The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

So, this last night, we got to finally play some of this Dungeons and Dragons campaign my brother has been working on. It went well!
Rachel Sparklewhisper made a slightly re-specced appearance as team Warlord/Healer. I took roleplaying her much less serious this time, though. Cause, you know, it seemed appropriate. So I ate muffins and I went into battle wearing souvenir T-shirts from the temple we were trying to purge evil from… our team leader was Essner’s wolf companion (which, of course, only he could understand) so that was nice. We kept giving the wolf all our gold for safe-keeping. (Though I demanded compensation for muffins purchased, because they were a business expense.) It was fun times.

The combat, as much as I hate to say it, seemed to work a bit well overall than mine did. His “more hitpoints, less damage, very accurate” setup of the monsters kept the tension higher and generally more exciting than my builds, which were based off the numbers in the books and seem more geared for a “high miss rate, high damage” kind of experience. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But I dunno, we’ve all grown up with games like FFT where missing is a catastrophic failure, so missing as often as you hit just doesn’t feel like you’re a badass hero, you know? In any case, his combat was pretty good stuff.
It was, however, based around “battlefield gimmicks.” This is not something I have a problem with! But I’m pretty sure it’s also something that isn’t going to seem special, because I’m pretty sure he’s built every fight around a different gimmick. I would more build those as special encounters as opposed to something that’s normal and expected, and let the combat and monster mix stand on their own to make things interesting. Still, maybe that’s an error on my part. I know Essner especially loved the gimmick twists on each of the battles we did tonight, so… yeah.

I feel like I’m comparing myself to Jonathan as a DM. I don’t know why I’m doing that. I guess because I always just kind of assumed that I would be better at such things, you know? It’s not that I don’t want him to do well, because hell, if he keeps doing great, that means I get to play more DnD from the character side, which I am all for. Still, I dunno. I feel something there. I need to get the fuck over myself. Heh.

Anyway, it was, overall, a damn good time, and certainly a nice change of pace from the hard workings I’ve had to do recently. Plus, as my commemorative jerkin states, “I Rocked the Temple – Crystaengland Earth Temple”

Last night, I was pulled away from a rousing game of Fallout 3 to play Left 4 Dead with Talking Time people. As per usual, it was a damn, damn good time. That game was great! But after we finished a Versus mode on Blood Harvest, we started talking about what to do, and it was decided that we would open the game publicly, get in an Xbox Live party, and grief.
It was a damn good time.
Not that I have any innate skill at such things. I’m not really adept at being annoying or whatever in various ways. My mind does not instantly figure out how to annoy people within the confines of a a game, especially a game I’m enjoying playing as advertised. But goodness, just being a part of it made me laugh so damn hard. We had so much fun doing shit like getting all the infected into the safe room and locking them in, and using Infected escorts, and accidental party-killing molotovs… It was an hilarious time, and once again proved that, without voice chat, these sorts of games aren’t NEARLY as fun. If we were making jokes and laughing the whole time, it wouldn’t have been nearly as fun.

Still, a part of me wonders if I should feel bad being such an ass to these random Xbox Live people. I mean, they could have been nice guys who just wanted to play some Left 4 Dead. Then again, we are talking about people on Xbox Live. The majority of them are dicks. The odds are extremely good that they deserve a little griefing. Still, I suppose that’s kind of a bad thing to say…
Aww, what the hell. I had a damn good time. They could have and probably should have left the game the moment we did something retarded. I refuse to feel bad about the fun times. The party times. Yeah yeah yeah.

So, to ring in the new year, we tried a lot of my new board games on New Years Eve, so I suppose I should write some impressions of them, hm?

Apparently, there are only 7 hotel chains, ever. Did you know this? It’s true. And Business Magnates? Well, they are all up ons these hotel chains.
That’s what Acquire told me.
The game itself is pretty awesome, honestly. It’s really simple. You don’t do a whole lot over the course of the game. You just lay a tile, buy up to three stocks, and draw a new tile every turn. But it’s very much a mind game. You have to think about what all the other players are trying to do so you can maximize your investment. Do you want to invest in Festival because it’s growing to be the biggest chain, and thus your shares will be worth more in the end? Or do you want to buy much stock in a cheaper chain like Worldwide, hoping that the much bigger Imperial acquires them in a merger, letting you trade in your stock for the more valuable Imperial stock? And is any of the other player’s plans going to screw this over? Is player two going to screw you out of the bonus you get for being the Majority stockholder?
But seriously, the game always seems like there should be more to it, and it’s odd that you can only cash out stocks during mergers (though that seems to be a balance thing to help encourage people TO create mergers, which is where most of the action is) but in general, from one playthough, this is a game with a shite-ton of strategy in it’s simplicity. That’s an awesome thing.

I honestly can’t wait to play it again, now that I understand how things work a little better. I’m probably going to try investing mostly in one company next time. This time I really spread out my investments and got second place, but Jonathan won by investing heavily in Festival early, and then working to make sure Festival was the biggest chain out there, whereas I focused on buying little stocks and getting them bought so I could spend my Majority Stockholder bonus on more stocks. I mean, I suppose either could be a viable option? We’ll see, though.

So Essner got me this Carcassone variant, New World. It’s… well, I don’t know if it’s better than original Carcassonne? But it certainly does add interesting elements.
For one, having to build off of one edge does add some interesting elements to the strategy. In normal Carcassonne, you can go just about anywhere to, you know, ignore what other players are doing, if you’d like. You can do no such things in this one. Everything is built off of this starting “coast” area, which makes all the play be bunched up a bit, which is interesting, though not completely game-changing.
The main thing the game adds, though, are these “Surveyors.” These little pieces move “westward” each time something is completed. If your little settler piece is in the row of a surveyor when you complete anything, you get an extra 4 points for each Surveyor in that row. That can get a pretty huge boost in points. On top of that, if you have any settlers on pieces that are uncompleted when Surveyors move past that row, you have to pick them up. (This doesn’t count “trappers” which are the farmers in this game. Those stay until the end of the game, like always.) You get no points. This is the mechanic that I think could really mess with the game right here, and although I haven’t played enough to completely gauge it, it seems to strongly punish people who try to make large towns and it makes “farms” (which are the monasteries in this game, named farms for MAXIMUM CONFUSION) much, much less lucrative than in the main game. In normal Carcassonne, there is almost NEVER a reason not to put a guy on a Monastery. In New World, I can totally see putting a settler on a farm often being a bad and kind of pointless choice, as it’s often hard to complete monasteries quickly. This game also makes mini-cities potentially maximum spiteful, too, which is always good. Spite is always good.
Anyway, I’m sure I’ll give it a more thorough playthrough soon, but that’s just kind of my first impressions. I think the main thing I’m going to get out of this game, though, is that I’ve added so many tiles through expansions to original Carcassonne that it is no longer the quick and fun game it originally was, and is now much more involved. Since this game is back to that original, smaller number of tiles, it would be great for those times when you have the tile-game itch, but want it to run quicker. If it manages to fill that niche, I’m all for it.

I BEAT PERSONA 4!

I didn’t get the true ending, though I have a save so I can, if I wanted. But I don’t want. But dammit, I BEAT PERSONA 4!

It’s so rare for me to actually beat a jRPG. I normally start so, so many of these, so many games in general, and never beat them. To overcome having new, shiny Christmas games and still beat it? It feels good. Real good.

The game itself is really great, too. I mean, some of the characters are kind of horrible. I hate Yosuke, and I hate Rise, but they’re both a believable kind of person I hate, as opposed to one who is unrealistic. The game is just so… realistic in its characters. It’s almost boring sometimes because of it, but they really spoke to me.
Picking Beginner was completely the right choice for me, though. I never had to restart or anything, which is probably what helped get me all the way through it. Never did I have to redo a battle or anything. The boss A.I. kind of would act stupid in my favor, and the 10 respawns, which I thought would be a very minor benefit, were actually a huge help in reducing the frustration of hard boss battles. I very much recommend anyone coming to this game because they heard about the cool characters and shit to pick Beginner. Also, to have a guide. It will up your enjoyment of the story, I promise.

The rest is probably all spoilers, so…
SPOILARZ

When Nanako “died” it seriously hit me with an emotional reaction. All of the Nanako stuff did. It played me the whole game, making me expect her always around. It worked PERFECTLY. I really appreciate games that can do that to me. Still, when she turned out to NOT be dead, I threw up my paws in anger. I complained. How dare the game make me feel so bad for nothing? It didn’t make me hate it by any means, but man, it affected me. I’m not all that cool with the game undercutting the emotional reaction like that.
Still, the path for the bad ending that I didn’t go on was… awesome. The whole idea that my party was emotionally charged and about to commit murder? It was so perfect, because I was affected emotionally at this point too. I’m completely unsure how you’d NOT get the bad ending, though. I used the guide to pick what I was supposed to say, and without it, I probably would have never picked some of those things. Then again, I have no idea how anyone would get the True Ending without a guide either, so…
Still, man, my main character was like… the calmest person in the history of ever. The entire time, everyone would be SO ANGRY GRRR GONNA KILL and my responses would always be “Hey, let’s calm down.” Again and again. And finally, in that scene, I got to go “CALM THE HELL DOWN” which felt good. Real good.

But yeah, the game was 70 hours of goodness. It came out EXACTLY when I needed a long awesome game. Everything was right for Persona 4 to succeed. And it totally, totally did.
Totally.

So, after reading this post over on Gamespite, I bought Dokapon Kingdom for the Wii on the cheap to give it a try. Me and my friends have been known to play some Mario Party, and I would be all for a better Mario Party, you know? Anyway, Essner and I finally managed to sit down and give it a little trial, and I am going to share some of my wisdom that I have gleaned from that experience.

First off, this is a fun party game. I mean, like, seriously fun. The 1up Review was all down on how little interaction there is between the players? This is also true, but there’s more to it than that. This is a game of huge wins and huge losses. When you win, you win easily, and when you lose, you lose incredibly badly. If you’re in a group of people who enjoy trash talking and making fun of each other, the game is utterly full of fuel for that, and that, honestly, is where most of the fun is. Although, I would say that most of the fun of ANY competitive game with a small group of friends is this kind of talk, so…
Secondly, don’t play this game with computer players. The computer is like… good. Really good. And you have to watch every single one of its turns. Even on super-fast, it got kind of old pretty quickly, not to mention how much the computer just trounced us. Four Human players seems the only real way to enjoy this game.
Thirdly, man, I fucking suck at this game. I was in dead last the entire time I was playing, and my warrior kept constantly dying. I have no idea what I was doing wrong, but I was doing it VERY wrong. Still, I was having fun. It wasn’t frustrating. But goodness, it was horrible. But hey, at least I got “Anime Heroine With Punk Rock Dye” hair near the end of our session. I was losing, but at least I was looking good.

I still don’t quite get all the mechanics in the game. For example, what bonuses to Magic-users get? Warriors get random strength boosts, and thieves steal things, but we never figured out what the magicians get. What exactly does the SP stat do? I know it’s speed, but does it just affect dodge rating? Does it change both dodge and hit chance? I couldn’t find these answers in the manual easily. I don’t know if I was just missing them, or it wasn’t there, but it was odd.

I’ll be sure to report more next time we dive into the Kingdom of Dokapon, but, you know, at the very least I’ve learned that it’s worth trying to get us all together to dive into said Kingdom again, eh?

So I finally, FINALLY got in my copy of Persona 4, and I have been playing it COMPLETELY non-stop. It has not disappointed whatsoever. I’ll give you some first impressions, eh? Without being too spoiler-y.

First off, I love, love the characters. In Persona 3, everyone was kind of depressed or stressed, and the tone was, for the most part, almost completely serious. In this game, though there are important events going on and, you know, fate is on the character’s shoulders, they’re still high schoolers. They crack jokes. They hang out and talk about all kinds of stupid shit just like I did back in the day. They are much, much more entertaining to watch.
Not that there was anything wrong with the Persona 3 characters? But it was an extremely rare occasion where they would let loose and have fun. It was an ever-constant focus on “we need to deal with Tartarus.” Just the basic structure of how the dungeons work inside the TV makes there be more opportunity for fun.

Secondly, I enjoy the modifications to the combat quite a bit. I like that all my characters can still run on their own the majority of the time, because that makes the combat go super-quick, which was one of the things I loved about Persona 3. However, being able to take control during bosses is kind of a godsend, and makes them significantly easier, which is a very good thing. I mean, I picked Beginner, because I mostly wanted the story and experience of the game, not the challenge, and I’m still having a little trouble in combats here and there. It’s a hard game, you know? Having that extra control during times when I especially need it really helps. The rest of the modifications seem to more be balancing issues, but I don’t really find any problem with them.

Thirdly, and perhaps, in my opinion, most importantly, I LOVE the new Social Links. The Social Links in Persona 3 seemed like little isolated pockets, completely disconnected from the story that you had to seek out. Here, almost every single Social Link is tied right into the story. They’re your family, and every single one of your party members. It just makes complete sense that you’d have these strong bonds that affect things with people you are truly close to, and not some random shop owner you visit every day, and I love it. I also like the fact that raising Social Links with your party gives them additional moves in battle. It’s a nice and logical touch. Basically, in Persona 3, I was happy just to pick a few favorite Social Links and work on them. In this game, I really want to work on them ALL, because they’re all characters I’ve already gotten to know through other things and I like them. Plus, you know, one of them is a fox. Heh.

Anyway, I’m going to keep playing away at this game until Christmas, I assume, but damn, it is really great, and if you like the MegaTen stuff at all, you should really pick this up for your PS2 at some point. Seriously.

So they came out this with No Doubt track pack? Say what you will about where Stefani went after No Doubt, but damn, they had some good songs. So I bought the pack, even though it was a bit expensive, and I was not disappointed. It’s got every single No Doubt song you’d ever want. Well, I’d ever want, anyway. It’s nice. I’ve been having a lot of fun belting those out.

But the point is, I suppose, that it got me to boot up Rock Band 2 again. Man, that game is still so great. I can just come back to it and sing again and again. And maybe it’s sad that I’ve spent this much money on DLC or just a sign of how awesome the game is, but I seriously have so many Rock Band songs now that I play on random and still get songs I don’t recognize, or just have completely different experiences every time because tracks are never repeated. Unless I want them to be. This is how a music game should be, dammit.
So yeah, I spent hours singing, and then Spaeth came over and I sang for a few more, during which I bought one more new song, Tempted. We discovered it was about as Spaeth was completely randomly going through and previewing tracks for sale. It was only a buck! It is hella fun to sing, though “put you asleep” easy on everything else. But who cares, I just sing. It was a great surprise to find that song, but even more of a surprise to find it was by the same band that brought us Cool for Cats. What. The. Fuck. Could these two songs be more different? Mind=blown.
We also found out that a three-pack of songs by a band named Locksley seem to have a ton of awesome potential and might get bought in the future. Also, two of the three songs by Siouxie and the Banshees seem pretty great, too. I’ll have to consider all these for future pickup.

But seriously, I don’t know. It may be expensive buying all these plastic instruments, but dammit, this game has legs. I’m willing to pay that much for a game I come back to over and over again. I totally am.

I’ve been distracted for awhile, so I haven’t gotten back to it, but I gave in and bought A Kingdom for Kieflings recently, and I’m glad I did. On the surface, it looks really boring. Basically, it’s an RTS without the combat. It’s all tech tree and resource management. That’s the entire game. But it’s shockingly relaxing, fun, and rewarding. I just found myself sitting there, for long periods of time, just gathering resources and building buildings. The way the game unlocks new customization vectors is about right, too. No sooner are you getting bored with building things when you’ll unlock, say, a building to let you paint houses a bunch of new colors, or you’ll build a statue-maker to make gigantic statues in your honor, and then you have to go play with those and put them all about.
I think I’ve mentioned before how important podcast-friendly games are? This is the DEFINITION of such a game. It’s fun, but it’s not taxing. It keeps you busy while you listen to a podcast or music or whatever. It’s wonderful in that regard. It’s also the perfect “waiting for people to log on and invite me into Left 4 Dead” game, as you can play in tiny bursts and still make progress. Not to mention, it’s amazing how many hours of gameplay is in there. For my 10 bucks, I’m almost to 10 hours logged, I believe. Sadly, I don’t always get that much gameplay out of full priced games.
If you enjoy games that relax you, that are casual, like, say, Picross DS or Puzzle Quest or whatnot, you should really give this game a go. Ninjabee hit it out of the park with this one. I came in so very doubtful, downloading and deleting the demo several times, but it won me over, and I’m glad it did.

Well, you can stop imagining, because it already kinda does.

Upon hearing about it from John Davidson on 1up Yours, I just had to try SMT: Imagine for myself. Could it be that great? Could it draw me in with a property I have come to love this past year or so? So I bothered all the people on Talking Time who had codes to the closed beta they weren’t going to use, and got in on it. It’s pretty good, and certainly one of the best free straight-up MMOs I’ve played. (Straight-up meaning, you know, the normal combat, leveling stuff, and not something like Albatross 18, which is a great free arcade-style golf game, you know? Which reminds me, it’s been a long time since I played that. I bet they have a lot of new courses I should try.) When it gets into open beta later this month, I would suggest giving it a try if you like the series and aren’t allergic to MMOs.

First off, the feel is spot on. The game looks pretty damn close to the PS2 Megaten games in feeling, and they’ve certainly matched all the demon animations and models exactly. I keep seeing new people in town with demons I haven’t found yet, and going “Ooh, wonder where you get that one.” The music is not Meguro-quality, but pretty good. Still, I mean, it’s an MMO, you turn that shit off. But yeah, they’ve nailed the “feel” of Megaten that I’ve come to expect.
The combat is sort of an advanced PSO-style combat with pets. It’s all about timing. I’ve been playing a melee attacker with heal spells, like I do in everything, so I don’t know how other people play? But it feels really solid doing melee. You hit combos until you knock an enemy back, and then you can guard, or prepare a counter-attack or cast a spell or whatever. Everything has a charge time involved, so you actually have to plan when you’re going to counter-attack and block, because you don’t throw those up instantly. Meanwhile, you have a summoned demon partner. They work via a customizable AI like most MMO “pets” do, and it works pretty well, but they were damn smart in letting you be able to give specific commands, if you want. If you really want your Pixie to cast Dia RIGHT NOW on this random person, you can use your Pixie’s Dia just like your own. The thing that worries me about the combat, though, is that it’s extremely tough to switch targets. Granted, your demon is normally smart enough to try to draw attention, but if I’m using a caster-style demon, that just means they get dead quickly. I haven’t found a keyboard shortcut to switch targets. You have to click with the mouse. This is just… not good. Tab should switch between close targets, right? Maybe I’m just missing something.

In all, though, the game is really getting me with the Pokemon vibe. You have to be high enough in level to convince demons to join you, and you do it just like in other SMT games, where you talk to them and negotiate or threaten or whatever. Every time I see a new demon about in the world, I start thinking about how I can get it. They have the fusion too, just like the other games, so you might want to recruit even more than just one. The main problem I have, though, is that you can only carry six demons. I’m fine with only being able to take that many into battle, but when I tried to use the “Demon Storage” to store a couple I had that I was going to keep for fusion fodder, I couldn’t. It told me I had to buy some sort of pass and didn’t tell me where to do it. Perhaps that’s their business model, and the demon storage is a premium feature. If so, that kind of sucks, because that means you can’t go all Pokemon without paying. Still, though, even with six slots, I’m sure you could play fine overall. I just like collecting creatures.

The game tries to have a story, too, which I’m barely into. So far I haven’t been impressed, but that’s because the story has mostly been tutorial so far. If the story is halfway interesting and you could play through it with a friend, this free MMO could be a great way to waste some time with an online friend or three. Hell, the whole thing has promise. So much so that I went back to play for several hours again today, because I was wanting to. That’s a good sign. We’ll see how it goes, but either way, it seems a cut above most of these free MMOs, even others by this same company, and I’m glad it’s about.