The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

Today I played a Doctor Who MMO thing.
I was just looking at it and then I learned you could be a cat person so of course I played. I am a very predictable furry.

Basically, if you want to play a lot of shitty in-browser versions of Puzzle Fighter, Bust-A-Move, Pipe Dreams, and Sega Swirl, this is really the game for you.

You make your dude, and then the Doctor picks you up in the TARDIS! Whoo! I will give the game this: it looks really nice. It’s clearly flash-animated so that every animation isn’t individually drawn, but it has a great art style that looks really nice, and the little animated version of The Doctor is spiffy. Anyway, you go into the TARDIS and the Doctor says things like “Blah blah blah time crisis blah blah blah probably going to fight all the villains from the show since it’s relaunch in sequence blah blah.” And then he gives you a gadget, which is TOTALLY NOT A SONIC SCREWDRIVER because it sucks and you have to play little minigames to do things. Either that, or the Doctor is just really, really fucking good at Bust-A-Move, because he can unlock a door in like a second and it takes me clearing like 3 boards of Bust-A-Move to do that. Then you go out and you fight some of the plastic people from the first episode using your PUZZLE MINIGAME POWERS. I assume you eventually move to other times and places and fight other enemies from the show, but I certainly didn’t get that far. It’s also weird that, if I have gone back in time to the point where the plastic people were invading, then Earthlings don’t know about aliens. I’m a cat person. Shouldn’t they all be fucking terrified of me? World going to shit and whatnot? Or do they just assume the furry convention is in town or something? I assume they have furry cons in London.

Anyway, back to the game. Another thing I will give the game credit for is this: you really aren’t doing like… typical video game stuff in theory (although in execution, it’s just puzzle minigames, as I’ve said). The game has you unlocking doors, interrogating people, rewiring gadgets, and distracting enemies. You’re not running around with a gun and shooting people. You’re doing what the Doctor does in the show, which is to the game’s credit. You team up with a bunch of other players (in theory. This beta didn’t seem to have that working.) or if you solo, you get some AI characters to help you. You assign them to tasks and you do some yourself, or help them do them faster. “You barricade the door, you keep the woman calm, and I’ll hack this computer!” Again, in theory, really like the show, but in practice, it’s just playing board after board of these puzzle games, so it gets old fast.

The conversation, or “wits” minigame as they call it, is especially kind of bad. It’s like Sega Swirl, except there are ways to make special gems that do things like clear a whole line. In practice, this means that once you start a combo, it can kind of go on FOREVER. I had a combo last for a solid minute without me pressing anything in the game. And that combo didn’t give me enough points to finish off the task I was doing. Thanks, game!

The game’s microtransaction system really confuses me too. Going on missions and upgrading your gadget and whatnot requires “Energy.” The game always said I had 0 Energy, and was asking me to buy more, but it let me do everything anyway. Sometimes there was a number to the left of my Energy, which decreased when I did stuff. Maybe that was my actual value and it was a bug? In any case, it was not explained how Energy works. Is it a currency that regenerates over time, like in Spiral Knights? I kind of doubt it, though, as it’s required to buy clothing and TARDIS decorations and shit, so I assume it’s just a straight up microtransaction currency. If so, then that just seems really, really stupid. You have to have some way to keep free players coming back to play the game, so they’re tempted to spend money, whether that be “You can only play so many turns a day, unless you spend money” or “You can go in this special dungeon if you spend some money” or “You can play with this sick gear if you spend some money.” But just requiring a purchase to straight up play after a trial period, especially when your game is like this? That seems dumb. Then again, the BBC is stupid enough to price Doctor Who seasons at like 90 dollars in America for no fucking reason, so maybe that’s just that tendency shining through. Either way, the game doesn’t explain how this stuff works clearly, so who knows.

I… can’t suggest you try it? I mean, go for it, if you want. You don’t have to be a cat person. You could be, you know, a human. Or some green dude with a weird forehead. And maybe it’s just being aimed at kids, and that’s the problem. I mean, I could see having fun teaming up with my kid or whatever and playing this stuff. But I dunno if it would keep a child’s interest much longer than mine, unless they really, really wanted to see the outcome of the little stories in each level. Eh, I dunno.

Demons’ Souls didn’t do a lot for me, but fuck, I am really kind of getting into Dark Souls.

I really don’t know why, either. I mean, I think, for one, I picked a starting class that makes more sense to me than what I did in Demons’ Souls. I started as a Cleric, so I started with the Heal Miracle, and that really helped me out early game. I also feel like I have seen several people play through the first few hours of Dark Souls at this point, which made me very prepared to get past the early roadblocks and really get into how the game feels when you aren’t dying every five seconds. (Spoilers: It feels pretty awesome when things actually start to click.) Finally, I think it’s just that this game is much more streamlined and refined in very subtle ways. It’s more approachable. It’s ever so slightly more obvious what you should be doing. That’s very nice.

In any case, I’ve had some adventures! I ran around a lot uselessly because I didn’t realize there were shortcuts, which is always awesome! I died a lot, but I didn’t get angry about it, really, because I’ve just sort of accepted the idea that I am going to lose a bunch of souls every so often! (Though it does suck when you lose a humanity you randomly gained for some reason. Why do you randomly gain humanity, anyway? (One trip to a wiki later, it seems like you sometimes gain humanity for having your messages upvoted, so maybe that’s how I was getting them.)) I summoned some phantoms, who proceeded to utterly slaughter the Belltower Gargoyles while I watched in horror having no idea what to do. I bought a lot of equipment for my bonfire! I got hugged to death by a tree! I upgraded a shield! I shot a million arrows into a dragon tail! I used an exclamation point!

But really, when I went back and killed some of the big knights that I was running away from early in the game, overcoming them after a try or two now that I had leveled up and got new equipment, it felt good. Really good. That’s the kind of satisfaction this game can offer, I suppose.

Anyway, I find myself still wanting to play it, so, like a fool, I kept it from Gamefly. I guess I am playing a very Miracle-based character at this point, so I’m thinking I will join the Co-op Covenant thing so I can get Lightning Spear, the Miracle attack spell. That’s my next goal, anyway. We’ll see what happens with that, and if it can keep making me want to play it like I feel right now. We’ll see!

Okay, so I guess I’ll write a little about the Magic draft, then get some sleep.

Last night, we drafted! Yay! About damn time! We gave Innistrad a try, with it’s stupid flip cards. From a victory perspective, the draft went very badly for me, as I lost a lot. Jonathan made a ridiculous 60 card rainbow mill himself deck that somehow worked fantastically. Essner drafted werewolves. Duh. But Spaeth’s fairly straightforward black deck ended up taking the whole draft.

Drafting this set, there just seemed to be an overwhelming number of completely garbage instants in this set. Just really terrible ones! It also felt like there was a lack of solid low-casting-cost creatures, but maybe we just got unlucky with the packs we opened.

I got a card I really liked. It was called Mikaeus, The Lunarch. That is a fun and powerful card, and I often paired him with this equipment that gave Hexproof, but he really didn’t go off as much as I would have liked. He was a bit too slow to get going for the draft, I suppose, and it’s always hard to keep a large number of creatures on the board in a draft because, in general, you’re more likely to trade to get rid of threats because you don’t have any other options to deal with those threats. Thus, he wasn’t as useful as he could have been.

Really, though, those stupid flip cards are the main thing here, and they just weren’t anywhere interesting enough to justify how fucking annoying they are to have in a deck. I mean, they were fine. I used some for easy beats and threats. I also got this planeswalker, and he was kind of a win button. But seriously, just… every time I shuffled the deck and saw those cards in there, it just frustrated me. I wanted to see all the card backs so I knew everything was okay. Bleh. It really was as stupid as I expected it to be. There were no surprises there.

Anyway, that was definitely a Magic set! It certainly isn’t going to get me back into playing Magic as much as I used to, but it was a fun diversion for an evening, to be sure.

Scribblenauts Remix is a dollar right now, and you should buy it.

Now, I wasn’t a huge fan of Scribblenauts on DS. It controlled completely and utterly like ass. It was a pain to play, so much so that I didn’t even try Super Scribblenauts.

They fixed all that on iOS. The controls are basically the same as on the DS, but because my iPad is a much bigger screen, it is much, much easier to tap on what I want to tap on, and so on, and even easier to type in words. You may still have similar issues on an iPhone, but even then, they’ve included a virtual joypad option for moving Maxwell which will at least deal with a majority of stupid movement issues.

This lets you enjoy the game, which is easy, but the ability to create basically anything you type in is still magical. I played for like, what, an hour today, and I already have beaten over 50% of the levels, but it’s still a lot of fun. They seem to be using a mix of Scribblenauts, Super Scribblenauts, and original levels in the iOS version, which means a lot of these levels I haven’t seen before, which helps too. Makes it more fun.

I don’t know how long-lasting the game will be. I’m pretty sure I’ll finish blazing through the rest of the levels in another session and then be done. But I’ve certainly had a lot less fun for a dollar before, and it is pretty awesome to make all the shit appear, especially if you force yourself to constantly come up with new words. I highly recommend grabbing this while it’s on sale (or, of course, when it’s on a future sale, because it’s iOS, that’s obviously going to happen.)

I have played through the Batmens. Well, okay, I’ve played through Batman: Arkham City. Well, okay, I played through Batman: Arkham City without the Catwoman code, because everyone said that was the worst and most frustrating part of the game, and I didn’t need that. I got frustrated enough without it. But yeah, okay, I played through Batman. This is established.

It was pretty eh.

I mean, it was still a good game. I enjoyed my time with it. I punched some dudes, and silent-takedowned some others. There was a really, really fantastic boss battle with Mr. Freeze that was only unfortunate in that the reasons leading up to meeting and fighting Mr. Freeze were pretty stupid. I don’t know. There were a lot of stupid plot points in that game! But yeah, the gameplay was satisfying.

Of course, the problem is, like everyone else in the world has said, that the gameplay was so… same-y. It didn’t feel like a revelation at all. It felt like the exact same game I played when I played Arkham Asylum, only now the plot was even stupider, and I had to deal with this stupid overworld all the time. Batman was constantly being more of a dick than usual, generally having way, way too high an opinion of himself for no real reason, while making like… the worst strategic decisions, which is very un-Batman. It was everything that made Arkham Asylum good, but less so. It was a lesser game, and was hurt by being a sequel to such a fantastic game.

I’m not saying not play it. Like, I’m saying as I’m being negative, it’s still fun, and there’s plenty of good content. I mean, there are tons of sidequests that actually sound pretty interesting if you care about Batman. (Stupid Riddler Trophies don’t count, just… forget those exist). I mean, I didn’t do any of them, but I’ve heard stories of all kinds of cool encounters with Batman villians in this game, so if you give a shit about Batman, maybe that’s something you’ll enjoy? I dunno. Batman is a cool dude, but I’m not that thrilled about him in general, so, you know, I didn’t worry about it. But I could have been! I guess!

I’m glad I played it, but yeah, I just wasn’t wowed.

I had a day off! What did I do with that time?

Uh, I watched way too much Yu-Gi-Oh GX.

Look, it’s not my fault, okay? (It’s totally my fault.) I just realized that they have every single episode of every single Yu-Gi-Oh series on Hulu. What else was I supposed to do? Play good video games? Nap? Enjoy my free time? I mean, come on.

But yeah, I mean, I watched a lot of this show in my youth, more than I care to admit, and going back to it, man, it is way worse than even I remembered. And I remembered it being really quite bad! Even if it is absolutely flawless.

I just can’t get over the voice actors on this show. When fans who aren’t getting paid but are making fun of your show do more acting, put more emotion, and just generally give more of a shit than your voice actors, you have a problem. I mean, so many lines just seem like the people reading them had no direction at all. They didn’t know if there were other characters around, or what they were saying right beforehand, or anything. This is especially true for anyone who is not a main character, who could be reading a grocery list for how much energy they put into their lines. I mean, I get it. This show is STUPID. But the characters think what’s going on is important, and fuck it, you’re getting paid to pretend, you can at least pretend, you know?

In addition, the choices the translators are making are just… what? What? I remember an episode where they replaced Sake and drinking with “Hot Sauce.” That makes sense, even if it’s stupid. Don’t want kids knowing about drinking, I guess. But I recently watched a dumb episode. It was called something like “Curry Worry.” But during the episode itself, they never say curry. They say “pot roast.” What the fuck? That clearly is not a pot roast on the screen! Plus, I mean, kids today very well COULD know what curry is! Or if they don’t, maybe you can expand their pallet a little bit by making them want to try it. It’s not like curry is some vice or something. What the hell?

Finally, the way the game treats its own rules is just really annoying. Sometimes the rule where destroying a creature in defense mode doesn’t deal damage works, but sometimes it doesn’t. I swear a lot of the time the main characters are just pulling extra cards out of nowhere that they don’t have, which is weird, because they do try to cover refilling people’s hands by having them play Pot of Greed and Graceful Charity quite often. At least, unlike in the original Yu-gi-oh, there’s much less of “card has an ability that makes no goddamn sense and would never exist” a la the Catapult Turtle Gambit. They’re just playing cards that very well could exist, but are so situational as to make a normal, sane player of this game never run them. But of course, Yu-Gi-Oh characters can pull whatever card they want out of their deck at will, so those cards then become very powerful. But whatever. At least I could see an actual, physical playing card having that rules text more often than not.

All that said, I watched like 4 and a half hours of it today, and will probably continue to watch it for awhile. I am such a sucker to a world where things are resolved through card games. Even when everything is fucking terrible about it.

Jonathan was all like “Woah, I got Four Swords for free on this 3DS that I got for Christmas early! So cool!” and I’m all like “I have that on my DSi! We should play!” and then he went “We totally should!” so we did. Although it was just us two, so it was more like two swords.

I really liked it! Jonathan seemed disappointed. I think he was expecting, you know, a co-op Zelda game, with Zelda dungeons and Zelda puzzles. I suppose that’s a reasonable expectation, but I had heard enough about Four Swords to know what I was getting into, and that was a crazy, fuck your neighbor and grab his rupees adventure. While I didn’t totally play that way, some shenanigans were had, and we both had a fun time. Just not the time he was looking for.

It was also just kind of interesting to play and go “Oh, hey, there’s that item from Minish Cap!” Because they totally just stole a bunch of the more clever items from this and put them into Minish Cap. Not that I can blame them, since nobody really saw this stuff when it first came out in that Link to the Past remake. The items themselves were nothing really spectacular, as they just wanted to invoke the “feel” of Zelda, so of course your get a boomerang, bombs, Pegasus Boots, and so on. Certainly, though, the Magnet was a pretty weird item, and fun to use. It was certainly a cool and more interesting hookshot variant. The puzzles where you had to stick the other player to the wall to progress were fun, too.

All in all, I don’t know if we’ll play again. It wasn’t what my brother wanted and while I had fun, it really does seem like you need four players so it can get super chaotic and backstabby for maximum fun. Still, for the low price of “free” we certainly got an afternoon’s worth of entertainment, so no complaints there.

Everyone loves The Muppets! Like, it’s this film, and everyone loves it! It’s awesome! Everyone should see it!

I found it incredibly mediocre.

Now, I’m not some huge Muppets fan or anything. I haven’t even seen all their movies. But I like the Muppets, and this movie excited me. I really wanted to see it! What I got wasn’t what I was bargaining for.

When the Muppets are being funny, they are awesomely funny. There are amazingly good jokes throughout this movie. I did many laughings throughout the film. But the movie was dead set on constantly killing any momentum of its jokes by becoming amazingly, overwhelmingly sentimental over and over again. Here I am, sitting in a theater, watching a movie called The Muppets, and constantly Kermit the Frog is putting on this super sad face because “nobody loves us anymore, and we need to work together, but how can we make people love us?” PEOPLE LOVE YOU. THAT’S WHY WE’RE IN THE THEATER WATCHING YOUR MOVIE. It felt so fake and so deliberately designed to tug at nostalgia heartstrings. It would have worked if kept to a minimum, but you’d have a scene of fun and funny jokes, and then a scene of this bullshit, over and over. It’s like they couldn’t just establish their premise, which was a fine premise for this movie, and then just move on with it and have fun. They had to treat their plot super serious, which is just not why I wanted to watch The Muppets. But maybe that’s not the case with everyone else. I don’t know. Still, the ending was a very silly resolution that was not the resolution to something serious, so I don’t know what they were thinking with that, either.

Really, them hammering that home is what hurt the movie for me. There was plenty of good stuff. I’ve had this song stuck in my head since I saw the film, for instance. When the Muppets were doing what they do best, they did a bang-up job of it, and reminded me why I wanted to see the movie in the first place. Maybe me and my friends are just broken, and it’s fantastic, but man, it didn’t do enough for me as a movie. So much potential, squandered. Maybe something good will come out of this “relaunch” of the Muppets afterwards, though.

Okay, let’s reach back on the ol’ list of blog ideas that I haven’t gotten around to writing yet.
Oh, okay, here’s an old one. Majesty.

Majesty is a series that one Matthew Essner really enjoys. I knew that, but I didn’t know much about it until I watched a quick look of the new one on Giant Bomb. The idea of not having direct control over your units, just how you spend money, seemed really appealing, so when I saw that there was a Majesty game on iOS for a buck, I figured I’d pick it up and give it a try.

First off, let me just say that the controls are not that great. They feel like someone shoehorning in normal PC controls on a touch screen. It’s very hard to set items down exactly where you want them, because you have to double tap on a grid that is actually very small. This can create problems when you’re trying to place important structures like defense towers. It also is near-impossible to set “Defend this” flags, which is kind of an issue, too.

The other thing that really confused me is that this isn’t a port! Apparently the levels in this are completely different than in the PC version, which is just… crazy. If they were going to make new levels, why not make controls that aren’t ass? I only found this out when I went looking for help on a level I got stuck on, and Essner told me that level simply isn’t in the game he played. How crazy is that, right?

Still, the basic concept is still cool. Instead of issuing orders to your adventurers, you post various bounties. “Explore here, get 100 gold.” “Kill this, get 200.” The more money, the more people will want to do it. When you pay the adventurers for doing this, they will spend the money in your shops buying a new enchanted sword, or some healing potions so they can take on harder jobs. It’s like you’re controlling the random sidequest board in an RPG, and I am down with that. There were certainly some points where I was like “Dammit, just kill that thing!” but most of the time I enjoyed the feel.

This version has problems, though. It apparently works on an iPhone, but I have no idea how shitty the game would play on that small of a screen. It’s a weird product, but I suppose if you enjoyed the original game, and had a buck, picking it up wouldn’t be a bad move to have some more of that action on the go. I know Essner was certainly interested when I showed it to him.

Today is the last day to use the milk in my refrigerator.

Today is also the day where I talk Saints Row The Third spoilers. Remember when I said that yesterday? I didn’t lie. If you want to play this game, and you damn well fucking SHOULD, you should not spoil yourself on it. So go away if that’s the case. Otherwise, feel free to read on.

—SPOILARZ BEGIN—

Fuck, that Saints Row the Third, eh? What in the game wasn’t amazing?
Seriously, though. I just have to point at a few things and go “Holy Shit!”

The mission where you are rescuing Zimos from the sex club was the first time I totally lost it. I am no stranger to this stuff, and when the manager mentioned “pony barn” I had a good idea where things were going. Still, the utter absurdity of the shootout on the Pony Carts, and the fact that they explode, just made me break out into laughter. I could barely shoot. I was involved in something so fucked up! It was beautiful. It was then that I knew I had made no mistakes about my love for this game.

The major setpieces of the game, where you’re destroying the rival gangs of the Luchadores and the Deckers, are equally fucked up, and I love them so much. When Matt started making my game lag in the Decker attack, and it really was exactly like a laggy FPS, I just couldn’t help but giggle. Similarly, every single bit of the showdown wrestling match with Killbane was just… perfect. It was ridiculous, and I loved it.

One little detail that kept showing up in the game that was so stupid, I had to love it, was my backpack. At some point, I bought this stupid bright pink kitty backpack and wore it. For whatever reason, whenever my character put on a costume, she’d still have the backpack on. I was wrestling with that thing! It just made the whole situation all the more ridiculous. It was perfect for the Boss’s character.

As far as the ending goes, I really have to say I like the “good guy” ending much better. I picked that one first, of course, because I am predictable, and everything about the Gangstas in Space mission was a joy. I was laughing. I can’t wait to play more of that, seeing as I threw down for the DLC. The other set of missions just… well, they were crazy, but they just lacked the humor. It was appropriate for the Saints to basically decide to have Steelport secede from the United States for no reason. That is dumb and also ridiculous. But just… a different kind of ridiculous. That one might be the more “true” ending for people who played the first two games, but I wasn’t a huge fan.

I think that’s about all I have to say. I am waiting desperately for the DLC. I felt like it was overpriced, but dammit, I want more of this game. So I bought it. I hope it lives up to the awesome titles.