The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

Fact: I play too many broswer RPGs.

Fact: This is because there are more and more completely entertaining broswer RPGs coming out every day.

Fact: Improbable Island is a broswer RPG, and I am really enjoying it.

I stumbled upon this game from a banner ad on MS Paint Adventures. It was an ad that was basically a big blob of text, but it was very well-written text, and I had no idea what it was talking about. Kittybikes? Huh? So I clicked on it.
Then I was suddenly in the middle of the game. Or so it seemed.

I always think that kind of thing is risky. You know, when the main page is playing the game, and you actually sign up a little later? But man, it worked so well this time. I read the humorous text, clicked through, and answered the questions. When it asked my name, I didn’t even put in poetfox, because I was roleplaying and I figured it would ask me explicitly if it wanted a screen name, so I just put in Alexis. Shockingly, I now have the account name Alexis. But man, it really drew me into the game.

Once you get into the game, though, what you find is a very humorously written lewtfest. Basically, this game is what Legends of Zork should be. It has a similar quick-paced, mostly hands-off combat system, though you can affect it by throwing grenades or using powers based on your improbable implants. But every combat is filled with all kinds of humorous pre-battle text, and you have plenty of non-combats that are well-written as well. All the while, you’re balancing risk/reward. It costs to heal yourself, but the more you heal, the less it costs. So it costs significantly more to heal 10 HP twice than to heal 20 HP once. So you’re constantly deciding if you should push yourself for one more combat, or cash out and heal up. It’s the main thing that drew me into Zork, that interface, and it’s so much better done here.

Apparently the game is based on an open source engine for a game called “Legend of the Green Dragon.” Apparently this is a really old game that’s been around a long while, and if you’re familiar with it, from what I’ve heard, you’re going to know exactly how to run the strategy in this game. It’s mostly just a cosmetic re-working, but it’s a very entertaining one. Plus, since I’ve never even heard of the first game, every bit of it is new to me, and I’m having a blast.

I’m happy to report that the game even has a fairly robust “ascension” mechanic in place. Every time you get a “drive kill” you start over, improbably losing some of your gear and stuff. But based on how many kills you have, you have a wide variety of new races to choose from. Tired of being a Human? Then try the game as a Kittymorph, Zombie, or Robot. Or hell, I think there’s a few more, too. They all play different, to make the experience different as you come back for more.

So yeah, give this game a try, if you give a shit about these browser games. I promise you’ll laugh at the text. I’m really close to my first Drive Kill, myself, and I’ve enjoyed every bit of the game. It’s worth your time.

So the other day, Val and I were talking about all the stuffs that be going on in KoL, what with the floaty sand and the Rock Monsters and whatnot. And then, as we’re talking, she’s like “You should be farming sands!” and I’m like “Yeah, I should be.” But I haven’t been.

See, a long time ago, I decided that KoL, and all these Browser RPGs, were a game, and that games exist to make me have fun, and thus I didn’t need to play them every day due to some sort of compulsion that just takes the fun out of them by making them mandatory. So I stopped worrying about wasting turns, and I had a lot more fun for it.

But these wasted turns were basically turning into an incredible expense if I ever wanted a Rock Lobster. I needed to be trying to farm me up some floaty sands.

So I tried something I’ve never tried before: KoL Mafia.

You can’t be all listening to the podcasts and fairly involved in KoL without hearing about Mafia. It is basically a separate program that acts as an interface to streamline KoL playing. This includes setting up a bot in order to run your turns in a particular way. Just click and go. It’s a godsend to people dedicated to playing many multis or who do a lot of farming, because instead of wasting a lot of time, you can just set up a good bot script and click one button every day, then rake in the profits. It’s exactly the kind of thing I needed to farm some floaty sands without the time investment.

The first thing you’ll notice when you boot up Mafia is that this is totally a program made for huge nerds (a term I use in the most endearing way possible) by huge nerds with no real accessibility in mind. It is a daunting program to look at, and I can only imagine how scary it would be for someone newer to the game who heard about it and wanted to try it. I mean, I can’t fault them. It’s a free program, and it’s not like every open source thing has to have the ease of use of OpenOffice or Ubuntu. But still. Man.

It kind of made me sad then that, when I looked at this thing, it seemed like most of the botting stuff required you to actual write code in their little code type. This is not something beyond me, but this was a path wrought with frustration that would make me very angry to figure out. Not something I needed.
So I turned to the more basic combat scripting, deciding that I didn’t need to program the bot to switch areas and all kinds of crazy stuff, just to adventure and not die. Setting up a combat scenario was significantly easier, and in no time I had the thing running, collecting floaty sands. Soon all my turns were burned effectively.

My favorite part, though, was the “Purchase Buffs” button. With a couple clicks, I could buy any buff from any buffbot without having to look at any annoying tables or anything. It made the buffbots so much more usable. I could get used to that. Maybe there’s a Greasemonkey script that does something similar…

Still, it really does kind of take the fun out of the game. I mean, I get why people use it. There is some really strong utility in there if you can figure the thing out. But man, I’m not going to make it a normal thing. I’ll use my Greasemonkied browser, thanks. It’s slower, but then at least I get to read the text, and have a little more fun.

In July, the IoTM of the Month for the game called “Kingdom of Loathing” is the Bag o’ Tricks. I really like this one. Really like it. Yep.

First off, just look at those base stats for equipping it. +item? Yes please. And the MP regen and +spell damage just go great alongside a Chefstaff. It makes the early turns of a Mysticality class go so, so much easier, because you actually have the MP to cast spells and deal some damage with them. It’s completely worth equipping for spellcasters even without the other effects, although it perhaps wouldn’t be worth a Mr. A without them.

Probably the most powerful element of the bag is extending 5 random buffs on your person once a day. That can really save you some money, and is really fairly neat. It’s unfortunate that you have to unequip the bag to use this ability, as that can mean a lot of wasted clicks. Still, the bleeding edge Softcore players probably aren’t going to be actually equipping it anyway, when they could shieldbutt their way to victory with a Pilgrim Shield, so this benefit is probably all their going to get out of it. It’s probably worth it.

But the ability in combat is what impresses me the most. Opening the Bag o’ Tricks is a free action, and not only does it give you some strong buffs (+meat, +items, or +ML (Which I don’t have to remind you essentially equals +stats), depending on how you use it, but it also is a free attack every once and awhile. Dealing a free 40 damage every few turns really does help make annoying fights easier, and I rather love the Bag for that.

Basically, the Bag o’ Tricks is the perfect softcore item for me. It makes the game so much easier and more fun while giving me some new systems to fiddle around with and think about, to keep the game from being boring. I doubt it’s bleeding edge, and I rather doubt it will be talked about much outside of this month (although Val did lay out a complicated way where the bag is optimal, at least until you use up your charges of getting Chihuahua Underfoot) but I’m sure I will be loving the crap out of it on subsequent softcore Mysticality runs. I sure as hell am loving it all over the place on this run.

Over in the land of Twilight, the current garment that is all the rage is the Three-Speed Bicycle Shorts. This stylish pair of shorts comes in three flavors: First gear, Second Gear, and High Gear.

This is a solid item. Unfortunately, I don’t think we’ll be able to enjoy the real neatness of these pants until we get into some sort of ascension/retcon environment, though, as the neat thing is that they level up with you. Every five levels you get to boost the pants into the next gear. But how are they individually?

Well, the Second Gear is obviously the weakest. HP regen, while useful, just isn’t something I need right now, as an Elementalist. I never turn down HP regen, but I never look for it. Classes without a good healing skill could probably benefit more from it, though. There’s nothing wrong with the time reduction, though, on par with other equipment in that slot, and the +to hit is never going to be a hindrance or anything. It’s useful, but unimpressive. You’ll equip it for the -time spent and nothing else.

At the top end, you have an item that is clearly better than, say, the Xentrium Breeches, and gives some all-important PP regen. This is how I’ve been using them, and they really are quite good. Unless you’re looking for item drops, they are probably better than, say, the Amazing Technicolor Dreampants, though the random nature of the pants makes them more fun, to me anyway. Also, the fact that they’re crazy rainbow pants. But yeah, you’d be doing pretty good at most level 10 and above content in these things, perhaps disregarding the super-high level stuff with the dreamer’s clock.

It’s the First Gear that’s really the unknown quantity here. I just don’t know how speedrunning in this game is going to work. It certainly seems like +XP is going to be very useful to people starting a run, but I just have no way of knowing how useful, since the game doesn’t really have any sort of speedrun community or anything at the moment. Granted, at level 1, -5 seconds is a huge boon, and being able to dodge hits probably is to. It’s just… I don’t know. Anyone in the game who is serious enough to donate for these pants is probably way past the level while the first gear is useful, and without people to test it, who knows if it’s actually as good as it looks. Is this and the Letter Shirt or sports bra better than, say, the Exosuit at early levels? I just have no idea.

Still, this is probably worth your time. It’s got options, options, options involved with it, and that is something I am always down for, and it does have effects that are better than what’s out there. It is likely worth your time.

Well, we finally finished up all our Hamster runs.

It didn’t even end with any sort of exciting moment or anything. The run was one of the smoothest we had. It was all business as usual. Hodgman went down, and our last team member got their Hamster.

And then, suddenly, I could ascend again.

It has been months since I ascended and played KoL in the way that I normally have, the way I have fallen in love with. I have all of these IoTMs I’ve never used, and so many options as to what to work towards and what to do. It was… kind of odd. I found myself extremely nervous about ascending again. Then again, I can get nervous at the drop of a hat, so I suppose that wasn’t too surprising.

I ended up perming Eye of the Stoat, because that’s just got some nice passive bonuses, and I decided to ascend Pastamancer and go for Spirit of Ravioli for the following reasons: 1. I wanted to use my new Bag ‘o Tricks (My pointless review of it forthcoming, after I use it a bit more, of course) and put my Frumious Bandersnatch to good use, and being a spellcaster helps with that. 2. I wanted something quite different than the straightforward “bash this” gameplay of the Seal Clubber I’ve been for awhile. 3. Spirit of Ravioli is really useful and I should already have it. 4. Why the fuck not, I have to pick something.

But yeah, I don’t know. It seems almost awkward to be delving into the Typical Tavern again… but I’m glad I have something to constantly work for once again. I haven’t actually been playing KoL, or many of these games, for awhile now. They’ve just been sitting there. Hopefully getting to ascend again, and getting to try out my many, many new toys since last I ascended, will make me play through this new run with renewed interest. I hope so, anyway!

And if it doesn’t? Well, whatever. I’ll play whenever I feel like it and have fun. That’s the important part.

Hey! Twilight Heroes had an IoTM. Well, two, really. What happened to them, eh?

Item number 1: Hobbes’ Nail Boots. Yay! An IoTM boot that isn’t Roderick’s Boots which is one of the few IoTMs I don’t have! Victory, or something!
But seriously, besides Roderick’s, there just isn’t a shoe in the same caliber as this thing. (The exception maybe being the Treader of the Dust’s Sandals, but that’s a high level only item.) There is never, ever a time when you don’t want an extra added boost of +item, so they’re worth it just for that. The additional melee damage is just icing on the cake, and the pounce attack is nice to have access to, even if it doesn’t seem to trigger ALL that often. Depending on what you’re doing, though, I could almost see the +combat being a hindrance. +noncombat does tend to almost always be more useful. Still, I certainly don’t mind it, and since you simply can’t get +item on any other boot in the game, this is almost certainly worth your stars.

The item number 2 would be the Mummer’s Gloves. Yay! An IoTM set of gloves that isn’t Roderick’s Gloves, one of the few IoTMs I don’t have! If you are a person who is ever going to be thinking of speed-running the eventual versions of this game, these gloves are clearly for you. +noncombat is going to get you far. Very, very far. That alone makes them worth having around, but the occasional stat boosts put it over the top. It’s nowhere near as good for that as the VR Helmet of course, since the VR Helmet boosts your basic XP gains too, but then again, it’s in a different slot, so they don’t have to compete. You can wear both!
The part I like the most, though, is the creating of the Invisible Box. This isn’t a combat skill or anything. You just use your gloves from your inventory to create a scaling defensive buff five times a day. I don’t know why that makes me so happy. I guess it’s just because, usually, such things give you an item that you can use for the buff? And then I never use the buff, or just give the items to other people. Somehow, having it just be used on yourself makes it more novel to me, because I will actually use it. If I don’t buff myself with it, I’m just wasting my uses, you know? And I do love extra defense. I’m a defensive kind of person.

So yeah, two pretty powerful, half-priced items. Pretty nice stuff. I would bet that the non-combat and stats of the Mummer’s Gloves would make it the better investment, but really, you can’t go wrong with either. Or both. I have both.
Yep.

So, it’s June. That means it’s the month of the crazy, wacky Super-Content Familiar. This time it is the Baby Sandworm.

It’s probably my favorite June familiar, hands down.

I’ve played all the previous June content areas. I own a Llama, too. Each of the other ones seem like puzzles to overcome in order to get ascension relevant consumables. You have to figure out how to rush through the Violet Fog to get your munchies pills or how to trick the Wormwood to get your Not-a-pipes with the minimum amount of turn investment. There is some funny, entertaining content in there, but it’s all just for the rewards. The Llama stuff was nice, in that it removed the puzzle to get you the items from a specific zone, which you can get while doing other quests. But it’s still just “beating the system for buffs and consumables.” That’s cool. People like that. But it’s not perfect for me, really.

The content that the Baby Sandworm gives you is a series of three, interconnected storyline quests, and that is why I love it.
To do this, they first just give the item people want the most from the content straight out. The sandworm drops Agua de Vida, a spleen for turns item. Wonderful. When you use it, then you get the ‘unlock” item, which isn’t trade-able. That’s an interesting drawback. But once you get into the actual quests, then you get into a quest throughout time. Granted, it makes absolutely no sense that you’re doing this quests by “remembering” what happened over time periods, especially in the future. But the content is entertaining and fun. Hell, it’s got a full in-game implementation of Hunt the Wumpus right in the quest! That’s pretty impressive.

Basically, I loved the quest. I’m going to love going through it several more times over ascensions to get all the rewards. I’m going to appreciate how wanting to do that content is going to make me actually use my spleen to be more efficient. I love this familiar.

And hell, it’s the first full Sombrero Mr. Store familiar. If nothing else, it’s a million times better than a normal Sombrero. There’s no reason not to get this. You know, unless you’re just opposed to donating, I suppose.

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.

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.

I don’t know if you heard, but part of the revamp of the Cube quest was that you got, gasp, a permanent sidekick! Which was really damn cool! It doesn’t do anything worthwhile for someone who is farming and has like… a million clockwork ants, but once we get into a retcon or ascension kind of environment? I know I’m going to use the thing like crazy!

In any case, that change hit in the middle of April, and then, in may, we had the equivalent of Twilight Heroes’ first “familiar,” the highly implausible script. It teaches your understudy a new role, that of the grumpy old smuggler. This role is basically a combination of the Flea Market Trader and the Jujitsu Expert roles that your understudy can learn at the Firebird College at Philbin, but with a much higher level cap, and it does both roles at once, and it’s significantly more entertaining.

Basically, I am completely down for all those things. Item Find is never, ever going to be unwelcome, even if I’m the non-optimal sort who doesn’t always use it, and I much like Potato variants over in KoL, so I can totally see me being quite behind blocking attacks once I am lower level again and, you know, attacks could hit me. (Or this supposed very high level content comes out and I’m fighting enemies that can hurt.) From a usability standpoint, the grumpy old smuggler is a hit.

And, of course, it’s pretty darn funny from a comedy standpoint, too. It’s obviously full of Star Wars references, but the long, boring, old man stories my understudy tells that get Star Wars totally wrong and totally right make me grin. I only wish there was more of them. Although I never really thought of Han Solo as a grumpy old man…

But yeah, this IoTM is basically a complete win. Part of it, I’m sure, is that there aren’t any other IoTM-strength options for permanent sidekicks in the game. Once, perhaps, additional scripts get out there, the smuggler’s benefits may be significantly reduced, and less worth your time. I don’t know. But for the cheap that want to farm and for the future, the script is completely worth picking up, in my book. Yep. Completely.

Yep.

Do I end a lot of blog posts with yep?
Yep.