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I… think I just don’t get this month’s Twilight Heroes IoTM. I mean, okay, it’s obvious that the Stainless Steelbreaker has some good stats. The Weakens Opponents is really useful, especially if you’re doing the crazy high level stuff.

But man, I don’t know.

There’s just nothing really thematically interesting, to me anyway, about an offhand dueling knife. I’m really more of a shield person, myself. It’s got a nice little bit of story in the description, of course, but if I equipped it, it just wouldn’t stimulate the silly part of my brain that kind of roleplays while I do such things.
It is also just one of those items that is only good stat-wise. There’s nothing mechanically new about this item. It doesn’t spring up any interesting effects during combat or anything. It’s just a really good offhand item, a slot which I already have a much more fun item for, Zorromir’s Double Tower Shield. Am I going to give up my battlecry, SMILES GO FOR MILES, just for slightly better defense and chance of enemy fumbles? Eh, probably not.

This is pretty well the first TH item I haven’t picked up in a long time. I’m sure it has its place, and I’m sure there are some people who just much optimize and have it. But much like the VR Helmet, it just does nothing for me, and I’ll save my money. I already gave Ryme a bunch of extra for all the new yearly Talismans! Hopefully he won’t starve this month because of that. Heh. (And thank you for the event, by the way, Ryme! I’m glad I noticed it in my busy-ness before it totally disappeared.)

Woah, hey, look, an IoTM review that isn’t on like… the last day of the month. Shocking.

But seriously, I have some reservations about this thing. KoL is the home of all kind of ridiculous shit. I can attack people with a butt tuba for crying out loud. This is not a very serious game. At the same time, I dunno. Nothing has quite disturbed me before than this month’s IoTM, the Stinky Cheese Ball. This is frustrating, because at the same time, it’s got a mechanic that I really like, and some really good effects on it. It’s an issue.

Why do I kind of hate this item? Well, it’s mostly because of the Stinky Cheese Diaper. The idea of equipping a diaper just… doesn’t sit right with me. Perhaps I’ve seen too many scary furry images in my day, but it just brings up associations I’d rather not bring up! (As per usual, though, if that’s your thing, have fun! As long as nobody is being hurt, fun is of the most importance. I’m just completely definitely against that particular fetish for myself.) Add that to the fact that it’s a diaper made of cheese? Well, uh, yeah. It just really unsettles me.
The kicker, though, is that this diaper is pretty seriously optimal. Unless you have Time Trousers, it is pretty well the easiest and best way to get +Rollover Adventures in the pants slot, a rare benefit. It’s also trivially easy to get them more effective than the Time Trousers, using the neat mechanic that I’ll get to in a second. Not only do I not like the idea of these things, but I’ll have to equip them every time I log off? Yeah, unfortunate.

Still, the mechanics of the Stinky Cheese Ball are actually really neat. It gets more pungent as you use it, and that increases the benefits of the items you can make out of it. It maxes out at 100 turns, but it’s still a very cool little mechanic. If I want the full benefit of the Diaper, which is +10 adventures, then I need to run a 100 turns of another item. Thankfully, they’re all pretty good, and can squeeze into your equipment somewhere. The “equippable at level 1” shield that is the Stinky Cheese Wheel seems like an overall good choice for many characters (I understand that most optimal players use Shieldbutt all the time, so having a good early game shield seems key, though I guess most would rather have the Pilgrim Shield.) and the sword and chefstaff are similarly useful to, at the very least, early-game characters. Probably the most useful way to charge up that diaper, though, is the Stinky Cheese Eye. Not only does it give you +item, which is, of course, what you want, but it also gives you one free Harold’s Bell a day in the skill it grants, called “Give Your Opponent the Stinkeye” This isn’t something I use very often? But I understand how it would be extremely useful, so it’s nice to have around.

Yeah, I think the Stinky Cheese Ball is a winner. While disgusting, I think every one of the items it can morph into has some very strong use. Obviously, the Diaper was the power item, but I can see me using all of them, unlike with, say, the Spooky Putty, which had several items of questionable use attached to the obscenely useful Sheet. This is probably an item you should pick up. Just don’t think too hard about the diaper, okay? Just… really. Don’t think too hard about the diaper.

In Twilight Heroes, the Heroes of Twilight have the option, for like another day or something, to purchase The Grouch’s Sack of Loot at the Wok of Stars, and thus increase the number of items they have that randomly makes more items everyday! Huzzah!

This item is almost kind of sort of a remake of the IoTM that started me buying Twilight IoTMs, the Pouch of Many Lost Things. It creates a collection of seasonal gifts, which you can then send to other players through a special menu, or use yourself. If you send them, you and your target receive a buff, this time called Holiday Cheer. It’s an extremely heart-y item, and I do love such things, so of course I had to pick it up.

However, I would go so far as to say that the gifts from the Grouch might be better, overall, than those from the Pouch. (HA! Rhyming!) The Sack of Loot is a constant supply of sugar, one of the two vectors to give yourself more playtime in the game. The Gumdrop, in particular, is the second-best sugar currently in the game right now, according to this handy chart. That’s power. Even though you can’t assure yourself to get many gumdrops in a day, that’s still a great gift to give someone, and a powerful item to be able to pull daily. The most powerful Pouch items are the Lost Phone, Lost Wallet, and Lost Toy. The Eggnog replicates the Lost Toy’s functionality in a debatably better way. Thus, the Pouch is only really better for the XP-grinding skills it grants. Which is a fine niche for it to be in, but man, I’d prefer the more fun stuff of the Sack, I’d think.

Yeah, this IoTM is a winner in my book. Granted, I have a kind of weird take on this stuff, sometimes, but eh, it’s awesome. You should get one, I think. And then you should gift me things, because that’s fun, too.

The KoL Item which is sold for only one month could be known as the Stocking Mimic. It’s a Ka-Razee familiar that doesn’t level up as per normal. CRAZY.

Basically, this familiar doesn’t have the normal 20 pound cap. It caps at 100, and only levels up when you feed it candy. However, once you use it for a few turns, it drops its familiar equipment, which makes it level up as per normal, which kind of defeats the whole interesting nature of the “feed it candy” thing. I mean, you know, people really concerned with speed would feed it candy? But this familiar is a Cocoabo. It’s not about speed. It’s about doing cool random shit. So… I guess I don’t really get what the point of that mechanic is. It seems like it would be more interesting to put something like that on a Fairy or something relevant to ascension. But what do I know.

Anyway, once you have the thing equipped with its Bag of Confections, it also sometimes drops candy with some cool buffs. You can, of course, feed the Mimic this candy if you really, really want to, but it seems like it would be more fun to enjoy the buffs? Why does the stupid sock need more candy, I ask you? It has a whole BAG of it. I mean, if nothing else, the Polka Pop seems really, really good, giving a very good +item and +meat buff. Belch the Rainbow from the Piddles gives some great Chromatic damage, and Full of Wist from the BitterSweet Tarts gives you more stats. These are all great buffs, and if nothing else, since people probably won’t be running Stocking Mimics all the time, seeing as they really don’t seem THAT optimal, you can probably sell all these candies off at a good price, one would think. Well, okay, a quick check shows that apparently BitterSweet Tarts aren’t selling for much, but the other two are probably worth selling, and hell, use those Tarts yourself. Level up quicker. Why the fuck not? Don’t give it to the stupid sock.

I look forward to having fun with this one. I like the randomness and whatnot, and the fact that it grabs its familiar equipment for me makes it likely that I will use this familiar on my next 100% Hardcore run. Still, it’s probably not a game changer. It’s just a fun little thing. Maybe when they adapt the “feed for weight” thing to something a little more relevant, you’ll have something that really changes the game up.

APPARENTLY IT’S THE LAST DAY OF NOVEMBER AND I HAVEN’T REVIEWED ANYTHING AND I WAS SO DEAD SET ON THAT AWFUL JOKE YESTERDAY I COULDN’T DO IT THEN AHH.

But that’s okay, I don’t know how much I have to say about either. Mostly because I, uh, don’t have much experience with either.

For example, the KoL IoTM is the first one in a long, long time I haven’t picked up. It’s the Movable Feast. It’s… kind of mind-boggling. Sure, it’s an all-around familiar equipment. Sure, it lets you buff up your familiars, I guess, and it adds some damage and familiar experience. But man, I just don’t know. It only seems worthwhile if you’re switching familiars a lot. At the same time, if you’re playing softcore, you’re PROBABLY playing casually and don’t switch familiars all that often, and this doesn’t do much to entice you if you aren’t trying to train up multiple familiars concurrently. It’s just kind of uninteresting to a casual player, which is who I always think about these softcore-only items being aimed at. It’s especially less useful when I have a Mayflower Bouquet, which, while more random, I feel is better in pretty much every way for my purposes. And while I passed the little box of fireworks up for a similar reason that I passed this one up, it’s still extremely close to the cost of 1 Mr. A in the mall and still seems way, way better than the Movable Feast in every way.
So yeah, I just don’t get who this is aimed towards. So I didn’t pick it up.

In Twilight Heroes, we have the Atmos Spear, which works both shortened and extended!
Twilight Heroes kind of likes these changeable morphable items like that. As is, in the current gamestate, it seems like the extra chips from the shortened version seems like your best bet, as it’s clearly the best weapon in the game at the moment with that kind of enchantment. And the flying on both versions can be useful to free up vehicle or other slots, not to mention the lighting strikes.
I just, I don’t know. I’m kind of burned out on the grind of Twilight Heroes. If there were some way to redo the quests, I’d probably check in more often… it’s a great game, that’s why I’ve supported it for so long. Just… yeah. I can only grind for so long! Especially when I have so many other distractions.
Still, you should at least read the utterly ridiculous story that Cris wrote about the thing. Because it’s pretty awesome. The idea that something I can go buy in a store is so important is kind of silly. And awesome.

Anyway, there are some thoughts. DECEMBER, HO!

I mean, helmets in RPGs suck. My characters look so lame in helmets. So my superhero in Twilight Heroes would look incredibly lame wearing this month’s IoTM, the Mask of Odysseus. Cause, you know, it’s a mask. Nobody could see my neat face! Maybe!

At first glance, this is just a worse Wolley’s Index or, of course Hero’s Cape. I mean, that’s 5% less Item Drop, and that’s the good stuff!

Of course, you can equip this WITH the other items, but maybe that’s beside the point.

Basically, I see this as a more fun Wolley’s Index. The Index is boring. It’s pure statistical benefit with no fun involved. The Mask does interesting combat things. Interesting combat things make me happy. I do smiling when I’m happy. Unless I am purely grinding for items or really, really want to be optimal, which probably won’t happen, I really can’t think of a reason why I would equip Wolley’s Index over this ever again for that reason.

Maybe I like things for stupid reasons. Maybe I should just work to be the best and have the biggest stats, etc.

But I’d rather do it with STYLE, man. Fucking style!

Even if that style involves a mask that I wouldn’t actually like to see on my character.
Style.

Do I even do these reviews anymore? Fuck if I know.

This month’s KoL IoTM offering is the Squamous Gibberer. It’s a clear Cthulhu reference, so that’s neato as well as torpedo. It potatoes. It whelps. It Wild Hares for extra turns. It breathes underwater.

Basically, it’s completely a win. I love Potatoes and Whelps, and the Wild Hare is one of two familiars whose functionality I liked and I wished I had. (The other being the Doppelshifter.) Now that I have this and the Tiny Costume Wardrobe, I’ve got every really rare thing I would pretend I would actually need. (Not that I’m going to turn down something else, if you offer it to me! I’ll take it!)

This is never really going to be bleeding edge, though, because potato and whelp action is just never going to be optimal. If you’re a good, optimal player, you shouldn’t need the healing or the attack blocking. You should be prepared for them anyway. The additional turns are likely not going to be worth it, either, especially when you’re needing to run turns with, say, your Baby Sandworm to get spleen turn items. Not to mention, apparently, before a buff, it was actually pretty close in power to the Cuddlefish. I still say it’s worth it for me, as the flavor is just fun as hell and I want that Wild Hare functionality, but maybe for the cheaper among us, just using the Cuddlefish would probably suffice.

But fuck, I’m happy with it. It’s a tiny Cthulhu that whispers in your ear, does the two familiar functions I love, plus gives me more turns. That’s a good Mr. Familiar to me. That’s the kind of familiar that’s going to make me want to make one more run in order to test it out, and that’s the exact reason I donate for these things.
So there.

So I’ve actually been playing Kingdom of Loathing again, although in Hardcore Oxy, so I only play like once a week or so. Still, that’s been working out well enough. And, of course, since I’m ascending again, I’ve been doing 100% familiar runs. And since the most recent Mr. Familiar I’ve gotten was the He-Boulder, I’ve been using that.
I like it pretty well.
Of course, it doesn’t hurt that it’s a part Ghuol Whelp. It’s always nice to have that extra healing after most combats. I heart those kinds of familiars. (Seriously, if only the Cotton Candy Carnie had flavor that I liked better. Then I’d use it all the time.) It’s also nice, I suppose, to have a Mr. Store Leprechaun that I would actually want to use for the Nuns or whatever. I’ll probably never actually use him for that effect, though.

So, besides the nice heals, the He-Boulder has one other thing going for it, and that’s it’s various eye beams. Once a combat, you can use the free skill “Point at your Opponent” to have it fire off a beam. Most of the time, this just throws out a little damage. (Well, it’s a ton of damage early in the game, but it quickly becomes more trivial.) However, one in every 150 turns, it fires a “Major Ray” which does TONS of damage with the red ray, defeats an enemy outright with the Yellow Ray, or essentially uses Entangling Noodles on the enemy with the Blue Ray, which is pretty cool.

So basically, you have a Ghuol Whelp who gives you some extra Meat drops and works like a sometimes effective combat familiar. It’s a pretty well-rounded combination, and it’s pretty fun to use. The familiar equipment (which I annoyingly didn’t get, but got a lead necklace instead, grrr) helps the Major Rays recharge faster, which is a decent enough incentive to go to the Cake-shaped Arena in more casual runs, too.

Still, the fact remains that this review is late. You’d have to buy this familiar from the mall. I don’t know if it’s gone up in price, but if it has, over just the cost of a Mr. A? I can’t really recommend it. It’s neat enough, and I’m happy with my purchase, but it just doesn’t seem powerful enough to invest in, and certainly not enough to pay a premium for when you can get so many other neat things. I’ll keep having fun with it, though, at least until this run is over.

Are we sick of Tomes yet? No? Cause, you know, this month’s IoTM (with the review barely in in time!) is the Tome of Sugar Shummoning. This is a tome that lets you summon 3 Sugar Sheets a day, which you can then change into a wide variety of equipment. These last for approximately 30 combats, then break into Sugar Shards, which are healing items.

Frankly, I think this is much more effective than the other tome I have, the Sticker Tome. In this run, I have used Sugar equipment a ton. It is amazingly useful in Hardcore, especially in Hardcore Oxy, where a day’s worth of summons can keep you in equipment for all of your day’s turns. The Sugar Shorts stat boost is nothing to sneeze at, and until you build your Legendary Epic Weapon or whatever, a Sugar Shotgun, Sugar Shank, or even Sugar Shillelagh for Seal Clubbers are all viable options. Finally, if you have Torso Awaregness, the extra substats from the Sugar Shirt are almost reason enough to have the tome right there, if you’re a serious ascender.

I compare this to the Sticker Tome, and the stickers just come up short. Sure, there are plenty of very strong enchantments on the stickers, but having to be stuck with the Sticker Sword really just kind of nullifies them for me. The main reasons you’d want to use it would be for things like substat and +item boosts, and both those things just don’t seem worth it if you’re having a lot of trouble killing monsters, which is going to happen if you get the sword early, at 10 power, to use these enchantments. I’m sure that more skilled players use the stickers all the damn time, but I have trouble getting myself to use them if I don’t have Double-Fisted Skull Smashing, so I can still equip another weapon, and even then I rarely think to use it. It just goes by the wayside.
For whatever reason, this temporary equipment clicks with me in a way that makes it feel slightly less consumable, and that makes me take advantage of it. That’s neat stuff. Well, it is to me.

So yeah, it’s another tome. But it’s a very good tome. It comes recommended. Plus, let’s face it, if you’re speed ascending in Hardcore, you need the Sugar Shirt anyway, so you’ve already got the tome. But, you know, at least you can feel confident that I agree with your purchase. Everyone cares what I think, right? That’s why I write on the internet. So people can care about what I think.
Right?

I haven’t touched a Broswer RPG since my classes started up again.

Blasphemy? Maybe. I don’t know.

But at some point, I told myself “these are for entertainment. If you don’t think they’ll be entertaining that day, you shouldn’t be playing them.” So I didn’t play when I didn’t feel like it, and kept it from being a commitment every day. It worked out well.

But goodness, it’s been so long. It’s especially been forever since I played Twilight Heroes, at least a month or two. I mean, I guess I should feel lucky that the farming grind kept me going in that game for as long as it did, and I’m sure as hell thankful for the awesome friends I made in the game, but every time I think about trying to play it, it sounds unappealing, so I don’t.

KoL has been similar. Ever since I got into a holding pattern due to the world event stuff, I just haven’t wanted to play, which I suppose is kind of ironic because the idea was to wait so I could play this new stuff, you know? And yet, I just don’t want to.

Even Improbable Island, which I just found and is still fresh, has no appeal for me at all right now.

I mean, it’s not something to fix, but it is interesting. It also means that, I dunno, there may not be IoTM reviews this month (not that anyone particularly cares, but it’s always something to write about) and such.

I don’t know. We’ll see. I assume at some point I’ll be suddenly all over them again.