The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

I tell myself again and again that I’m okay. That things are fine. Almost going my way, even. I go out, I do what I need to do, I play games, I have fun, I make money. I’m good.

And then something, a little something, sets me off.

It’s a comic, this time, and it’s a very good comic and I will tell you about it outside of my depressive fit.

I’ve trained myself long and hard to put on a face of stability. I’m pretty good at it. I can lead. I lead a whole team of people every time I work and seem like I know what I’m doing, even if I’m just winging it. (Though that’s the key to leadership, as far as I’m concerned. Always seeming like you know the answer to those working with you, but approaching things knowing that you don’t.)
But, you know, it’s all a facade.

I know I’ve said all this a million times… and each time I say it, a week or so later, I’m like, eh, I’m back in control. I got this. I’m on it. But I’m not.

I’m pretty broken, you know?
Pretty much.

So our next door neighbor has had these No Tresspassing signs up for awhile now. They’re plastered like… all over the house. I didn’t think too much of it, especially after the time where my car got robbed just sitting in the driveway. That could make anyone want to try something to keep yourself a little safer, right?

But recently, the guy has been coming over, asking if we’ve seen anyone near his yard. He says he’s seen people spraying his house with something (apparently not paint or anything, though) and that kids have been pointing “laser tags” at him. He got himself a gun, he says, and a restraining order against people with laser tags.

All kind of creepy, certainly, and the fact that he’s going door to door telling people this seems… kind of stupid. But it’s not like I’m ever in his yard or anything. It didn’t seem to concern me.

Until, a few nights ago, I was getting ready to play some Killing Floor when I heard a gun shot. It was close enough to wake my parents up, and we all were thinking the same thing. We ran downstairs, and saw him walking to his house with a flashlight. It was pretty creepy stuff. He even came by the next day to say that, yes, he had fired a shotgun, and that some cops had came and did we call the cops? We didn’t, although I kind of think we should have. Still, the fact that someone who would fire at shadows or whatever would think we tattled on him is kind of scary.

I drove home from work last night, and he had all the lights on his back yard. Big floodlights so he could see everything.

You never expect to have to deal with this sort of stuff, you know? I don’t feel like I’m in danger or anything, but it just… it’s almost surreal. To think about. And now I’m worried about other times I’ve heard gun shots, and assumed it was people up in the woods shooting at deer out of season or something. Was that him too?
I have no idea.

So, the netbook, ehhhhh? How’s that going for me? It’s all installed, upgraded, and named. (It’s Mokona-chan, to go with my main PC, which is named Yuuko-san. I am so lame.) I’ve been using it for awhile.

I quite like Easy Peasy.

Instead of a normal desktop, it’s basically just a series of big icons to launch things, and, honestly, I think that works very well for what I’m going to be using it for. I favorited Firefox and Pidgin so they’re right there, whenever I turn on the machine. I click on both, and I am off and running. I am a big fan of the Netbook Remix base they’re using. It’s a very good idea.
Along the top is what Windows people would call the task bar. It’s a little weird, but functional. Basically, the majority of the bar states what program you’re currently using and has a close button. It kind of looks like a huge Firefox tab or something. To the left of that are a bunch of little icons showing the other windows you have open. A click on them brings them to the forefront. This works pretty well, too!
The only thing I wish it had was Alt-tabbing between various programs, as that’s something I use constantly on my main PC, and since I am unskilled with the trackpad, would be convenient on the netbook too, in order to switch between Firefox and an IM conversation quickly. I’m sure there’s such a keyboard shortcut in Ubunutu and whatnot. I’ll just have to look it up sometime.

Hardware-wise, the machine is really quite usable. The trackpad… well, it’s a trackpad. I’ve never been a huge fan of them, though I understand why they are important. To carry a mouse around with this thing kind of takes out all the benefit of having a tiny, portable computer, you know? Still, if I was going on a trip or something, I would probably pack a mouse. The one feature I do like is the fact that the trackpad has a little multi-touch action going. A two-finger swipe scrolls the screen like a scroll wheel. It could work a little better (I have tap to click on, and that confuses it sometimes) but it’s still a nice little feature.
The keyboard is also shocking me in how fast I am learning to touch-type with it. I’m already doing pretty well! Sure, there are still typos, but I can tell that, after a little more practice, it won’t be an issue, even with the little keyboard. That’s good, because when I want to chat, I gotta be able to type at the speed of my thoughts. That’s just how I roll. I am kind of unhappy with some of the layout, though. For example, the 1 key is way the fuck out of the way, where the ` or ~ key would be on a normal keyboard. I can’t type exclamation points without hitting tab or something, and that bothers me. It also bothers me that the comma button is bigger than the button for a period. Are you serious, Asus? Which does someone use more, commas or periods? Well, I guess it depends on their idiom, but having the period button so tiny is also a really silly design choice. If you get a lot of sentences from me in chat ending in commas, you’ll know that I’m on my lappy.

Performance-wise, it basically does everything I need it to. It can’t seem to deal with Spoony’s horrible video player (I love you, Spoony, but you have to admit that Blip.tv’s player is shit) but it can play Youtube videos flawlessly. I can chat and surf the internets without any lag from the processor (Is this because of my RAM upgrade? I’m actually thinking it probably is) and that’s really all I need out of the thing. Sure, it could be more powerful. But for the, what, 200 bucks total I paid for this little thing? 250? It’s working like a champ.

I’m pretty sad I couldn’t get Windows 7 on the machine, to try it out, but as is, it is working just great. To anyone getting a Linux-based EeePC, I completely recommend doing away with Xandros, the distro that comes on there. It just wasn’t working well. Easy Peasy offers the same easy accessibility and seems to be running a ton, ton better. (Granted, I upgraded the RAM and SSD since installing Easy Peasy, but…) And I’m pretty happy with my purchase.

You may recall me saying, way, way back when, that I was thinking about putting together a physical archive of all the content on the old site. I might have said it, oh, here.

Of all things, I started trying to put that together the other day.

I was motivated into trying it again, sort of, by how much success Parish is having with building books and magazines in the Blurb editor. Apparently it’s working pretty damn well for him! Surely it couldn’t be too hard for my silly project: I just had to cut and paste a lot of blog posts, maybe write an introduction. Nothing difficult. If the editor was as easy to use as he said, hey, I could probably do it!

So I download the thing from the Blurb site, and I get to work. The thing has some quirks. It really wanted me to use Georgia as a font, for instance, and it was doing some really weird things about splitting the www off of www.getmetoufothis.net. Still, I persevered. I put together a simple color, in the weird shade of pink the old site was, with some cover blurbs and promotional text, like someone would actually buy the thing. I skipped the table of contents and introduction for the time being, and started pasting in blog entries, shaking my head at how silly and not at all like the blog is today that it was in its youth.

Then the program crashed.

To its credit, it was saved EXACTLY where the crash happened. I lost no data. Still, that wasn’t a good sign. And it continued until it got to the point where it would crash every time I tried to bold something. That’s where I gave up.
I needed to be able to bold the titles to the blog posts to set them apart from the rest of the text, you know? This is not some hard thing for the program to be able to do! But it’s pretty completely unusable because of it.

I guess this new version just came out, and that Parish used an old version before. Maybe they’ll patch it quick. I don’t know. But for now, I suppose that’s another little project tabled. And like, 40 bucks I won’t have to pay. Heh, it was going to be an expensive little book… but it would look nice. All hardcover and shit. Seeing all 400 or whatever pages of my stupid blogging for so many years… yeah.
I’ll get back to it sometime, I’m sure.

So I managed to play a bit more Killing Floor. It’s still not a bad game. But man, some of the choices still bother the crap out of me.

I mean, okay, here’s Left 4 Dead. Casual is set up for people who have never played an FPS, which is fine. That’s why it’s called casual. If you’re a gamer and you want a “casual” experience, you can play Left 4 Dead on Normal and have a fun, very casual play experience with your friends. You can’t completely zone out, and are challenged sometimes, but are never completely crushed or anything. It’s good times. If you would like to be challenged, Advanced is a decent jump up, and Expert is really damn hard. You have options for how much skill you want involved in your game.
Now here is Killing Floor. The easiest mode is a complete joke. If you can fire a gun in an FPS, you can complete it, no problem. Now, you jump up to Normal. The game is incredibly difficult. Certainly harder than Advanced in Left 4 Dead. You’re lucky if the same team who passed through Easy half asleep could do much of anything on Normal. It’s just kind of ridiculous. I really dislike that about it. Maybe it’s because I’m not playing with a full 6 players, but one of the touted game features was that it scaled based on the number of players, so I don’t really buy that as the reason.

But wait, you say! This is a mod-able game! You can install a mod to make it easier! Say, one that doesn’t take away your money when you die or gives you more HP or something!

Well, I would, but those mods would not be “white listed.”

See, one of the game’s features is a level-able set of Perks. These give you goals to go for, as you build them up, and give you various advantages based on the play styles you like to play. This is a very good thing.
But if you use any mod that isn’t on their approved list (Read: Any that would actually change how the game plays) then Perks are turned off. You can’t gain experience in them. You can’t even use them, I don’t believe.

What the fuck is the point of that?

People are going to grind for levels no matter what you do. People are stupid like that. Put any restrictions in place that you want, people will find away around it. They will sit for hours, boringly grinding away. Look at the Achievement servers on Team Fortress for just one example. There are Perk-grinding servers of Killing Floor set up.
So why, Tripwire, are you keeping me from enjoying the game the way I want? What are you gaining by keeping me from getting levels by playing the way I enjoy? If I want to make the game super stupid easy, or give myself tons of money every level, why do you care? Why do you keep that from being a fun option, or a diversion I can turn on every once and awhile? Why did you make this “whitelist” to keep what could have kept your game going from actually working?

In a single-player experience, I get locking away content. Well, to an extent, with certain kinds of games. Leveling up in an RPG unlocks new spells and abilities. It’s important to the design of the game that that happen, and is part of the fun. This is good. The single-player game can’t exist without it. I don’t mind the developers locking that away.
Now, if, in that same game where I had to slowly unlock things, I go into Multiplayer and I cannot just play the way I want? That’s kind of bullshit. Street Fighter IV unlocks? Bullshit. You’re ruining the fun me and my friends can have. We can’t play the way we want, and it’s your fault. Same with Smash Brothers unlocks. Basically, anything that keeps the fun away until I jump over hurdles is bullshit.
That’s exactly what this whitelist is. Instead of letting me make the game I want, and play it, I am forced to play their game, exactly their way, or they take the toys away. Seriously, why even allow mods if you’re going to do that. It’s like ordering a burger at Logan’s. When they ask me how I want it cooked, and then don’t give it to me that way, I am angry. If they just hadn’t asked, I wouldn’t care. If I didn’t think the game could be modded, I wouldn’t be angry. But it has those hooks all over the game. It can be. They encourage it. But then they give me my burger burnt to a crisp, and turn off my toys.

Bleh, fuck you, Tripwire. Let me play the game I paid for my way.

…apparently I am angrier about this that I thought. Huh.

So there’s a new Clan Dungeon about, The Slime Tube. And hey, we haven’t even finished our Hobopolis runs yet! (Although I do have my Hamster now, and damn, it’s pretty powerful, even with just the Hobo Power from Hodgman’s Bow Tie.) But I’ve been checking it out. It’s simple, but it is indeed quite fun, and it’s got some rather interesting items for high-level farming, with huge drop bonuses for certain types of things. It also has some weird skills that are ascension-relevant and buff up bigger each time you use them.

Needless to say, it’s looking like there is a need to speed run this dungeon too, in order to get lots of goodies. The way to make the Slime Tube go faster seems to be to buff Monster Level up incredibly high. This makes you have to do less fights, which can quickly change the Slime Tube from a 1000 turn affair to a 400-something turn affair. The crazy thing is, though, that buffing your monster level that high is extremely difficulty. The fights themselves, once you get it up there, are not, really, but to get buffed up to that point… well, Val was planning out loud and bouncing ideas off of me on how to do this, and it was quickly apparent that it would take at least 6 days of not using any turns in order to get the buffs from food and booze needed to get it up to appropriate levels, not to mention the cost of most of the other +ML buffs, and the annoyance of getting enough turns of, say, Unpopular. It’s a huge undertaking.

Of course, the reward for going that fast? A drop that lets you make gear that slowly, as you get more of it, makes speed-running the thing trivially easy. What?

The concept of difficulty in Kingdom of Loathing is just so weird like that. No fight is ever difficult, besides fights that game the system, such as Uber-Hodge. Any challenge put forth seems to require just gobs and gobs of resources, and it’s not so much difficulty as just perseverance to farm all the money you need, and wait around to get everything set up. That is just kind of fucked up.
At the same time, I realize their problem. You have a game where those who first created characters have characters in the insanely, mind-blowingly high levels. There’s no level cap, so they just keep grinding away, more and more. Creating an encounter that could challenge these characters is no easy task. I mean, I’ve been not ascending for awhile, and I’m over level 30, and there is nothing besides Hobopolis Bosses and a couple encounters in the Sea, really, that are anything more than one click on the attack button. I understand the design issues that make these sorts of problems come about.
I also see a potential benefit to the economy of the game. The economy of KoL is actually pretty damn important to its continued success. People enjoy being able to speculate, invest, and turn money in to more money. Having goods that everyone needs in bulk is always going to be a good angle for people to farm and make a lot of money. Once Hodgman required Pufferfish Spines and Spectral Jelly to defeat, you can bet people jumped on farming them, and created a whole economy out of them. I mean, hell, I bet that if I now started to go out of my way to farm Great Tit Feathers, I bet I could make a pretty decent profit, as I’m sure they’re in much greater demand than they ever were before. These sorts of things do make the economy more interesting and do make for an interesting game.

At the same time, though, isn’t KoL supposed to be a casual experience? I understand that there is an extremely hardcore fanbase that they need to tie into. I also understand that it is completely possible to enjoy The Slime Tube without speedrunning it, because I am right now. But still, it just kind of bothers me that there are such things that are so locked off this way that a causal player without a group of knowledgable friends and a bunch of resources will never be able to experience them.
On the third paw, I suppose the same can be said of World of Warcraft. It’s taken as a very casual game by a lot of players, but you still have to be very hardcore and very prepared to run the high-level raid dungeons. And that’s what Clan dungeons are: KoL’s raid dungeons.

I guess I don’t have a solution to this problem. And Jick and Company are obviously doing a decent job with the game, as it continues to keep going and make money and whatnot. But sometimes I feel like I’m losing what originally drew me to this game when I dive into all this hardcore content. I’m losing the joy I first had about having a short, daily play RPG with funny writing that made me smile. I guess I’d like if they focused on making the game work like that a little too.

Are you feeling down? Uninterested? Thinking that the world perhaps just isn’t awesome enough? Just a little?

Then may I present Robot Dinosaurs That Shoot Beams When They Roar.

It’s so short, and it’s so silly, but dammit, it just makes me smile. The idea is awesome, the execution is awesome, the game mechanic of the beam deserves more exploration, the music is pretty intense… this is pretty well the definition of a good flash game, you know? I mean, I might have a few things to say about the guy who made it. He deserves a high-five. Definitely.

So there. There’s a little smile for you on your Sunday, hm? Have an awesome day.

…Roar.

So all of my parts and shit came in.

It was time to upgrade my Eee PC.

First things first, I had to flash the BIOS in order to recognize the new parts. I had ordered a new USB thumbdrive, so I went to format it as FAT, which it required in order to find the new ROM for the BIOS… but I couldn’t format it FAT. It was 8 Gigs and thus too big.
I raged for a bit. The walkthroughs I had read had told me to use a stick at least a gig big! But dammit, this was frustrating. The ROM was less than a megabyte. I decided to fuck it, and formatted my old 256 meg stick, and tried flashing it with that. That worked. Score.

So I unscrewed the little hatch on the bottom of the lappy. Inside was the SSD and the RAM. It was a little cramped, with barely enough opening to see them both completely, but eh, I could handle it. I pried the clips on the RAM apart to pop it out. It caught and pinched my fingers. Then I slid the 2 gig stick on in there and clicked it in place.

I turned the thing on. Blank screen! I turned it on again. Blank screen! Lovely.
Oh, wait, I’m stupid, the RAM didn’t click in the right way.
Fixed that, and it booted, and recognized the RAM. Score.

I then started to unscrew the two screws holding in the SSD. I tried and tried, but my screwdriver couldn’t get ahold of the tiny screws. I searched the house for more screwdrivers, trying them. Nothing could find purchase. Once again, in a bit of a rage, I decided to go buy a set of tiny screwdrivers. I did, and came back. Having the right tool for the job made it work easily. I slide the new 16 gig SSD into the slot and screwed it back in. It’s recognized in the BIOS. Victory.

Of course, then I had to get an operating system on there. I had gotten it into my head to install Windows 7 RC1 on there, but try as I might, I couldn’t get the installer to boot from a thumb drive. So I said fuck it, and went with my original plan, and installed Easy Peasy. The little program got it on the thumb drive easily, and it installed. Score! Then it updated! Score! And then I was almost late for work.

So, uh, I got all the work done… but I haven’t even gotten to try it yet.

Go… me…?
I’ll tell you how I like Easy Peasy’s modification of the Ubuntu Netbook Remix interface, and if the upgrades helped the computer, soon.

Speaking of games I bought on the iPod for a dollar, let’s talk Star Trigon.

As per a lot of my iPod game purchases, this started with a twitter tweet. Once again, I’ll try just about any game for a dollar, and I had recalled reading about Star Trigon on one of the 1up Blogs, though fuck if I can find the post because 1up’s search is so god-awful. In any case, I bought it. And then never booted it up for days. And now I have.

Verdict: Totally worth a buck.

Apparently Star Trigon is an old arcade game of Namco’s that was made by the Mr. Driller team as some sort of side project. Now, I kind of extremely disliked Mr. Driller when I finally got to try it with a cheap copy of Mr. Driller Drill Spirits. Going fast got you crushed, going slow got you suffocated, and it never managed to get me into that “puzzle game groove” that I can get into with, say, a Puzzle League. I know it has its fans, but it wasn’t for me. Luckily, this game doesn’t carry much over besides the art style, which is awesome, and the air mechanic, which is… an okay mechanic, I suppose.

The game works like this: You’re some crazy space rescue guy. There are these little cute aliens floating in space. You orbit around planets. By bouncing between them, you can form “Trigons,” which are just triangles. Any aliens inside the triangles are rescued. You rescue all of them, you move on to the next stage. Simple enough.

There’s only one thing you can do in the game: Go. Thus, it works pretty perfectly on the touch screen. You just tap anywhere to send your little spaceman flying through space. It is a game of skill, much more action than puzzle. You have to be able to time your little spaceman’s flight to go the direction you want and hit the next planet’s gravity field, and it’s not as easy as it may look. On top of that, you have to complete the level before you run out of air, or pick up more air that the people you rescue drop, and as you keep playing, your guy speeds up faster and faster, making it harder and harder to make the jumps. There’s actually differences in the characters due to this. One has a huge air supply, but speeds up extremely quickly. One has almost no air supply, but never goes to fast. The third is right in the middle of those two. So the character you pick can really change up your game, actually.

It’s all really simple, but honestly, they do a pretty good job mixing it up. As you get going, there are different planet types, like a sun that you can’t orbit and bounces you away, or a poisonous planet that drains more air if you orbit it. There are aliens that require multiple triangles to rescue. All the while the levels are getting bigger and bigger, so you have to balance your air supply and work faster and faster… it’s pretty fun stuff! The levels are short enough that you can knock one out in a few seconds and go back to what you were doing, a good thing to have in a portable game as well.

One thing that really confuses me, though, is that you can’t type your name in in the score list. What? There’s a high score list, which is good for arcade games of this type, but you can’t enter your own name, it just lists the character you used. I want to at least know if I beat my friend whom I handed my iPod to to try it, you know? That just seems kinda odd.

Still, it’s a solid, well-rounded experience for a dollar, I think. I’m sure if you were a fan of the original game, it would be worth more, as it seems like a pretty solid port. (Again, hard to mess up a game that only requires one button, eh?) But I feel like I’ve gotten my money’s worth in the couple hours (read: probably barely 2 and thus qualifying for the word “couple”) I’ve played today, and I can see me playing it a bit more. At least until I beat all the modes. (There are four “difficulties” but which are actually sets of stages. I wouldn’t mind seeing all of them.) But again, it’s not hard to make a game worth a dollar. Still, I love getting an actually solid title for that price. I think Star Trigon fits the bill. It’s probably too arcade-y “the fun is in beating your best” for me to have paid any more, but I’m glad I tried it.

If you clicked on the link in Tuesday’s post, you might have noticed that Monster Trucks Nitro has an iPhone version. It’s true! And since it too, was on sale, and was only a dollar, I also gave it a try. If you make an interesting-looking iPod Touch game for a buck, I almost certainly will buy it. I’m like that.

The game actually works pretty well. On the screen, on the corners, you have a little virtual brake pedal and a virtual gas pedal. There’s also a Cruise Control button, if you’d rather not hold down the gas, which is a nice idea. To lean your car, you just rotate the iPod. It works really well, though you get some weird views you don’t get while playing the PC game because of it. Nitro, instead of being deployed by the player, is now just sort of a generic speed boost, much like going over a set of arrows in Mario Kart or something. That takes a little of the finesse of using the nitro in the PC version out of the game, but at the same time, I don’t have any idea where you’d put a button for that that would work well, so I don’t have a problem with it.

Visually, the game looks almost exactly like the PC version, though a little dumbed down. If I didn’t have the PC version’s stuff maxed, it would probably look pretty similar. It looks nice, though. The iPod Touch is kind of a hoss like that. The wheels on the monster trucks do seem very oddly detached from the trucks themselves in this version. They get really out there! But it doesn’t really affect gameplay, it just looks funny.

Gameplay-wise, most of the “tricky” levels seem to be missing. These levels are designed purely to test your skill with keeping up your speed. The goal times are much harder to achieve because of this, as well, with takes a little of the casual feel away from the game. You really have to know exactly how to lean your truck to maximize your speed and whatnot. It’s still plenty of fun, though, and as I said, it controls impressively well.
Still, it’s hard to overlook the fact that there are only 8 tracks in this release. At $1, I have no problem with this at all. Especially if you want to go for the gold times for each different truck (which all do handle a bit differently) you can get plenty of fun out of the game, and each level only takes 30 seconds to a minute, which makes it perfect for just picking up and playing. But I have no idea what the normal price for the game actually is, and I would have a hard time recommending it at anything other than a buck.

Man, there are so many neat little games like this out for the iPhone and iPod touch, though. Maybe I’ll spend some time reviewing some more of them this week. I really do need to find myself a good review site for these things… there has to be one out there.