The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

Well, we finally finished up all our Hamster runs.

It didn’t even end with any sort of exciting moment or anything. The run was one of the smoothest we had. It was all business as usual. Hodgman went down, and our last team member got their Hamster.

And then, suddenly, I could ascend again.

It has been months since I ascended and played KoL in the way that I normally have, the way I have fallen in love with. I have all of these IoTMs I’ve never used, and so many options as to what to work towards and what to do. It was… kind of odd. I found myself extremely nervous about ascending again. Then again, I can get nervous at the drop of a hat, so I suppose that wasn’t too surprising.

I ended up perming Eye of the Stoat, because that’s just got some nice passive bonuses, and I decided to ascend Pastamancer and go for Spirit of Ravioli for the following reasons: 1. I wanted to use my new Bag ‘o Tricks (My pointless review of it forthcoming, after I use it a bit more, of course) and put my Frumious Bandersnatch to good use, and being a spellcaster helps with that. 2. I wanted something quite different than the straightforward “bash this” gameplay of the Seal Clubber I’ve been for awhile. 3. Spirit of Ravioli is really useful and I should already have it. 4. Why the fuck not, I have to pick something.

But yeah, I don’t know. It seems almost awkward to be delving into the Typical Tavern again… but I’m glad I have something to constantly work for once again. I haven’t actually been playing KoL, or many of these games, for awhile now. They’ve just been sitting there. Hopefully getting to ascend again, and getting to try out my many, many new toys since last I ascended, will make me play through this new run with renewed interest. I hope so, anyway!

And if it doesn’t? Well, whatever. I’ll play whenever I feel like it and have fun. That’s the important part.

It’s time for a pointless spiel about Penny Arcade!

I like Penny Arcade. Hell, you like Penny Arcade. Everyone likes Penny Arcade, and there are good reasons why everyone likes Penny Arcade. Recently, Penny Arcade put forward a series of story starters for people to vote on. This is when the problems started happening.

Now, I’m going to preface this by saying, it’s not like I’m NOT going to read Penny Arcade any more. It’s mostly just… I can’t believe all this bullshit has been happening. They HAVE IT TOGETHER. They have turned a webcomic into an actual company that makes money and runs a charity and all kinds of shit. They shouldn’t be making these weak mistakes. I don’t get why they did. I really don’t.

So they put forward these story starters, Lookouts, Automata, and a Jim Darkmagic story starter that wasn’t actually a story starter but was really a Jim Darkmagic one-off. And they said “Vote!” and so we voted. And then, when Automata won, they said “Well, uh, vote again!” And we all cried bullshit on that one.
Seriously, I trust Gabe and Tycho. They should make whatever the fuck they want. If they wanted to make Lookouts, then they should have just done Lookouts, and not tried some sort of bullshit re-voting thing to try to sway it in their favor. Ugh.

So that happened, and then it passed. And now, all of the sudden, here comes Lookouts pg 2, only it’s done by somebody else.
And everyone hates it.
This must have caught them by surprise. For once thing, since I first saw the comic, its title has been changed to “Guest Lookouts, pg 2” to try to indicate that no, it is not the real next page, ha ha, when we said that we were fooling. But it is, of course. There has been tweets about the backlash.

What happened?

There is just so much wrong with this decision, I don’t see how they could have decided this was a good plan. People were REALLY excited about Lookouts. Irrationally excited. Sure, it didn’t win, but there was much fervor for it. To throw it to someone else, even a very talented someone else, with no warning is going to piss people off. And seriously, the people who made this page. They are talented. I went and I read their comic, Tiny Kitten Teeth. It is so cute and wonderful. The art style stands out and is fantastic. But it just doesn’t work with the dark, scary world that was laid out for the Lookouts. It is a bad fit.
On top of that is the fact that this continues the story. Gabe and Tycho’s story! I think, if this had just been a little separate Lookouts story, nobody would have cared. Show me a different tale, that’s the guest artist’s doing, you know? Don’t continue what was already started. Throwing away your story like that is such a horrible plan, and people are going to hate you for it.

I just don’t get it. If they wanted pretty filler while they were vacationing that was in the Lookouts world, they could have had that. But they didn’t ask for that, obviously. Because we got this.

I just can’t understand it. Are they losing touch with people? What’s going on?

I can speculate all day, as I have been, but it won’t do me any good, I know. I mean, I have been. And I wrote this thing about it.

You’d just think at this point, they’d know that we’re all fans of THEM. I want to watch them do things, read what they have to say, and see their art. That’s why I visit the site so often.
You’d think they’d know that.

I am a person who is serious about T-shirts.

Really serious.

I spend way more time deciding what kind of t-shirts I am going to buy and what particular shirt I am going to wear every day that I should really be admitting to. (I can’t decide… I CAN’T DECIDE BRAIN ANEURYSM!) If you buy me a t-shirt, you’re sort of walking on thin ice. If I do not like the T-shirt, I will feel horrible, because I will not be able to wear it. I will not endorse your t-shirt if I cannot truly, truly WEAR the t-shirt, you know?

I should not think of my t-shirts, hell, what I wear, as a reflection of who I am… but I kind of do, so it’s kind of important to be wearing the right things.

Rules: If you’ve seen it in a store, it is unlikely to be a t-shirt that I can wear, because it is too mainstream. Cleverness wins much extra points. Cuteness also, but cleverness is more important. If it’s black, that’s fine. If it’s another color, it best makes sense in the context of the shirt. Every time someone compliments me on my shirt, or asks me where I got it and I say “internet” then I win.

Anyway, the point is, I have no fucking idea why it took me so long to start going to Woot Shirt.

Basically, they make a T-shirt every day. They are t-shirts that are decently priced. Most of the time, they’re sort of artistically cool but not something I’d wear. But that’s okay! I think they should exist! For example, this shirt? I wouldn’t wear it, but it’s totally bad-ass and whatnot. But I mean, when you offer me something like this? Or this? How the fuck can I resist? Not to mention that the shirts are so short-term that the kind of unspoken rule I have about not wanting to be wearing something anyone else is wearing is pretty well going to be protected.

Seriously, finding those shirts and buying them makes me wonder what the fuck I’ve been missing. I need to check the damn site every day. I need to keep up with my t-shirt purchases. I also need to purchase this one and this one too…

I don’t buy as many t-shirts as Vidjeo Gamez… but I still perhaps spend too much money on them.

Ever since I have had a steady paycheck, I haven’t really rented vidjeo gamez. I suddenly had money to spend on things, and dammit, I care enough about games that that’s where all of my money went. Lots and lots of money. Lots and lots and lots of it.

Lots of it.

It didn’t seem like too much of an issue before, but nowadays, it seems like I’m getting more and more games and getting less and less out of them. I’ve got this stack of portable games on my desk, here, which I have only played a few hours of each. The number of games on this desk is almost into the double digits. I am just so interested in keeping up with gaming culture that I have quickly found myself buying everything under the sun, and not just buying a new game when I felt that new game itch. I preorder everything now, on Amazon, and it just shows up, my bank account docked.

I can’t keep doing that.

I’ve got plans for next semester, big plans. I’ve got to get out on my own more, and I’m going to have plenty of new bills to start paying. I have got to start paying a bit more attention to where my money is going. Even just at a glance, it is clear that the majority of my money is being spent on video games. The vast majority.

So a few days ago, I signed up for Gamefly.
I’m not stupid. I know there are still games I am going to flat-out buy day one. MegaTen games? Yes. Stuff I know I will love like Modern Warfare 2? Of course I’m buying that. Quite a lot of portable games? Sure. There’s no way I’m not actually owning future Professor Laytons, or 3D Picross, or any of that. Indie stuff I want to support, like say, Telltale’s catalog? Hell yes I’m buying that.
But at the same time, there are so many games I buy just to try or to play through. There was no real reason why I had to buy Ghostbusters at full price, as much as I enjoyed it. I am sure I will never pick it up again, though I will loan it around. There’s no reason, back in the day, why I needed to buy Fable 2, either. I want to play the new Prince of Persia, Red Faction: Guerrilla, I want to play through RE5’s co-op. But there’s absolutely no reason why I need to own these games. I will never come back to them, and they’re never going to be rare enough to make me feel justified in keeping them around.
So if I can spent 22 bucks a month to rent them from Gamefly instead of 60 to buy each one… well, that’s a significant amount of money saved, isn’t it?
It also gives me a chance to try out random things, I am hoping. For example, John Davidson talked about this game called Miami Law, and how it was some weird mix of Phoenix Wright and a light gun game on DS. I know it’s going to be passable at best. There’s no real reason I would ever buy this game… but now that I can try it on that 22 bucks a month 2 game plan? Well, why the fuck not? I’ll try it for an afternoon and then send it back and get something else.

I honestly don’t know if all of this is going to work out for me. I honestly don’t know if it’s actually going to save me all that much money (Again, I just… I am still going to buy a lot of DS games. I know this.) or anything… but hopefully it’ll save me a little. And maybe it’ll help break me of the habit of having to be there the moment something comes out. There are so, so many good games to play nowadays. I’ll be alright missing just one for a week or two.

I always used to wonder why people bitched so much about working retail. I mean, I have a retail job, and I really don’t mind it. Almost like it some days. Sure, I’m just working for the paycheck, but that’s why you go to work. I could think of many jobs I would rather do, but none that I had access to. My job was just fine. I don’t know why I should hate it.

Recently, there haven’t been many ad sets, and I’ve been filling in on the floor quite a bit in order to get some hours.

I get why people bitch and hate retail jobs now.

Granted, it’s not for the reasons that I think most people would think. It’s not the customers. On the contrary, I rather like dealing with customers, because it gives me something to do. That’s the main thing I want at work: I want something to keep me busy. Something to make the time fly by faster. Something to keep my paws working. And if there’s nothing to do, I want the freedom to do whatever I need to entertain myself until there is something to do. So no, I don’t mind dealing with customers, even with dick-ish ones, because at least I’m doing something.

But depending on where I am working in the store, there is nothing to do. I pace back and forth. Every once and while, I find a shirt to fold, and I fold it. And then I pace more… and more. If I’m lucky, someone whom I am friends with is working that day, so I have someone to go bother and talk to time and again. But it’s very possible that that is not the case. So I just keep pacing, and pacing, and all the walking makes my ankle ache more and more, and it’s just horrible. Give me work, I want to yell! I can do things! I CAN DO THEM!

It’s really frustrating. Normally when I get to work, I might resist going, but once I’m there, I’m fine. Working these floor shifts, I want nothing more than to go home, the whole time. It sucks.

So, yeah, I’m sorry for not saying but thinking that you need to suck it up if you ever talked about hating a retail job. I take it back.

So, on Friday, I finally got to try out my new bowling ball.

This was a moment months in the making.
Mostly because it took months for me to actually get the ball. After I ordered it, the guy is like “I will call you back when it’s here! No problem!” and because, you know, I hadn’t paid him yet, I thought he would. Since, you know, it cost him money to order the ball… but no, he didn’t. And since he’s only around at completely random times and also I am forgetful, it took 2 months and 2 days to actually get the ball in my paws.

The ball itself is nothing special. It’s what professional bowlers call a “spare ball” because it doesn’t have much hook potential. If you’re a crazy serious bowler, you want hook potential, because a hooking ball makes strikes much easier than throwing straight. But I’ve always been a straight-shot bowler, and I do pretty well that way. I see everyone curving, and while they are somewhat more likely to pick up strikes, because they don’t practice with throwing straight, they never seem to pick up spares, something I have little issue with. So I feel like it’s a decent tradeoff. Therefore, I didn’t need to buy an expensive ball, because they cost more due to hook potential. I’m best when my ball DOESN’T curve. So I got one of the cheapest balls. It is a bright neon orange. I picked that color because I wanted to name it The Will ‘o wisp, and I have done so. Because I am the sort of lame person who names things like that.

So how did the ball handle? Pretty well! I had never used a ball sized to my fingers before, so I was assuming it would take some getting used to. Though I did notice that I curve this ball to the left more than I do with the lane balls (If I curve a ball, it used to always be to the right. This one, probably due to how the top two holes are different sizes, tends to lean left.) there was really no significant difference in handling, especially since it was the same 13 pounds I was used to. I’m actually pretty happy about that: after a game, I was bowling some of the best I’ve ever done. Still, having the same equipment every time will help my game in the long run. Bowling is all about getting to the point where you can repeat an action perfectly. Having the same variables every time is going to help that. That’s why I wanted a ball.
And now I got one! Huzzah!

Unless my fingers get huge or something, I figure I’ll never really need to buy bowling gear again. Probably. Heh. I’m looking at this as an investment for future bowlings, you understand! I really do love the game. I’m very glad all the people at work got me back into it. It’s a little sport and a whole lot of sitting around socializing. That’s a great mix. And now I’ve got the gear to do it again… and again… and again.

And again.

Yep.

After, what… months? Month? We finally managed to schedule another play session of high-level DnD campaign. And man, it was an epic one, lasting into the wee hours of the morning and being entertaining! Maps that spanned literally every doodling surface we had! Puzzles! Destroying priceless art! Me having like a million action points and then not using them! Madness!

As we started exploring the temple that we got into last time, we realized it seemed very badly constructed (“I know it’s not a perfect hexagon, but I’m not redrawing it,” Jonathan said) and since there was another temple just right next door, we assumed this must be the beta test temple. I mean, obviously. Just, you know, to give the builders an idea of what the real temple will be like, and test a few things…

So yes, Templ(beta) was filled with many golems. Golems are the magical robots! And Liendshauf (I don’t know how to spell your German character name, man, back off!) found a remote control, and used it to bash many priceless works of art. We also found a rock, which Jonathan represented with a Dire Badger. “That is a very dire rock.” “That’s it. It must be a dire rock. It’s got those spikes all over it.”

The Dire Rock was a very formidable foe.

In any case, the whole building was based around some puzzle ACTION where this crazy system put up barriers to block our path that we could only switch when we were all in certain rooms, and we had to figure out how to traverse the whole temple (or templ, if you will) to get to the bottom. It was actually a pretty well-designed puzzle. I have to give Jonathan props for that. Then again, I was distracting everyone by telling jokes about how “I can’t use this key to open the door! I have to insert the key into the door! That’s like raping the door!” “But look how sluttily the door is dressed!” “Dammit, it is asking for it, isn’t it…” (I don’t think Shauna liked that particular joke. I blame Jick for making me make rape jokes.)

There were also some combats.

The first combat was against a whole bunch of Manticores. In searching for an image of a manticore on his iPhone (for Shauna did not know what a Manticore was) Spaeth came up with this image. That seems like a pretty good representation of the battle.
Or not.
Well, okay, basically, we all ended up clumped in the corner of this library except Spaeth, who charged right in. So he was basically being attacked from all sides while we all lobbed ranged attacks and heals in there. A highlight was me moving into position to use a bit of Magic item that heals 1d6, and got attack of opportunitied for like… 26 damage during the move. A good tradeoff, there!

There was also a very dramatic boss battle against a Mummy who may or may not have been a Werebear. He was a total dick, because I tried to talk to his spirit, being a Shaman and all, and he just punched me. It was probably because he was some sort of Ioun spirit. I decided that Sehenine didn’t much care for his stupid ass or stupid religion!
Spaeth was Immobilized for like… this whole fucking battle, so we basically were having to use all our teleporting skills and such to get him into position, seeing as he deals fucking Sicknasty amounts of damage and we needed him. The boss had some really crazy high amounts of damage dealings as well. We were getting hit for like… half our HP. Lucky that 3/5ths of our party are healers then, huh? It also helped when I used my newly gotten utility power that lets me teleport people to switch places with my spirit companion to yank our Cleric out of the way of a particularly intense attack that would have downed him. (Sorry, my highlights are the things that I did that were awesome. I am biased.)

All in all, it was a damn, damn fun time, and just goes to show how much of a shame it was that we don’t manage to get our schedules working to make that happen more often. Hopefully we can get back together soon. Templ RC 1 is waiting for some exploring!

Hey! Twilight Heroes had an IoTM. Well, two, really. What happened to them, eh?

Item number 1: Hobbes’ Nail Boots. Yay! An IoTM boot that isn’t Roderick’s Boots which is one of the few IoTMs I don’t have! Victory, or something!
But seriously, besides Roderick’s, there just isn’t a shoe in the same caliber as this thing. (The exception maybe being the Treader of the Dust’s Sandals, but that’s a high level only item.) There is never, ever a time when you don’t want an extra added boost of +item, so they’re worth it just for that. The additional melee damage is just icing on the cake, and the pounce attack is nice to have access to, even if it doesn’t seem to trigger ALL that often. Depending on what you’re doing, though, I could almost see the +combat being a hindrance. +noncombat does tend to almost always be more useful. Still, I certainly don’t mind it, and since you simply can’t get +item on any other boot in the game, this is almost certainly worth your stars.

The item number 2 would be the Mummer’s Gloves. Yay! An IoTM set of gloves that isn’t Roderick’s Gloves, one of the few IoTMs I don’t have! If you are a person who is ever going to be thinking of speed-running the eventual versions of this game, these gloves are clearly for you. +noncombat is going to get you far. Very, very far. That alone makes them worth having around, but the occasional stat boosts put it over the top. It’s nowhere near as good for that as the VR Helmet of course, since the VR Helmet boosts your basic XP gains too, but then again, it’s in a different slot, so they don’t have to compete. You can wear both!
The part I like the most, though, is the creating of the Invisible Box. This isn’t a combat skill or anything. You just use your gloves from your inventory to create a scaling defensive buff five times a day. I don’t know why that makes me so happy. I guess it’s just because, usually, such things give you an item that you can use for the buff? And then I never use the buff, or just give the items to other people. Somehow, having it just be used on yourself makes it more novel to me, because I will actually use it. If I don’t buff myself with it, I’m just wasting my uses, you know? And I do love extra defense. I’m a defensive kind of person.

So yeah, two pretty powerful, half-priced items. Pretty nice stuff. I would bet that the non-combat and stats of the Mummer’s Gloves would make it the better investment, but really, you can’t go wrong with either. Or both. I have both.
Yep.

I never played or had any need to play the original Mercenaries. It didn’t seem like a game I would enjoy at all. Mercenaries 2 was originally skipped for similar reasons, as well as due to their completely scary-ass box art. I don’t want to play as that guy. I don’t even want to have anything to do with that guy. It was never on my radar.

But Crackdown had weakened me to the whole open-world concept… and then I went and enjoyed Far Cry 2 so much, once I got it figured out…
So I was weak, and when I saw the game new for $10 in the Toys R Us clearance rack, well, I couldn’t pass it up. Especially since I had been jonsing to try Red Faction: Guerrilla. Here was a cheap replacement I could play until that game dropped in price! Perfect.

I fear, though, that Crackdown has really kind of ruined me on Open World games.
Crackdown was brilliant for many reasons, but one of the things that I don’t think is immediately apparent is that it didn’t have “missions.” Sure, you had a list of people to kill, and you had to eventually go kill them. But there was no “start” and “stop.” You just went for them if you wanted, or you didn’t. The game didn’t load an instance to give you a very guided experience that goes against what an open-world game actually does, you know? This is why I didn’t like Bully, and Mercenaries 2 is no different. There are all these missions (well, they’re called “contracts”) that you take on and have to do. What’s worse, the game doesn’t really penalize you for dying in the missions, letting you just retry them, but if you die outside of a mission, it costs you money and you lose all of your guns and are left with just a pistol. It is actively de-incentivizing you to explore, and instead to just take your helicopter to the next mission point and do the next mission. So you’re pretty well stuck in these missions, and the open world is just some pain in the ass to travel through to get to more missions. Sure, there are things to find in the world (such as large pallets of money that people are keeping in the middle of fields for no sane reason) and little tiny sidequests to take on (the factions point out “High Value Targets” you can capture and buildings you can raze for additional cash) but when you’re risking having to go through the pain of getting yourself re-equipped if you fail, it just doesn’t seem worth doing half the time.

Still, the gameplay itself is not bad. You can pick from three different Mercenaries, not just the one on the cover (although he has arguably the best perk associated with him: quicker regenning health) and then you run around, building your PMC and managing your relationships with these factions in order to get to the final boss and murder him for shooting you in the rear. The gunplay originally feels a little weird (the guns aren’t super-accurate, besides the sniper rifle, and it seems to take multiple shots to take someone down and you can never get ammo for it outside of buying it and air-dropping it to yourself) but I found myself quickly getting used to the fact that it’s nowhere near one shot, one kill, and that you just have to spray enemies for a little while to take them down. This does give you a really go reason to rush in and use Melee a lot, which is a one-hit-kill. (I think it knocks them out, actually, but same difference. I also think my Melee skills were improved by picking the girl Merc, who has a faster run speed so I could rush machine gun turmulents and whatnot and melee the gunners easier) You can buy and helicopter in vehicles and weapons and whatnot, but I really don’t know why you’d want to. It doesn’t really feel good to do so. Air-dropping in a box of ammo doesn’t feel more badass than murdering someone and taking their ammo, so I don’t know why I would, and I have yet to find a specialized weapon so good that I wouldn’t just use the rifles most of the generic enemies drop. There’s also no real reason not to just steal cars as they drive by if you need a vehicle, so I’ve never found a good reason to air-drop transports, either. I don’t know. For being what I assume was the core mechanic to make this game feel different, it doesn’t actually feel very useful. The only thing I really use is calling in the Helicopter for quick transport to other places on the map. There were, however, some missions where I would get free “call in the troops” air-drops, where I could call in helicopters that would drop in 3 grunts to fight for me? That felt pretty awesome, and was a great way to divert fire from me. I think I can buy those, too. Maybe I should be buying a bunch of those and using them more often.

The one thing that I actually really like about the game is that it makes no pretense that you’re not a bad person. There are pickups all over the map, as I said, but they aren’t normal video game collectibles, where it’s okay to take them because they are there just for you. You walk up to a fuel tank, and it says “Steal Fuel.” And you steal it. If the owners are around, they shoot at you. It’s a little touch, but I rather liked that. You just take it. If you’re taking a faction’s stuff, and they get pissed at you, well, just donate money to their war fund until they can’t ignore you any more. You do what you want. You are a very bad person, and not for some noble goal. You just are. I dunno, it’s refreshing not to have some bullshit explanation for every damn thing, and just let it be what it is.

But yeah, I don’t know. Mercenaries 2 is not a perfect game. If I had paid $60 bucks for it, I would probably have been displeased. But the basic elements that make open world games great are hiding in there, and it can be a pretty fun time, if you let it be. It is sure as fuck worth the $10 bucks I’ve paid for it, and after the like… two days straight of playing it, I’m pretty sure I’ve gotten my money’s worth.

So, it’s June. That means it’s the month of the crazy, wacky Super-Content Familiar. This time it is the Baby Sandworm.

It’s probably my favorite June familiar, hands down.

I’ve played all the previous June content areas. I own a Llama, too. Each of the other ones seem like puzzles to overcome in order to get ascension relevant consumables. You have to figure out how to rush through the Violet Fog to get your munchies pills or how to trick the Wormwood to get your Not-a-pipes with the minimum amount of turn investment. There is some funny, entertaining content in there, but it’s all just for the rewards. The Llama stuff was nice, in that it removed the puzzle to get you the items from a specific zone, which you can get while doing other quests. But it’s still just “beating the system for buffs and consumables.” That’s cool. People like that. But it’s not perfect for me, really.

The content that the Baby Sandworm gives you is a series of three, interconnected storyline quests, and that is why I love it.
To do this, they first just give the item people want the most from the content straight out. The sandworm drops Agua de Vida, a spleen for turns item. Wonderful. When you use it, then you get the ‘unlock” item, which isn’t trade-able. That’s an interesting drawback. But once you get into the actual quests, then you get into a quest throughout time. Granted, it makes absolutely no sense that you’re doing this quests by “remembering” what happened over time periods, especially in the future. But the content is entertaining and fun. Hell, it’s got a full in-game implementation of Hunt the Wumpus right in the quest! That’s pretty impressive.

Basically, I loved the quest. I’m going to love going through it several more times over ascensions to get all the rewards. I’m going to appreciate how wanting to do that content is going to make me actually use my spleen to be more efficient. I love this familiar.

And hell, it’s the first full Sombrero Mr. Store familiar. If nothing else, it’s a million times better than a normal Sombrero. There’s no reason not to get this. You know, unless you’re just opposed to donating, I suppose.