The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

So the other day, Val and I were talking about all the stuffs that be going on in KoL, what with the floaty sand and the Rock Monsters and whatnot. And then, as we’re talking, she’s like “You should be farming sands!” and I’m like “Yeah, I should be.” But I haven’t been.

See, a long time ago, I decided that KoL, and all these Browser RPGs, were a game, and that games exist to make me have fun, and thus I didn’t need to play them every day due to some sort of compulsion that just takes the fun out of them by making them mandatory. So I stopped worrying about wasting turns, and I had a lot more fun for it.

But these wasted turns were basically turning into an incredible expense if I ever wanted a Rock Lobster. I needed to be trying to farm me up some floaty sands.

So I tried something I’ve never tried before: KoL Mafia.

You can’t be all listening to the podcasts and fairly involved in KoL without hearing about Mafia. It is basically a separate program that acts as an interface to streamline KoL playing. This includes setting up a bot in order to run your turns in a particular way. Just click and go. It’s a godsend to people dedicated to playing many multis or who do a lot of farming, because instead of wasting a lot of time, you can just set up a good bot script and click one button every day, then rake in the profits. It’s exactly the kind of thing I needed to farm some floaty sands without the time investment.

The first thing you’ll notice when you boot up Mafia is that this is totally a program made for huge nerds (a term I use in the most endearing way possible) by huge nerds with no real accessibility in mind. It is a daunting program to look at, and I can only imagine how scary it would be for someone newer to the game who heard about it and wanted to try it. I mean, I can’t fault them. It’s a free program, and it’s not like every open source thing has to have the ease of use of OpenOffice or Ubuntu. But still. Man.

It kind of made me sad then that, when I looked at this thing, it seemed like most of the botting stuff required you to actual write code in their little code type. This is not something beyond me, but this was a path wrought with frustration that would make me very angry to figure out. Not something I needed.
So I turned to the more basic combat scripting, deciding that I didn’t need to program the bot to switch areas and all kinds of crazy stuff, just to adventure and not die. Setting up a combat scenario was significantly easier, and in no time I had the thing running, collecting floaty sands. Soon all my turns were burned effectively.

My favorite part, though, was the “Purchase Buffs” button. With a couple clicks, I could buy any buff from any buffbot without having to look at any annoying tables or anything. It made the buffbots so much more usable. I could get used to that. Maybe there’s a Greasemonkey script that does something similar…

Still, it really does kind of take the fun out of the game. I mean, I get why people use it. There is some really strong utility in there if you can figure the thing out. But man, I’m not going to make it a normal thing. I’ll use my Greasemonkied browser, thanks. It’s slower, but then at least I get to read the text, and have a little more fun.

So, this is a blog post. A post on my blog. Blog post. Yep.

There is shit going down in my head right now. There are worries about. Worries about school, about finding a therapist and how I’m going to deal with that at home, about questionable purchases that may be arriving soon or not, about my body, about so many stupid things.

So many stupid things!
So many.

I mean, on one hand, I feel like I’m doing pretty okay. Things are going pretty sweet in my life. I am moderately successful. I am not having panic attacks.
And yet, I don’t know… my mumbling has come back, the mumbling where I constantly belittle myself and tell myself I’m stupid and whatnot. It hasn’t really been around for awhile, and I really don’t think it bodes well. I’ve got to be stressed.

And the semester hasn’t even started. Man.
How my thoughts change a lot in a day, huh?
Well, not really change… just the other side of things. The other one. Yeah.

School has started.

Okay, so, not really. The pre-school seminar on how to teach EN100 has started, as of today.

But it’s really the same kind of feeling.

I would have popped you in the lip for suggesting I would be back in school again at this time last year. I just really can’t escape this stuff, I really can’t. It is a whirlpool that is constantly pulling me in. Ugh! Ack!

But this is still an exciting time. I get to teach a class! I get to write more short stories in the graduate version of the short story class I already took! I get to get more hands on job experience at the press! I, uh, have Medical Insurance! It’s exciting.
And scary.

But exciting!

Anyway, wish me luck. And especially wish me sleep. I honestly have no idea when that’s going to happen this semester. BUT SLEEP IS FOR THE WEAK!
THE WEAK!
Weak.

One of the things that’s sometimes kind of nice about how I listen to music is the fact that I can “discover” something I’ve had around for like… years. Since I listen to one to two tracks on an album endlessly, forgetting all the others, I can sometimes stumble on a “new” track that I’ve had all along, but never actually gave much time to.

This happened recently, and I was pleased. Back on Election Day, when Rock Band put out it’s Presidents of the United States of America pack, I was like “Hmm, these songs are pretty good. I wonder what else they have.” And then I very quickly became a huge fan of the band. I devoured their work, eventually lingering on their last album, These Are The Good Times People, and mostly listening to that. But so much of their stuff was worth my time. It was exciting. It was entertaining. I was entertained.

The other day, I was preparing for my trip to the City Museum, which I told you about already. But, at the time, I was unsure whether or not I’d be driving up alone or not. So I felt it time to stockpile some podcasts, and that meant not playing podcasts while I played my games. So I dove into my library to try to find some music to listen to, and stumbled upon the POTUS (as hip fans call them, I guess) album, II. I had never really given this one a chance, so I put it on.

By the time the second track came on, I was in love with the band again. Man, they are just so good! They’re just the right mix of pop and odd and clever and rock for me, and I just love the crap out of them. I’ve been listening to that track constantly, but Volcano, Mach 5… the whole album is solid. It’s just wonderful stuff.

So huzzah for discovering music I already have, I guess! Huzzah!

Thanks to Pepsi, I have like a million Wii points (okay, as of this writing 8700) so I decided to spend some on a game or something. Cause, you know, what else am I going to do with them? I want to save some for the new Pokemon Mystery Dungeons and Pokemon Scramble and, of course, Cave Story, but I’ve still got plenty. Might as well enjoy something, right?

So I jumped into the painfully-long-named Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a Darklord since I had heard some pretty decent things. Those decent things were pretty correct, but man, it’s a little harder than I had hoped.

First off, I just want to say, and this is kind of a stupid problem, but I am really unhappy to find I was playing a character. The game is called “MY life as a Darklord” and the whole game mechanic is very abstracted. I expected to type in a name, and have little minions talk to me through the television screen and whatnot, but instead I get to play as this annoying girl. Yay.

Still, it doesn’t really affect the gameplay, which is quite good. The game is a Tower Defense game, because you are defending your magical, evil, flying tower. It uses some ideas from traditional Tower Defense, and is very similar, as you’re setting up things ahead of time and letting them happen, but it is very much its own thing, which I appreciate.
Basically, you build floors to your evil tower. Each floor type has a different evil artifact which can give various effects to the floor, such as dealing damage to adventurers who enter it, or protecting your monsters. Then you summon monsters onto the floors to fight the adventurers. They have a simple R-P-S system in place for weaknesses and strengths of these monsters: Melee beats Ranged, Ranged beats Magic, Magic beats Melee. Etc.
So, okay, you’re setting up “towers,” essentially. Big deal, right? Well, what makes the game interesting is how adventurers climb the tower. They show up either individually, or in parties, and try to scale to the top to break the Dark Crystal. When a “good guy” gets to a floor, they will turn on their combat timer (which is different for each time of adventurer) and then get into combat with the monsters on that floor. After the timer runs out, then they scamper up to the next floor. The catch is that only one adventurer can be on a floor at a time. So if another adventurer, done with a battle, tries to climb up to a floor where his buddy is already doing battle, he just skips it and goes right on to the next floor. So when a party of three adventurers rolls in? Well, I hope you have a lot of floors, because they get to skip quite a few of them.
It’s this mechanic that really makes the game feel unique. If I put a lot of monsters on a floor, I can deal more damage to the adventurers, but their combat timers stop when attack animations are going off. That means I can stall people on the floor for a long time if I use a quick monster that attacks many times for little amounts of damage, but that can also be a hindrance, keeping the adventurer from moving on while three of his buddies skip the traps on that floor. It’s actually quite a lot to have to try to juggle.

What gets me though, is the game’s difficulty. It is pretty brutal. You really have to learn exactly what types of adventurers are coming on a level and how to stop them, or you will, very quickly, continue to fall flat on your face. I’m already having trouble and I’m not very far in the game. I suppose I could buy some of the $60 (!!) of DLC for this $10 game to make it easier, but… no. That’s retarded. Extremely retarded. At least the obscene amounts of DLC in My Life as a King (which I still need to try sometime, too) gave you more and more stuff to do in the game the more you bought.
Then again, I plunk down money every month for IoTMs that make KoL easier. But donating for something in a free, indie game made by a small company just has significantly more feelgood value than giving the Squenix behemoth money for content they didn’t put in the game.

Still, I think it’s a fairly neat game, and if you’re the kind of person who likes trying many different things to figure out how something works, you’ll probably love this one. I honestly just kind of hope they port this to the iPhone. It would work really well there. The way the tower gives the game a vertical look, especially. And surely Squenix wants that money! But who know.

So, Telltale sent me an e-mail saying that the last episode of Wallace and Gromit’s Grand Adventures, the Bogey Man, was out! And as I’m downloading it, I’m like “Wait a second, I never played the third episode.” So I did. It’s called Muzzled!. It was fun. I also got bonus points for spotting Jake Rodkin of Idle Thumbs fame in the credits.

But yeah, I’ve talked in previous Wallace and Gromit blog posts about how Telltale tends to have a very clear act structure. However, I was kind of sad that they dropped actually pointing that out in this episode. I thought it worked very well just giving in and bringing attention to it during The Last Resort. There’s nothing too out of the ordinary from the act structure in this one, besides one or two deviations, or at least things that I noticed.

First off, the other two games had you starting out as Wallace, in order to complete this or that to, you know, set up the wacky situation. This dispenses with that, and you only control Wallace in the third act, which is kind of interesting. It works, of course, but I’m always more of a fan of controlling someone who can tell me helpful and hopefully humorous things about what I click on, so I’m not always a big fan of using Gromit the whole time. So that’s a deviation. There’s also a fairly big deviation story-wise, in that there is a villain in this episode. That’s not a spoiler or anything, it’s, you know, kind of completely painfully clear the first time you see him, not to mention the title of the episode is Muzzled!. This too, is an interesting deviation, because suddenly the puzzles revolve less around dealing with Wallace’s wacky hijinks and more around, you know, normal adventure game stuff. It’s a nice break, but perhaps not as true to the source material.

In any case, the main thing I wanted to point out is that there is a very clear example of the game training me for later. A good example of what I’m talking about would be Portal. It trains you to deal with future, more complicated situations, by starting you with easy situations, and then introducing an extremely similar, but more complicated one, so you can see what else you can do. This is the first time I can recall a Telltale game really doing that, and awhile it’s not going to go unnoticed by anyone, the fact that the solutions to the puzzles in the first act become the building blocks to solutions in the second act lets those puzzles be a little bit more complex, which is certainly appreciated.

Still, the lack of Wallace for most of the game cuts down on the amount of dialog. I mean, I don’t doubt that it takes a lot of hard work to keep the game working as intuitive as it is without a protagonist that can talk, but at the same time, I really do take these Telltale episodes as interactive little TV shows or whatever. I really am mostly there for the dialog, as the puzzles can be fun, but are rarely so awesome as to carry it by itself. So I worry this one might end up being the weaker episode of the set. Still, it’s certainly fun. More fun than, say, the Bone games.
(Aside: Along with my purchase of Tales of Monkey Island, I got any Telltale game free. Well, the only one I didn’t own was The Great Cow Race, the second Bone game. I’ve tried to play it, I really have, but it is so painfully obvious how far Telltale has come. Their games are so much more polished, and so much more fun, and the fact that I’ve never read Bone makes me have basically 0 interest in what’s going on. So when I say this is the weakest of the Wallace and Gromit games, it’s still much more interactive, well-paced, and fun than that. Probably better than many of the first Sam and Max episodes, too.)
So yeah, play it. And I’ll get to The Bogey Man soon. Maybe. You never know.

So, in an attempt to not have a summer completely devoid of fun and interesting trips, it was decided that yesterday would be a day trip to St. Louis! When discussing what to do, the idea of the City Museum came up. Now, I had no idea this thing existed until about a week ago when it was mentioned, so the first thing I did was look it up. The second thing I did was get completely excited to see it. I couldn’t believe I went so many years without knowing it existed, and just a relatively short drive away. It looked amazing from the website.

It didn’t disappoint at all.

Holy crap, the place is just so pretty and so… fun. Everything is a work of art, and you can climb on everything. Inside everything. Around everything. It’s just crazy. I took some pictures you can look at to see just a taste, but, you know, they’re cell phone pictures.

But as fun as it was? Holy crap, it was tiring. I have never felt so out of shape, I swear. One can only climb on huge, metal monstrosities for so long without getting completely exhausted. I had to sit down and just recover a few times during the day while Essner dived into the tiniest crawlspaces and circled around behind me, and whatnot.
But I wouldn’t have traded it for anything. That place is so neat. SO NEAT. I crossed a tiny, open air tube made of rings of metal 5 stories in the air. I rode a slide that went from the 11th Floor to the 3rd. I crawled through a makeshift air conditioning system. It was an amazing experience.

It was such a great trip. Completely successful.

Also of note was how successful two pieces of gear were. One was my Ankle Brace. Yes, I gave in to my shitty ankle and got a brace. But you know what? I climbed around that crazy place for hours, and I never even limped a little. The brace worked like a charm. And at least nobody can see I’m wearing it under my long pants, so… I’ll have to wear it whenever I’m going to be on my feet for long periods.
The other piece of gear was Google Maps on my phone. Oh man, it was so neat. It worked so damn well! How can AT&T get away with charging money for a GPS program when I can just download this bit of free software that just works amazingly well. Note that this is my first time playing with a GPS device. I’m sure watching yourself moving on the little map is old hat to many, but I just found it so cool.

But yeah, man, a completely exhausting trip, but oh man. So great. I’m going to have to go there again someday. Perhaps at night. That sounds like a ton of fun.

So, I’ve been a Gamefly subscriber for awhile now. So I guess, the question is, how do I like the service? Or maybe that isn’t a question anyone has, but just for the record, I think it’s pretty nice. I mean, it’s been forever since I had rented games, but Gamefly seems to do everything one would want from such a service. I am fairly happy with it.

The only thing that’s annoying me is… well, the fact that they set expectations really high the first time and then cut them down.

The first time I returned a game, the very next day, I got an e-mail saying they sent out a new game. I was astounded. There was no way the game had gotten back to them yet. It turned out that they sent out the new game due to something called “FastReturn” which lets them send out new games before they even have the old one back. I was incredibly impressed with it! I was like “Yes, this is going to be totally sweet.”

FastReturn hasn’t worked for any game since the first one.

Originally I thought it was, perhaps, because I put the first game in the big mailbox at the actual post office. Maybe that gets them to scan it, and putting it in the mailbox at home does not? So I put the most recent game in that big mailbox again, and it once again did not work. Or at least, it certainly didn’t seem to.

This is one of those things like the Logan’s Burger problem. If they hadn’t ever turned it around so fast, I wouldn’t be annoyed that they haven’t since. And I mean, I shouldn’t be annoyed in general. The service is still worth the money I’m paying for it. I just want things to play, and the game I keep holding on to, Resident Evil 5 (Which I should ramble about someday) is a purely multiplayer with my brother experience, so having it around isn’t useful for just, you know, normal stuff. Normal single player gameplay. Though I suppose I could just try it and see what happens.

But yeah, anyway, those are my thoughts on Gamefly. I hope the service continues to help me not waste all kinds of money on Vidjeo Gamez. I was already proud of myself for not putting money down on Scribblenauts, even though it looks amazing, and just adding it to my game queue.

So here’s how awesome everyone’s precious Apple is.
Okay, I don’t want to get TOO down on them, because man, the iPod Touch and iPhone really are just amazing devices, but man, this struck me as so dumb.

So I’ve used my AIM account to do my iTunes transactions for a long time. I never understood why I could, but it let me, and I didn’t want to make another account, so I’ve been using it to buy my games on my iPod Touch. So Sunday, I get a message that there are new updates for games. One of them was the previously mentioned Mevo and the Grooveriders, which probably meant new free levels for me. Huzzah! So of course, I went immediately to update them. This requires logging in, so I did.

Then a little window pops up, saying I needed to transfer my account to an Apple ID. It seems they finally stopped the odd, nonsensical ability to use my AIM name for transactions. That’s fine with me, it makes sense, no worries. So I click the little “Update Account” button.
I get taken to a little screen explaining that I’m going to make a new Apple ID, and they’re going to transfer my licenses and whatnot. Sounds good! So I click continue.

“iTunes could not process your request. Try again later.”

So I tried again later. Same problem. And again. Same problem.

It’s important to note that I can’t update my apps, nor can I purchase new apps, until I get this transferred. It stops any transaction and makes me do this thing that I cannot do. Brilliant.

So I e-mail tech support, and ask them to fix the problem. The e-mail that comes back says, sure, they can do it for me (as opposed to fix their broken program) and that all I need to do is relinquish the password to my AIM (which they will change, sometime at random, and it will just stop working I guess, probably right when I need it) and all kinds of financial data through an e-mail.
I don’t really want to do that. I don’t want to have to worry about losing connection to my messengers. I guess I’m just lame, but the idea of my AIM account being held hostage for any length of time, however small, really really bothers me. I don’t want to do anything fancy. I just want to be able to give them money. But apparently I can’t do that.

I guess I’m just lucky that there isn’t any apps I really want to buy right now, so it’s not really affecting me. But eventually there will be. I hope they’ve fixed their stupid form by that point so I can make it all happen.

So my latest Gamefly conquest was Punch-Out!! (the two exclamation points are important, apparently) the sorta-remake sorta new game for the Wii.

Note that I didn’t even try the motion controls. Just the first match with Glass Joe showed me that it would be a tiring and inaccurate exercise that I wanted nothing with. I played it NES style, all the way.

And man. For all the talk about “looks good for a Wii game” that people throw around, Punch-Out!! looks gorgeous. I’d be completely happy with graphics like these on the 360. The characters are so expressive and alive, and they get all injured and everything… it is just fantastic to watch. It just goes to show you that a good visual style trumps millions of polygons any day. At least in my opinion.

As far as the gameplay goes, though, there isn’t much to say. If you’ve played the original Punch-Out! then you’ve played this game. It controls exactly the same, and it handles just as wonderfully. I haven’t played the original in long enough to remember, but from what I’ve heard, the various boxers you know and love act similarly to what you remember, but are different enough to still challenge. In the end, though, it’s one part puzzle, one part memorization, and two parts reflexes. There’s always that time period of figuring the boxer out, and what you have to do, and that is certainly fun. But in the end, it all comes down to training yourself to make those dodges at the right times.

It’s because of those reflexes that I didn’t “beat” the game. I mean, I beat the game. I beat Mr. Sandman, I got myself a Title Belt. But then the game throws out “Title Defense Mode.” This is a great idea: it’s the same boxers, but their weaknesses are gone, or modified. Title Defense Glass Joe murdered me completely. Granted, it was clear that I could beat him, if I kept at it. I knew it was possible. But I also knew that, a few fighters down, would come a boxer that I could not beat without so much frustration and memorization that it wouldn’t be fun.
So I let Glass Joe keep the belt. The guy deserves a break.

In the end, I’m very happy to have gotten to play Punch-Out!!. It really is a lot of fun, and fans of the old school game really should give it a shot. But unless you really, really, really enjoy memorizing these fights, or are just, I don’t know, much much better at your reaction time than I am, this is really a rental. A really, really awesome rental, but a rental none the less. I rented it, I’m done with it, and I am happy.