The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

So I beat Ghostbusters: The Vidjeo Game.
Honestly, you could probably get away with renting it and then putting in serious time and energy into beating the single player during the rental period. But you should definitely play it. This is how you make a good licensed game, seriously.

The game brings the humor, as you would hope. It’s got all the voices of the cast, which is a wonderful thing indeed. These are things so many licensed games get wrong, I suppose, but the moment you heard they had the original cast, you knew this game was going to get that right.
So the exciting part is that the gameplay stands up against all the writing.
Granted, there is nothing TOO shocking. It’s fairly stock Third Person Shooter fare. (although most Third Person Shooters nowadays steal Gears of War’s cover system, and this has no cover system, so it almost feels a little fresh because of it.) But it’s very solid, mechanically. You get to wrangle ghosts into traps, which is tons of fun, but they also have “Corporeal” spirits to mix it up, which are bound to physical objects, so they can throw a wide variety of enemies at you. Often you’ll get a mix of ghosts you have to trap, and smaller, corporeal minions which you can just blow up with your proton stream without trapping, to make you have to make choices: Do I take out the big threats, or do I try to clear out the area first of the little guys to make trapping the big ghosts easier?

Your Proton Pack has the standard Proton Beam, which acts just like you expect and is a great general-purpose weapon. You can pretty well use it all game, if you want to. But since you are the “Experimental Equipment Technician” you also get a nice selection of upgrades and other “weapons.” (Although I find it odd that you are supposed to be the Guinea Pig testing all these new weapons, and yet all the other Ghostbusters use them, too. Not that I don’t appreciate the AI having the appropriate weapons for the job.) The first thing you get is your “Boson Dart,” which is basically like a rocket you can fire while shooting your Proton Beam. Then you get the “Shock Blast,” which works like a shotgun and feels completely awesome to use, the “Stasis Stream” which freezes enemies in place, the Slime Blower from the second movie, with attached “Slime Tether” which is basically a setup for environmental puzzles, and my favorite named one, the “Meson Collier.” Using the Slime Blower seems a little weak, but that’s okay because it’s useful for other things. All the other weapons have a great feel, and are effective in most situations, though there is always a best one for the job.

Throughout the game, you can also put on some goggles and scan things with your PKE Meter, Metroid Prime-style. Not only does this provide a tactical benefit, as it gives you extra money to use to buy upgrades, as well as tells you what different beams and whatnot a particular ghost is weak against, but it also is another vector for humor. There are multi-paragraph explanations for everything in the game, and they are all fairly entertaining to read. If you scan a ghost, you can be sure that Tobin’s Spirit Guide will have a full write-up of that Ghost’s history. The same if you find some sort of haunted or supernatural artifact. It’s a nice touch.

I played the game on “Experienced,” but I would probably suggest playing the game on Casual. Experienced isn’t hard, but I certainly didn’t feel like I gained anything by the times I had to restart a few difficult situations time and again. I’m just glad the game was smart enough to have a checkpoint before basically every large-scale combat scenario to keep the frustration to a minimum. But yeah, you aren’t missing anything by playing it on Casual, I don’t think. Go ahead and be a wuss.

But yeah, I’ve thoroughly, thoroughly enjoyed this game. It’s helped me realize that, more and more, what I want out of games isn’t difficulty, and it isn’t even some sort of clever new gameplay mechanic. It’s just something that’s purely and genuinely fun, and not frustrating. That is pretty well the exact definition of Ghostbusters: The Vidjeo Game. Genuine fun. Play it.

Work on Saturday night sucked.

Why, you ask? Well…

So it was looking like it was going to be a pretty big night. A lot of work to do! A lot of stuff to sign. No big deal, everyone is short on hours due to some horrible scheduling issue that’s screwing everyone, staying an hour or two late wasn’t going to make anyone mad. And we needed that time too, as our crew was made up mostly of the new members of the team, including one new guy who was still being trained. So yeah, it was going to be slow going.

So I plan everything out for this, I get people out there, we get working, etc. At 11:15, over the loudspeaker comes the announcement that we have to be out of the building at 12:15. This wasn’t me, the team supervisor being told this. No, this was everyone being told this. But it was the first I’d heard about it. If I had known about it ahead of time, I could have done something about it. I could have planned the night around the limited time, and maximized what we got done and made it easy for the rest of the store to finish up after us.

But it was too late for that. We had an hour to do half the work of a basically 6 hour shift.

We rushed. We got done what we could, and I wrote a note explaining, but fuck… this makes me look bad. Very bad. To both the people working in the store tomorrow and to my crew. Maybe it’s stupid of me, for I am just Management’s puppet, but I like to at least seem like I know what’s going on and am in control. It just makes people worry less, so we get more done. But that sure as fuck didn’t happen that night.

I shouldn’t care. I’m not going to get fired for it, because it’s not my fault. I got paid. I shouldn’t give a shit about my silly part time retail job.
But bleh… still frustrating…

Hey now, look. It’s Dad Day! Yay Dad Day!

So say hello and I love you to your father, eh? Or at the very least, thank him for half your genetic material, or something.

I know I’m nowhere near the child my father wanted. He wanted someone with at least a passing interest in sports, someone who got out and about, someone who was into scouts more than just being along for the ride because that’s what you’re supposed to do and happening to get things done. I’m not the person my father wants.

But eh… I’m a pretty good person. I think he’s come to see me as I am. Well, somewhat, anyway. He at least understands that what I do up here in my computer room is important to me, and that my hobbies are not invalid and that somehow I’ve become a fairly useful person even while indulging in such things.

But even though he tried to push me in so many ways I didn’t want to go, he’s still always been there for me. It was him who flat out told me that they still loved me and supported me when I fucked up my scholarship, and it is him who stands up for me against some of my mother’s more intense whims…

He loves me, and I love him. He’s a pretty damn good Dad.
Happy Father’s Day.

So Wal-Mart sells “draft packs.” It is three “random” boosters of Magic hidden behind a Foil land, so you can’t see what you’re getting. They are 11 dollars. Buying three packs alone would probably be at least 13. So, you know, a little discount, mixed with not having to run all over town to find enough packs (which is often an issue around here without going to the card store. It’s an awesome card store, but, you know, you are paying more that way) and with a little of the fact that I know two Wal-Mart employees to buy the cards with their discount, and you have the perfect excuse to buy these packs and draft with them.

So that’s what we did last night.

The first thing we noticed is that the packs in there aren’t as random as they might seem. Wizards of the Coast must have printed no less than 4 Billion Fifth Dawn packs, because man, I see them discounted constantly, all over the place, and every one of these packs that we bought had a Fifth Dawn booster in them. They also all contained an Eventide booster. This is better than Fifth Dawn. We have opened so, so many Fifth Dawn packs. Three of the Draft Packs also contained a Tenth Edition booster. For no reason, mine contained a Guildpact Booster instead.

So that was our combination. How did it go?

Jonathan drafted a rainbow deck that did well. We all tried to act shocked. Though the fact that he didn’t win WAS kind of shocking.
Spaeth pulled a Joiner Adept first thing, and then proceeded NOT to draft a rainbow deck for no reason whatsoever.
Essner ran a Redish deck with Nobilis of War to a very complete victory.

And me? Well, I drafted a Mono-Black deck based on Blind Creeper and Seize the Soul.
Yeah, I don’t know what I was thinking either.
I got a ton of recursion, in a whopping three Desecrator Hags and an Exhumer Thrull, but when you’re having to put Dross Crocodile in your deck because you have nothing above a 2/2? Well, you’re not going to do well. So I annoyed a lot with all my recursion, but did little. I managed to beat my match with Spaeth, though, simply based on him being extremely mana-flooded. So I got a pity win, I guess.

Still, Magic Drafting is always fun times, and I have a shiny new pair of Evershrikes that we opened to put into a revamped White Enchantment deck, along with these Celestial Ancients I have sitting around.

I’ve really got to sit down and do some serious deckbuilding soon.

I was working at my job. You know, the one that I have to earn money? Yeah, that one. So I was working there, changing all the jewelry signs because I promised Krista I would, so I’m doing that, and then I feel kind of squirmy-itchy around my stomach region. And I’m like “hey, okay, no big deal, I shall scratch a little, not like anyone is around.” So I give my stomach a scratch. Doesn’t do much. I look down, and there seems to be something on my shirt, so I brush it off… but it isn’t on my shirt… it’s in my shirt… so I lift it up and

HOLY SHIT THERE’S A BUG IN MY SHIRT.

To my credit, I did not kill the creature. I could not really tell what it was as it crawled away. It wasn’t big, but it didn’t have wings. I don’t think it was a tick or anything, as it didn’t look like that. I have no idea what it was, and even moreso, I have no fucking idea how it got in my shirt. Did it climb all the way up my body? When did it do that? Why did I not notice it until then?

There are so many unanswered questions.

But most importantly, it has made me insanely itchy the whole rest of the night. So many phantom bugs, coming out of nowhere, crawling under my clothes… makes me shudder just thinking about it…

…stupid bug…

Recently, in searching for a podcast-friendly game (because I so often need those) I’ve been playing Spelunky. I had installed it a long time ago, played like three lives, said “that’s cool” and then put it down. Then I was cleaning up my desktop, and wanted to move the folder I had it installed in to my games folder. “Hmm, but then I’d forget about it” I thought. So I got it set up as a shortcut in Steam. An hour or so later, I was looking for something to do while listening to a podcast, and saw the link, and then there I was, playing Spelunky.

I mean, I’m still a lightweight. I’ve only played maybe 150 lives at this point. But still, I’ve gotten my first shortcut built, and I’ve made it to the ice levels multiple times. (Well, using said shortcut, not from the beginning.) So that’s something! I’m not completely useless!

The real breakthrough was plugging in my SFIV Fightpad. Intense 2D gaming like this was the whole reason that I bought the fightpad in the first place, and it does not disappoint, now that I’ve put it to its first real test. It feels kind of odd in my grip, or at least it did at first. It has a weird shape that I’m not used to. But the D-pad is completely top notch. A good gamepad really, really makes Spelunky a whole lot more playable, and if you want a 2D gamepad and can still find a Fightpad, it comes highly recommended.

Brickroad, in his wonderful LP of the game, mentioned that “life isn’t that important, because most of the deaths are instant.” Maybe once you get the hang of the game, that’s true, but I’ve died so many times from life, it isn’t even funny. I take plenty of damage from enemies because I suck, and I normally end up dying from falling, and then an enemy taking off my last heart while I’m dazed. I die instantly so much rarer than damage from enemies… and it’s not just because I don’t have a good weapon. I have been successful stealing from shopkeepers many times, and I still die, even with a shotgun and jetpack, even. Just lots of stupid mistakes! But then again, that’s what a roguelike game is all about. YASDs.

Still, man, I’d easily pay money for Spelunky. It is a good, good game. I know the internet already knows this, but I’m just making it official. For the record.

I am currently in bed on my lappy. I am trying to help my back recover. Why?

Gods, I don’t know, but my back is in extreme pain.

I bent down to pick up the bag containing Ghostbusters: The Video Game (Which has been nothing but awesome so far. Expect a full write-up later, but if you’re excited about the idea of the game, it’s worth your time.) as I got out my car, and then BAM. Intense back pain.Overwhelming. And now I can’t really bend over or anything.

Of course, after like a week of no work, this decides to happen during the day when I have to work. Heh.

This pain is pretty well identical to the horrible pain I got from lifting heavy things to help my brother move in. Only, of course, that’s a reason that makes sense. I lifted too much and threw out my back. But now, I guess, it’s come back? It wasn’t totally healed? I mean, I guess it did take quite a long time to heal last time. I guess it’s a permanent issue. Horrible. Unfortunate.

Of course, a lot of this comes down to how I deal with pain, which is, I normally just ignore it. Headache? Ignored, and I continue with whatever as my head pounds. Ankle aching and I’m limping? I’m certainly going to keep walking around and aren’t going to let it affect my plans. And hell, I carried a lot of heavy objects while my back was fucked up last time.
I guess, at some level it’s because I deserve pain. But I also think it’s sort of an inherent hate of my body. It deserves to ache and limp. Fuck that thing. It’s all wrong anyway.

But I need to take care of myself better… I should really stop that…
So I stopped playing Ghostbusters, and here I am. In bed.
I hope you’re happy, body.

Okay, so I’m going to attempt to make a point about vidjeo gamez. Stand back.

Difficulty in video games. On one paw, you have things like this. Horrible, awful things that only exist to be hard and, potentially, drain your will to live. On the other, you have things, perhaps, like this, where perhaps the complains of “OMG for n00bs too easy” are warranted.

Still, I’m so far in the second camp, it’s silly.

I’ve never been into video games for the challenge. I can’t remember a time when I thought a game was too easy or too simple. I don’t doubt it happened once or twice. But no strong examples spring to mind.
Like most gamers my age, I grew up playing games. I played all of the hard games, of course. At the same time, I sure as hell used my Game Genie a lot. So I guess I had more fun when I was jumping over the levels in Super Mario Brothers 2 than when I was trying it for reals and failing. As games matured I found RPGs, and latched onto them. Here was a genre where, much like in the design of the original Dragon Quest, if you couldn’t defeat something, you could overcome it with sheer perseverance and level-grinding. The fact that I didn’t have skills didn’t matter so much. I could still enjoy the game, and I got a little story in there, too. Then came music games into my consciousness, a genre where it’s just all about fun. There’s a challenge element, but you can set it to easier modes and still feel like a rock star, or, more appropriately for my first excursion, enjoy the humorous and catchy rap tunes.

And now, difficulty need not be an element at all in games. It’s so far away from what’s actually popular. I couldn’t be happier. Sure, once I’ve mastered a difficulty in Rock Band, I do kick it up to make it more challenging, but that’s not the real reason I’m playing. I want to feel like I’m rocking out to my favorite songs. Sure, I do enjoy a roguelike now and again, and those are the hardest games out there. But the idea isn’t to beat those games. It’s about seeing the progression of your own skills. I know that that’s probably what everyone does in every hard game. “Yes, I made it X amount farther than last time!” But I don’t know. Most games have the end as a goal. Roguelikes don’t. It, like golf, is simply all about bettering yourself. If a roguelike is worth its salt, you will probably never be able to beat every single run you do. But that is okay.
The point is, games without challenge can be just as fun. I love the crap out of all of Telltale’s adventure games, and they are essentially interactive stories than games. Same with Phoenix Wright, or Hotel Dusk. These are very, very entertaining games! I love the crap out of them. Difficulty isn’t necessary.

In fact, more and more I’ve been doing away with difficulty entirely, and enjoying games more for it. I play too much shit to get stuck on one level and play it over and over. The last thing I want in a game is to die more than once or twice in an area, and even if I do die, I want it to have auto-saved close enough to keep the frustration down. So I pick easy in games, sure. All the time. Games I know I’m good at, I go normal. But there’s no shame in Easy mode. I’m sure I got just as much enjoyment out of Persona 4 playing it on Easy than anyone else did on normal, and it stopped me from getting stuck on the harder bosses.

There was a while where I bought into the hype. That I was getting soft spending my time playing Crossword DS and shit. But just like there are a wide variety of types of things in any media, there is a place for easy, casual, and completely non-challenging games. I love them more and more as I have less and less time to consume things that take awhile to get to the fun, or frustrate me during what is supposed to be my leisure time.

Bring on the tiny, fun, easy games, I say. I will be there to buy them.

(And if this blog post didn’t turn out as imagined, I blame PaRappa the Rapper, who completely distracted me for like an hour as I was looking up a youtube video for that link up there. Damn you for being so catchy! But again, I had fun reliving those games. So who cares. WHO CARE
Also, this is probably why I don’t try to write more detailed blog posts. Yep.)

Rock Band Unplugged has a bad rap, I think. It’s gotten mediocre reviews, and I’m not hearing about a lot of people playing it.

That’s a shame, because it is pretty damn good.

Basically, take Amplitude. You remove the techno music, reduce the number of tracks down to four. To compensate for this (since Amplitude was a game about switching tracks and keeping the plates spinning, which isn’t hard at all with four tracks) you have four buttons to hit instead of three, and you add chords. Then you take songs straight from Rock Band 2, put a Rock Band 2 skin on the thing. Bam. You have Rock Band Unplugged.

Yeah, I guess that doesn’t make it sound appealing.
It really isn’t anything revolutionary or something you must play. But it is just about as good as you can get the rock band experience on the go, and I am having quite a good time with it. On Medium, the button presses are fairly close to what the song is, and it’s challenging without being back-breakingly hard. I’m sure on Expert, I would be weeping.

But yes, I am having a good time. So much so that I have Class of Heroes sitting right here, and I keep going back to the World Tour mode. I’m going to beat Rock Band Unplugged.

It’s main flaw, I think, is the same flaw with the first Rock Band: Small number of songs. Now that I’ve experienced Rock Band 2 with all the DLC and all the songs of Rock Band 1, I never want to go back to playing songs more than once in a session. I want that huge list, and this game just doesn’t have it. It’s got a fairly nice setlist, taken almost completely from Rock Band DLC, but I’m still ending up playing songs twice during longer sessions, which is unfortunate.

The game also has The Trees, which is the worst song ever created by mankind. Bleh.

There are two main complaints about the game. One is that “it doesn’t capture the spirit of Amplitude.” I can’t really argue with this one. Amplitude is a better game. But it’s not portable, and I’ve played Amplitude to death. Heh.
The second is that “it doesn’t capture the spirit of Rock Band.” This is mostly connected to talking about a lack of multiplayer modes. This is a complete bullshit complaint. If I want to play Rock Band with friends, I will, gasp, play Rock Band with friends. I have never, ever played a PSP game multiplayer, and I probably never will. A portable game NEEDS a strong single-player component. Multiplayer is almost always going to be useless, unless it is hot seat. I guess I just don’t know what these people expect. Guitar Hero On Tour was trying to make the game “feel like Guitar Hero” and that gave us this and was god-awful to play. At least this is a fun game, you know? It’s blatantly using the Rock Band name for sales, but it is a fun game.

So much of me is saying “Yes, but, yes, but, yes, but.” That isn’t a good recommendation, I guess. There is a demo, I hear, so I’d download it and try it, if you’re questioning a purchase. But I’m completely getting my money’s worth out of it. It’s a solid game! Not a must-have. But if you like music games, and actually own a PSP, it is worth your time. Yes. Yes it is.

This manga is very good. I wish it were officially translated, so I could give them lots of money.

I like Shojo manga. I mean, I do. Granted, I’m past the point where I will read most everything, much like I’m pass the point where I’ll enjoy just about any Shonen manga… though fun, especially your first one, there are definitely tropes and a set pattern to putting them together that, eventually, you get tired of reading again and again. Then you look for something different. You look for something with deeper characters than most and an interesting world, like xXxholic. Or you look for something with amazing twists, such as the intense, constant hatred and forced submission take on the standard shojo love triangle in Hot Gimmick. (Which I need to get back to. I hope it stayed as fresh as it started) Most of the time, the gimmick (which is almost ironic to say after I just mentioned Hot Gimmick, huh) is all a shojo manga has, and that isn’t enough to mask the generic, formulaic plot.

Hourou Musuko is formulaic, in ways. It’s got your love triangle action. It’s got kids growing up and finding themselves. And, honestly, it has a gimmick. But that gimmick is that two of the main characters, Shuichi Nitori and Yoshino Takatsuki, are transgendered. Not only does that idea change the tone, the plots, everything about the manga, but it does so in a realistic way, which characters true to life that it can bring me to depressive tears. Sure, there is the standard awkward romance stuff in there, and perhaps some of the things that occur is a little unrealistic, (The schools they go to seem a little too eager to put on many plays where guys and girls switch their roles, for instance) but that stuff is always fun, and the comic doesn’t let it stop this strong look at how kids dealing with knowing their body is wrong try to figure themselves out. So much of what they say to themselves, at times, seems like things that have come out of my own mouth. Their problems are realistic.

And hell, it even does a very admirable job of dealing with how their friends, who know about their issues, deal with them as well. I think Saori is a pretty fantastic character. She’s in love with Nitori, but doesn’t know how to deal with the fact that “he” is leaning towards Takatsuki. Is it because Takatsuki is really a guy? Or does “he” like girls and is just not interested in her? Her dealing with these things in anger, in religion… it’s pretty intense as well. I love it.

I also think it pretty great (although another one of those crazy coincidences that seem unrealistic, but you let it go because it works so well in the story) that Both Takatsuki and Nitori end up meeting and befriending an adult named Yuki, who turns out to be an MtF transsexual. She’s a very awkward character in many ways, oddly sexual with these young kids, for instance, but at the same time, she too is a complete character, and not a stereotype. We see her family situation, the good and the bad, and we see how she views gender, which to her is kind of invisible and inconsequential. It’s also nice for the characters to have someone to come and ask for advice, which makes her a good plot helper, as well.

Anyway… this comic is the real deal. It’s very well written, moving forward at a slow, but purposeful pace. I’m not done with everything translated on the website I linked up there, but it’s been nothing but great so far. I am a fan. I think the fact that it affects me so much just says how well it’s put together.
I highly recommend giving it a chance. Highly.