The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

Seriously, what the heck is this “kick” thing of which you speak. Balrog knows not of this.

But seriously, I was really hesitant in picking up Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix (or SSF2THDR for short) because they priced it at 15 bucks and because I never have anyone to play with in these things. Even though the Talking Tyrants were playing it, I thought for sure it would go to waste. So I hesitated and hesitated, and eventually gave in.
I’ve been totally getting my money’s worth. Not only have I had several nights of hawt Street Fighting Fun with the Tyrants, but I’ve also been learning the game. I’ve been winning against random people online! It’s crazy! And it’s all thanks to that crazy Mike Tyson clone.

It all started when I picked Balrog just for shits and giggles against my fellow Tyrants… and then I won. And then I won again. And then I won again. It was shocking to me. I’ve always been a keepawayfireball kind of player in these games, and Balrog is all about charging in and dealing heavy blows. Granted, I’m normally Kamakaze. I shouldn’t be suprised that I take to his methods. But I took to them.
This led me to actually practice with him, to figure out what was going on. Morbid Coffee jumped in with some tips, as he’s also taken up the Balrog call and really gotten good with him. Better than me! And he showed me two keys to victory with him, and probably in Street Fighter in general.

1) Balrog’s throw is the FUCKING SHIT. He has this like… endless throw loop? It’s a thing of beauty, and just one of his throws does so much damage. Me throwing in general was something that I never did before in the game, and it’s so very effective.
2) There are moves other than special moves. Being effective with Balrog requires you to use several of his normal attacks well. I’ve always been a special move spammer, and now that I’m not doing nothing BUT those moves, I’m being much, much more effective.

Anyway, it’s nice to not suck at Street Fighter! At least with one character. And I hope some of these skills transfer to SFIV… that would be nice… yep!

So, for the first time in a long time, I got to go Slap the Euches at Dustin’s. Playing Euchre used to be something we did quite, quite often, but now it’s kind of a nice rarity. I mean, I have all kinds of games I could be playing instead of this simple card game, but it doesn’t mean we don’t have a damn good time when we do it.

(We also played a little pool before I got in a Euchre game. Man, I did abysmal at that. It’s been even longer since I played pool, of course, but my shittiness was far beyond rusty. At least I was almost competent before the game was over. Geez.)

The thing about playing Euchre with Dustin is that… well… the man plays Euchre. He may be slow to pick up other games, but he knows Euchre backwards and forwards and backwards again and then forwards a little more. We play a hand, and then we spend minutes either talking about previous Euchre stories or much more in depth Euchre strategy that I would have ever envisioned existed before I started these games with Dustin. He discusses this card game like pro Magic players discuss deckbuilding. It’s kind of awesome and a little scary.
The result is that I really, really, really over-think myself when I play with Dustin a little. It makes me completely aware that there is always a correct move when I look at my hand, and when I’m thinking about calling, or whatever. Someone knows what I should be doing in this situation. So I stall for a little bit, and I also start asking questions after every hand where I was unsure, to figure out what I should have done. I take games seriously in general, and Dustin taking Euchre seriously (even though we’re just dicking around. If I make a wrong move, it’s not like anyone would be mad at me at all. Some friendly insulting, probably, but that would be it, and that could happen for… well… anything. Heh.) puts me in the mindset that I should. So I’ll try, for better or worse.

And then I do retarded shit like not going alone on 4 trump and a side ace, just because I didn’t know where the left was. Sigh.

Oh well.

So I was reading about FusionFall being out of closed beta and it made me really really want to try it. Why? Mostly because I”m lame, but also because there is something about “childish taken in an adult manner” that really rocks my socks. The idea of running around with bad-ass anime versions of these cartoon characters I’ve seen so much of just, honestly, sounds great. I mean, I’m the guy wishing for more plot in my stupid Pokemon Mystery Dungeon, you know?
In any case, it’s free to try for the first 5 levels or something, so I jumped in.

First off, this game does a lot of things right. The cheap subscription fee as well as the “parent account pays 10 dollars and four kids can play with their own accounts” is just plenty inspired. I appreciated the fact that you could submit your own character name, which would then be reviewed before it would actually show up in the game, or you could use another one of those kid-friendly “slap three words together” name generators, which, honestly, I have a lot of fun with. Wizard 101 gave me Rachel Sparkewhisper. FusionFall gave me Maple Angeltazer. I dunno, I could just hit “generate” on those things for hours. But having both options to name generation certainly gives you the best of both worlds, as well as the game defaulting to a “OMG PROTECT TEH KIDS” can’t actually type system, but it being easily changeable to a full, standard chat via parental settings or whatever.

However, I only played past the tutorial. Why? Because the game was lagging my computer up something fierce. I can’t even begin to understand how something completely browser-based could make my computer chug so hard. I mean, with this game aimed at kids, I would have assumed just about any working computer could play it, you know? I wonder if there was something set up wrong to make that happen? I have no idea. But I could only stand the lag enough to try it that long. It really seems like a simplified PSO with some platforming, which, honestly hits a great sweet spot for their target audience, I think. In fact, this is pretty well the best MMO I’ve seen for this age group, and I support it a lot.

Playing it, though, made me think a lot about how great it would be “if I had kids,” you know? I get such horrible mothering pangs sometimes… it really kind of depressed me for awhile. I really do have to face facts that I will probably never have a kid, you know? Bleh. I’m sure scoping out what the game scene for that age group is like really isn’t helping though, huh?

Ever since Mario Golf and Mario Tennis for the Gameboy Color showed me the light, I have been a fan of very arcade-y golf and tennis games. However, Nintendo has failed to beat Camelot into make a new Mario Golf and Mario Tennis for the DS or the Wii, so I’ve been without for awhile.
Then here comes Essner, who buys a 360 and with it gets a free copy of Sega Superstars Tennis. It’s a tennis game that’s very similar to Mario Tennis, only it has Sega characters, both the lame Sonic people as well as awesome characters like Ulala from Space Channel 5 and Beat from Jet Grind Radio. Noticing that a new copy of this game was a mere 8 dollars after shipping on Amazon, I decided to give it a try myself. This was a good decision. I didn’t get the game as I expected but the bundle that came with someone else’s 360, which meant I got the Arcade Collection with it for free. (I gotta try Pac-Man CE sometime soon) Also, the game is pretty solid. Probably not like… 60 dollars solid? But certainly 20 dollars solid, and a real bargain at 8.

Basically, if you’ve played Mario Tennis, you’ve played this game. You’ve got two buttons, a lob and a slice, and hitting them in different ways produces different results. As you rally, you build up a “Superstar Power” which you activate with the triggers. Then you get to make a couple of super shots, which are powerful, but very disorienting to use and often end up screwing you over as much as your opponent.

The controls are really frustrating at first to someone coming from Mario Tennis, though. The timing is similar enough to make you think you can play the same way, but just slow enough to make you miss stupid shots if you play that way. It takes some real adjustment if you’re coming from that background. I’m sure Virtua Tennis fans and people who have never played Mario Tennis wouldn’t have that problem, though. The other thing that is all different from Mario Tennis that throws me off is that instead of jamming on a button to build up hit strength, you hold down the button. This is a completely logical decision, but again, it still takes awhile to deal with the transition.

Once you get over that, though, it’s awesome arcade Tennis fun. I’m saddened that I don’t like the selection of “power” style characters, since that’s normally what I use, but that’s a minor annoyance.
You unlock most things in this “Superstars” mode, which is basically a series of minigames to unlock characters, courts, and music. Some are just straight up Tennis tournaments, but some are creative tennis-based minigames. For example, in the Jet Set Radio world, you have to hit tennis balls to paint tags on the court, and in Super Monkey Ball world, you have to use tennis balls to ricochet monkey balls into the goals on the court. Besides a few EXTREMELY HARD ones, these games are pretty fun, if sometimes pointless. (Really? You want me to just run around the court collecting rings? That… doesn’t really teach me ball control like some of the other minigames.)
I especially enjoyed the Puyopuyo minigame. This was probably the best Tennis-related minigame I ever played. Puyos fall in a wall just like in Puyopuyo, and whenever you hit a puyo, it destroys it, as well as any connected in a combo with it. It’s a really solid twist on tennis and a really good adaptation of the game. I played that one for quite a long time.
One more thing I quite appreciated was that several of the achievements have nicely fanservice-y names. Run 6 in-game miles total? Get the achievement OutRun. Collect all in-game music? Get the achievement Magical Sound Shower. Have a really, really long rally during a match? Get the achievement SEGA Rally. The game needed more of these, as far as I was concerned. That’s awesome.

Anyway, especially if you can get the game as cheap as I did, I highly recommend this game. If the idea of arcade tennis to the music of Space Channel 5 or Jet Set Radio sounds completely awesome, you’ll be quite happy with the game, as I am.

So the other night, I played a board game of a much different sort than I normally play. Jonathan convinced me to try some Harry Potter Clue, which his ladyfriend had gotten a copy of and wanted to play. Clue is always a decent sort of time, so I decided to not hide and be sociable and play, even though it seemed like the game wouldn’t last long. I mean, whoever was playing as Harry Potter would obviously win, because he can accuse anyone of any stupid thing and always be right, because he’s the main character. Still, gave it a try I did.

It’s not a very well-designed game.

The changes to the game are pretty clear. For one, all the player characters are not also suspects, even though no matter what happens, it’s probably Harry Potter’s fault anyway. That change is less of a big deal, though it does steal the “teleport someone away to accuse them” aspect of the normal game that you could use to dick people over. For two, all but one of the “murder” weapons can’t actually kill someone. No, these are all like… evil inconvenience weapons. There are no murderers at Hogwarts. Probably. Just people who like to be really annoying to people.
But those are mostly cosmetic changes. There are real ones. The board, for example, has these little wheels built into it that, as you rotate them, open and close doors and secret passages all over the board. This is probably the most welcome change to the game, as there’s nothing wrong with that at all and it does give it a big of “magical” feel, though it does make it so you rarely have to walk out into the hallways once you get in a room with a secret passage since, by the time your turn comes around again, the secret passage in your room now probably goes somewhere new on the board. Also, the players no longer hold all the cards that aren’t the solution. You apparently give everyone 3 and put the rest in Dumbledore’s office. If you walk in there, you can look at all of them. I don’t know what I think about that change. It doesn’t completely remove most of the strategies with suggestions, but it certainly hurts them. I guess, perhaps, they wanted to give people a good reason to get out of the secret passages and walk around? I dunno.
The real big change, though, is this deck of evil things, called Dark Mark deck or something. Each player starts with 80 House Points (Or HP! Get it! Ha! Hilarious…ish.) and when you roll the dice to move, you also roll a dice that either tells you to move one of the secret passage things or draw a Dark Mark or Help card. The Help cards just sit around and negate some of the Dark Mark cards. The Dark Mark cards randomly take HP from random people. Some are extremely specific (Only female characters in one specific room) and some just dick over everyone. The point is, this makes it possible to die and fall out of the game. If you lose all your HP, you’ve lost the game. However, the game then makes you just sit there to reveal your cards for the rest of the game. Sure, you can do this by making a horrible accusation too quickly in the original Clue, but at least then it’s your own damn fault. It’s horrible game design to make a game where, through no action of their own, a person can just fall out of the game completely and no longer get to play. Hell, even Arkham Horror lets you restart with a new investigator or just go to the Hospital when you die. This mechanic is completely bullshit, and I’m not just saying that because I got knocked out on the third turn and just had to sit there (I still had fun. I played TapDefense on my iPod) though that does make the feeling a bit stronger, I suppose? But it doesn’t seem like I just got incredibly unlucky. It seems like this would happen regularly enough to quickly sour the game and make you turn back to regular Clue.

I mean, I dunno, I guess I’m turning into kind of a board game connoisseur or something. I do take my board games seriously. But I mean, I have nothing against the classics like Clue or Monopoly. That doesn’t mean they can’t have issues, and Harry Potter Clue… well, you have issues. Sorry. Just the truth.

So, we played another (short) session of Jonathan’s DnD campaign in the magical wonderland of Crystaengland on Sunday. It was exciting times, I suppose! There was only one serious combat, and that was against a big rock that Essner dealt like a million damage to in one turn. He was all gloating about it, and I’m like “Dude, you’re the damage dealer. You don’t see me gloating when I throw down some heals. Whoop dee doo, you did your job.” Yeah. That put him in his place. Yeah. Heh.

Anyway, it was fun as always. Jonathan gave us an NPC teammate for the next part of the quest, which… I dunno. We’re all being dicks. Having an NPC to be dicks to constantly… is that a good or a bad thing? WHO KNOWS. But he’s good at carrying gear, and he has a beautiful pompadour.

It’s amazing how dickish I can get, though. I’m always such a good guy when I play any kind of game like this, and yet, somehow, in this particular group of people, I’m the one suggesting we beat up old men to take their stuff and encouraging all kinds of stupid evil. It’s not a bad thing, but it’s certainly a change for me. I’m having a lot of fun with it, though… though I don’t think I could do it in different company. I can be a total ass around Essner, Spants, and my brother because they know me. Being that way around people I’m less familiar with? Probably won’t work.

In any case, we apparently are going to get in one more session before school starts up again (Fucking school… so close already! Bah.) so we’ll see how things go at the windy temple of windy wind or whatever it’s called. Maybe I can get a commemorative jerkin there, too.

So, after finally beating my two RPGs from 2008 that I wanted to tackle, I finally got to turn my attention to the unfortunately overlooked last episode of Strong Bad’s Cool Game For Attractive People, 8-bit is Enough.
It was a fitting end to the series. I suppose Telltale thought that putting Trogdor in the last episode would be enough fan service to really excite people and make for a strong end. I can certainly see why they’d think that, and it’s certainly fun, but this was far from the best of the 5 episodes. Dangeresque 3 had fan service coming out of its ass and was a stronger episode overall. If they wanted to end on their best note that, to me, would have seemed like a better way to do it. But eh, like I said, it worked and it was fun.

The ending especially, with the revival of Strong Bad’s original concept art, was a genius move to those who follow every bit of Homestar Runner stuff like myself. That was probably the part of this episode that I enjoyed the most. Other than that, though, I can’t really think of any points that particularly stood out as funny or outstanding. It was all competent and all entertaining, but it just was, you know? In comparison, I can think of many points in Dangeresque 3 that really rocked my face, like the car chase, and Strong Bad covering for various bloopers in the set…

Still, there is absolutely no reason you shouldn’t get and play ALL of the episodes if you’re a fan of Strong Bad. They’re just great, funny stuff. Hell, if you’re a fan of Sam and Max, you could probably enjoy these too. I probably said all that already. But yeah, Telltale continues to do episodic gaming right, and they will continue to get my money. Here’s hoping that Wallace & Gromit’s Grand Adventures comes out soon and is completely awesome, eh? It’s certainly the first IP Telltale has put with these episodic games that I had no real active knowledge of since the press release that they were making the game. Since then, of course, I went and watched Curse of the Wererabbit and it was pretty good, not to mention seemingly well-suited to Telltale’s gameplay style. So I can’t wait. Heh. Keep making awesome, Telltale!

So, I beat Fallout 3! Yay for me, I suppose! First, some general comments, then, I suppose, some ending spoilarz. Which I’ll have a line designating before them, so, you know, read on.

This was a damn good game. Brer can bitch about it all he wants (No RPG can ever make him happy, I’ve come to realize) but man, this was definitely one of the best if not the best RPG of 2008 (I hesitate because I love Persona 4 SO MUCH. But I think I’ve made that clear.) hands down, and the improvements over Oblivion were astronomical. For example, this game actually had characters with personalities that I found interesting, and I wanted to hear their stories. That’s a TON, TON better than the cookie-cutter fantasy world from Oblivion, where I was just in it for the dungeon crawling, and couldn’t care less about what people were telling me. On this, they did quite well, in my opinion.
Though not perfect, I also have to give props to their VATS system for keeping, sort of, the feel of the original Fallouts. Seeing the hit indicators all over just really makes me remember those old games, you know, and it’s a nice compromise between shooter and RPG. Although, if someone decided not to use VATS as much as I did, man, I don’t think they’d have nearly as good of a time. Fallout 3 without VATS has really shitty combat! I guess if they used Melee, they’d be okay? I dunno.

Still, though, it wasn’t perfect. I got lost. Nothing frustrates me in a game more than getting lost. The moment you have two different objectives on the HUD, you can no longer use your HUD to navigate, because both points look exactly the same on the little compass. It’s maddening. Also, having people move about and eat breakfast and go to bed and stuff is great for having a living world, but fucking frustrating when you’re trying to find someone to turn in a quest. Still, fast travel is a fucking godsend, and I’m so glad that’s there. I wouldn’t have gotten anywhere in the game without it, though I wish I could do it in locations, too. Having to walk to my house over and over again was kind of retarded. I should be able to teleport right in there.
Also, the game crashed several times. A rarity on a console. I didn’t enjoy that much either, though it never set me back very much at all.
Still, my problems were nothing that stopped me from loving the game, even though I do feel I was about done with it, even with leaving so many side quests undone. Good thing I finished up then, eh?

I’m going to talk about plot now, so…
HERE BE SPOILARZ! PROCEED BECAUSE YOU LOVE SPOILARZ.

Everyone hates the ending to this game, and now I see why. The decision you have to make makes NO SENSE if you have basically any of the people you can get in your party with you. And that’s complete and utter bullshit, I admit.
Brer explained it to me through cut and pasted stuff from Bethseda where they basically said “Party members were added AFTER the plot was done, and we could either fix the plot and cut party members or have cool party members, so we decided to have cool party members.” I mean, I can get behind that, but it’s just really frustrating when I kept coming up with like… seemingly simple solutions to their problem that would seem to take very little time to implement. Still, it only frustrated me for moments, and didn’t ruin the experience for me too much.
The other major plot thing that got to me is how much it depended on me giving a shit about my father. The game gives you SO many reasons to hate your dad, yet expects you to follow him desperately and do everything he says without question. I helped him out because, you know, quests, and also because I’m a nice guy and I do see the good about what he’s doing, but I wished very often for a “you are a complete dick, and I’m only helping you out because I want to help the people of the Wastelands” option.

Still, though. Still. Rough around the edges at parts, but still a damn, damn good game. I’m glad I played it. It was a lot of fun.

The question is, now what do I play? Hm.

So we finally got to give a go to Scene It! Box Office Smash. Just like the other game, it was a lot of fun. There’s nothing special about the movie trivia game, but hell, a good trivia game is always a good time, even if there’s absolutely no way Essner won’t win, because he’s the movie guy. I still always have fun.

The game has made a ton of improvements. The animations are significantly toned down and probably only hide loads now, which is a godsend. The announcer is slightly less annoying, but can be turned off in the options, which is also a godsend. The worst categories in the original have been reworked so they’re more playable. For example, Distortions in the original game were basically un-getable because they were cutting the picture into these little squares, and you just couldn’t guess early enough to get any points, even if you knew it. In this game, they’ve replaced it with a water ripple kind of effect, which still makes it difficult but also makes you able to guess it much earlier if you know the answer. The very worst category from the first game, however, was Sequentials, where you had to put movies in the order they were released. These questions are hard for even movie trivia fanatics. Thankfully, they’ve changed it to the point where it’s actually fun, by letting you take multiple guesses (You could only guess once in the original) and by slowly revealing some of the dates to help in guessing. It perhaps lowers the stakes a little bit, but it makes the category much more hectic (as, even if you don’t know it, you’re frantically trying to get in more guesses) and in general more fun. So yeah, all those improvements are welcome.

The game also uses the Xbox Avatars, a feature that… well, it’s a feature aimed at my mother, really, and since my mother is someone who will play this game and will be totally thrilled by seeing them in it, it’s a great move. They don’t really harm the game in any way. Your icon is just your Miivatar and when you’re getting your points in between rounds they make little happy faces or sad faces or whatever. It’s a positive addition, overall.

The one change we all agree was kind of negative about this game is the removal of point penalties. In the previous game, after round one, wrong answers lost you points. Since the amount of points the questions are worth tick down over time, it made guessing later on a very risky proposition. You had judge how confident you were in an answer before you buzzed in, because you could lose as many points as you could gain. That’s totally lost on this version, and I think that’s a shame. It’s a solid mechanic that keeps people from just jamming on buttons and gets them to try a little harder.

Still, there are so many improvements that I would have trouble recommending the original over this one. This is the one to get, if you want such trivia action, unless you, I dunno, desperately want more questions. Then go pick up the old one too. Or get both, whatever. It’s all fun.

Another board game we tried out on New Years was Fury of Dracula, from the company that brought us Arkham Horror. I thought the all vs one mechanic combined with what looked to be a hopefully shorter game would make this one a winner, so I went about making sure I got it for Chrissymas.
Before I talk about my impressions, though, I have to put a huge disclaimer on here. There are a ton of rules to this game, and learning any game like this makes the first time you play draaaaaaaaaag and go sloooooooow and generally be much less fun than it should be because you don’t know what you’re doing. I especially, as Dracula, had a ton of rules to juggle and figure out. I remember Arkham Horror sucking the first time we played it too. It’s not surprising I didn’t have a great time this first go.

However, I feel like the game may have some problems. For the first… I dunno… hour of us playing the game, nothing really happened. Essner and Spaeth were annoyed because they were just wandering about with no guidance, and I was just playing cards without knowing exactly what I was doing because I wasn’t getting any feedback on them. This wild goose chase gameplay could be fun for Dracula, after I figure out exactly what I should be doing, but it’s certainly not too fun for the Vampire Hunters. It seems like there has to be a way to fix that, but I don’t know what it is quite yet.
The part that was the most fun was when the hunters had my location narrowed down to like… four locations, and had to strategize about where to wait for me. Then you were having those “detective deduction” moments constantly, and I was trying to throw them off the trail using my powers. However, to get to that point, basically my whole trail had to be revealed, which basically removed all traps I could spring on them to give me many options. All the locations of my catacombs were revealed, so I couldn’t spring any big traps on them. It was… less than optimal. It might just have been that I didn’t set things up the way I should because I was kind of clueless. Which I was. I don’t know. In the end, Spaeth had to leave, so I started making some suicidal moves to finish things up, and lost. (Note that I probably would have lost either way at that point, I was just speeding up the process.)

One interesting thing about Fury of Dracula is that it is a game that I don’t think gets better with more people. Three MAY be the optimal number. The hunters have another player to bounce ideas off of, but play moves quicker because you don’t have to wait for too many people to take their turns. Since every hunter is on the board no matter how many players are playing, it certainly doesn’t seem to give an advantage to having more people, even though you can play with five. Who knows, though.

Anyway, this is a game that needs at least a few more playthroughs before I can make a real judgment of value. It’s interesting, and all of the things that I expected to be in the game and that drew me to it are there… I just don’t know if it works well as a package overall. We’ll see, I’m sure.