The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

So, the Klonoa remake is out, I have it in my paws, and it’s awesome. If you own a Wii and don’t buy this $30 dollar game, you will lose much respect with me! Plus, I mean, it comes with a free taco. Just TRY to turn that down, I dare you.
Anyway, I’m warning you now: I’ve thought of at least 3 blog posts worth of Klonoa to talk about, so consider this Klonoa week or something. I’m going to talk about it a lot.

I remember my first brush with Klonoa. Jonathan and I were looking for something to rent, and he saw the game, and pointed it out. I thought it looked questionable, but he wanted it, so we rented it. Unfortunately, when we got it back, the disc was scratched to hell, and couldn’t be read past Vision 1-2. Bummed, it got returned.
A monthish or so later, I was looking for a birthday present for Jonathan, and I saw the game in a store, I think Wal-Mart. I remembered that he wanted to play it, but didn’t get to, so I bought it for him.

He played it, certainly. I know he likes the Klonoa series as well. But once I got in front of it and actually gave it a go, I was hooked. I blazed through the game. I’m pretty sure I beat it before my brother. I don’t even know if he’s beat the original. This is rare: Jonathan is much more the action gamer than I. But dammit, I loved the crap out of the game.

The sequel came out, and I rented it and beat it in one crazy weekend. It was just as good: All of the elements I loved so much were right there. We got a copy on the cheap later, and I played it some more. It was so good.

I remember searching internet desperately for the Klonoa soundtrack. I remember how awesome it was when I got Klonoa: Empire of Dreams and found a near-perfect portable rendition of one of my favorite platformers. I remember being constantly frustrated that Best Buy wouldn’t reduce to price of Klonoa: Dream Champ Tournament, sitting at full price when it was basically the last GBA game they had in stock. I remember scouring sites looking for a Klonoa doll, only to find that there was only one ever made, and it is very rare.

I remember a lot about Klonoa, but I will admit, until I started waiting and waiting for Amazon to ship this copy of Klonoa to me, it didn’t occur to me quite how much I loved the series. But I am playing through the remake, and it is just how I remember it, and I have a huge grin on my face the entire time.

I would go so far as to say that Klonoa: Door to Phantomile is my favorite platformer of all time.

It’s a joy to be replaying it.

So, way back when, as you may recall, I bought a whole bunch of games on the cheap side from a Best Buy sale. What amazes me about said sale is that the one game I bought completely on a whim, Neopets Puzzle Adventure, is the one I’ve been playing the most. Sorry, other, probably better games!

The concept of the game is a simple one. “Hey, that Puzzle Quest was popular. Let’s take that and put Neopets in it to make it MOAR POPULAR!” It’s a recipe for success, honestly. I haven’t played Neopets in years, but from what I remember, it, as a franchise, is totally about little games like this anyway, and weird little plots. I am also of the camp that believes that, if you’re going to try to make a licensed game on the cheap, you might as well completely rip off a good game, so the game comes off fun. So I was all for this idea. In execution, there are many flaws in the game, but it’s so damn fun I find it really easy to overlook.

First off, I was unhappy I was unable to make an Aisha for my character. What Neopet you are has ABSOLUTELY no bearing on the game, but that’s the Neopet I had back in the day, and I even have an Aisha doll in my room. So I was kind of disappointed. The game does have an awesomely bad random name generator, though, which I enjoyed. My character ended up being named something like Aiirepyaa. A good random name generator is so much fun. I will forever thank Wizard 101 for giving me the name Rachel Sparklewhisper, for example.
Once you make some character, there’s some plot about getting a ship ready and then there’s some amulet summoning meteor monsters or something. It’s all pretty pointless, much like the Puzzle Quest plot. Still, again if memory serves, it seems pretty true to plots in Neopets, so I could see fans enjoying it muchly.

The game itself is a modification of Reversi or Othello. The rules are exactly from that game, and if you know how to play it well, you will win. There is an element of randomness, in that if you flip a whole bunch of pieces, you create a “shockwave” that flips over a random piece and can trigger others flipping, but this random element seems to always be in the player’s favor. I didn’t see any complete bullshit of the computer getting shockwaves and coming back from behind. Basically, if you don’t know how to play Reversi well, you will get totally destroyed. The first few matched I lost obscenely because I didn’t know the tricks to playing a good game, but once I figured them out, I never really lost.
The main problem and blessing of using Reversi as the base is that it’s a game that you can’t fiddle with much. In Puzzle Quest, you can have powers that drastically change the playfield because in a few turns, the playfield will be completely random again. In Reversi, changing too much completely and utterly breaks the game. The game attempts to mix it up by having different board shapes, which do help, But the powers, which come in the form of collectible PetPets you gather during the plot, are not very varied. There are only so many things you can do, and certain ones are clearly the best. Granted, anything with Stun properties were clearly the best in Puzzle Quest, but there were still other powers worth your time. Less so in this.
Additionally, leveling up does nothing to your character. Since there’s no “HP” or anything in a game of Reversi, I can’t see anything that gaining levels does for the actual gameplay. It seems to just be a method to unlock codes to get items in Neopets proper, which is probably a good incentive for someone who actually plays Neopets, but I basically felt gypped out of the feeling of progression I go to RPG elements for.

Still, I can’t deny that the game is really fun. It’s missing the “bullshit!” moments of the computer pulling out a win from its ass a la Puzzle Quest because Reversi is a game of complete knowledge, and the computer can’t screw you in that way. There’s also no denying that Reversi is just a fun game to begin with, and the perfect game to play while listening to a podcast, something that really elevates a game in my book. If the Neopets theme won’t drive you crazy and you’re jonesing for puzzle-y action, I can easily recommend this game. It might be a harder sell at the $20 it is on Steam, but at the $10 price point I got it at on DS, it was very, very worth it.

Oh, hi! It’s angry rant time! Yaaaaaay!

A long time ago, in an effort to promote awesome multiplayer gaming with the boyfriend, I purchased a copy of Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory for the PC. The Co-op missions are awesome, I heard! It was cheap, too! So I just picked it up (a special edition for cheap, no less, in a fancy case) and installed, ready to give it a try!

Ubisoft’s PC net code was so horrible, so god-awful, that not only was I unable to EVER play multiplayer with Brer, but both of us were never able to get into a multiplayer game PERIOD. It was retarded and frustrating, and contacting their customer support only told me to open all the ports. I did that already, jackasses! And I SHOULDN’T HAVE TO DO THAT TO BEGIN WITH!
The purchase wasn’t a complete loss. I went on to play through most of the single player, and since I had never played a Splinter Cell before, I had a pretty good time at it. But it made me kind of angry.

Now, I realized recently that Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter had a co-op mode. Now, Brer and I tried the demo for this in co-op a while back. There were some hiccups, but I assumed it was because my computer at the time really shouldn’t have been running the game. No, now I had a really powerful new PC, and I could run it fine, and it was a mere ten bucks on Steam. What could go wrong?

To attempt to figure out some of the settings in the game before we tried to hook it up, I booted the game up a moment ago. I go into the multiplayer, and it tells me to log in to my Gamespy account. Okay, I say. Sure. I log in. Nope, doesn’t work. Well, I guess I don’t remember it. Retrieve password… nope, no account. Okay, I’ll make one… I can’t make one because the account name is already taken. BUT there was no account. It couldn’t retrieve the password. Huh?
At this point, I log in to the GameSpy website. I do this fine. I have poetfox, the account on GameSpy. It’s mine. I go back to the game, having confirmed I got all the information right. It still won’t let me in.

At this point, I’m getting kinda annoyed. I am poetfox. ESPECIALLY when I have the account, I should be called poetfox in game, even if it’s just a game between me and Brer. So I go to the Ubisoft help site. It gives me this bullshit.

How the fuck can Ubisoft think such obviously intensely and incredibly shitty programming is okay? GRAW is a game INTENDED to be played online often, and they can’t even get a simple thing like the LOGIN working properly? Are you fucking serious? What’s more, I don’t have any options to create a game outside of using GameSpy. So now I have to make some bullshit throwaway account I don’t want to make just because Ubisoft is so fucking lazy.

I’m kind of fuming with anger right now, if you haven’t noticed. Ugh. The fact that I’ll probably have to make a THIRD account if I ever pick up GRAW2 just makes me seethe in anger all the more.

On top of all this, and this is probably the bigger problem, I can’t play the single player game either. Somehow, a patch to this game literally DISABLED the ability to command your squad, something you can’t beat the game without! The only solution is to manually edit settings files, which is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.

Fuck you, Ubisoft. Try programming your games sometime.

So apparently City of Heroes is 5 years old recently? So they sent me an e-mail informing me that, hey, free play for a week. Come see our new stuff. So, on a complete whim, I took the time to download the client and play a little more with Crossfox, my hero I haven’t played with in, gods, years.

It’s clear that they’ve added no less than like 4 million new features to the game. The moment I logged in, there were all kinds of pop-ups telling me I had access to things I had only heard about vaguely in press releases and whatnot. It was overwhelming. So I ignored basically all of them and just ran around and killed people.

It’s nice to know that my character, who is like… an Empathy/Psychic Blast Defender, is still completely useless in combat. Psychic Blast has a neat sniper power, but goodness, I can do NOTHING unless I’m in a group throwing down heals. I feel like such a complete pansy. Just like I remembered!
It’s also a bit unfortunate that some missions still don’t have very clear indicators of where to go. I have a mission that I probably didn’t finish back in the day for just this reason, which tells me I need to “Kill 7 Clockwork” in this area. But I wandered around aimlessly and didn’t see a single steampunk robot. It was pretty frustrating! So I did other missions. They did add indicators for stuff like stores and whatnot, though, making those easier to find. I remember having my mind blown originally when I was told there was stores. “What? I can BUY THINGS?”

City of Heroes is still a fairly solid MMO. You have so many movement options, it’s kind of empowering in that regard, and it’s the most customizable thing around. You can only do MORE of that now, with being able to have multiple costumes and, hell, the new mission architect that lets you make your own missions instead of playing the ones in game. I think it’s pretty damn impressive how they latched onto the fact that that is the key feature of their game and are really pushing the crap out of it. I think that’s really neat. I give the game my seal of approval.

Still, since WoW, I seriously can’t play MMOs. I’ve done about 3 missions, and I really doubt I will boot the game up again. WoW is a hard, apparently impossible, act to follow, and the fact that I get my level grind, lewt getting fix from KoL, Twilight Heroes, and the like doesn’t help either. Every time I try to play an MMO again, I realize I am never going back, even if I had a group of friends to party with. And you know? That’s probably alright. I’ll leave that to my brother. Yep.

(Pardon the long, rambling intro. This is a review for Rogue Touch. I promise I get to reviewing it at some point.)

I’m relatively new to the Roguelike scene. I played Chocobo’s Mystery Dungeon 2 way back in the day on the Playstation, but much like my first play of FFT, I didn’t get it, and I never got far.
Fast-forward to a year or two ago. I love Pokemon, and Pokemon Mystery Dungeon looked like fun, so I picked it up. I ended up putting a decent amount of hours into it. It was pretty easy, and since I knew Pokemon, I already knew all the moves and elemental charts and whatnot. I had a great time, and I picked up the sequel and had a great time with that too. (SMILES GO FOR MILES!) About that time, there was much talk and reviews on the Talking Time about Mystery Dungeon: Shiren the Wanderer. It was apparently the game that all Mystery Dungeon games were based on, and was more true to the Roguelike pattern than others. I tried it, and completely sucked at it! I went back to my easy baby Roguelike. But a few months later, I picked it back up again, and really started to learn it. It was good times. It’s still hiding in Best Buys for like 10 bucks, and everyone should buy it.

But yes, I’ve come around and I like Roguelikes. Which means when I heard that the original Rogue was ported to the iPod and iPhone for a buck as Rogue Touch, I decided that I could give it a go. I mean, it’s the game that all the other games are like, you know? I’d never played it. And surely, portable, with a different interface, I might be able to enjoy it.

I was completely right on that point.

The idea of Rogue is, of course, that you are a Rogue going in to the Dungeons of Doom in order to retrieve the Amulet of Yendor, and score some phat lewts along the way. It is the game that came up with the random dungeons, the randomized scrolls and wands you have to test, the cursed items… all those things that make up the strategy of most modern roguelikes are already here. It’s brutally hard, but I can already tell that it’s earned its reputation.
The game doesn’t use ASCII like a version one might play on the computer. It does use tiles. Personally, I vastly prefer such tile systems. I hated Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup until I realized how much help the tiles were and installed them. So yeah, I’ve no complaints about the tiles.

The controls, too, work surprisingly well. You tap to the sides of your character and he moves a square. Double-tap, and he keeps moving in a direction until you tap again, or he hits something like a door, or an item, or sees an enemy. He even automagically turns when moving down the twisty passages between rooms using this double-tap. Tap on him directly, and you get options like pulling up the inventory screen, descending stairs, and shooting a bow. There’s a button to tap to rest for a turn, and a button to tap to search. That’s basically it. It works pretty well, although not always perfectly. I’m sure it would be much less of a hassle to zap an enemy with a wand with a keyboard, since you could just hit a key or two. In this, you have to tap on the guy, then tap on inventory, then tap on the wand, then tap on zap, then tap a direction. Yeah. Still, I have no idea how it could possibly be better on the iPod. I’ve no complaints.

I’m still figuring out how to play the game worth shit, but I’m finding it as addictive as any other Roguelike I’ve tried. My best run so far is only to floor 17 (From what I understand, you have to pass at least 52 floors, maybe more, to actually win) but even then I was testing scrolls and potions and really getting going with my hero, whom I named @, actually. My main problem is probably that I fight too many things, but that’s just how I roll. I do find it funny that, due to all the fighting I do, sometimes the game changes my class to “Fighter” instead of Rogue. I don’t know exactly how it determines that, but it’s fitting.

Anyway, it’s certainly a solid roguelike experience on your iPhone or iPod, if that’s something you want. Apparently the sale that had it for a buck is over, and it’s three dollars now. But it’s probably worth that if you’re a fan of the genre. And hey, if you aren’t sure if it would be fun, you can always download the original game to your computer and try it there first, hm?

When we last left our heroes, Lord Captain Alluishous had jumped directly into a slime and got his ass devoured. Luckily, since then, we got another party member… who was with us the whole time! Of course! Originally, I thought it quite unfortunate that he didn’t go Barbarian as I was expecting, but instead went Cleric. Yes, this brings our party to THREE healers and 0 tanks. But, it worked out well. He built him up as muscular, beefy, and hit-stuff-style as was possible, basically. It worked out well, with him on the front lines next to Spaeth, I think. With two melee-style people, we were looking a lot better.

This temple-thingy was the first actual “dungeon” I’ve probably ever been in while playing this stuff. We’ve been doing it wrong all along! Sort of. There was a fairly solid fight with some slimes and some rats, and a small little interlude with a Mimic of all things. It was good times. Still, I was OVERWHELMED by how badass Alena’s healing is. Man, I used my Spirits of Battle, and suddenly, healing the entire group was effortless thanks to my paragon path, since everyone was always in a zone of conjuration I made. It was kind of obscene. If I wasn’t so fragile, I’d say Shaman was kind of broken. As it is, I know if I was focused on fully, I’d go down like nothing.

I got to try out my Spirit of Shielding Flame, and it was as excitingly neat and as frustratingly situational as I expected! Still, I love the flavor. Setting up a protective barrier around a person that lets me burn anyone who hits them is fun, fun, fun for a healing/defense-oriented person like myself.

Mainly, though, there was problem-solving in this dungeon. And I amaze myself in how I work. Maybe it’s just because I was so tired, but man, the first thing I thought of to do was the solution, and then, suddenly, everyone starts coming up with humorous, silly ideas, and I get so caught up in playing along that I forget to even suggest what I knew, from the very first moment, we were supposed to do. I suppose it’s a good thing that we’re having such a good time and messing around so much. Fun is fun! Having fun is good! But goodness, it’s almost frustrating when I realize I’ve been sitting on the answer the whole time and I just forgot to say it while we were cracking jokes about my character stripping in front of everyone (to change armor, of course!) and people screaming at walls to create avalanches.
It’s also kind of amazing how wrapped up we can get in our own bullshit narrative around what the real narrative is. Every time I have to recap to explain what we’re doing (although I never remember any names or anything, so there’s a lot of “that dude” and “that one guy”) everyone is kind of amazed and finding it odd that that’s what we’re actually doing. Such bullshit we are spinning, let me tell you!

Still, our planar adventures are continuing. It looks like we won’t be able to play again for awhile, but hopefully this one doesn’t drop off and disappear. I’m having a really great time, to be sure, and I would like it to continue. Here’s to hoping scheduling prevails! Yay scheduling! I think!

I bet when you ask a wrestling fan what they want from a wrestling game, they would say they want all the moves, a hardcore fighting game where they can do everything from the show.

They’re wrong.

The wrestling part is such a small part of wrestling. The vast majority of these shows aren’t the fights. It’s the soap opera. It’s the backstage plots, the betrayals, the trash talking.

I don’t claim to know much about wrestling or wrestling games, but I certainly haven’t HEARD of a wrestling game that really covers all that backstage drama stuff. With TNA Wrestling for the iPhone and iPod Touch, that is the majority of the game. And goodness, it’s pretty darn awesome.

I’m sure if I were a fan of TNA Impact! I would probably love this game even more. It certainly seems to have a full list of people whose names I should know, who I can either insult, fight, or team up with and befriend. I mean, I don’t know these people, but it seems to have everyone, and after you beat them, then you get their signature move to use in the ring, which would please fans, I would think.
However, I can only look on the game as a fan of dialog-driven RPGs, and as one of those, this is by far one of the best gaming experiences I’ve had on my iPod.

You start the game by making your wrestler. There’s not an overwhelming amount of customization options, (You can only choose between three facial portraits, for instance, though they change color based on what you’re wearing, your hair color, etc) but you can choose all your colors and what kind of things you’re wearing, and generally make your guy look unique. I picked a really creepy picture, and created Taco, a wrestler with green hair for the lettuce, a yellow wife-beater and boots for the shell, and a pair of pink briefs, for this spicy hot nature. I then jumped into a world of wrestling and intrigue!

The majority of the game is conversations, which are very important. There are branching paths depending on your choices. You often have at least 3 dialog options any time the game stops you. Every time you say something, you get general XP, as well as experience in one of two areas: Face, where you are the kind of wrestler who the crowd loves and works the crowd to your advantage, or Heel, where you’re a villain character everyone loves to hate. These unlock various “Crowd Support” powers, depending on what you level up. You also gain new wrestling moves in the ring from your general experience.

The combat itself is completely turn-based, and is oddly kind of similar to Fallout. Every turn, you have a certain number of BP. You spend these BP on various actions. Slapping someone only costs one BP, but if you want to clothesline someone, you spend a BP to run and bounce against the edge of the ring, and then another to slam into them. As you level up, you unlock combos: lists of moves that, if you do all of them in a row, you do a special finisher. These start out simple, like grabbing someone’s head and slamming them to the ground, but end up, towards the end of the game, being things like throwing people out of the ring and then jumping off of the ropes onto them. Each of these moves requires a kind of “quicktime” event of sliding your finger about or pushing a virtual button. They work well and are pretty fun to do. (and having to hit two buttons at once for “Eye Gouge” is just too awesome.)
To counter these moves, each wrestler gets three “defenses” per match. These are gone once they are used, but can be regained with enough crowd support, though they can only be recharged once. Avoid simply makes you run out of the way, avoiding an attack. Counter turns an attack against your opponent, and Reverse not only turn the attack against your opponent, but ends their turn, even if they still have plenty of BP.
At first, you’ll feel like there’s no way you can lose. That would be fine for me, since it’s a pretty casual experience. But you soon figure out that there is much more strategy to it than you would first think. If you don’t use your defensive moves correctly, you WILL get schooled, and it quickly becomes very important to use your turns pumping up the crowd to use your crowd powers. It gets surprisingly tough. I kinda liked that.

What’s mostly entertaining about the game, though, is the dialog. I don’t know if wrestling is normally this bad, but EVERYTHING in this game is so ridiculous and stupid, it is hilarious. I constantly found myself laughing at the absurdity of it all. There’s something special going on when someone threatens to take you down with his special move, “Defribri-see-you-later”. The writing was entertaining. Oh yes.

So yeah, I have completely gotten my $5 bucks worth out of this game. It’s of a solid length, and it is funny and a lot of fun. Granted, it didn’t work for me immediately, but after some help on that front, I have absolutely no complaints. TNA Wrestling is a very easy recommendation.

The other game I was playing all Easter weekend was, well… Tetris.
It’s all this thread on Talking Time’s fault. There was Tetris love! And I love Tetris. Not as much as, say, Panel de Pon. But I love Tetris.

So when Rei linked to Tetris Friends, I went and checked it out.
Hours later, I realized I had just played, well… hours of Tetris.

Tetris Friends leaves little to be desired, if it’s Tetris that you crave. You can turn the “piece shadow” off and on, so if you’re a purist who doesn’t like that, that’s your option. It has the hold thing, which I hadn’t actually used before this but actually adds a great additional element to the game. It has a couple completely normal Tetris variants, which are always needed. It has 2 player VS mode, which would be nearly perfect if you could pick your opponents. I do like the “only 2 minutes” aspect of it. Makes it easy to go “just one more game” since you know you’re not going to get trapped in an epic back and forth battle. It has a neat mode called Sprint, which you can play alone or in multiplayer, which is basically a race to clear 40 lines first. The strategy is actually much different than a normal multiplayer, as setting up Tetrises is much less important.

The only really unfortunate thing about it is that you can’t pick your opponents. I can’t challenge a friend to a game of VS. It’s all done by their matchmaking. Though their ranking system seems pretty darn effective. When I get online in Tetris DS, I am immediately destroyed by power-players. In Tetris Friends, I have yet to be completely stomped in a match. When I did some complete stomping myself, the game popped up a window and offered to rank me up about 5 ranks, which I accepted. Now I’m facing people more my level faster, which is exactly how it should be. Playing with just people who are close to your skill. Awesome.

But yeah, I dunno. I have no idea how this venture is making money. One little ad can’t pay for everything, can it? Especially since I think this is licensed and not like… the Tetris Company itself putting this out? But it’s everything I could possibly want from a Tetris game, and it’s free and online and with robust stat tracking and a “token” earning system to keep you coming back again and again. What’s not to like?

So, last night, we got in some more inside-tense Dungeons and Dragoning. Fun times were had! And I guess we’re going to have more next time (Tentatively scheduled for next Wednesday) since we have an additional party member joining us, in the form of that guy I sort of remember that is a friend of Shauna’s that I played DnD 3rd edition with one time! He’s going to be a Dwarf Barbarian, I think. So, still no tanks, but having another front-liner will help, as we are a horribly distance-focused party at the moment.

Combat, however, went only marginally better for me than last time. I missed with every single one of my encounter powers during the bit of combat we enjoyed, though I was a bit more effective overall, hitting with Haunting Spirits several times, as well as getting to use Spirit’s Shield, my spirits Opportunity Attack, to heal Spaeth a little. So I suppose all went well. Speaking of Spaeth, he used his Paragon Path encounter power, got a crit on a guy we hadn’t touched yet, and killed him in one hit. The man is an avenging MACHINE, let me tell you. Shauna focused much more on her distance attacks than last time, which was good. I was worried she was specced out wrong, if you recall, because she relied mostly on her beast form last time. Kevin… was Kevin! I don’t remember him doing anything too effective. I only remember him starting out combat by jumping into water so crazy cold so as to do him damage, like a wonderful idiot. He also dealed out some pain with Rolling Echo again. That move is crazy good.

The more role-playing bits also went pretty well. I continued to have Alena put on puppet shows, as it’s pretty clear at this point that that’s what she does. She found a new totem after the last combat, so she keeps having it talk to her old totem. They’re good conversationalists.
Shauna had notes that helped us remember things. She remembered this Amulet we had gotten last time and flashed it at the right time, basically shocking Jonathan. I also dropped a bit of a surprise when I actually knew why we had come to this other plane. Nobody else really knew, just that we were trying to get to this person, and so I did some interviewing… and then went back to playing with my totems. They’re so cute and fun!

Anyway, the night ended with Spaeth jumping down a hole and being absorbed into a slime. It’s going to be the exciting times next time, I assure you!
Probably.
I may also use some action points and some dailies next time. I keep not summoning spirits besides Keiko. I’m a Shaman! I should summon spirits! Maybe!

Far Cry 2, in so many ways, is just a pain to play. You’ll spend the first hour or so totally confused about its mechanics. Why don’t my save points have ammo and health kits? Why don’t they repair my guns? Why do these random cars always hunt me down? Why do members of a faction I’m working for try to shoot me? Why is the game so damn hard? Why does every enemy take a million bullets?

My first play session, I played for about an hour, and after a bunch of dying, I got really frustrated. I promised Brer I’d try it again, though. On Easy, this time.
On Friday, I flipped it to easy and tried it again.

I’m totally hooked now.
Far Cry 2 is a game that is completely, completely mean to a player just starting it. It has tutorials and explains its mechanics, but they really only make sense after you play for awhile. It doesn’t tell you things like drinking bottled water refills your health, or that by finding the ammo stations in guard posts, you can “scout” them and make your map more useful. It never mentions the buses, which are critical to getting around. (The only reason I knew about them was from listening to podcasts.) It never mentions that you need to go rest at a safe house to reset your buddy rescue. It never really mentions that you can’t pick up weapons from enemies ever, because they will jam, and that instead you need to make occasional stops at your arsenals to pick up new copies of the guns you’ve bought so they don’t jam. It does mention that doing buddy missions will improve your safehouses, but it doesn’t really mention how doing this changes them from out of the way annoyances you go to just because you want to save or move time forward so you can fucking see to checkpoints you hop from one to the other from in order to make sure you’re always prepared for the battle ahead. The flow of this game is a mystery to the new player.

Once you plow through, get some money, buy some decent guns, and learn these things, though? The game starts to get really, really fun. Sure, it’s still bothersome that every person on the face of the planet wants to kill you. Sure, it’s still sub-optimal that there’s only the vaguest of plots. But suddenly, the world changes into this combat playground. You pick whatever loadout you want at your arsenal for your play style, and then you murder everything your way. Convoy to take out? You can wait at the side of the road with an RPG, or snipe the driver out of his seat, or run it off the road with a car. Whatever you think of in the rules of the world, you can probably do, and do effectively. It’s addicting like that.

Of the things I like about this game, the map has to be one of the best. It’s completely immersive. You press the map button, and your guy puts away his guns and pulls out a paper map and a GPS. It looks cool, and it’s just neat to have your map laid out in your lap while you drive, for instance. At the same time, it’s still completely useful. It transposes the information your guy is getting from the GPS on your paper map, so it has everything I need to know about where I’m going and how to get there. More games need this map system. I love it.

I really suggest setting the game to easy, as well. Even at normal, this game is kind of unforgiving. I die all the time on Easy as it is. I would compare Easy to the “normal” setting of Call of Duty 4. There’s little shame in it, especially in a game where most of the fun comes from dicking around.

If you would have told me I would be so into Far Cry 2 back when I bought it, I would have completely laughed at you. But damn, I’m into it now. I don’t know how much longer I’ll play it. I’m almost positive I won’t beat it. (I’m at about 20% completion as of this writing, apparently) But there’s a reason why it got Idle Thumbs’ GOTY. If this game was a bit more polished, it would be mind-blowingly fantastic. As it is, it’s a very, very rough diamond. Still, it was totally worth the 15 bucks I paid. I have no complaints at this point. I’ve gotten my money’s worth.