The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned before that I am an “endless repeat” kind of music listener. Some people listen to albums, some to random selections of shuffled tracks. Me? I’m one song, constantly, over and over and over, until my obsession gets to something else.

The current song? Froggie by The Presidents of the United States of America. (Please, don’t mind the odd “music video.”)

This one didn’t catch me the first time I listened to it like some songs. It was just kind of there, and I thought it odd, with it’s weird energetic crescendos and whatnot in between a fairly calm song for POTUS. (Pot Us!) Yet when I listened to it again, and soon a million, million times, it became exciting for just that very reason. There’s a constant expectation there. I know the part that makes me want to get up and dance like an idiot is coming. It’s always coming. But you have to wait for it. It builds and builds. That’s pretty fun.
Pretty, pretty fun.

Jonathan bought Virtua Fighter 4 on a whim, once it came out in its cheap updated form back in the PS2 days. I was kind of astounded by it. The original Virtua Fighter, which is all I’d really played, was silly and stupid. I mean, it looked like this. It’s not something to inspire confidence. So when I found that, at some point in between, Virtua Fighter had become this crazily technical thing, filled with amazing depth without involving any sort of “super moves” and was incredibly fun to play. On top of that, they had created this thing called “Quest Mode” which made single player play amazingly fun.

I had been meaning to try Virtua Fighter 5 for awhile now, because of that. It came in from Gamefly, and I gave it a go. My verdict: More of the same, though that’s not a bad thing.

Seriously, I’m not a hyper-technical person with this stuff, but I could see very little difference between Virtua Fighter 4 and 5. I mean, sure, the graphics looked better, and there were a couple new fighters, but it was essentially the same game. You still had the completely excellent Quest Mode, where you run around to virtual arcades to fight the virtual people in them to win tournaments and increase your rank. You still have the large amount of character customization, so you can really make your character look different and unique, and where the better costume pieces are awarded through play, giving you a nice Skinner box to keep going. Especially now that I have an Arcade stick, I was having a lot of fun playing it.

In the end, though, I didn’t decide to keep it. There is just no competition for the game. I wasn’t about to be anywhere near good enough to complete with the people online, who are surely only the hardest core of players at this point, and although I might have gotten Jonathan into a match or two, none of my other friends would really be into a fighter that technical. So I decided to save my cash and send it back. Probably a smart move, what with me deciding to give in, support Tim Schafer, and buy Brutal Legend on the 13th.

Still, Virtua Fighter has one of the best single player experiences of any fighter. I enjoyed Quest mode while I played it, (which was just about to the point where it started being too hard for me to win. I suck.) just like I did last time. At the same time, if you’re going to play it single player, I don’t know if there’s really a lot of reason to get 5 over a super-cheap copy of 4 Evolution in a bargain bin somewhere. They are just so similar because 4 was polished to near perfection. It would definitely seem hard to move from that without completely changing the game up, you know? So instead they just added more costumes, a few more characters, and more pretty. And I guess that’s alright.

Remember that paper I submitted?

Well, uh, it got accepted.

So now I’m going to be going to beautiful Arkadelphia, Arkansas in November to read this paper, which doesn’t QUITE exist yet but I’m working on it, in front of other people who are doing the same thing and who may or may not be more qualified than I am.

Needless to say, I’m thrilled. Thrilled-ish.

Granted, I still have a ton of paperwork to fill out. Paperwork is fun! But that should, you know, pay for the whole thing, which will be cool.
I’ve never been in an hotel room by myself, though. That’ll certainly be an interesting experience. But I made sure my room had Internet and I’ll bring the lappy, so I will be entertained! That, and I’ll have papers to grade. So, you know. Fun times.

I guess I’m kind of legit, huh?
No?
Oh well.

While waiting on students in the lounge of the office (which is basically a very small room which has a couple couches in it) I got back into playing Rogue Touch, for lack of anything better to do. That inspired me to go to my office computer and install Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup on it, for whatever reason. I guess to sap my productivity? I have no idea.

Needless to say, I suck at it.

I don’t know. Whenever I play these sorts of games, I always want to be a healer, or a mage of some kind. I pick these classes knowing good and well that I am going to go Kamikaze at some point and die immediately, because I’m a mage, and I have no armor, and I suck in general anyway. So after playing a couple of deaths like that on my office computer, I decided, fuck it, I’m going to actually accommodate my urges. It’s nothing but Hill Orc Fighters from now on.

Strangely, though, that hasn’t seemed to improve my effectiveness much at all. The top of my leaderboard is still a birdie healer, much like I kept running at home when I tried the game. I guess it’s not surprising that the class I played like 30 rounds of would be the one I would be best at, but at the same time I totally forgot how to call in divine favors so I wasn’t even using the healing powers of my healer. Also, I accidentally killed something while praying to my pacifist god and made her mad at me, so, you know, I was pretty well playing the worst healer ever. Yet, I still did better than all of my fighter runs thus far. Who the hell knows.

I mean, I’m not all that good at Roguelikes. I figured out Shiren pretty decently, and made it to the last area a few times, though never cleared it, but that’s about it. I’ve never made it out of the first strata of Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. I’m under the impression that there are like 15 areas and I have to pick and clear like 7 of them to get plot coupons to clear the game? But as I’ve said, I’ve never seen past the first, so… yeah. I’m doing pretty awesome. Don’t want to brag, but, you know, I’m pretty well the best. At being awful.

Still, even when constantly losing, the game remains fun. It’s certainly helped by the fact that, as long as you’re using tiles, the interface is so, so much more useful than, say, Nethack. If you’re looking to try one of these hardcore roguelikes, I really can’t recommend Stone Soup with Tiles enough. It plays like someone gave a shit about interface. It’s wonderful.

But yeah, so that’s what I’m doing instead of the tons of homework and grading and whatnot I should be doing in my office. Exciting, no?

So, as of iPod Touch firmware update 3.1.1, my beloved Mahjong Mobile no longer works. It crashes on startup. What’s worse, the program has apparently been completely removed from the app store for some reason, so it seems unlikely that it will ever be updated. This really makes me unhappy, honestly, but, especially seeing as Saki just ended and thus pushed my Mah Jong lust to new heights, I attempted to find another understandable Riichi Mah Jong game for my iPod.

Unfortunately, I could only really find one. Most of the others I had looked at when I got Mahjong Mobile seemed to have disappeared! It seemed my only real option was Simple! Jong Touch. But it was only a buck, so I felt little hesitation in trying it.

Simple! Jong Touch is a completely adequate single-player Mah Jong game. The interface works fine. It’s not quite as slick at the sliding bar in Mahjong Mobile, but since it’s on its side, it’s easy enough to tap the tiles you want, and then you just tap again to discard. I haven’t made any mistakes in that regard yet. It also has all kinds of options on rules, if you know enough about Mah Jong house rules to have preferences in that regard. So, you know, it seems to work pretty well.

The problem is, where Mahjong Mobile was completely aimed towards a more casual effort, Simple! Jong Touch assumes you know Mah Jong backwards and forwards.
Mahjong Mobile only shows you options when you can do them. It puts up useful markers on tiles immediately discarded so you can learn to track the pond better. It breaks down how everyone who goes out scores in pieces, tells you what their fan was and so on, so you can try to figure it out.
Simple! Jong Touch does none of this. When people go out, you see the official name of the hand and a score. That’s fine, but again, the foreign words that make up the names of the hands aren’t helpful in me figuring the game out, because they’re just nonsense to me. It also displays buttons for basically everything you can do in the game all the time. Even if you have an open hand, it still offers you the option of calling Reach constantly, for instance. You can also call false Tsumos and Rons all day long, and the game penalizes you according to the rules. This is probably preferable for higher-level players trying to train and remember the things they need to while actually playing at a table, but since I still haven’t completely gotten all the rules to the game down, this just makes the whole experience less fun.

So, basically, I really hope that Mahjong Mobile gets updated again so I can play it. Still, if you’re some actual person who plays Mah Jong, Simple! Jong Touch seems like a pretty solid buy, especially with that dollar price tag. I think Mahjong Mobile was worth the $3 I paid for it, but I can see someone not needing all the helps I want as I figure it out, and just wanting the most Mah Jong for their dollar. Simple! Jong Touch can give that to you.
And hey, at least it’s not another stupid Mah Jong Solitaire game. (Not that I dislike Mah Jong Solitaire, it’s just, seriously, you can’t even find anything about the actual game under the millions of shitty Solitaire games.)

So, Saki is over.
Well, for the season, anyway. It was very vague on whether or not there was going to be more. I certainly hope so, as I am a sucker for lesbian high school girls playing Mah Jong in a dramatic fashion. Mostly for the dramatic Mah Jong thing. Not the lesbian thing.

Honestly, can we talk about the lesbian thing. I mean, I am all for girl/girl romance. TOTALLY. Love in all forms is fucking awesome. But oh. My. God. At least have the romance be for the characters, you know? So often, so much of it was completely fanservice bait. It made it completely impossible to give a shit about the relationship between the characters. This is no less dramatic than in the last episode where, instead of, I dunno, playing Mah Jong, all the characters from the whole series decide they are all going to get naked in a tub and talk, sometimes about their feelings and sometimes about Mah Jong, and it’s just about the worst fanservice ever. Way to ruin the ending of the series. Good job.
The place where I get these episodes, which is… here, has a comment thread, and I made the mistake of looking. All throughout the thread are people talking about how hot the show is. Seriously? That’s why you’re watching this? You do realize you are on the internet, right? You can watch girls, anime or not, doing much sexier things RIGHT NOW. You wouldn’t even have to slog through all the playing of the Mah Jong. Hell, you could probably find a comic with the characters OF THE SHOW doing such things. Why are you even watching this? Ugh.

Anyway, that rant over, the show was really good. Well, in the way that any show about playing a game is really good in my eyes. It probably isn’t as good as Akagi, so if you’re going for only the top notch, I would probably suggest watching that. But it is certainly better animated than Akagi, is more over-the-top, and is really just a lot of fun once they get to the Mah Jong tables.
Everyone has some sort of crazy “Mah Jong” power. Some people control the “flow” of the tiles, some people have extra strength in various situations, such as during the East round or while on a Hell wait. Some players, such as the main character, Saki, have a specific hand that they can manifest at will. These powers don’t ALWAYS come into play, and are not specifically called out as superpowers. But they are used, fairly often, to really ramp up the tension in a way that someone who doesn’t know the game of Mah Jong can understand. It may require a lot of explanation by the narrator in Akagi before I can truly get what he did, but in Saki, it’s explained in much clearer anime terms: I have to do this to block her power from going off. It’s understandable, even if you don’t enjoy the game, and it is enjoyable.

Anyway, it’s a very silly show, but I enjoyed every moment of it. At the end of the last episode, they showed this sort of… montage of the teams they would be playing against at Nationals. I’m unsure if that was throwing the fans of the manga a bone, or if that was an indication that they’re working on a second season. I certainly hope it’s the second season. I would love to watch more.
Whether or not you’d like to watch it really depends on if you can stomach blatant, painful fanservice and enjoy silly game-based shows as much as I do. I think, just by reading a quick description, you’d know if you’d get a kick out of it or not. If you think you would, let’s watch it together or something. It’ll be awesome.

A long time ago, on some podcast or something, John Davidson, whom I like quite a bit when he talks in a podcast, mentioned a game called Miami Law, which he described as some weird mix of Phoenix Wright and a light gun shooter for DS. Feeling all empowered by the fact that I now had a Gamefly account and could rent horrible games, try them, and then immediately send them back, I put it on my Queue. Then it showed up the other day.

The most hilarious thing, and the first thing I noticed, was that, if you click on Extra in the main menu, you can play Sudoku puzzles and Texas Hold ’em. Is this relevant to the game at some point? I have absolutely no idea. But the idea of “We’re making a casual game, casual people like Sudoku and Texas Hold ‘Em, right? Then just throw some in there” makes me giggle.

Now, let me be the first to say that, honestly, this game is not a bad idea. Mixing up a mystery with some touch screen minigames honestly seems like a great combination for a nice casual game. There’s nothing wrong with the concept. The execution, though, is pretty bad.
The game can’t decide if it wants to be controlled via stylus or the buttons. If you use the buttons, it’s awkward, because the set-up of the menu is designed for the stylus. But when you press something with the stylus, nothing happens. You have to double-click on all the menu options to get them to do anything, which is completely stupid. That got annoying really quick.
On top of that, the actual gameplay is extremely trial and error. When you’re given decisions, I hope you pick the right one, because otherwise, you just lost! Granted, there’s a little thought bubble on the bottom that tells you what the character thinks is the right choice. Most of the time it is! But that just creates other issues, in that you never feel like you’re actually doing anything in the case, since your decisions do not matter.
The first time I was given a decision that matters, I got completely confused as to what the game wanted me to do. I had four suspects I had to get information out of. I could “Use Force” to pull my gun on them, but then I’d get scolded. Even “Using Force” on every person didn’t make anything happen, nor did talking to everyone and looking at everyone. I couldn’t move away until I figured out who had the information I needed. If I “Use Force” a second time against any of the people, I lose. I had no clue what the game wanted me to do. It went back into the Gamefly Envelope.

The presentation is both good and bad. It has this weird half-anime art style that works for some characters (like the male lead, named Law, because someone could not resist being so fucking clever) and then totally falls apart and looks freakish on others. (like the female lead, Sara, whose face just seems like someone inflated her eyes way too big) I think it would have worked a lot better if they had just gone with the more realistic style they were leaning for, especially since the target audience for this seems to be the same kind of people who bought Brain Age and also like CSI or whatever.
The writing, though, was actually decent, from what I read. I mean, it’s not great, and it certainly seemed constrained in some scenes to make it “acceptable.” (I mean, Law is running around with this drug ring who is killing all kinds of dudes. They are going to use harsher language.) It’s passable, but it’s certainly not worth fighting through all the constant Game Overs for no reason.

Anyway, I still think the idea was solid, and it was kind of fun to fiddle with for an hour or two, but it’s heading back to Gamefly. As much as I was thinking about it, though, and how much I’d actually LIKE an interactive story like that. I think I’m probably looking all the more forward to renting Women’s Murder Club: Games of Passion at some point. That’s got like… a guy who has written a book before behind it, right? And Nintendo First Party support? Surely it’s going to be everything this game isn’t. Hopefully.

So I’ve actually been playing Kingdom of Loathing again, although in Hardcore Oxy, so I only play like once a week or so. Still, that’s been working out well enough. And, of course, since I’m ascending again, I’ve been doing 100% familiar runs. And since the most recent Mr. Familiar I’ve gotten was the He-Boulder, I’ve been using that.
I like it pretty well.
Of course, it doesn’t hurt that it’s a part Ghuol Whelp. It’s always nice to have that extra healing after most combats. I heart those kinds of familiars. (Seriously, if only the Cotton Candy Carnie had flavor that I liked better. Then I’d use it all the time.) It’s also nice, I suppose, to have a Mr. Store Leprechaun that I would actually want to use for the Nuns or whatever. I’ll probably never actually use him for that effect, though.

So, besides the nice heals, the He-Boulder has one other thing going for it, and that’s it’s various eye beams. Once a combat, you can use the free skill “Point at your Opponent” to have it fire off a beam. Most of the time, this just throws out a little damage. (Well, it’s a ton of damage early in the game, but it quickly becomes more trivial.) However, one in every 150 turns, it fires a “Major Ray” which does TONS of damage with the red ray, defeats an enemy outright with the Yellow Ray, or essentially uses Entangling Noodles on the enemy with the Blue Ray, which is pretty cool.

So basically, you have a Ghuol Whelp who gives you some extra Meat drops and works like a sometimes effective combat familiar. It’s a pretty well-rounded combination, and it’s pretty fun to use. The familiar equipment (which I annoyingly didn’t get, but got a lead necklace instead, grrr) helps the Major Rays recharge faster, which is a decent enough incentive to go to the Cake-shaped Arena in more casual runs, too.

Still, the fact remains that this review is late. You’d have to buy this familiar from the mall. I don’t know if it’s gone up in price, but if it has, over just the cost of a Mr. A? I can’t really recommend it. It’s neat enough, and I’m happy with my purchase, but it just doesn’t seem powerful enough to invest in, and certainly not enough to pay a premium for when you can get so many other neat things. I’ll keep having fun with it, though, at least until this run is over.

Speaking of World Building, you should read this story. It’s “Jon” by George Saunders, and it’s long, but it’s awesome. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

– – –

What did you think? Awesome, right? Well, actually, maybe you won’t think as such. People outside of my short story class, which is where I first encountered this story, haven’t liked it so far. Maybe it’s too “english major-y?” Is that even a thing? I dunno.

Mainly, though, this is just a poster child for what I’m going to talk about in my previously mentioned paper. The story does an AMAZING job at building a world with no exposition whatsoever. It’s really quite neat. You know more about Jon’s world in the first couple of paragraphs where he shows us “all what he is saying” than you do in multiple pointless paragraphs of back story in a fantasy novel.

I dunno. I loved it. LOVED IT. And I wanted to share. So there.

I submitted an abstract to a conference the other day.

I mean, I don’t know if I’ll get in, but goodness… that was not on a list of things I expected myself to be doing… going to scholarly conferences… reading papers I wrote in front of strangers and trying to sound important. That is just… not something I was going to do!

I’ve always thought of myself as a smart enough person, but never so much as an “intellectual” or someone who does this kind of shit. Someone who would, potentially, be making their way in life as an academic. That was never even vaguely in the game plan. I never really felt comfortable writing papers. It never felt like I was doing good work, even though I always got good grades on them. To think that creating these papers could be a marketable skill for me seemed… pretty crazy.
The main reason I’m drawn to that kind of life at all is a want to teach, and the main reason I’m repelled from it is getting into the supposed “Publish or Perish” mindset of actual academic life, you know? I don’t need this vague deadline over my head that I’m needing to get another article out there. Ugh.

And yet here I am. I submitted a paper.
I dunno. It’s odd.