollar. Still, I love getting an actually solid title for that price. I think Star Trigon fits the bill. It’s probably too arcade-y “the fun is in beating your best” for me to have paid any more, but I’m glad I tried it.

If you clicked on the link in Tuesday’s post, you might have noticed that Monster Trucks Nitro has an iPhone version. It’s true! And since it too, was on sale, and was only a dollar, I also gave it a try. If you make an interesting-looking iPod Touch game for a buck, I almost certainly will buy it. I’m like that.

The game actually works pretty well. On the screen, on the corners, you have a little virtual brake pedal and a virtual gas pedal. There’s also a Cruise Control button, if you’d rather not hold down the gas, which is a nice idea. To lean your car, you just rotate the iPod. It works really well, though you get some weird views you don’t get while playing the PC game because of it. Nitro, instead of being deployed by the player, is now just sort of a generic speed boost, much like going over a set of arrows in Mario Kart or something. That takes a little of the finesse of using the nitro in the PC version out of the game, but at the same time, I don’t have any idea where you’d put a button for that that would work well, so I don’t have a problem with it.

Visually, the game looks almost exactly like the PC version, though a little dumbed down. If I didn’t have the PC version’s stuff maxed, it would probably look pretty similar. It looks nice, though. The iPod Touch is kind of a hoss like that. The wheels on the monster trucks do seem very oddly detached from the trucks themselves in this version. They get really out there! But it doesn’t really affect gameplay, it just looks funny.

Gameplay-wise, most of the “tricky” levels seem to be missing. These levels are designed purely to test your skill with keeping up your speed. The goal times are much harder to achieve because of this, as well, with takes a little of the casual feel away from the game. You really have to know exactly how to lean your truck to maximize your speed and whatnot. It’s still plenty of fun, though, and as I said, it controls impressively well.
Still, it’s hard to overlook the fact that there are only 8 tracks in this release. At $1, I have no problem with this at all. Especially if you want to go for the gold times for each different truck (which all do handle a bit differently) you can get plenty of fun out of the game, and each level only takes 30 seconds to a minute, which makes it perfect for just picking up and playing. But I have no idea what the normal price for the game actually is, and I would have a hard time recommending it at anything other than a buck.

Man, there are so many neat little games like this out for the iPhone and iPod touch, though. Maybe I’ll spend some time reviewing some more of them this week. I really do need to find myself a good review site for these things… there has to be one out there.

Much like last year, Talking Time got a chat room and watched all the press conferences for this year’s E3 together. It was hilarious and awesome times, even if I accidentally slept through the first part of the Nintendo conference. But man, overall, the showings of the Big Three were much better than last year. Of course, a lot of what excited me wasn’t even in the press conferences. What excites me? Well…

Starting with Microsoft, they announced Shadow Complex with Epic. It’s a game that looks like pure Metroidvania, and it’s coming out on XBLA this summer. I can’t wait for that.
They also showed off enough Beatles: Rock Band to have me learn that the game has THREE PART HARMONY on the vocals! I am in love.
Of course, the biggest news from their conference was the news I heard right before that didn’t have anything to do with Microsoft: Telltale announcing Tales of Monkey Island. Holy shit. Holy. Shit. I’ve already preordered.

On the Nintendo front, they, outside of the conference, confirmed Layton 2 for early August, and that 3D Picross and Made in Ore (coming over as Wario Ware: DIY) were coming over to America, which pleased me.
I’m interested in 4 Player Co-op Mario Brothers, too, although questionably. Could be great. Could be not so great.
I didn’t much care about the completely fucked-up new Metroid game by Team Ninja? But Parish just tweeted this, so… maybe it’ll be great.
I was also excited about Galaxy 2 on Jonathan’s behalf, since he’s played through that game, what, three times now?
Also, before the conference, once again something unrelated made me happy: Atlus is bringing over Shiren on the Wii. I’m thrilled.

Sony had a new PSP Metal Gear, which is nice I guess, and nothing that will sell me a PS3. Certainly no price drop. So that’s… nice…? I think that’s nice.
The Last Guardian, of course, looks fucking beautiful, though. Who knows when it will be released, however.

But yeah, the real joy of E3 was making fun of all of the silly bits of the press conferences with all my good internet gamer friends. THE TIMES WERE FUN! They were fun.

E3. Man, I am going to spend so much money on games this year. But we knew that already, didn’t we?