The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

I was on the app store, and there was an app called “Rocket Fox” and because I am literally the most predictable person, I downloaded it. Well, the free trial anyway. But I’m thinking about going ahead and ponying up for the full thing, because it was a fun time.

Basically, you are a fox (Yay!) who is tasked with bouncing around between these “rocket flowers,” that shoot off fireworks. You have to clear all the flowers in a stage by falling into one, riding the rocket up, and then gliding to fall into the next one. Every time you fire off a rocket, swirling foxfire springs up around you, which you can collect to unlock shit like silly hats and new firework colors. It’s pretty simple, but it’s easy to pick up and has a decent difficulty to it where you rarely feel like the game is fucking you over when you die: it’s always your fault.

This game is one of the best uses of accelerometer controls I have seen. The game is played in a top-down view, and basically you just tip the screen about to lean the fox around while he’s gliding in the air. This works way better than I anticipated: You kind of want to do that anyway, and they have it calibrated like… perfectly, even on the gyroscope-less iPad 1 I am using to play. It would probably be even better on a phone, where you could lean it easier.

I found the unlocks pretty rewarding. They’re just cosmetic, but getting new burst patterns to add to the random rotation, and new colors of fireworks feels pretty good. Eventually I’ll probably get all of them, though, and the little outfits didn’t seem very cool. I kind of liked how the fox looks without accessories. He looks much cooler. Oh well.

Anyway, give this game a try. It has a very nice demo, and it’s fun. It also has a fox. So, you know.

CJ and I played Dungeon Twister. It had been awhile since I played, but I swept him pretty completely. It’s… an interesting game.

Being a game of basically complete information, where you know everything your opponent could do at any time, really, it’s so very, very unfriendly to new players. I obviously had figured out the game more than CJ had in his like one play of it, and it was really easy to sweep in and sneak through the gaps in his defense, because I knew what to look for and what I could do. I mean, I’m sure there are plenty of people more skilled that could beat me, but even with that slight experience gap, it was really no contest.

How do you overcome that? I mean, it’s the same sorts of problems you have in games like, say, a DotA, where you jump in to try to figure out the complicated rules and just get utterly destroyed. Or a Street Fighter or other fighting game, where you need to learn many characters patterns to be successful, but are often given nowhere to start, really. Or even something like Team Fortress 2 or some other very team-based shooter, where you need to build up a skillset in order to even be vaguely useful to your team. It’s such an amazing problem. It’s something that keeps people who could enjoy a strong, interesting multiplayer environment away.

When even a little bit of knowledge can basically knock you out of the “fun” bracket for playing with your friends, that shit is tough. I mean, I always play to win. I feel it would be an insult not to play any game I am playing to the best of my ability. But when I’m just crushing people, why would who I am destroying keep playing? And why would I want to play? I don’t really get much joy out of winning most of the time. It’s the game that’s fun. If my opponent is not having a good time, I don’t really want to be involved.

At the same time, something completely random and stupid like Mario Party is absolutely no fun, because you really have 0 control over what happens, and victories are completely and utterly empty. There’s nothing to really find there.

It’s a tough line to walk, I guess… I don’t know. TF2’s Coach program is a good idea in that direction, but also just doesn’t seem like it would work. I’d love to be coached by a friend (the little bit of time where Morbid Coffee coached me in Super Street Fighter IV was pretty awesome, and though I’m not GOOD, perse, I learned a lot about how to play Abel, even in that little session), but even among nice people volunteering for that job, I just wouldn’t be comfortable with that. A strong tutorial can help, but that sort of thing just can’t really teach a metagame. It’s hard to learn that stuff via anything but constant loss, and that’s the problem.

I don’t know. I’d like to feel like I can pull these sorts of games out, especially when I think they’re pretty neat like Dungeon Twister. But I am unsure how to do that, really.

I guess that’s what I’m trying to say.

Here’s a poem about my gut reactions and how fucking stupid and jealous they are. Not one of my best, but eh.

Spent Youth

I could never have
done
all that.
So clearly
clearly
it must be wrong.

On the Bombcast recently, they had this argument over whether Prototype 2 was Dumb, or dumb. Like, is it dumb as in stupid and silly and fun? Or is it Dumb as in completely stupid bullshit that’s painful to play.

Anyway, The Darkness 2 is dumb in the fun silly way, and I really enjoyed it.

I mean, the combat is pretty silly stuff? You shoot a dude. If you run up to them, you can slash them with your evil back snake, or grab them with the other evil back snake and then tear out their guts and get healed or whatever. It’s breezy and silly and pointlessly gorey and a lot of fun. It does get annoying near the end, where you’ve got dudes with big flashlights and guys with these stupid laser whip things that steal your weapon in the mix, but it never gets so annoying that I wanted to even dream of stopping.

It was kind of clever in a lot of ways too. Those eat a dude kill moves varied up by what button you pressed. Each one got you a different benefit. You could get health, or extra ammo, or recharge your evil powers. It made no sense, really, but it was pretty fun because it gave you more of a reason to want to rush in and do them all the time. “I could really use another blast of swarm for that shield dude, so I’ll run in and eat this guy for recharge power… and now my really good gun is out of ammo, so I’ll eat the shield guy I just stunned with swarm for ammo…” It made a nice flow to the combat.

Anyway, the story was pretty stupid. Very grimdark in a pretty silly way. It had this mob story too, that it was trying SO HARD to make “a thing” but it was really just this huge bunch of crazy stereotypes… and it was trying to convince me that maybe the whole game was a delusion as well, which was just silly. But it was, for the most part, an entertaining silly. I didn’t even listen to a podcast while I played it. It kept my attention. That says something, certainly.

The best parts, though, were the collectables. Hearing the crazy man, Johnny, describe the history of the collectibles in this game was just fantastic. It was, hands down, the best writing and acting the game has to offer. Very, very funny, and oddly relevant to the game as a whole. It almost made me want to go back and get all the collectables! But, not really. I mean, I hadn’t played a console game in forever because I’ve been so busy. I’m not that sort of player. But it made me search a lot harder for them while playing, to be sure.

This was a fantastic rental and a fantastic like 7-8 hour romp. I really enjoyed myself. What I played of the first Darkness felt stupidly complicated and I didn’t want to fuck with it. This was simple, but it did what it was trying to do well. I had fun. Give it a try if you want a light, fun shooter, for sure.

I’ve been playing Scramble with Friends with my brother.

I’m really just kind of fucking annoyed that Zynga has the market cornered on these good asynchronous games, mostly. They work without any problems, and they play across platform so I can play on my iPad with my brother on his Android phone. I am not a huge fan of Zynga the company! Most of what they’ve done with these games has been pretty sleazy! And yet, I play their games like… all the time. Most days I will play turns in Draw Something, Words with Friends, and now this. Ugh.

Anyway, Scramble with Friends is way better than Hanging with Friends, which just never caught on with me. Maybe it is because Boggle is just a more interesting game than Hangman. It’s model to get more money is also incredibly lacking in annoyance, so that’s nice.

You play a series of 3 back and forth rounds of Boggle with a friend. The second round adds “double letter” tiles, and the third adds “triple letter” tiles. The person with the most points at the end of all three rounds wins. Each time you want to play a round, it costs you a coin. Coins regenerate over time (faster in my version I paid a buck for, apparently) so they are mostly just a mechanism to keep you from playing 5000 games of Scramble with Friends at once. Unless you want to buy coins, of course. Before you start the round, you get to pick powerups. You can take one for free, but to take a second, it costs you another coin. There is basically no reason not to do this, especially if you are only playing against one or two opponents once a day. I have never fallen below like 17 coins (I think it maxes at 19 or 20) playing this thing, and I play whenever I want with two powerups.

There are three powerups. Scramble, ironically, is completely useless. It doesn’t actually scramble the board. It just rotates it in another direction. The words you can make don’t change. They took what could have been the most useful power, and made it completely useless. Freeze just stops the timer and gives you more time, which is good if you’re a good Boggler. Inspiration will let you just reveal a word you haven’t spelled on the board three times. This is where the money is. Most of the time, it’ll show you a word that you can also make plural, doubling your points. Since you can take two Inspirations, that’s six words, and that’s a huge point boost, as most of the time (not always) it’s showing you the big words, because you’ve already caught all the little ones. I always bring two Inspirations. It would just be stupid not to.

Anyway, I dunno, it’s boggle. It’s fun. There is nothing wrong with it, and again, the “get money” model does not hit or annoy casual players AT ALL, which is nice. Play it, I guess? Or don’t and continue to take a stand against Zynga. I can’t blame you for that one.

Hello, and welcome to blog. Today I will blog. Prepare to blog.

So I talked about an issue yesterday with money and shit and it solved itself in the “aww but at least we’re not in financial trouble” sort of way. Which is better than being fucked over, I guess. Even though it said on the website I couldn’t, I sent the ticket people an e-mail asking if I could cancel my ticket order, and they said “Yeah, sure.” So that’s that. No PAX for me.
It’s probably for the best. It would have been a huge fucking strain on resources to go, especially for CJ, even with our “solution” options we were coming up with and watching disappear in real time. I just really wanted to go. I wanted to be at a point in my life where I can travel and do this kind of shit. I want to take my family to PAX, and Disney World, and creepy furry conventions, and all kinds of pointless fun shit. But we’re just not stable yet.
Still, I said on twitter and Talking Time that I had tickets. So I feel like an idiot now that I’ve bowed out. I should probably tell people, but I’m embarrassed, even though there’s nothing to fucking be embarrassed about. Oh well. Sorry. Don’t judge me for being an idiot, blog reader person. Thanks.

I like foods I used to hate.
Not like… in a crazy way, perse? It’s all kind of sensible stuff that I all the sudden am going “Fuck, I love this.” But like… mushrooms, okay? I never used to like mushrooms. Texture freaked me out, and taste was blah. But recently, I’ve been like “Wait a goddamn minute, I love mushrooms!” CJ has been making these sauteed mushroom and swiss burgers for me because of a random idea and having mushrooms in the fridge for some reason? And they are FANTASTIC. I love mushrooms on things now. I just kind of love eating mushrooms. When the fuck did that happen? Just one day, I’m like, “No, everything I’ve known is wrong, I want that.” It’s weird.

I bought some Adventure Time toys just to take pictures of them with Skylanders and Ponies. Because it entertained me for some reason. Then I posted them to twitter with dialog captions from the characters.
I may have a problem.

I just gave a test where 90% of my class failed. I was told that this is normal for this test. People don’t pass it. What the fuck.
I mean, I took this standardized practice test for this test? I got 2 questions wrong because the questions make no sense. I stared at these questions after the fact and could not figure out why my answer was wrong and not just as good as the actual answer. So that’s great, and says something about the test quality. It’s also a really, really hard grammar test, but they’re taking it in a writing course, not a grammar course. We covered some grammar, of course, but writing was always the focus. Did I focus the class wrong? Were they lying to me when they called it a writing course? I was always taught that grammar should come second in a writing course, because you need to focus on big picture problems with their writing, and that’s what I did, because that made sense to me. And now they all failed this test. Badly.
Apparently this has to affect their grade in some way. I’ll have to figure that out. That’s really shitty and silly. Seriously.

Okay, I’m going to go… TO WORK! I shall see you all later, blog people.

Word that starts with P.
Here’s my impression of my PAX experience so far.

“Oh, they’re sold out of 3 day passes? Are we doing this? Okay, let’s buy two days of passes, that’s all I can be there for anyway. Cool, got them. Now to do some research on travel and hote… HOLY FUCK. That’s… way more… than we thought… uh… can we afford this?”

Like, for serious. I don’t know if everything is being jacked up for the convention or whatever, but my goodness. It’s all significantly more than I expected. Which just kind of sucks. Because while I could probably potentially splurge with no issues, CJ is going to have issues with the super pricing. It’s all just… arg!

We did more research, and we THINK we can get it down to a reasonable level as long as we’re splitting a hotel room with a couple of nice dudes and taking some specific sneaky flights. So I guess the idea is to find said nice dudes now and go from there. Surely we can make that happen? We can’t be the only people wanting to cut the cost of this shindig down significantly. Surely it’ll work out.

Just… fuck. Makes me wonder why the fuck I even wanted to do this! Much better to stay hidden here at home for all time, right?

Brian will be here in two weeks or so.

THIS IS SO AMAZING.

How long have I been waiting for this? So long. I was bouncing around the room all day with excitement. I can’t wait to show him things. I can’t wait to hug on him again. I can’t wait for him and CJ to meet in person. I can’t wait to deal with all the little problems adding a third person to my little house is going to cause. I can’t wait to attempt to find a solution where three people sleep in the same bed comfortably.

I CANNOT FUCKING WAIT.

My family is coming together and I am so excited. I want a family portrait. I want to start planning things to do together. We should play through my copy of Risk Legacy all the way through! Play games! Start a Dungeons and Dragons or other Roleplaying Games night! But mostly just start living life and stop worrying about waiting for things to happen. The life I want, in a few weeks, will be officially set up. Things will be IN FUCKING PLACE romantically and, in general, socially. I can focus on wanting the sane things normal people want now! I CAN BE!

There’s sure to be issues. I’m sure to worry about this or that at some point. But right now, for serious, I have not a single worry about this not working out. I know we can handle anything that comes up. I know it.

I love Brian, and I love CJ, and we are going to be one fucking awesome family. Just you wait.

Look, fine, let’s finish up my Skylanders 3DS talk, okay? Let’s finish it.

I talked about general mechanics with the Portal of Power here, but I’m going to talk about things overall real quick.

Time limits suck.

I mean, I’m just going to say it: having these time limits on you to rush through levels where you are encouraged to collect all the little doodads about the level is pretty stupid! It really frustrates me, because the game is more FUN if I try to complete the special objectives, because it is not challenging. But if I do that, then I run out of this arbitrary time limit. My only option becomes to just run through the level, but that can be very boring. It’s just running forward and jumping very quickly without the combat challenges and searching for the hidden items and paths in the levels. It’s not that hard to do. It’s just less fun. But if you try to do most of the special objectives in one run, you can easily run out of time on the later levels, and you have to start all the way over. It’s annoying.

It also kind of bothers me how the game discourages having a huge fucking collection of Skylanders like I have. If you use a variety of Skylanders, they will NOT be leveled enough to take on later challenges without grinding, pure and simple. I mean, I understand that I am insane for owning like ALL SKYLANDERS but the 360 game gives you bonuses and XP boosts to help ALL your Skylanders be always viable, which is just smart. It lets you level at the perfect speed for the game no matter how many stupid figures you buy. The 3DS version offers nothing like that. You’re kind of penalized for not sticking with mostly two different Skylanders, though at the same time, if you only stick with two, you won’t be able to complete the elemental challenges. Basically, I had one Skylander of each element, at level one, for my play through the game, and I used what guys I had to in order to complete the challenges, and my guys were SO UNDER-LEVELED. Annoying.

Anyway, complaints. But the game itself is fun enough. It’s a solid action-platformer, and as I think I’ve said, many Skylanders who are kind of garbage in the 360 version are really way more relevant in the 3DS version, since they can jump to dodge enemy attacks. It’s fun! I recommend it if you, like me, wanted more Skylanders after the 360 game, and wanted to play with those toys some more. I would not recommend it as your first Skylanders experience. The lack of skill trees and equipment in the 3DS version just makes it so much less engaging. Play the “full” version first, if you’re just going to play one.

I drank an alcoholic beverage yesterday that I did not hate. Basically, I drank more yesterday than I have… well… ever? Note that this consisted of two fairly small glasses of something that probably wasn’t very alcoholic in general, as opposed to the small sips and miniscule glasses of wine I have had in the past. Still, it was an experience? It is an experience I will chronicle here now because, I dunno, it feels like a first to me. So.

Basically, we went over to Layne’s for her birthday. We had a nice time, sitting about and talking. Nothing exciting, perse, but just some nice conversation. But anyway, she’s like “I haven’t really drank in like 3 years so I’m going to!” So her husband was making her these drinks, Midori Sours, and Layne says “Try this, it doesn’t taste like alcohol, it tastes like a watermelon Jolly Rancher.”
Every time someone has said to me “You can’t taste the alcohol” or something similar, they have always been lying. It would always have a strong taste up front, and then just become alcohol on the back half, which I guess the drinker doesn’t notice because, you know, they drink. But Layne was 100% right this time. It just tasted like a watermelon Jolly Rancher. I was kind of shocked. I turned down the offer of them making one for me, out of habit more than anything I guess, but I was like “Wow, I could like… drink that.”

Afterwards, I tell this to CJ, and he’s like “Let’s make you one, then,” And I’m like “Okay, sure, experiment, let’s see if I can actually drink a thing for once.” So we run around town and buy this stuff, and I’m like “Alcohol expensive!” and he’s like “Shush, all this is a pretty fair price and it’s not like you drink much of it at once,” and we came home and he made me one and it was pretty good! Like really sweet. I think the stuff he put in that was like “sweet and sour?” Which probably kicked the sweet over the edge. Layne’s wasn’t QUITE as sweet. Maybe we should have put in something that was just “sour”? I dunno how drinks work, even though I have my e-bartending certificate. I am just guessing. Anyway, it was nice enough. I could drink a one of those if in a social situation where I am supposed to drink a thing.
Then he’s like, “Let’s try something apple-y instead of melon-y,” which I am all for because I like a sour sweet apple more than a sour sweet melon flavor, and he makes an Appletini, I guess? And I taste the alcohol right away there. Not a fan. I guess it’s because he added extra vodka? I’m really not sure. Again, the sour apple at the beginning was nice, but then at the end it’s just ALCOHOL! Just… bleh.
“I have one more idea,” he tells me, and he brings me this thing he calls a “Golden Apple” and tells me you’re supposed to drink all of it at once. This puts me on edge. To me that says, “This tastes horrible, so survive it quickly.” But I tried it, eventually. It was pretty bad. It was like ALCOHOL followed by RED HOTS and I’m like blerg. And he’s like “I thought you said you liked cinnamon,” he said (I type as he corrects my story as I type it because he’s reading over my shoulder and being all defensive). I’m like, “Sweet cinnamon, sure. Cinnamon sugar. Not like… red hots or whatever.” Anyway, I guess the red hot stuff was like… fucking Goldschlager? What? Weird. I’m going to get gold poisoning now.

Anyway, after having these things and watching Adventure Time, we went to bed. MOST EXCITING NIGHT OF DRINKING EVER, AMIRITE? But it was kind of nice to be involved in it for once, I guess, though I still don’t really get the appeal. Basically all that I really felt from it all was that my stomach felt weird. I dunno. I felt like I should eat something to keep my stomach from being upset. That doesn’t seem like a goal worth going after? Who knows. Maybe I just didn’t get to the point where it does whatever magical thing alcohol does that makes people want to learn to tolerate and actually enjoy it’s pretty godawful taste. I’m a fairly large lady, and again, I doubt what I drank had all that much actual alcohol content in it, though maybe I’m wrong there. Still, I have basically 0 points of comparison to determine if I was feeling any effects full on, so I dunno.

But yeah, I finally drank a thing, and it was like the most girly of all girly drinks in the world, so huzzah for me, I guess. Also, man, this is a rambly blog post! Oh well.