The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

So, I am not a person who normally eats breakfasts. After that stint of time when I was just kind refusing to really eat anything, I told myself “Okay, fine, self. We’ll eat. But we’re only going to do it when hungry, and try to keep it to a minimum.”
That hasn’t totally held up. I snack and whatnot. But I certainly try to keep actual meals to a minimum. Preferably one big one and a snack, but most of the time it gets down to two meals. Those two meals tend to be lunch and dinner. These tend to be the ones I keep up with and do because they’re much more likely to be social situations, and that’s kind of the one rule I always follow: Always eat in a social situation if the option is given to you. So, you know, it makes sense those would be common.

Suddenly, however, I am now a morning person, getting up at 6:30 in the fucking AM. Suddenly, I am hungry to the point of being sick by the time a normal lunch period rolls around if I don’t eat a breakfast. This puts me in a dilemma. A potential three meal a day dilemma.

Strategies to try include the “snack on the way out the door,” or “Pop Tart” method, and the “stop being such an idiot and eat breakfast” method. But none of those really seem to be options that I’m happy with. It’s so hard for me to change my ways, and harder still for me to be okay with it. I’d rather it just be the same sort of thing I’ve been doing forever, where I have a big lunch to make up for breakfast, and then a small dinner, or vice versa.

But I dunno, I guess I’m all grown up and some shit, and I should just deal with it. I just hate bending my will to my stupid body that I hate. Rather it be on my terms.
Stupid body. Always needing food and sleep and being all wrong.

So, you’ve played Ben There, Dan That! You’ve both Ben there and Danned that. So what do you do?

Well, you give a nice indie developer 5 bucks and move on and play Time Gentlemen, Please!

The description on their website there is pretty well completely accurate. Time Gentlemen, Please! is bigger, better programmed with better interface stuff, funnier, and just all around a better game. Not that this makes Ben There, Dan That! any less fun. It’s just clear that, once they realized they had a hit on their hands, they came back and made a much better game in the same world, letting the in-game versions of themselves start to deviate nicely from who they were and become their own characters, and giving the game all the bells and whistles one expects from an adventure game in this day and age. Like, say, nice background music most of the time. Still no voices, though, but once again, the writing does make up for it. Completely.

The plot involves significantly less alternate dimensions than the first game, though keeping things just as wacky: in an attempt to stop coathangers from existing, they’ve managed to get stuck in WWII, where they’ve accidentally given Hitler an army of cloned dinosaurs and a large mecha suit. Maybe that doesn’t mean much, but it actually does mean quite a bit for the flow of the game. Ben There, Dan That! was very much a big collection of silly ideas thrown together with the “alternate dimension” mechanic as an easy explanation to paste it all together. (Again, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t entertaining, just, you know, it was obvious what they were doing.) In this game, Zombie Cow has obviously planned out what’s going on, making a very unified world that feels like a complete space, even in it’s complete and utter weirdness and humor.
There’s a plot, there’s character arcs, everything happens so much better. The puzzle-y bits, too, are more involved and more difficult, if you’re into that sort of thing, but they also seem to have built in much more hints into the dialog to counteract this, so the overall difficulty isn’t too bad.
It’s just a great little adventure game that’s worth your time, and the really cheap price of admission.

Luckily, this seems to have done well for them, which is excitement! They announced that they have another sequel coming, this in a more strongly episodic format, they say. I’m all for more episodic adventure games, and I’m sure I’ll toss them a few bucks when this new endeavor comes out, though I hope it gets on Steam quicker than the originals did. I kinda like Steam a lot. It’s why I waited so long to try Ben There, Dan That, even when I had heard buzz about it before. Then, suddenly, it was on Steam, and there you go. I’m weird.

But yeah, no, I am of the much enjoying this game. Yes.

So I’ve got Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box. It looks so great! I’ve played some of it, and it’s so good! So what do I do?

Why, I buy a completely different pair of Indie games and play those instead, of course. Why would I want to play the awesome retail release I just bought? How silly.

But no, seriously, it’s okay, because these games are great. Best yet, the first one is free, though I got it in a little two pack for the cost of the second one on Steam. It is called Ben There, Dan That! and it is great and you should try it.

The game is a click-’em-up adventure, as Strong Bad would say. It’s obviously made by a low budget team, but they do their best! They don’t have voice work, which is a real shame, and the graphics look a little janky. But at the same time, they’ve managed to cobble their strange art into a very distinct visual style, which is always a plus, and even though I don’t get to hear someone reading it, the writing is pretty damn awesome. I laughed quite a few times.

The story is oddly selfish in its design. The characters in the game are actually supposed to be the two guys making it, completely. There are jokes about how lazy the programming is, and how hard it is to write a good joke here, but eh, they’ll put one in later, and so on. I’m sure this started out as a silly kind of joke project for the guys who made it. Still, it’s hard not to like it, even with some of the blatant fan service to themselves, because it is so well-written and entertaining. The majority of the puzzles are pretty straightforward and understandable, and the nonsensical ones are wrapped up in such entertaining jokes that you really don’t care all that much.

Of course, the best part is, it’s free. It’s worth the day or so it takes to play through it, totally. Download it, try it, and if you like combining items with other items, the mark of any TRUE adventurer, you will enjoy it. Promise. And then you’ll likely drop the five bucks on the sequel. And enjoy that. But I’ll talk about that tomorrow. Probably.

Dateline: Labor Day Weekend! On a whim, I remember that the Missouri Botanical Gardens is having some sort of Japanese Festival! I say to myself, “Self, you never fucking DO anything. Sure, spending all weekend playing the excellent Red Faction: Guerrilla would be time well spent, but shouldn’t you go DO something?”

So I called some people, and sure enough, on Monday, Spaeth and I ended up going to the Japanese Festival. Yep.

It was pretty neat! I mean, the Botanical Gardens is, honestly, a pretty cool place to begin with, and I hadn’t been there in years. A plant zoo sounds potentially unexciting, but it really is a pretty place, and there is just all kinds of stuff to look at. Spaeth hadn’t been there in forever either. So it was pretty neat just to walk around.
That said, I kept trying to use the map to take us on “shortcuts” that involved us getting extremely lost. This happened all the time, the worst part of it being when we got lost in the English Forest for like 15 minutes, only to end up about 5 feet away from where we started. It was excitement, let me tell you.

But yeah, we got to see a lot of cool stuff. We got to see some people practicing the classical art of Koryu Bugei, which was pretty interesting, especially with a guy there to explain it. We got to see a huge explanation of the art of Sumo, and saw a couple mock fights. We got to see a performance of a bunch of Taiko drummers, which I took a shitty Qik video of here, if you care to see.

During all this, we walked by more people with cat ears than I’ve ever seen in one place before. Granted, I know of several places I could go where I’d see more of them? But I almost felt out of place! Should have brought some ears.

The excursion ended with me wasting money on some cute dolls because “fuck it, I’m on vacation, sort of.” And then, of course, the required stop by J in the B. It was a pretty fun time!

In any case, I took some pictures with my cell phone, and you can look at them here, if you want. But yeah, it was a nice change of pace, going. I’m glad I did.

Saturday night, I dreamed I was in an Adventure Game.

There were at least three distinct time periods, and I could travel between them for some reason. The one in the “past” was some sort of party, there was a “future” where I was in some sort of TV or Movie studio where something involving puppets was being filmed, and the “present”, which was in some sort of apartment complex, as well as some woods outside.

The puzzles seemed to revolve heavily around this item I had. It looked like a Compact Flash Memory Card reader, but it was a “Lip Scanner.” I was having to convince people to kiss it in order to get a perfect scan of their lips and a selection of their genetic makeup for some damn reason. I built up a really big collection of people, both past and present. I think I was establishing lineage? Maybe? But there were other things.

The one puzzle I remember clearly was me trying to make a fountain spring of someone spit. Seriously. To do this involved blocking an already existing spring with a rock, and using the lip scanner to make some spare saliva. Then somehow, all of this got into a water fountain at the party in the past, and I had the guy confirm that it was his spit by tasting it. And then that had the spring become a saliva spring. Yeah, I have no fucking idea either.

Moral of the Story: Adventure games are really fucking weird, man. Really fucking weird. Or I guess, maybe it’s my dreams that are really weird.

So, I bought a T-shirt, as I am fairly often doing. I noticed that the sloshy t-shirts on Homestar Runner (as first seen in this sbemail and later in this wonderful bit of music.) were on the super clearanceness! So I snapped one up. Because, you know, why not? Seriously. WHY NOT?

Anyway, so, as per usual, my mother doesn’t get the reference on the shirt. She constantly has things to say about my shirts being inappropriate and whatnot, even when she knows not what she’s talking about and I can prove that I constantly get compliments and whatnot about them. Having a guy with a gun on your shirt does not mean I’m going to shoot you.

In any case, this time, instead of asking me, she decides that she has a computer, she’s going to just look it up. So she googles “sloshing.” This apparently comes up in Urban Dictionary or something similar as a word for female masturbation. So she runs downstairs to check my shirt to make sure…! And realizes it’s “sloshy.” But she’s still concerned, because it has a lyric from their song on the back of the shirt, “We Don’t Really Care About You.” Which, apparently means that I don’t care about my students? I mean, obviously, right? So we have a talk about it, and I show her the cartoon. Yay.

I dunno, does she really think that I’m going to wear a shirt with something that inappropriate in front of my class? Give me a little credit, you know?

Anyway, that’s my most recent T-shirt/Parental story. Yay.

So I guess Blackberries are magic or something? Because I put my school e-mail into the phone and it magically can check it somehow, even though it’s some crazy silly proprietary system. Not that I mind that it’s crazy magic and working.
In any case, now I get my e-mails about all the work associated with my TA position beamed straight to my phone!

I feel so professional.

This is just one in a constant string of things that make me feel professional. First it was the office, totally, and then it was just how I was being treated in class. My students still don’t have a thing to call me that I don’t dislike, but it’s just kind of a thrill to be treated as someone with the knowledge and know-how by such a sizable group. And now it’s this kind of thing, where I’m responding to students in real time and stuff, going all Crackberry like an executive or something…

I’ve never really felt more legit than this before. It’s just nice to have that. I mean, I knew I was good enough. I knew I was that good. I didn’t really question it. But it’s one thing to know, and it’s another thing to feel like you’re being constantly recognized for it, and to be treated as an equal, if one who’s still getting experience, rather than a cog in a wheel.

I think I might have said it before. But still.
I could really get used to this.
I really could.

Do you know what’s awesome?

Chainsawsuit.

You should all read Chainsawsuit. It is fairly random humor at its finest. I can’t stop laughing at this comic, for instance. And let’s not forget my personal favorite about the Fontalist.

Seriously, I have no idea if his other comic is any good, but Chainsawsuit? Now that’s something I can get behind.

Yep, that’s basically all this post is about. Go read it nao.

So if there’s one thing I think we can all agree on, it’s that Hitler is a dick. I mean, what’s up with that guy? Seriously. So we have no choice but to blow up his head in a robot body again and again and again. And again. Forever.

But wouldn’t it be better to do it in some sort of Turn-Based RPG?

And so here comes Wolfenstien RPG! To your iPhone! Spectacular Timing!

I’ve been waiting and waiting for this game for a long time, actually. Mr. Carmack announced it was coming forever and ago, and then went and screwed it up by releasing some shitty port of Wolfenstien 3D with shitty controls and going “Oh, we don’t want to confuse people!” Fuck that shit. Nobody wants a horrid port of Wolf 3D, and everyone should want this RPG, because it is awesome.

Basically, the game is set up like Wolfenstien 3D, though with better graphics, and Hitler replaced with some weird guy with a soul patch. So you move around, just like you do in that game, but every step you take takes one turn. Every time you fire a gun? One turn. Enemies work the same way, So you slowly run and gun through the spaces in a turn-based style. Along the way you pick up healing items and syringes which give you various buffs, as can use those to your advantage to make it through all the enemies, and eventually kill Hitler. Or his brother. Or something.

So remember yesterday, when I was talking about how shitty virtual D-pads were? Well, Wolfenstien RPG has a virtual D-pad, and it is perfect. Doesn’t bother you at all. Why? Because it’s turn-based, of course. There’s never any pressure, and you rarely actually need precision. It’s pretty good anyway. But because of that, it goes so easy. It’s not hard to move around at all. The only thing that doesn’t work very well is the swipe to strafe, but since turning doesn’t cost you a turn, you never actually HAVE to strafe, so it’s never really an issue.

The combat itself is pretty simple. You pick a gun, and fire like crazy until the other guy dies, using health kits as needed. You can do some advanced things with dynamite packs and buffing up appropriately, but for the most part, it isn’t needed. It’s a very casual experience. On top of all that, it saves when you leave the game, and you can save at any time. Since the levels are mostly linear, unless you did something silly before you quit last time, you never really feel lost when you jump back in, because chances are, you need to move forward. This makes it an amazing portable game, because it’s extremely easy to play for 2 or 3 minutes, and then get back to something else.

But seriously, there’s achievement-like things in there, if you like those. There’s a decent amount of gameplay and plenty of portability in a game suited very well for the iPod platform. It’s totally worth your money. You really should try it! And then you can wait eagerly for the Doom 2 RPG, which is apparently coming out next year or something. Sure, it’ll probably be similar, but, you know, running through hell: better than killing Nazis? Maybe. Should at least have a bigger enemy variety, anyway.

Because I am a robot, and I buy anything on the iPhone platform that is ever recommended to me, I read this and I bought Zenonia.

There’s nothing particularly off about that review. It’s fairly accurate. But the entire time I was playing away at it, it was hard to do anything but wish for buttons. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve certainly never seen a BETTER virtual D-pad and button on any iPhone game, but that doesn’t make it suck any less.
Add that to the fact that this game is very much a button masher, and you have a recipe for not-as-nice. I’m expected to slam on the attack button constantly, especially as the Paladin class, which is built for survivability as opposed to damage dealing. (And I had to pick Paladin. It had a heal spell. I always pick the one with the heal spell.) But since it isn’t a button, it can be very easy to get slightly distracted, and have your thumb slide just so, and suddenly your character is just standing there, getting his ass beat. Most of the time, it works just fine, but when such errors happen it is really frustrating.
It’s the same with the D-pad. Most of the time, it works really well, and the game is smart enough to have some very minor pathfinding so you don’t have to be extremely precise. (For example, if you are walking straight towards a box that is only blocking one space in the middle of the path, holding up towards the box makes your character go ahead and walk around it) But it’s really easy to slip, and suddenly your character is facing the wrong way when his big attack goes off, making him miss.
You have a hot bar of various abilities you can set on the bottom, but these also pose problems, as the buttons aren’t very big. Setting a move to the slot closest to the virtual D-pad had me turning just as often as pulling off the move, which was annoying. It also normally took me two or three presses to pull off. That isn’t what you want to be happening when you want to heal in the heat of battle.
On top of all this, the menu system uses the D-pad, instead of being touch screen based. There’s no good reason why I can’t drag and drop equipment into slots instead of having to use the D-pad like I’m playing a GBA game. It’s kind of ridiculous.

Still, the only problems I really have with the game are control issues that can barely be helped. The game is pretty deep, and it certainly is engaging. But when it started to get difficult due to the controls, I kind of started to put it down. If you really wish you had a deeper jRPG-style experience on your iPhone, Zenonia will deliver. Just expect to have a lot of frustration with the controls.