The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

Much like last year, Talking Time got a chat room and watched all the press conferences for this year’s E3 together. It was hilarious and awesome times, even if I accidentally slept through the first part of the Nintendo conference. But man, overall, the showings of the Big Three were much better than last year. Of course, a lot of what excited me wasn’t even in the press conferences. What excites me? Well…

Starting with Microsoft, they announced Shadow Complex with Epic. It’s a game that looks like pure Metroidvania, and it’s coming out on XBLA this summer. I can’t wait for that.
They also showed off enough Beatles: Rock Band to have me learn that the game has THREE PART HARMONY on the vocals! I am in love.
Of course, the biggest news from their conference was the news I heard right before that didn’t have anything to do with Microsoft: Telltale announcing Tales of Monkey Island. Holy shit. Holy. Shit. I’ve already preordered.

On the Nintendo front, they, outside of the conference, confirmed Layton 2 for early August, and that 3D Picross and Made in Ore (coming over as Wario Ware: DIY) were coming over to America, which pleased me.
I’m interested in 4 Player Co-op Mario Brothers, too, although questionably. Could be great. Could be not so great.
I didn’t much care about the completely fucked-up new Metroid game by Team Ninja? But Parish just tweeted this, so… maybe it’ll be great.
I was also excited about Galaxy 2 on Jonathan’s behalf, since he’s played through that game, what, three times now?
Also, before the conference, once again something unrelated made me happy: Atlus is bringing over Shiren on the Wii. I’m thrilled.

Sony had a new PSP Metal Gear, which is nice I guess, and nothing that will sell me a PS3. Certainly no price drop. So that’s… nice…? I think that’s nice.
The Last Guardian, of course, looks fucking beautiful, though. Who knows when it will be released, however.

But yeah, the real joy of E3 was making fun of all of the silly bits of the press conferences with all my good internet gamer friends. THE TIMES WERE FUN! They were fun.

E3. Man, I am going to spend so much money on games this year. But we knew that already, didn’t we?

RedLynx makes games that I never would have expected to enjoy. However, one might recall how much I loved Trials 2. And I did love it! Would I have paid full price for it? No. But it is a damn fun little game. So when I heard that RedLynx had put out another game, called Monster Trucks Nitro, I was intrigued. It looked like a game that worked on the same basic control ideas as Trials 2, but put them in more of a racing setting, in order to, perhaps, lessen frustration and maximize feeling like a badass. I wanted to try.

But for $20 bucks? No way.

Then, last weekend, Steam had a “Bone-breaking Racing Package” that had both Trials 2 and Monster Trucks Nitro for only $4.50. That was a much more palatable price to try out Monster Trucks Nitro, and hey, I’d get a free copy of Trials 2 to give to Brer or something! So I bought it. Unfortunately, it is apparently only Valve games that do the “gift your extra copy” thing, and my extra copy of Trials 2 has gone completely to waste. A shame. But Monster Trucks Nitro is still pretty well worth that price of admission.

The game was pretty well exactly what I was expecting: It is a more casual, faster version of Trials 2. You accelerate with up, reverse with down, and lean yourself back and forward with the left and right arrows. You race down crazy tracks, which start out mostly as time-trials, but soon become as tricky as some of the stages in Trials 2. Along the course are Nitro canisters, which you can pick up and then deploy with Control for a boost of speed to help you up ramps, over gaps, etc. Much like Trials 2, it’s a fantastic podcast game, and it looks really nice, with weird crazy physics as you crush cars and slam into piles of tires to push them out of your way, while being on a 2D plane.

Still, you can tell that Trials 2 has been around longer and has much more support. The amount of levels in Trials 2 is pretty staggering. There are quite a few, and they continue to release downloadable level packs. Monster Trucks Nitro is still fairly new. While I have no doubt that they’ll put out more levels, I’ve almost beat all of them already. Granted, I think there is also something to be said about how long it takes to defeat a Trials 2 level as opposed to the easier, more casual Monster Trucks Nitro levels, but it is slightly disappointing. I don’t feel like I got cheated or anything, however.

As it is, for 5 bucks, I think that Monster Trucks Nitro is a great purchase. However, by the time you read this, it’ll probably be back up to $20, which is kind of a ridiculous price. $10 would be justified, but $20 is just kind of crazy. I’d wait for another sale, and then pick it up. But I’m having fun with it, and that’s what matters.

So if you look back, you may remember me talking about the Browser RPG of my dreams, the one I have planned out in my head that I wish I had the skills to make, called Small Souls. Or maybe you won’t. In any case, I was all about making this game with branching paths and a card-based battle system, and it was going to be totally awesome. I guess.

Man, Metroplexity is going off of a very different thematic base, but it is DAMN close to the game I was dreaming of.

Of course, I”m very late to this party. It was at least a month or two ago when I heard about the game, but I only started playing it now that the semester is over, simply because I didn’t have enough time to play the games I was trying to keep up with, much less start a new one. Val was even telling me I needed to try it after that. Well, I finally did. And it’s very good stuff.

Basically, what separates this game from others is the fact that you can fail missions. The vast majority of the time, if you get into a tough and plot-important battle, and fail it? Well, you fucked up. You don’t get to try it over and over again. The hostage died, or the evil corporation managed to do what it needed to do and left while you were on the floor bleeding. The plot changes based on how successful you are and decisions you make in this regard. This might frustrate completitionists. I mean, hell, I am the sort of person that, when I like something, I do want to see as much of it as possible. I want to see everything that can happen. But the game has a variation of an “ascension” mechanic built in, where once you get to the end you can start over, make different decisions, and see what happens this time. That’s a huge incentive to keep playing. I like that very much.

The combat, too, is combat of my dreams, because it involves building a deck of cards and then playing them. Basically, the combat works like playing straights in poker or something. Abilities have a number, from 0 to 9. You draw a hand of 5 abilities each round. Either going up or down, you can play as many as you can string together. So you could play 4->3 or 1->2->3->4 or 9->8->7 or whatever. The more you can play, the more actions you get a turn, so it’s to your benefit to build a deck to be able to chain together multiple actions. The various moves also often have special effects depending on where they are in the combo. For example, I have a move called Kidney Punch (1). It does significantly more damage if it’s the first move in the combo. I also have a move called Lash Out (2) which is most effective as the last move in a combo. So 1->2 using those moves would deal a whole lot more damage than comboing them 2->1.
On top of comboing, you also have attacks in various disciplines. There are four main ones, from what I can tell: Melee, Ranged, Etheric, and Stealth. Melee, Ranged, and Stealth are pretty self-explanatory. Etheric refers to the drug-and-nightmare-fueled “magic” of the world. I don’t have many Etheric or Stealth powers at the moment, but what’s interesting is that Melee and Ranged powers don’t overlap. You don’t find Ranged attacks in the 0 to 5 range, and you don’t find Melee attacks in the 6-9 range. Since you want to spec out your equipment to help the moves you’re using, it makes it more difficult to use a mixture of Ranged and Melee attacks effectively. I kind of like having to make those kinds of decisions. I’m using a Melee-based deck myself, at the moment.

Like most of these browser games, the amount of turns you can play is limited by your energy. You get some back every day. You can also get extra turns by using up your Hunger and Body points. Hunger is just like Stomach in KoL. You eat various foods, which use up different amounts of Hunger to give you more energy. Body is more like KoL’s Spleen. It’s about how much you can push your body before you can’t take any more. So you can use your body to take caffeine pills or drink coffee and get more energy, or you can use it for various other buffs and things to help make the turns you have more effective. Pretty easy to figure out.

There’s no chat or anything in this game. Even more than other browser RPGs, it’s very much trying to be a single player experience, though I can’t fault it for that. I mean, although I’m lucky to have found some good friends in these games, they started as a single-player sort of thing, and will probably always be, for the most part. But man, it’s just amazing how well thought-out Metroplexity is. It’s a really good game. I hope that it gets to a more complete form and keeps being worked on. It comes highly recommended.

So last Sunday, Woot twittered a message.

Moments later, I bought a Netbook.

Saturday, I get an e-mail saying that it’s been shipped, and here’s my shipping information. Huzzah, I say! I click on the shipping thing to see when the estimated delivery for the machine is.

It says it was dropped outside my door not 10 minutes ago. I run downstairs, and sure enough, there it is.

Now, I had done a bad thing after I ordered the Eee PC. I had gone and read messages from the last time Woot sold these things, and as such, I read the horror stories. This was a bad plan. Most people weren’t going to have horror stories! But still, I had got myself all worked up about it. Good for me.
There was nothing to worry about, though. My white EEE PC 900 booted up fine, and is running just great. I mean, sure, it could use more RAM, perhaps some more storage… but I may or may not have already ordered all those upgrades because I am like that. So that’ll fix itself sometime next week. The Xandros Linux that comes on the machine is servicable, but not optimal as well, since it does stuff like not automatically connect to Wifi networks. (It’s a netbook, for fuck’s sake. It’s pretty useless without an internet connection!) But again, once I get those upgrades in, I plan in sticking Eeebuntu Netbook Remix on there, so that should help. Hopefully!

One thing I was worried about, though, was internet video issues. I had vaguely remembered reports of earlier netbooks not being able to process youtube videos without skipping, due to weaker processors, so Youtube was the first place I went, followed by Yugioh Abridged. Both worked just fine, thank goodness.

But yeah, I’m now the owner of a Lappy of sorts. We’ll see if it all goes to waste, or if I get a lot of use out of it. If nothing else, I’m sure it’ll get use with me, say, playing browser games in bed. But who knows.

I am not really a music person. My parents are the sorts that listened to Talk Radio when I was growing up, so I was never really exposed to music until I was introduced to They Might Be Giants during my high school years. Even then, I myself almost always listen to my generation’s version of Talk Radio, podcasts, and never really tend to attempt to broaden my music listening experiences.

Thus, it felt like kind of a big deal when, listening to this Radio Lab’s podcast, I got introduced to a musician that I have very quickly fallen in love with: Juana Molina.

Seriously, just take a moment, go to her website, and take a listen to the little player that plays, hm?

The first thing you might think of, if you know me, is that this doesn’t normally sound like the kind of music I listen to. I enjoy very quick, energetic, pop rock kind of music. Say, a little Franz or Flans-centric TMBG or whatever. But damn, I don’t know what it is about her music that really gets to me. I mean, it’s really fucking pretty. I doubt few would argue with that, but why do I like it?

I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that it does have a constant repetition and beat. This is due to the fact that all the songs are made with just her and her guitar, and then using this looping software where she plays a bit, clicks a button and it just loops, and then she adds another layer, and so on. So it has this constant beat I can get into.
That’s my theory, anyway.

No matter what the reason, I love this stuff. After hearing the podcast, I went and grabbed her latest album, Un Dia, and have been listening to it constantly. According to iTunes, I’ve listened to the whole album… let’s see… at least 6 times. I never listen to music this much. It’s something special. And I feel like I need to share it with everyone.

I have big hopes for this album. I hope that I can write while listening to it because it doesn’t have lyrics I can follow. (I’m one of those people who can’t write while listening to music with lyrics, you understand. I want to sing along and it just breaks my flow.) But I’m listening to it while writing this blog post, and it seems to be going okay. Huzzah!

But yeah. Juana Molina. Awesome.
Yep.
(I will end every blog post with “yep” now. Yep.)

When I last talked about GRAW, I was a little pissed, as you can tell. The game still is a pretty glitchy, horrible mess. On a lot of missions, Brer and I will get into a co-op game, and then fall through the world geometry and have to restart half the time. It has crashed many times. It’s just pretty badly put together. I keep being told that GRAW 2 is better in every way, but dammit, it’s still $20, and I had GRAW. So that’s what we’re playing.

There are plenty of problems outside of the glitchy-ness, too. There is a really small selection of weapons. There’s only like 6, and several of those are extremely situational. There’s no respawning, so when you die, you’re dead. This actually makes two players the optimal number, I think, because if there are AI partners and you die, you take over for an AI. So playing 2 player basically makes you have two extra lives for your team. Still, it’s not really optimal, especially since when you’re playing co-op games, there are no mid-mission checkpoints. So unlike playing them in single player, you can’t save in the middle. You have to complete the entire mission in one perfect run. This means you never complete missions unless you’re some sort of god or something. I mean, we’re playing on easy, and we only got close to beating our first mission the other day, and we still didn’t pull it off.

Still, I can’t deny I’m having a good time with it. I wasn’t sure I would. Brer is a very controlling perfectionist, and past games that are his games that we’ve tried to play co-op, I kind of hated because he was basically treating me like a little smarter AI partner, you know? We work alright in Left 4 Dead and Killing Floor, because they’re very arcade-y in a way. You have to use strategy, but you’re mostly running and gunning, and everyone is yelling out strategies and having to change them on the fly. I mean, I enjoy my games a bit more on the arcade-y side in general, where people go down with only a few shots, like in GRAW, but where you can take many, many more, which GRAW is not like. You can easily get ambushed and die before you even see there’s someone there. That’s the kind of gameplay Brer likes. I thought that, because this was his game, it would probably end up with him working in that controlling, no fun for me way.

But I think Brer either decided he wasn’t going to do that so I would enjoy myself, or the way I play made him change his gameplan, but he just decided to play extremely aggressively instead of slow and steady, and we clicked very well. His aggressive is my normal pace in such games. So as we started pushing forward, we really started clicking together as a two-person team. We’d call out enemy locations. We’d split up the jobs, with me doing most of the sniping work and Brer handling figuring out where to maneuver and ordering the AI around and whatnot. Even though we haven’t beat a mission, I still keep finding accomplishment in those moments when we are working in perfect harmony. It’s pretty damn awesome when it happens, and the more we play, the more it happens. It’s fun.

There is also one thing that GRAW did so well that, when I realized it, it blew my fucking mind, and that is the aiming. If you hold down the “look through scope/iron sights/aim” button, then when you release it, you go out of aim. If you tap it, then it toggles you in and out of it. I personally hate toggle aiming, having been trained the other way through so many console games, but I know Brer hates the “hold down” aiming. There are times when both are useful, but normally you have to chose. The method in GRAW is so fucking seamless that I was toggling sometimes and holding others, and it took me many, many sessions to realize what it was doing, and only because I had recently had conversations about having to set that up in Killing Floor. Bravo to GRIN for that bit of control decision. Every shooter with that kind of aim button should work like that.

Still, I don’t know how much I can recommend the game outside of a neat control thing and that I was having fun with it. Co-op can make anything significantly more fun, and I don’t think the game would be very much fun, at least to me, without it. I mean, I don’t have any interest at all in the game’s “die constantly, memorize enemy locations and move super-slow” gameplay outside of co-op, and the co-op really doesn’t work that well. You’d probably be better off getting GRAW2 for co-op, or anything, really, if it’s as fixed as I’ve been told. Still, it’s got me interested enough to wish for Steam to discount GRAW 2 and Rainbow Six: Vegas and Vegas 2 down to $10 so we can try those co-op as well. Hell, if Steam wanted to have some sort of GRAW 2, Vegas 2, HAWX discount bundle, that would make Brer’s co-op day for me to pick up, and I’d love to.

TL;DR: Co-op is Fun.

Rapid Fire Ramblings returns! For some reason!

This is the essence of Justin Spaeth: Right here, in this tweet. That just sums the man up so perfectly, I think.

I really wish I could figure out why Steam’s voice chat works so weird. I love it: it works like Xbox Live when it’s working, and bringing that kind of functionality to the PC is so sweet. But every time I plug in my headset it’s a crapshoot whether or not I’m going to have to restart Steam in order for it to recognize it and let me talk in a call. It’s actually probably some sort of issue with the audio drivers of my headset, but oh well.

So awhile back, I noticed they had apparently translated the Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei manga. As someone who had enjoyed the show, I picked it up. The show did so many weird things, I was expecting the manga to be different, but not so! It’s almost shot for shot the same thing. This means it’s still quite entertaining, but I have issues reading it, as I’ve watched all the episodes covered in the first volume at least twice. Oh well, at least the creator got a little money from me for making something I enjoy.

I cashed in my bucket of pennies over the weekend. I had 2400 pennies! I also cashed in 121 quarters, 242 dimes, and 130 nickels at the CoinStar machine to end up with an $84.95 Amazon Gift Certificate, which is basically paying for the next couple games I’m being mailed. So that’s cool. Time to fill the bucket up again!

I’ve had two packs of Maui Melon Mint gum on my desk, and every day I think about taking them to work and then every day I don’t take them to work. It’s not a bad gum. I should take it to work tonight. I won’t, though.

Yep.

Hey, I finally completed the latest Wallace and Gromit episode, The Last Resort! Just in time to get the next one and not complete that one in a timely manner, I imagine.
How was it?
Well, it was definitely an episode of a Telltale adventure game, I’ll tell you that much! Which basically means “entertaining, but not really hard or anything.” Which is just fine with me. Here are some impressions which I am now realizing are kind of disjointed, but oh well.

I still know why I have to move Wallace and Gromit around with the WASD keys, which is so they can make the game more controller-friendly so they can sell it on XBLA, but it still kinda frustrates me. There seems such little reason for it, especially since I’m mostly just moving to get stuff into the screen so I can then click it, and they walk to it… it’s kind of awkward. But nothing that ruins the game or anything.

In past Telltale series, the first episode has always tended to be a little weak, and you could tell it was in the second or third that the series hit its stride. I honestly don’t think that’s the case for this. There’s nothing wrong with The Last Resort. It was a fun time. But I can’t say it was the leaps and bounds better that the second Sam and Max was over the first, or Strongbadia the Free was over Homestar Ruiner. It did benefit from having the supporting cast introduced, as you had to use what you knew about them to make them happy at the little resort, and then fiddle with them during the whole “murder but not really” mystery section. So I guess it’s a benefit there.

I think I’ve talked previously about how Telltale tends to put its games into three acts: An introduction, a center bit where the locations are slightly changed from the introduction, and a “boss” or grand finale. This episode actually had four acts, and just flat-out stated them as such. I think the game was all the better for just admitting it was in this format, and it worked very well.

Wallace and Gromit’s puzzles seems to depend a whole lot on “pointing towards objects for inspiration.” This is not a bad thing, and honestly, it feels a bit unique. There was a section in Baddest of the Bands which worked like that, (though with an extremely Homestar bent) but they are really all over this episode, in particular, and it stood out. It really seems that Wallace is the kind of person who looks around desperately for inspiration on what to say. These kinds of puzzles can be entertaining, and Telltale does them well. But they’re also extremely easy to solve, because it’s completely a multiple-choice test. At least in most Adventure game puzzles, you don’t know all the possible solutions. If you get stuck, you can attempt to take every item and use every item on everything, yes, but there’s always the possibility that there’s another item out there you didn’t think of using to let you think outside the box a little. There is no such thing in these puzzles. I basically fail them once, figuring out what exactly I’m doing, and then solve them the next time. I suppose I could try every fail case for funny dialog, which would be funny, I know, but once I solve a puzzle I just want to make sure I’m right, so I never do. Oh well.

…I can’t think of anything else to say about the episode, so I bring the disjointed rambling about said episode to a close. Seriously, any of Telltale’s stuff is completely worth your time, and Wallace and Gromit is no exception. The Last Resort is good. I just, perhaps, think a lot or too much about my vidjeo games. But you already knew that, didn’t you?

This is a boring post. Sorry. But here are some things to look at and watch that are NOT boring. Yay!

This is a video showing why Star Ocean 4 apparently has the worst voice acting and animation in any video game ever.

This is a BBC video about monkeys and how much they enjoy the booze, which was shown to me via Shawn Elliott.

And this is something that Talking Time showed me. A “Let’s Play” of sorts. I don’t know if I should be ashamed that that’s so funny.

This is, of course, Meet the Spy, which you should have already seen, but damn, watch it again because it’s still awesome.

I have been much too obsessed with listening to Rap Chop and the follow up, Jam Wow. Yeah. They’re on my iPod.

And, of course, if you combine TF2 with Vince, you get this. Yep.

Also, I know it’s not a video, but dammit, there’s new Azumanga Daioh that someone was nice enough to translate. It’s wonderful.

And okay, since this is apparently not a set of video links anymore, go play this nice art game, hm? It’ll only take a few minutes.

So yeah. Go forth and be entertained. It’s a huge internet. There’s lot of entertainment out there, and most of it is better than this blog, probably! I’ll write something better some other time. Maybe!

So apparently there’s a new season of Haruhi and I was all excited. So I watched the first new episode. It was good! No dance, but how could they beat the last dance? So that’s alright. Then I went back and I watched the first episode of the first season. I laughed. Then, when I got to the end, I was hit with a strong, hard punch of depression. Pow. It certainly isn’t designed that way. I shouldn’t have felt that. But man, did I.

I looked at the core group of the show, together in their prime in the first episode, and it just hit me. I went out this evening and watched Essner’s practicum, his big finale for his film degree, and it was excellent. It was a far cry from us attempting to make horrible movies in Danny Robert’s back yard, or at the park, barely scripted and badly edited, much like the film in Haruhi. It was a real movie, and if it didn’t show his skill as a director, it sure as fuck showed his skills as a script-writer. But that’s it, you know? He made the film. He has the degree. Now he’s got to find him a job where we can use that passion and knowledge to make him a living, and he’s almost certainly not going to get one doing anything vaguely like he loves around here. Hell, there’s a good chance that I won’t, that nobody will. My core group is not together in their prime. We’re about to split up.

This isn’t a surprise. I knew it would happen. Hell, I’ve been thinking about what will happen when I move away from here for a long time. But normally such depression doesn’t hit me until I’m watching something that’s intentionally invoking it. (Say, the end of Azumanga Daioh.) It’s now apparently getting worse. Heh, it’s like back when I was really depressed about my gender issues, and just seeing genuinely happy female characters that I looked up to would punch me in the gut like this. It’s right in my face, and I’m going to have to deal with it, I guess.

I’m strong. I’m going to survive. I’m going to move on. And I’m going to keep in contact with them through the power of internet anyway. But dammit, I know when the first of my friends really move away, I am going to cry. I am going to cry long and hard. Hell, I kind of want to cry now.

I really do hate change. But without change, nothing good can come.
So much change is about to happen in my life. I just have to pass through it with a smile, as best I can.