The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

I had heard lots of good things about Age of Empires Online from Giant Bomb, and I wanted to try it. Since it is free, that seemed easy to do! So I went to the website, where I clicked a button that said “Download now!” It downloaded a little thing which, when run, downloaded another thing, and had the game installed, which then needed to patch, but that’s cool! Once it was all patched up, I could play.

I get into the game, and click to start. It asks me to sign in to my Live ID, which I do just fine, but then it asks me for a “Live Access Code.” I have no idea what that is. I go to the main website of AoEO again, and it doesn’t mention anything about an access code. What the fuck? So, of course, I go to the forums, because surely there’s a solution there.

You see, the Access Code is basically a CD key. You get one when you download the game through the Games for Windows Live Marketplace. You can look it up there.

I didn’t get the game from there. I used the button on the website that it was telling me to use very eagerly to try the game. It gave me nothing. When I opened the Marketplace, it didn’t show that I had downloaded AoEO. It didn’t have a code for me. I had to download it AGAIN, though the Marketplace, to get a code to be able to start the game.

Nice going, Microsoft!

(The game’s kind of cool once you get into it, though.)

They mentioned Godville on a podcast I listen to and so I downloaded it. Because I am a sheepfoxbunny who will buy any iOS game I’m told to. Of course, it was free. You can also play it on the website, I guess, but I’ve only really played in the iPad app.

Do you remember Progress Quest? This is basically just Progress Quest. But it’s like… bad. I remember when I first played Progress Quest. I found many of the items and shit funny. Then again, maybe that had something to do with how the game taught me awesome words like Vambrace. In any case, the mechanics within were kind of novel and a solid critique of the time, and I found the writing funny for the bit I played the game.

Godville just doesn’t have that. I mean, I appreciate they’re good enough to give credit where it’s due to Progress Quest on their website. I can dig that. But it’s just not funny. All the monsters and little comments my hero makes just don’t make me smile. They are like, the very worst jokes. They are like 4th grade jokes, and not even dirty ones. It’s really kind of a shame. I hear many of the items, enemies, and so on are made via a player submission system, which is probably why they just aren’t up to snuff. I just really expect more actual comedy from my comedy games.

Godville does attempt to mix up the formula. You’re a god or goddess, so you can send messages to your hero for minute amounts of control. You can Encourage or Punish them. You can revive them if they die. You can shout messages from the heavens at them. You really don’t get to do this enough for it to be engaging, though. The Encourage or Punish just… I don’t know! They probably only affect your hero’s motivations at specific points, but the game doesn’t make that very clear. Similarly, I looked up on the wiki what words made your hero do something, and it is a very small amount! What’s worse, often the hero will ignore them because she’s doing something else, or started an action as you sent the command. You can pay them for more power to give these commands, but eh. I don’t know why you would. They don’t do enough!

I dunno. It doesn’t need much interaction, I suppose, much like Progress Quest, so that’s nice. You can check on it every day or every week, and it works, I suppose. The reward would be looking in on your hero and going “Oh shit, that is one wacky item or skill you’ve learned, hero!” But they’re just not that well written, so it doesn’t give me that.

It’s free. You can try it. But I’m really not impressed with it. Oh well.

I fell asleep during Conan.

I feel old.

Then again, I did go see it really the fuck late and night, and Molly woke me up at like 7 in the morning so it’s not like I slept much. But yeah, I saw Conan, which was quite a change of pace from the large amounts of My Little Pony Fanart I was looking at before I left for the film. There was a lot of bloods and there were many decapitations. There were also tits, but for better or worse, those were in some of the fanart, so it wasn’t that much of a change of pace in that regard.

Anyway, enough ponies while talking about Conan.
I feel like this is a hard movie for me to really give a good whatever about, not just because I dozed off. It was just so violent and so predictable, but at the same time, that sort of thing is what one would seem to be coming to see a Conan movie for. It’s certainly what Cara was coming for. She said it had all the boy eye candy and murder that she was hoping for, so good for her! I’m glad she liked it.

Seriously, though, it was pretty intense on the violence front. I can’t remember the last movie I watched that was so brutal directly. Guys had their heads smashed in on concrete in full view. You get to see lots of decapitated heads with nice entrails and shit. There were certainly a few times where I flinched away from the screen because of the violence level.

But yeah, plotwise, nothing unexpected happens. Conan’s father needs avenging. Conan ends up doing it, but first he accidentally ends up teaming up with a pretty lady type person to do it, who then gets captured, and you know. All that stuff. I couldn’t help but think about Glistening Chests while I watched, either. A personal holdup, sure.

The one thing I will mention that I was really impressed with is that the movie made damn sure to get those book cover painted vistas in there. To the point where they looked painted and obviously green-screened, but still. Certainly set the tone right, you know?

Anyway, yeah. It was an odd experience for me. Not a bad one, perse? But I certainly didn’t feel any connection to anyone in the movie. It seemed to offer up all the right visuals, but I wouldn’t call it a great film. Still, if you like Conan, I bet you’d like it. It would be fun. I think. This has been a terrible review, all infested with ponies.

P.S., Ponies.

Well, last Steam Sale, I bought Atom Zombie Smasher, the newest joint from Blendo games, the guy who did the completely awesome Flotilla. I loved that! I wanted to try this! So I did.

There’s a lot of nice stuff here, but ultimately, I think Flotilla is a superior experience.

Basically, like Flotilla, Atom Zombie Smasher, at it’s core, is one type of combat randomized and thrown at you again and again. You are given an area of city. In this area are Zombies and Civilians. You have to land helicopters and lift out as many good guys as possible, while setting up Marines and traps and stuff to slow the Zombies so you can actually get to the Civilians while they’re alive. The game randomizes the kind of units you can have for each mission. There are some that are super useful, like Artillery and the Marines, but there are some that are useful, but not nearly as useful as other units and make the challenge quite hard if you get them, like Roadblocks. In any case, you set them up before the mission, but some units are active, and you can reorganize and regroup as you play, moving the Marines around, re-aiming your snipers, changing the landing zone of your helicopter, and so on. You can retry as many times as you want, too, so if your strategy is bad, you can adjust.
Sometimes, it’s just impossible, though. Areas have infection ratings, and if you go into a high-infection area with a shitty loadout, you are just kind of all-around screwed. Don’t do something higher than one if you have roadblocks! Just don’t.

The game runs on a scoreboard. Clear an area, and you get points. Fail, the Zombies get points. Infected parts of the map generate points as well every turn, but liberated areas generate points for you. The first to fill up their meter wins. It’s important to focus on keeping the Zombie scoring capability down by clearing out higher-level missions so that outbreaks don’t fuck you over as much. It’s an interesting dynamic, to be sure, and eventually you’re rescuing scientists to upgrade things, and killing Zombies to charge orbital barrages… it’s fun.

Like Flotilla, though, eventually you figure it out. Once you’ve figured out the combat in Flotilla, it’s pretty trivial: you either win, or you are so outgunned you were going to die no matter what, really. Atom Zombie Smasher is much the same way. Once you figure out how to keep the Zombie meter under control, and how to use the units effectively, no encounter is really hard. However, Flotilla was much more random. There were many random events, and several storyline plots you could fall into as you played. The game felt fresher for a ton longer because of that, because I wanted to see all the content. Atom Zombie Smasher advances on a very clear timeline, and that wacky “what’s going to happen?” thing just isn’t there. Once you’ve mastered the combat, that’s pretty well all there is, unfortunately. There are little storyline bits that show up at random, but they don’t swing your game at all. They’re just kind of funny. It’s a shame.

To it’s credit, though, Atom Zombie Smasher has a ton of options to customize your experience. You can make the game super hard, super easy, or whatever you’d like. Would you rather pick units for each mission? You can turn that on. Would you like to take less units into each mission? Possible. There are tons of checkboxes to make it fun for yourself, which I do appreciate and got some mileage out of. There’s also a super-interesting Development Diary that unlocks the first time you complete a runthrough, and it’s cool to see how much work went into this game and how it came to be.

Anyway, it’s a great little indie game by a cool guy. It’s totally worth picking up. But if you were only to get one Blendo game, I would still suggest Flotilla. There’s just more game there. Still, I can’t wait to see what else he makes. He’s pretty awesome.

I bought a physical CD from a physical store.

It felt kind of weird.

I mean, it’s not like I hadn’t bought physical media before for songs. But the last few actual albums I bought with a physical CD I kind of ordered on Amazon and then pirated, and the copies were never opened. Zero Day and Tonight would be those. Not even opened. I don’t know why I got the physical disc at all, really, except it kind of feels nice to have an actual object, and it was from the Borders clearance thing, so it was basically like 40 cents more than it would cost to download it, and TMBG can gladly have an extra 40 cents from me or whatever.

But while I was buying this physical CD (it was Join Us by They Might Be Giants) I just felt really awkward and out of place. It felt surreal to be buying music from a store. The world is already at that point for me. I decided to listen to it once on CD on the way home, to make the physical nature of the purchase worthwhile, but of course I broke the shit out of the case trying to get it unwrapped, so that’s fantastic. I buy the physical media, and it doesn’t even last! Lovely. And now that I’m home, it’s ripped to my computer, put on my iPod, and I will never, ever use the physical CD again.

The album? Well, I’ll talk about that another day. Let me be honest: I’m completely exhausted right now, moody, and just want to go to bed, preferably with a wuff. But I am too stubborn to not write something on this blog. So this is what you get! Tomorrow will be better. Later.

I never watch television, but sometimes something comes into my field of vision and then I watch it. All the nice IRC people who originally got me to take the Pony Plunge and really fall in love with Friendship is Magic pulled me into another viewing party the other night, and showed me something called Regular Show. I had vaguely heard of this, but I knew nothing about it. However, just watching a few episodes with them made me fall in love. I watched basically everything else there was. It’s a pretty fantastic show.

Here, experience it for yourself.

Nothing about it is particularly like… laugh out loud hilarious? But there’s just a level of insanity that somehow is completely logical in the setting, and a pushing of what you can show in a TV PG show, that just makes it quite enjoyable. I mean, just take a look at the first episode. There’s absolutely no explanation of anything, really. This episode could appear anywhere in the show’s run. Yet you never really feel like you don’t have a grasp of what’s going on. The characters are so realistic to how people act, but yet they’re in a world that’s just fucked up. That’s pretty cool to me.

The show is very formulaic in a way. Something completely mundane or not sensible happens, and eventually some sort of supernatural or otherwise thing is born from this scenario, and the cast has to stop it. I can see the formula, but at the same time, it’s still surprising each time. Because everything is so disconnected from the logic of our reality, you’re never sure exactly what kind of monster they’re going to be facing. Yet, again, somehow it all makes some sort of sense. It’s pretty amazing.

I also just like how much it pushes the boundaries. The characters are obviously getting drunk fairly often, and there’s pretty clear sexual references, though just not explicitly. It just feels like a show that, if you added a few more cuss words to it, would probably stand up just fine on Adult Swim. It’s cool. Give it a watch.

I think I’ll just continue clearing down my list of topics for awhile… let’s see here…
Okay, Super Stickman Golf. I can do that.

Super Stickman Golf is kind of neat. It basically has absolutely nothing to do with golf. It’s kind of a very strange platformer, and it’s clever, fun, and chock full of tons of content. If that’s your thing, this is a game you should pick up on iOS.

Basically, what you have are platformer levels, from a side view. Your little golfer is trying to put the ball in the hole, of course, but it’s all about traversing cliffs and platforms, instead of the normal “ball control onto the fairway” sort of thing that actual golf involves. There are sand traps, of course, but those are actually more useful than “trap” in this game, because it’s a safe place for the ball to stop without rolling, for example. Water Hazards and similar are as per normal. You try to shoot for the “par” score on each hole, like in golf, though many levels have floating icons that subtract strokes from your score for making difficult shots, so you can try for them, if you’d like, and make Par that way.

To help you, you can pack a number of special power balls with you for each course. The simplest is the mulligan, which just lets you take a shot over, but eventually you unlock things like the Sticky Ball, which will stick to whatever it hits, even a wall, and stop there, or the Ice Ball, which freezes water hazards into a platform. Eventually, it becomes a hard choice. Mulligans are so useful that you want to take a lot of them, but without the special shots, some holes become extremely hard or nearly impossible to do at or under par. The fact that you have to pick them before starting a round really adds a little bit of strategy to the game. I like that.

There are just a ton of levels in this game, too. From what I understand, this game basically has the entirety of the previous game (which is just Stickman Golf), and then two more sets of levels just as long. It was getting fairly hard near the end of the “beginner” courses, so I can’t even imagine how hard it would be once you get to the high-level courses. It requires skill and precision. It’s fun, and easy to pick up and play. The only thing that seems a waste is the multiplayer mode, which isn’t hotseat for reasons I can’t even begin to understand. But it doesn’t matter. It’s a fun game with plenty of shit. Ignore the microtransactions and just play. You’ll find plenty to entertain you without paying for early unlocks.

Let’s see, what’s like, the oldest thing on my to-write-about list…

Oh wow, Dungeon Raid. How have I not talked about that?

Dungeon Raid is an iOS game you should buy. If you liked Puzzle Quest, but wish the outcome of games would be more in your hands, Dungeon Raid is a game for you. While there is no “quest” with a storyline you will skip, Dungeon Raid keeps randomish matching gameplay, but never feels like the computer is purposely screwing you over. Sure, eventually it gets to be a war of attrition that you have trouble beating, but you never feel like “that’s bullshit that the computer just took four turns in a row!” or whatever.

Basically, there’s a grid. This grid is filled with Gold Coins, Shields, Swords, Health Potions, and Skulls, which represent enemies. You pick one piece, and trace your finger along similar pieces until you can’t go any farther, then release to clear all those pieces. Clear gold, and you get gold. Clear shields, and you repair your armor and get “gear EXP” for enchanting your equipment. Clear health potions, and you get healed. The only thing that’s different is skulls and swords. Each skull has HP, needed to defeat it. After you take a turn, each skull on the board attacks you, with damage mitigated a bit by your armor value. Each sword you trace through increases your attack power, so you trace through swords AND skulls, and kill them to get EXP. Sometimes there will be special skulls on the board, which do special things. One “breaks” swords so that the swords stay on the board, but don’t do anything if you collect them, for example. One teleports around. One can only be hurt if it’s not the last skull in your line that you’re tracing, and so on. These bosses give you more EXP, of course.

The only weird part is the level system. You have several equipment slots. Fill up your gold meter, and you’re given a selection of equipment to buy and replace your current gear, which will hopefully improve your character. Fill up your “gear EXP” and you can add an effect to an item you own, like Poison, or +HP, or something like that. Level up, and you can pick a new spell or ability. These do things like turn all skulls into swords, collect all gold on the board, and so on. They’re actually dictated by what class you are, and you unlock more classes as you play through the game. The thing is, what the game offers you is random. If your level up offered you a +Luck stat boost skill one time around, there’s no promise it’ll be there next time. Same with equipment. You can’t count on anything. It’s sometimes frustrating like that, when you want to buff a certain stat and the game just won’t give you the option to.

Still, this is a great little time-waster. It requires focus, but not TOO much focus. It’s not a huge commitment: you can play a round for a few minutes, and pick it up later, and not be lost on what you’re doing. It’s just really good game design, and totally worth the three bucks I paid for it. I’ve stopped playing it now, but I really played it solid for a few weeks when I got it. Do consider it! It’s good.

I feel exhausted. I worked all day, then I was all friendly with people and learned the amazingness of Regular Show, and now you expect me to write a blog? Pft. Links. That’s all you get! I’m going to bed!

Sorry, but I am kind of tired and, hey, I got cool links.

Do you like very heavy-handed metaphors? How about when there’s some humor in there and it’s kind of clever? Then you should probably try The Stanley Parable. If you’re going to do it, just do it: it’s one of those things that, once spoiled, means nothing.

Morbid Coffee linked this on twitter. I don’t really know what it is, but it’s, um, interesting. Yeah.

Best Cosplay Winner.

The best news ever is that they’re making a Black Dynamite animated TV show. The pilot exists and is on-par with the film! A must watch.

I think this picture from the set of Star Trek is kind of cool.

These are soon to be part of my brother’s lawn army.

I found this funny. I am easily amused.

Finally, just to prove how ridiculous My Little Pony has gotten, here’s a little My Little Pony game I played today.

I’ll try to sleep and feel better. Later!

Today I decided I would stop feeling useless and sorry for myself and fucking ACCOMPLISH SOMETHING. Because, you know, that’s the best way to not feel that way. I hadn’t really written any fiction in awhile, so I decided that’s what I’d do. I’d sit down, and I’d write some fucking fiction, like a writer! Yeah, that’s the ticket, I would write something. Fuck yeah.

I sat down and opened Microsoft Word, and tried to think of a story idea I’d developed enough to actually write down. Sadly, all I could come up with was an idea I had for some furry porn, but dammit, I was going to write something, so I started writing on it anyway. It’s porn time! Yeah, that’s what I’m doing.

I occurred to me about a page or so in that I had really made no reference to these characters being furries yet. I went back and started changing some things, but it felt wrong, so I changed them back. I guess they’re humans then, that’s cool. I mean, I hear some people like pornography involving humans, as strange as that sounds. I continued on. A thousand words or so later, I realized how little this story had to do with fucking. I mean, fucking was a big part of it, sure. But that wasn’t the point. It was about these characters finding love and falling into this odd situation with technology. You know, a cyberpunk kind of story. Only with fucking. I had been percolating the concept so long in my head, I made the characters, to me anyway, too people-y, and thus I wanted to tell their whole story, not just their bedroom antics. I didn’t let this revelation stop me though. I mean, I finished the story. It went where it was going, and when it got there, it was done.

I then looked back over the whole thing. What I had was neither pornography nor a serious, literary short story. If it was supposed to be pornography, well goodness, I’d have to add a lot more description of all the fucking that occurs in the story. The framing device would probably have to be thrown out, because it’s a downer, and pornography is supposed to be an upper. If it’s a serious short story, it’s lacking conflict. What conflict is there is brushed over quickly. I would need to spend some time really fleshing out the characters more, make them not pornographic stereotypes, and show the conflict more between them, instead of just saying it happened. The framing device could stay, but would need to be more seriously involved in the story. The more I thought about it, basically either path would basically double the size of the story, at least. Not that that’s a bad thing. But basically, the story has a ways to go after this first draft, no matter how I slice it. I’ll probably try to make it legit.

The whole experience, and this is the reason I wanted to write about it, really made me wonder about the difference between writing porn and writing a short story. I mean, in my head, there’s a clear difference. One is a legit craft that I work on honing, and one is something fun I do to distract myself when I’m horny. But a lot of work I’m most proud of, including the story that I’ve managed to get published, have near-pornographic themes and depictions of sex. I set out to write those to write a short story, one that works as I believe a story does, and has conflict, characters, and so on. But when I set to write something pornographic, I mean, I’m still thinking about a lot of the same things. The only difference is the solution to whatever conflict there is has to be fucking. But that’s a possible solution in a real story, too. No reason it can’t be. There’s also no reason a “legit” story can’t be sexy. Granted, a short story might not be the best place for a superfluous sex scene, as you’re trying to keep your used space to a minimum, but some sexy times are always nice, if they’re appropriate for the characters.

I think what shocked me is that I didn’t set out to write something I wanted to make really good. I set out to write that pornographic distraction. Yet that wasn’t what came out. It’s that intent, I think, that I’ve always used to determine whether or not a story is pornographic whatever, or something I should make really good and think about publishing. Again, this story needs a lot of revision before it is any good, but the pieces are there. When I write porn, I normally take a “fuck it, just write, it doesn’t matter” kind of approach, and do things like not name the characters or basically anything else I have difficulty with when writing a story. It was kind of refreshing to do that and have something come out that I see potential in, because it was so low-stress. Normally when I have a BIG IDEA and want to write it out, I find it very stressful and often throw bits away in frustration instead of continuing to roll. This… wasn’t too bad. I could keep doing that.

I don’t know, it was an interesting and successful experiment, not only because I wrote a short story draft, but because, well, it did help me not to feel like a useless asshole. So good for me! Victory all around!