The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

So, I was fucking tired of every single podcast ever and every single news blogpost and everything talking about Burnout Paradise without me having played it. TIRED OF IT. So I got it, since it was only 20 bucks.

Now, common sense would dictate that this was 20 bucks badly spent. I’m not a racing game person. At all. I play Mario Kart, I suppose, but that’s about it. I dislike most vehicle sections in games and such. In fact, back when the game first came out, I tried the very nice demo, and was completely unimpressed and uninterested.

Criterion sure showed me.

Burnout Paradise is the racing game for people who hate racing games. The entire design seems built up to get rid of the elements that would frustrate someone who isn’t a huge fan of cars and the technical side of racing.
What exactly does this, you ask? Well, first off, the fact that crashing your car is only the most minimal of setbacks helps a ton, first off. When I can completely wreck my car 4 times in a race and still end up winning? Well, that’s a stress-free experience. It only helps the fact the crashes are totally badass to behold. They look really impressive, and they put cool camera angles on them… it’s almost positive reinforcement than negative. I love that. Now, of course, if you don’t crash, you’re going to do a ton better. But the fact that you can and not be completely screwed makes this game less technical and more fun.
Secondly comes the fact that there isn’t a list of challenges you have to do to move up. You literally can do anything you want at any time. If all you want to do is play Road Rage today, then you can just play Road Rage and smash a bunch of cars. That’s expected, I guess, but the fact that this helps you progress in the game as much as anything else? That’s just awesome. And if you decide that you hate this particular challenge and want to quit? You just come to a complete stop for 2 seconds, and the challenge is gone. No “You lose” message or a “Try again?” prompt to make you feel in any way responsible to complete the challenge. You can just drive away. It really is the game your way.
Finally is the fact that it’s fun just to drive around the world. Any time, you can start “Showtime” mode to just deal damage as you drive around. The mechanics of driving are arcade-y and fun, and it’s just enjoyable to go fast. As you drive around, you constantly see jumps, billboards, and gates that you have to figure out how to get to and break, and it rewards you for seeking them out. As you complete challenges, cars appear in the world for you to collect. You can just be driving around, and one of these cars will roar past you, and then IT’S ON, and you have to rush to wreck them to get a new car. You can have a great time without even starting a race.

So yeah, Burnout Paradise is a fucking great game. It’s really hard not to recommend at 20 bucks. My favorite events are Road Rage (where you have to wreck a certain number of opponent cars under a time limit) and Marked Man (where you have to get to a certain location while every single car on the road is trying to wreck you) but I’ve had fun with basically every single event type in the game. I haven’t even gotten online with it yet. Sure, that time might be past with Talking Time, but I’m sure that’s even more fun if I can make it happen sometime. And hell, if nothing else, this is a REALLY great podcast game. You don’t need to listen to it. You just need to race.

So yeah, I love a racing game. There, I said it.

So, for the lovely day of Valentine’s, Brer got me a copy of Aquaria on Steam. If you haven’t heard of this, it’s an indie game in the Metroidvania style that takes place under the water! Crazy water! I’m a fan of the Metroidvania style of gaming, so I had always meant to try it, and suddenly I had a good reason to. So I did.

Man, where to start?

Well, first off, this game is painfully pretentious. Your main character gives little snippets of story every once and awhile through these voice-overs, and they just make you wince, not because they’re so bad, but because they think they’re so completely important. It’s almost like the text in Braid, except Braid’s text gives off the impression its actually about something, and you can ignore it. Still, the voice-overs are very rare, so it’s not a big deal, But it’s worth mentioning.

Secondly, the controls. The developer went above and beyond the call of duty to make a just-mouse control scheme work. It works pretty well, too, for the most part! The moment I plugged my 360 controller in, though, the game controlled just exactly how I wanted, so I used that the whole time. It made aiming difficult, though.

There is a lot of aiming, too. It’s weird, the game starts off being about a mermaid who can sing. The voice-overs and the pretty visuals really kind of suggest that this is going to be a very relaxing little indie game of exploration or something, you know? Then you get the ability to throw fireballs and suddenly there are constantly enemies swarming you and it starts to feel more like a two-stick shooter. It’s kinda strange how quickly it gets hectic!

Still, the game is pretty darn solid. Moving works right, it has a nice little magic system and a big world to explore. My main problem is how little guidance you get. Most Metroidvanias either let you know where you’re supposed to be getting to, or have you smartly funneled down certain paths by using barriers that can only be surpassed using things you get by going the right way. Aquaria does a little of that, but not very much. You just kind of have this whole big ocean cave world to wander through, and no direction.
If there’s one thing I hate, it’s not having direction in a game when I want it. Ugh. Add that to the fact that the game is pretty difficult, and you can head the wrong way and immediately get slaughtered, or do a bunch of exploring, die, and lose all of your map progress. Normally, I would be thankful to fix this kind of thing by heading to GameFAQs and pulling up all the maps and FAQs I need, but there aren’t any! It shocked me. How could there not be a guide for a vidjeo game? But there isn’t. At least last I checked.

And that’s kind of where I ended with the game, at least for now. I was frustrated not knowing where to go, and so I turned to other things. Still, if you are someone who likes wandering around and things in games, this is pretty damn well made. I’m just not that kind of gamer, I guess. Maybe someday someone will make a very elaborate map and I’ll get to finish it.

So, Retro Game Challenge! The game that Parish and all of Talking Time is all crazy over! Guess what? There’s damn good reason.

If you grew up playing console games, there is no way this game will not put a smile on your face. The presentation starts off silly, and most of it is kind of silly. But it’s so true to how it was back then. They nail so many things. Having someone sitting there, watching you play on the bottom screen just… feels so right. The magazines and manuals are so spot on, and they just make me grin as I’m reading the horrible reader mail section and everything… this game attempts to be living through that era of video games in a sort of compressed, mini form, and damn, if it doesn’t nail it.

All that wouldn’t matter if the games suck, but they don’t. Much like the presentation, you’ve got a very compressed version of genres and games, and dammit, they all play so well. The trick is that they look retro, they feel retro, but there is obviously modern influence on them. You won’t notice at first that, say, the weapon system in Guadia Quest is way too advanced for RPGs of the time period. It’s not intrusive into the gameplay, but it makes a much, much better play experience than if it would have actually been modeled on RPGs from that era. The same goes for all the action games. The little tweaks, like having the ninja stars in Haggleman to the changing ship forms in Star Prince, don’t feel out of place, but when you really think about them, they wouldn’t have been included in a game from that era. Still, they make the games that much better to play.

To top it all off, the game flows extremely well. All the challenges Game Master Arino gives you aren’t very difficult. They’re basically a tutorial on how to play each game well. They have you learn the game, and then you can decide yourself if you want to keep playing at it. The best part is, they don’t take long. I’m never going to put a lot of time into Rally King, like most Talking Timers, but the game is well-made, and I finished the challenges long before I got bored with it, even though I don’t really like those kinds of racers. The only exception to this, I suppose, is if you don’t like RPGs. The last challenge in Guadia Quest does take a little, but if you’ve enjoyed any jRPG in the past, it will fly by, I assure you.

If you do get stuck, though, one final, perfect tweak makes this game hit it out of the park: the cheat codes. You can use these codes to beat challenges, and there are a lot of them, from making yourself invincible to just being able to continue in games without a save function. It’s basically a difficulty selector. Use all the codes if you really hate Rally King and just want to be done with it, or use none of them if you’re really digging it and want to challenge yourself. The fact that you have to look them up in the in-game magazines also helps to get away from the whole “oh, it’s there so I have to use it” kind of easy mode in these games. People complain, for instance, about being able to give yourself infinite lives in arcade games, because they say they always have to do it. Looking up these cheat codes takes time, and they take effort to input. It’s not just an option you toggle. As such, I found myself only using them when I was actually frustrated. The fact that they’re annoying to put in actually works in their favor, I think, to make it easy to challenge yourself exactly where you want the challenge to be without being tempted to make it all super-easy. On top of it all, entering such codes are extremely nostalgic, of course.

This game is seriously a must buy if you, in any way, enjoy retro gaming. I’ve had a lot of fun. I’m going to try to finish up the final challenges (Which is simply beating every game, unlocked after you complete each challenge on all the games) this week before Dragon Quest V and Street Fighter IV come in. I might not: Guadia Quest is actually decently sized. But I’m certainly going to have a whole lot of fun at it, either way.

So, I was continuing to have a roguelike urge, and Talking Time had, conveniently started up a thread about stupid roguelike deaths. I was all playing Shiren, but they kept talking about a PC roguelike called Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. It’s apparently a modification of Dungeon Crawl, if you couldn’t guess. Since it was popular and free, I decided to give it a go.

It went badly. It was all ASCII characters and I couldn’t grok the controls or understand anything. Ugh. I went on my twitter and complained.
Red Hedgehog responded in surprise. “But it’s so newbie-friendly with its mouse controls!” Mouse controls? I knew of no mouse controls…

It was then I learned that Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup with tiles is almost a completely different and much much better game, from an interface standpoint. Everything is very visual, and you can mouse over anything to get a list of commands that object can do, and the most common ones are mapped to the left and right click. So the mouse basically works as a cheat-sheet and an interface all at once. You can even see what the enemies are holding by their pictures. It’s pretty rad.
Once I got controls that worked, I was hooked for quite awhile!

Granted, I suck ass at these games. There’s like… a whole bunch of layers or something in the game, many different dungeons in the dungeon, and I still haven’t found any of them. Not one. But I’ve been pretty impressed by the different classes, as they really do seem to play fairly differently, at least at low levels. I’ve had the most success with Healer, though, as they come already with the knowledge of what potions are potions of healing, which, well, really helps me remember to actually attempt to use potions of healing. Which is probably why I’m so successful with that class.

Anyway, if you’re looking for a roguelike, it comes highly recommended by me. It’s so, so much easier to comprehend than, say, Nethack, and it’s a good time. Oh, and if you want even more information, I’m sure @play would be happy to oblige.

So, I don’t know if you listened to the last 1up Yours, (even though it seems like Listen UP is the exactly same show only it doesn’t have Shane) but if you did you probably heard Luke Smith and John Davidson talk about, what else, an iPhone game. Mr. Davidson likes talking about those, and dammit, I appreciate it, because there just aren’t any good ways to get information about iPhone games. Parish’s iPhone blog is a good help, but at the same time, he’s talking about all things Mac related, whereas I want mostly just an app review portal, you know?
Anyway, so they bring up what they’ve been playing on their iPhones, which is WordJong: Daily Challenge. I’ve heard of the WordJong before, back in the EGM Live days, when they made fun of the DS release, and then found out it was actually kind of respectable. I’m still wanting more killer apps on my iPod, because I find myself playing games on it in between classes all the time, so I snapped it up for $5. It was a good choice, because it is a damn good word game. It’s probably not worth the full price DS release, but it’s hard to pass it up as a $5 download.

The game basically is what the horrible title suggests. You play MahJong solitaire, but instead of the normal tiles, the tiles have letters on them. You have to spell out words, trying to spell long ones to score more points, all the while having to adhere to the rules of what tiles you can use in MahJong, as well as having to clear every last piece from the board. This is made easier by bombs, which can destroy a single tile. You can only hold one bomb at a time, but if you don’t have one, you get another one every time you spell a 5 letter or longer word. Of course, blowing up tiles gets you no points, so it’s perhaps better not to rely on it.
Obviously, if you have no love of word games, this is completely not the game for you, but it’s the perfect game to pull out for 5 minutes if you enjoy word-based action. There is a new puzzle every day, and that puzzle is the same on every copy of WordJong, so you can compare scores with friends. Each puzzle ramps up in difficulty like the daily crossword puzzle in the newspaper. Monday’s score to beat is easy, and then each day gets harder until you reach Sunday’s impossible number.

I agree with the Luke and John that the game desperately needs an online friend leaderboard so you can race for high scores against your friends more easily, but other than that, it’s really hard not to recommend. This is exactly the kind of experience I want on my iPod: a relatively fast, easy to grasp but decently deep little game. If you have an iPhone or a Touch like me, you should really give it a purchase.

…oh my, I just learned there’s a free online version on their website? That’s awesome, although the rules seem a little different. Instead of bombs, you earn wild tiles, which aren’t in the puzzle itself this version. But yeah, that’s great. Just go check it out and try it for yourself.

So, it’s offical now: My friends love Dominion.

Dominion is a card game made my Rio Grande Games. I heard about it on the 120 minutes of Jick and Crew, as they were talking about a card game that was about building a deck, much like you build a deck in Magic the Gathering. Of course, the very mention of a card game was enough to inspire some interest in me. So much so that I ordered a copy on the spot, even though this was back right before Christmas and I had gotten a big bunch of board games we had yet to play.
It was totally worth it.

In this game, there are three types of cards. There are action cards, which let you do things, as well as just let you do more things in the turn, like draw more cards or have more money. There are treasure cards, which are money. Finally, there are victory point cards, that do nothing, but whoever has the most victory points wins. Players start with a deck of 7 Copper (worth one monies) and three victory point cards. Every turn, you can play an action, then buy a card, then you dump your hand and draw a new one. Each card you play goes into your discard pile, and each card you buy goes into your discard pile. When your deck is empty, you shuffle your discards to make your new deck. The game ends when three types of cards, or the “Province” victory card, are sold out.

It’s really a very simple game, but it’s shockingly strategic in its simplicity. You not only have to constantly adjust your deck-building based on what everyone else is buying, but you can do things like try to corner the market on a particularly useful card. You also have to balance making a more effective deck with actually buying victory points, as well as figuring out what to do with those victory points when they get into your hand, because they’re mostly dead weight.
On top of all this, you only use 10 different types of cards to buy in every game, and the game comes with 25 different types. So, by switching out what cards are available, you really switch up the strategy of the game. It’s really, really damn cool.

The best part, though, is that all my friends love it. So often I get a game like this that I can obsess over, especially due to the card element, and then my friends are very “eh” towards it and I never get to play. Not so with this. Even Buchhiet loves the crap out of it, and the individual games are not all-night affairs like Arkham Horror or whatnot. It’s so awesome to find a game that we can go to again and again.

Now, here’s to hoping that Rio Grande soon puts out an expansion pack of new card types to buy. Each card in the game seems stamped with an expansion symbol, so it seems like they are planning on it, but I haven’t heard any announcements. We’re all hoping, though.

They say the highway’s just one big road, and it goes from here to there…

There being Table Mountain, of course.

So, I kept checking back in and reading Netbrian’s Nethack Let’s Play and it was making me all hungry for some hot Rougelike action, especially since I didn’t have anything else on my gaming plate at the moment. It really made me want to play Nethack. But Nethack is complicated and ugly and… I tried it once. It went badly. It was then I realized I had one of the best Rougelikes ever made on DS, Shiren the Wanderer. I might as well whip that out and play a couple more rounds of that instead of intalling Nethack and hating it.
So I did.
And I immediately got farther than I ever had back when I first bought the game. Such as, you know, to Table Mountain, which is the goal of the game. Heh.

It’s kind of cool how the game slowly starts to change over time, something that I never really survived long enough or smart enough to see. It slowly becomes less and less about combat and more and more about identifying items, using every bit of your inventory effectively, and evading enemies. I’m about as far from a rougelike master as you can get. Pokemon Mystery Dungeon is really more my style. (SMILES GO FOR MOTHERFUCKING MILES) But it’s amazing how much I’ve improved. Since I bought Shiren, I’ve played so many rougelikes with varying degrees of success at them, but I’ve obviously learned something, because I’ve started to become vaguely effective.
For one, I was using items. There were so many situations where I know, back in the day, I wouldn’t have wasted, say, an item that could hit multiple enemies when I wanted to affect one enemy. I wouldn’t have used a staff to give me a minor boost and more safety when there was a vague, shady chance that it would be more useful later. I never did those things, but anything that keeps you alive keeps you going in a rougelike, you gotta. And thus, I’ve gotten farther.
I also had to deal with jars, which is something I’ve never really had to do before this. Chiropractic Jars are pretty amazing, and I ended up with many Jars of Change, which I used to decent effect to swap items for hopefully more useful ones. I also got the joy and pleasure to meet my first item-rusting monster, which kinda killed all my equipment, which may have been a reason I died soon after that. Heh. But it was all neat!

The thing that really hit me about this, though, was how new it all felt. Like the title up there, it felt like I’d not put time into this game before. Higher level play gets different like that, I guess. It was the fun times.
I dunno, going back to the game certainly scratched that itch, which is good. Also, it’s a damn shame that Shiren is on so many clearance racks and stuff. It’s pretty well $15 dollars everywhere, if not cheaper. If you have a DS and care about rougelikes in the least, it’s a game that should be in your collection.

So, as I sometimes do, I find myself unfocused, without a game I really feel drawn to playing. I’ve been trying about everything. While iced in, I gave many demos a try. Puzzle Quest Galactrix was better than the flash demo indicated. It’s certainly on my radar now, especially since it has a “space trader” buy high sell low mechanic built into it which sounds like a lot more fun than some of the side quests in Challenge of the Warlords. Defense Grid: The Awakening was a really great tower defense variant, but at 20 dollars, I really can’t justify the purchase. I even tried playing some more Peggle to think about whether or not I wanted to pick up Peggle nights, but dammit, the final boards in that game are kinda hard. I don’t know how you’re supposed to do them without getting lucky.

I feel like the main problem is that everything is coming out in the last two weeks of February. If just one thing would come out this week, I’d be satisfied, but no, it’s all then. Just look at this list: Dragon Quest V, Retro Game Challenge, Street Fighter IV, the aforementioned Puzzle Quest Galactrix… That is a lot of game power. Granted, Retro Game Challenge comes out one week earlier than the rest, but still. And the hits don’t stop in March either. I’m probably picking up The Dark Spire, Steal Princess, and Class of Heroes, and that’s just Atlus titles.
All these great games coming out at once just makes me grumpy. I wish what I wanted was spread out over the year a little better than it tends to be. I mean, Street Fighter and Dragon Quest on the same day is actually fine. I need something to play in between online matches while I’m chatting with people, and something simple like Dragon Quest fits the bill perfectly, but otherwise…
I’m especially disappointed in Atlus. They almost have games of theirs competing with other games of theirs. I mean, isn’t like… that Ys collection and My World My Way coming out on the same day now? And I think Steal Princess and Class of Heroes are on the sameish week as well… Mm, nope, I’m wrong on that one. Steal Princess comes out on my brithday and Class of Heroes is in April… but damn, still.
(I still love you, Atlus. You keep putting out everything you can, and I will buy the vast majority of it.)

But yeah, this is just mostly a post saying “Conform to my schedule, game publishers!” Which is stupid of me. I mean, if I didn’t buy so many games the day they were released, I probably wouldn’t have this problem. Oh well. I know my medium. I know my fun. I’ll chase it however I want, dammit.

So I played The Maw after hearing Tycho’s recommendation and trying the demo. It looked to be a sort of short and sweet puzzle platformer, and I mean, it’s cute as all get out. That’s a recipe for success, isn’t it?

Well, yes and no.

I enjoyed the game pretty much. It was cute, it controlled fairly solid (except for the Bee-tull power, which was shockingly frustrating to use) and, you know, it was pretty fun if you like platformers. Think about to the Nintendo 64, and then think if someone had made one of those platformers, only it was short and had better and cuter graphics. That’s what the game is.
I was really expecting the game to get… puzzle-y at some point, though. The way it started out, I thought what would happen would be that I would find all these different things for Maw to eat to get different powers, and I would have to juggle these powers to get out of levels. It doesn’t really work like that, in the end. Basically, you work to get Maw big enough to get to the power, figure out how to get it, then use it to get out of the level. Still pretty good, but less enjoyable than I was expecting.
Perhaps they were worried about losing audience with the game. It’s extremely casual. You can’t die (something I appreciate. More games should be like that) and it’s pretty nice about giving you hints if you get stuck. Perhaps they felt all the puzzling would confuse some of their audience. However, I mean, it’s an XBLA game, you know? You more than likely already have a level of “hardcoreness” to even access it. I think they could have pushed it a bit more.
Losing the puzzle element also makes the game pretty darn short. If you aren’t trying to get some of the achievements and just blaze through it, you could easily feel you didn’t get your 10 dollars worth. I was alright with the length, though. I would have loved more, but I enjoy supporting good indie developers, you know? These guys obviously know how to make a game. If they made a more puzzle-based sequel, I would be grabbing it in a heartbeat. So I don’t lament the purchase. However, if you’re someone that must make every dollar equal X gameplay hours, you might want to be wary.

So yeah, I guess I give the game a sort of… bittersweet recommendation. I bet younger gamers would eat it up, and people like me, who just kinda like cuteness and solid short experiences, had a good time. I do wish it would have unlocked a gamer picture of just the cute alien. It might have gotten me to change away from my Puyo Puyo Fever girl. Heh.

Late Minute Addition: After writing the bulk of this review, I read this, which said they had three DLC levels coming for $1.25 a pop. This really kinda rubs me the wrong way. The game already feels like it’s pushing it costing 10 bucks, and now to say “oh, we have these three levels we cut that we’re selling to you” just seems… really horrible to me. I guess maybe it was a file size thing? Or maybe it’s just a money grab thing? Either way, I don’t like it very much at all. I certainly won’t be buying them.

So a little while back, I finally got into the remake of Chrono Trigger on the DS that I got for Christmas. Good news, everyone: The game is as wonderful as you remember. Or at least as I remember. If you’ve never played Chrono Trigger, grabbing the remake is a great idea. The new DS touchscreen controls should work great for anyone who’s never played it before and loved, say, the controls for Pokemon. (I loved using those controls in Pokemon, but I just can’t play this game like that. I’ve tried. It feels wrong. Still, I like that the option is there.) They also managed to get all of the PS1 anime cutscenes into the game, so you can now watch those without playing a version of the game that loads every few seconds! Huzzah! I haven’t gotten to the new optional dungeon, I admit, and all reports say it completely sucks, but still, overall, this is probably the definitive version of the game now.

However, the thing that really gets me about the game as I replay it is how little I remember about it. I always felt like I remembered quite a bit about the game, and I mean, I do. But my memories of the game are all slices. Little bits. I sort of remember the plot, I remember some key scenes, I remember what the sidequests are, but in general, I’m having to find out this stuff all over again and being pleasantly surprised by how awesome the plot is playing out.
For example, I seriously could not remember why you go back to 65,000,000 BC for a second time. I know you did, because as I got through the area the first time I didn’t have Ayla and there was still plot there I remembered. But I couildn’t, for the life of me, remember how the party got back there. When it happened, I was pleasantly suprised.
I was also greatly pleased with Crono’s trial. I remembered there WAS a trial, but I didn’t remember how interactive it was, and how much what you did at the fair affected it. Man, this game was just crazy well put together, you know?

For this run, though, I’ve decided to try to do things differently. I’ve been using Ayla. Out of all the characters in the game, she’s the one I’ve never really given a fair chance. So far, she seems as least as awesome as everyone else, which is great news. She just does massive, massive amounts of physical damage, and that’s effective against most enemies and bosses. If I do end up beating the game, I’ll probably keep using her all the way through.
I also plan to kill Magus this run, if I get that far. I’ve never done that either, so I figure that would be a bit of a different thing to try for once, eh? We’ll see how that goes.

But yeah, anyway… Chrono Trigger! Whoo!