The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

I guess I should probably look at the ol’ list of topics I haven’t touched yet and write about one of them, huh? Let’s see. Ah, Groove Coaster. How have I not talked about that yet?

Groove Coaster is a game by the people who made Space Invaders: Infinity Gene. I still haven’t gotten to play that one because I keep waiting for sales and stuff that don’t come, but I’ve heard nothing but good things about it. If it’s anything like Groove Coaster, I bet it’s great, because Groove Coaster is great.

You pick a little avatar (mine was a goldfish) and you ride a rail throughout a level. The rail twists and turns in a pleasing way. Whenever a dot would hit your little avatar, you tap to play a note. There are also hidden “ad lib” notes you can hit for extra points. In the beginning and on easier modes, the dots to tap are just sitting on the rail that you slide down, but on harder modes, they’ll do cool things like fly in from the side and other visual tricks that also make it a bit harder to keep your rhythm. They also add in “advanced moves” like holding down on the screen instead of tapping.

That’s… pretty much it. The music is the sort of standard techno fare you’d expect. It’s great for in-game, but it certainly isn’t something I’d listen to outside of playing Groove Coaster. Really, what draws you into this game is the great visual style. Again, from what I understand, it looks a ton like Infinity Gene, which I haven’t played, but it just looks great. It looks retro, but not in a particularly identifiable way. It doesn’t seem like they’re copying a style. It feels like their own, but it also feels old. It’s pretty cool. Colors flash, and it responds satisfyingly to your input.

The thing that seems weird is the ability to buy power-ups for real cash. I mean, I guess that’s just going to be a thing now? But it just seems really odd in a game with a clear DLC model of more songs, which they are also doing. I can’t really fault them for throwing stuff against the wall and seeing what sticks, and it’s not like any of that stuff is required to enjoy the game: I certainly didn’t buy any of it and had a blast. But, well, it’s there if you’re allergic to it, I suppose.

I feel like this is not a game for everybody. It is very “old school rhythm game,” though not in the “punishingly hard” way like a Beatmani or something. But I love music games, and I quite loved this. So there.

Today, Jonathan came over and was like “Seriously, boot up LoL right now, and try Dominion.” That’s what happened. He coached, and I played, and I died a lot.

I was really happy when they announced Dominion. I mean, I like League of Legends quite a bit. I’ve put a lot of time into it and I’ve got what I feel to be my money’s worth out of the 30 bucks I gave them. At the same time, I was hoping they’d do something with it to revitalize it. The three lane thing is fine, and a solid, strategic game. But I wanted them to experiment more like with Twisted Treeline. I wanted variety. Dominion looked like it was going to be that, and I was all for it.

Let me just say that Dominion is fucking ridiculous. If you think normal LoL is fast-paced, this will blow you out of the water. It is a non-stop, relentless game mode where you are fighting other champions immediately. There’s no rev-up period. It’s just go, go, go. It feels extremely different, and that is cool.
Basically, there are five points on the map. You capture them by clicking on them, and your champion shoots some energy at it until it’s yours. If you get hit by anything, you stop capturing and have to restart, though it does keep your progress for a little while. The more points you control than the other team, the faster the other team’s life bar ticks down until one side loses all their life and dies.

They’ve done some super interesting things. Capturing a point turns off the turret while it’s being captured, making combats around points very interesting. If you can sneak one guy to capture while the rest are keeping the other champions busy, you don’t have to worry about turret fire turning the tables. If I had any sort of skill at all, it would really make those combats more dynamic and interesting.

I got trounced, of course. I played Alistar, because I knew him, but I just had trouble figuring out the new dynamics of combat. I’m so used to being support and focusing more on taking out towers than fighting other champions, but this is all champion-fights and I was really no good at it, much less while being as rusty as I am. I’m not quick on my feets. Still, I’m looking forward to playing more. This new mode is totally going to make me look completely different at some builds and really rethink things, and I hope they’re willing to keep mixing things up like this. I may not have the staying power of Summoner’s Rift (that’s always going to be the main draw) but I think it’s going to be a lot of fun when it’s out in the wild.

I’m writing this while my students take a test! While I can’t see my list of blog topics, I know one SUPER OLD ONE on the list is The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, so let’s see if I can’t make a blog post out of that while I’m here.

Many of the tabletop RPGs that I enjoy list a roleplaying game based on this movie, by the same name, as a huge influence. Thus, it made me interested in what the movie actually was. When I was visiting Brer (man, that seems forever ago now…) we saw the movie in the movie rental place. He had seen it, and thought I’d enjoy it, so we gave it a rent and a watch.

Man, that sure is a Terry Gillam movie, isn’t it?

Munchausen seemed like it was trying to do quite a lot of things that I completely and utterly agree with. It was trying to create crazy stupid layers of show within a show, story within a story, which let the entire reality of what was going on be incredibly flexible. Of course, sometimes that bending of reality was used to have a floating Robin Williams head be annoying, but, you know. I was actually surprised that the movie gave up on the show within a show as fast as it did, but it seemed to do so only to highlight that the movie itself was a show, and it was inside of it. Eventually you get to the point where the Baron is going around, and you get flashbacks to a realistic battle that he is supposedly trying to stop by gathering his old team of super-powerful dudes once again. You have these moments of seeing the world as real, and seeing what would be happening if the Baron were actually doing these things. Then you flip back to fantasy, with him having tea with Vulcan or whatever. It’s… it’s bold, especially when he does somehow save the day in this fantasy world, and then dies, and nobody has the fantasy to bring him back.

There’s also some level of “modern progress ends the old ways” about the film. The fantastic adventures were before science was really a huge thing, and you feel the analitical world crushing the Baron and what he does, which is probably what ultimately ends him. He dies not in a dramatic way, but from a sniper shot via hired assassin. By that new modern world. There’s something there, too.

It’s a movie that, overall, feels like it’s trying to make a point, and be fun while doing it. However, I just don’t feel like it completely works. It just didn’t seem to get the “fun romp” right, and instead tended to just be really weird. I never really got a good sense of it and what I should be making of it. Clearly, this is filtered through having watched it some time ago, but I just don’t remember it as fondly as one would hope. It’s an experience I’m glad I had, certainly, as I was wondering about it. But yeah. I can really see why it was kind of a flop. I’m just glad it existed to spawn the kind of games I am totally into.

Usagi Drop is a lovely show.

For whatever reason I have been following a lot of anime lately. Usagi Drop is one of them.
It gets me every damn time.

I swear, an episode of this show does not end without me tearing up a bit. You can just feel the love radiating from these characters. It’s awesome. Daikichi is every bit as bumbling as you’d expect an older, career oriented dude to be who is suddenly a father. However, he has so much fucking heart. He dived into this thing head-first because he couldn’t stand to see this girl ostracized and hated, and fell in love with her immediately. It’s touching, and most of the big problems in the show are incredibly mundane. “Oh shit, I need to find a school? How do I even do that?” “Oh shit, I need to pick up Rin after school but my job requires me to stay and do overtime often.” “Oh shit, Rin is getting sick, how can I help her?” These issues are everyday, but they are harrowing. They’re tough, and the show shows exactly how they are tough. He makes difficult decisions, but the right ones. Things happen in a fantastic way. I love it. It makes me so jealous as someone who tries to write sometimes. I always feel like I completely fail at making those conflicts seem like conflicts. I feel like I can’t write a story based around that kind of action. It makes me jealous of shows like this.

Rin, too, seems to be really realistic to her character background. She was raised before having to do a lot alone. She was raised with her father, so she doesn’t think of Daikichi like that, although he clearly is. It just works. She’s adorable and also portrayed deeply. It’s nice.

Sure, there are some elements of the show that frustrate me. Daikichi not just getting up the nerve to ask the single mom he is clearly completely into on a date really bothers me, for instance. Maybe this is just a thing in general, where it’s easy to know what to do in a relationship outside it? I don’t know. Fucking ask her already! Gah.

But seriously, every moment filled with heart in this show makes me want to cry. I think that says something about my want to be a mother and have kids. Heh, maybe I’m not as good at hiding it and burying it as I thought. I’ve tried very hard to rid myself of that for a long time, since I can’t have kids outside of adoption and I hear that’s super hard to make happen for people like me. I certainly don’t think I want any children for awhile now anyway. Too much living my life as me I have to catch up on first. But I guess that’s still a want of mine. Somewhere, deep down. Heh, I bet when I become an aunt (which I am to believe is in my future some years from now) that sort of thing is going to come back in full force, and I am going to want a kid so badly! But for now, it gets to surface a little in teary smiles when I watch a silly show. I guess that’s alright.

Bleh, alright, what’s on my list of things I should have already written about?
Sanctum? Alright.

There’s basically one downside to Sanctum. Getting co-op to work requires PC bullshit wizardry of ports and all kind of shit that’s just annoying. You can’t just join a game with your friends. It requires prep time. This is still a huge issue for me. I need to be able to invite a dude, have them join the game, and that’s it. Done. Game working. I know it’s an indie title, but fuck, they are hurting it’s potential usability big time with this old school bullshit.

Other than that, the game is great, especially in co-op.

It claims to be a first person tower defense game, and that’s totally what it is. You build towers, create mazes, and upgrade your weapons, and then let the monsters in. You have an assault rifle with a grenade launcher, a sniper rifle, and a “freeze gun” to slow enemies. None of these has ammo, but they have a cooldown. Use them a lot, and they heat up, and need to cool. You can teleport to teleport points you build on the map and attack enemies to help take them out. You can’t really be a one-person army. You’re just about as powerful as one turret, although you can be more pinpoint. But you can really help.

The game does some things great. If you’re playing a co-op game, and are trying to build a tower you don’t have enough money for, you can “hold down” the button until a friend comes over and picks up the rest of the tab for the build or upgrade. Mazing is extremely important, as well as upgrading your personal weapons. You really have to be able to strike a strong balance all around while playing. The game also has awesome Steam achievements to guide you towards various challenges you can do.

There were only four maps when I played, but they were all solid, and for tower defense, that can take you a long time. I certainly never cleared any of them in my time with the game, and I’m not terrible at tower defense or anything. But seriously, if the idea of a tower defense FPS sounds fun, you will like Sanctum. Pick it up for cheap sometime. It’s a solid indie game, and I’m glad I bought a four-pack and passed that shit around to people. Well, hey, I still have extra copies too, if you want one. Whee.

Happy Pony Day!
Let me talk about Penguins.

I’ve been watching Mawaru Penguindrum, as I said yesterday. But now I’m caught up. (Up through Episode 10. I think that’s caught up.)
I am loving this show.

If there’s one thing I really like about it, though, I suppose it’s how grounded it feels. The show can border on extremely silly, and there are many completely surreal and unrealistic elements to the show, like the silly transformation sequence I showed last time, and this lady who seems to be assassinating people’s memories with some sort of slingshot with a laser sight. But it never feels unreal. All the characters feel like actual people who could exist, reacting to things appropriately, even when they’re a little crazy. It feels stupid to me that I feel the need to point this out every time I notice it in an anime, but it’s honestly just rare. Anime tends to use so many stock characters and stereotypes. It’s so very nice when a show doesn’t. It shows that anime with good writing is just damn good television.

The show has also just flat-out shocked me several times so far. Ringo’s character has just overwhelmed me with how far she is willing to go. To the point of me yelling “OH FUCK!” at the screen. I’m proud of the show for going there. I’m proud of the show for letting a character with some believable and understandable motivations also be so batshit insane and uncaring. I like her, despite of how horrible she is. I’m interesting what latest plot twist will mean to her character going forward.

One more thing I appreciate: the show seems to be leaving nothing on the table. When recent reveal about a background element of many episodes being important to Himari’s past came about, I was all like “Ooooh. Good job.” It really completely spun her character about: She can’t go ANYWHERE without being reminded of her life’s failures. All intense. Little elements or things that seem throwaway keep coming back in bigger and more important ways. It’s nice, because it makes the show feel very planned, which makes me confident that the narrative will continue and end as good as it’s going.

There is one thing I don’t like, though: the Penguins themselves. I just don’t find them working as comic relief, which the show seems to want to use them as, and they’re just kind of stupid. They don’t seem to be doing too much, plot-wise, now. Maybe that will change. Probably will. But for once, the random dose of cute doesn’t seem to be doing the show any favors at all. If I had to pick a weakness, that’s it.

Anyway, I am going to keep following this. Because it’s awesome. So I wrote some thoughts about it. The end.

River Song is a waste of a good idea.

I dunno, I just have to say this, because it frustrates me. So much of Dr. Who is so much better now that Russel T. Davies is gone, but at the same time, they’ve done so much shit. The show is so great, but they just tend to forget where the line is for creating entertaining cheesyness and real, terrible cheesyness. They do great work, and then cross the line and ruin the work they’ve done.

River Song is just such a great example of this. Current season spoilers coming, of course, so, you know, if you’re not caught up, don’t read.

When River first appeared, she was a great idea for a character. Being from the Doctor’s future, she was the first character who truly had something up on him, and could put the Doctor off=guard. You could see the Doctor react to that. It bothered the shit out of him, which was perfect. He was threatened in a whole different way. It was the sort of thing that you could get some character development out of the Doctor from, which is hard to do with a character like the Doctor. I was down.

Then she came back for another episode, which was fine. Sure! Why not? More Angels and shit. She’s still mysterious and a problem for the Doctor. I can dig it.
Then she came back again.
And again.

At this point, the mystery of her was wore out. She was just this person that the Doctor was supposed to be in love with. But there were no sparks between them. That was kind of a problem. Still, I was okay with it. Then there was this pirate episode that disgusted me so much I kind of gave up on the season.

Coming back, I got caught up with what had happened. And what had happened was bullshit. Apparently River Song is Rory and Amy’s daughter for no reason, and she’s also part Time Lord for no reason, and she’s also an assassin for no reason. I watched the episode “Let’s Kill Hitler” and I shook my head. They were flushing her character, and all the good she brought to the show, down the toilet for some really, really stupid plot twists out of nowhere.

I see it again and again from the show, and it frustrates me. It’s like they don’t know what they’re doing. I think the problem is a George Lucas kind of problem, where they worry that they need to make a show that kids will like, instead of just worrying about making something good that kids can watch. Whatever it is, I wish they’d stop it. They’re obviously capable of making some super-fun, super-interesting television. I wish they’d just do it.

Another iOS game I’ve been playing, one that is pretty fantastic, is Rainbow Six: Shadow Vanguard. It’s a Gameloft joint. I never know what to think about Gameloft. Their games are normally solid, but they’re also normally complete fucking ripoffs of console IP. Still, this one is licensed and it is really great.

I’ve been thinking of the game as SWAT 4 Lite. This game has most of the fun parts of SWAT 4 (looking under doors, planning attacks, clearing rooms, ordering your squad) without all the tedious parts (being incredibly difficult, following police procedure) which were cool to include in SWAT 4, but make it a game I will never play for fun. Basically, you get thrown into various scenarios around the world and your squad of three people (I guess the other three people of the Rainbow Six are backups in case you die? I dunno.) has to infiltrate buildings, rescue hostages, diffuse bombs, and so on.

The graphics in this game look fantastic for iOS. They’re basically of an early PS2 sort of quality. They’re not as pretty as, say, Infinity Blade, but this game is doing a whole lot more than Infinity Blade, what with tracking two companion AIs around with you and all the enemies, so I think it’s really good visually.
The game also has really slick presentation. When you peek under doors, the enemies are having funny or relevant conversations, which is a nice little touch. Your mission briefings and guy in the ear guy does a great job of being a tired veteran of this sort of thing. All of the icons on the screen make basically perfect sense without having to decipher them. (I knew, for instance, what the “Flashbang and Clear” icon meant before the tutorial told me.)

The controls, however, are shit. I’m sorry, but emulating dual analog shooters on the touchscreen just DOES NOT WORK, no matter how much you want it to. You just cannot do any sort of twitch shooting and moving in this game. Luckily, the game knows this, and this isn’t a twitch shooting kind of game. It’s very methodical, with a majority of the kills coming from ordering your teammates, if you’re playing right. They also layer on a fuck-ton of auto-aim, which helps a lot. When I first started the game, I thought the controls would be a dealbreaker, but as I learned that normal FPSing wasn’t the focus of the game, I really changed my tune. They did a good job of making up for the flaws in playing a shooter on an iPad.
The only other control thing that seems a little wonky is the cover mechanics. You can only get into cover at certain points, but the game is sometimes kind of picky about what distance from them you have to be to get into cover. It’s normally not a life-or-death thing: you’re normally getting into cover by a door before you tell your team to breach, for instance. Still, it’s a bit frustrating, and I kind of wish they would have made that as sticky and forgiving as the auto-aim for shooting is, as then you could take a little more active role in taking out bad guys without getting yourself killed, if you were the sort to want to do that.

The game has an EXP system that unlocks weapons a la Modern Warfare, because that’s a thing all games must have now. It’s inoffensive, but also mostly useless. I don’t know. I haven’t switched from the assault rifle I started with, because of course I want an assault rifle. It’s flexible. If I took a shotgun, I wouldn’t be as good as sniping from cover. These unlocks carry over into the deathmatch multiplayer, which I’m sure is pretty bad and I haven’t even pretended to be interested in. The game, however, does have co-op through the story, which is crazy and seems like a feature nobody would use, but I guess for the like 2 people who both own this game and have iPads in the same room or whatever, that would be pretty damn sweet.

I’ve played 5 or 6 of the missions so far, and I really had a lot of fun. I bought it on sale for a buck, and I don’t know if I’d quite bite at the $8.99 I think it normally sells for. But this is Gameloft: next time they have a sale, probably around Thanksgiving, it’ll be a buck again. When it is, you should really consider picking it up. It’s just a really polished, really fun game. I was surprised I enjoyed it as much as I did, and I’m glad I picked it up on a whim.

Before I get started, I decided to add an iOS category today, which I should have done a long time ago, as I know some of you probably don’t give a shit about the iOS games I talk about. This took forever because I had to go and label all my old blogs, and I don’t know if you know this, but I have written a ton of stupid blogs! Anyway, I hope that’s useful. Then again, I doubt anyone uses the categories, but eh, whatever. It’s sorted and shit, right?

Anyway, today I want to talk about Hospital Story. No, this isn’t a game by Kairosoft, the people who brought you hits like Game Dev Story and Hot Springs Story. They really want you to think it is, though, with the icon looking pretty well exactly like those Kairosoft games. No, this is a fairly useless microtransationfest that probably isn’t going to hold your attention more than 15 minutes. Still, it’s free, so maybe 15 minutes is enough.

I downloaded this game because I often click on the little ads that give you free Tower Bux in Tiny Tower because 1) I want free Tower Bux, 2) It takes like 2 seconds, and 3) I want to support the people who made that game, because it is so awesome, and I assume they get money for people who agree to take a look. Hospital Story was the first game on there that really seemed like it might be fun. I thought maybe this would be someone else’s take on the Kairosoft sim model, and I was interested to try it.

Basically, the game goes in rounds. People come in the top of your hospital, and they need various treatments. You have a little electric machine, and little heart monitor, a strange machine that looks like a hand, and some sort of brain scanner. You drag the people to the machines, then tap on them to send one of your workers to do the procedure. Many patients need multiple types of procedures, so then you drag them to another place, tap on them to send a guy, and so on. Finally, after they’re cured, they’ll go to the desk, and, you guessed it, you have to tap on them to send a worker over to take their money. A game day is maybe a minute or two long, and then you can upgrade your equipment and hire more workers or whatever before going at it again. The game also gives you experience points, and you level up, but these levels seem to do absolutely nothing besides show up on the top of the screen. I don’t know why there’s an EXP system besides the fact that games have EXP systems, I guess.

This game is all about microtransations. You can upgrade your stuff with the in-game money, but hiring most of the staff requires “Medi-Points” which, as you can probably guess, they’ll be happy to sell you. They give you a few to start, which is enough to hire a few people and not be totally screwed, but it is really frustrating. They do have one thing I found smart, though: they have this weird thing where you can elect to watch commercials to get small amounts of Medi-points. Instead of forcing them on you, it’s voluntary, but they reward you. I could really get behind this sort of model as an alternative to paying, but the returns just aren’t any good. I had to watch like 7 commercials to get enough Medi-points to hire one of the cheapest nurses, and that was only with the bonus points they gave me for starting the game. I’d be doing that for an hour or more before I’d be able to buy, say, the Cat Doctor. It’s just not worth it.

As you play through the game, patients start coming in faster and faster, and you have to scramble to get them all taken care of. This might be a cool little arcade game, if for the fact that basically the only thing that makes it possible to do the numbers they throw at you is having enough staff. If you don’t have enough, you’re screwed. If you do, it’s a cakewalk. And, of course, you have to hire new workers with Medi-Points. Yeah.

Once the game picked up speed, I had fun with it for a little while as a time-waster, but it’s nowhere near deep enough of a game that anyone would ever think to spend money on it, and their little “watch ads” thing, while smart, just doesn’t give enough of a return for you to even want to try it. It’s free, sure, but there’s no reason to try this game.

I was cleaning up installs on my 360, and it occurred to me that I never actually wrote about Half-Minute Hero: Super Mega Neo Climax. Which seems like a huge mistake. And since this is a day to NEVAR FORGET, I guess I best not forget to write about it, and give you a review.

While some of the things they took out of the game are stupid, overall, it’s a really great game and a worthwhile purchase if you didn’t play the original.

The premise, if you’ve never caught it, is that there’s a spell going around that destroys the world and takes 30 seconds to cast. You’re a really fast person, so you’re recruited by the greedy Goddess of Time to stop the Evil Lords who are trying to cast the spell. So you run around and do everything you’d normally do in a JRPG, but you only have 30 seconds in which to do it.

Let me just be clear: the premise is still awesome. They get to make fun of and play off of genre tropes, all the while making a game that actually doesn’t play much like a JRPG at all, but is instead this weird, timed puzzle game. You have to balance grinding for experience, buying items and completing quests with finishing the overall quest of the map before your time is up. You also have to balance when you can afford to pay the Time Goddess to give you back your 30 seconds and plan your routes through the map accordingly.
There’s a ton of thought put into the game, and a ton of love, and it really shows. There are usually at least two or three ways to solve the major problem on each map, and many of them cause the story to branch off in a completely different direction, leading to completely different levels. Each level has special titles you can earn by performing crazy stunts in the levels themselves, and even wanting to replay each level to get enough money to collect all the equipment in each stage really gives you multiple ways to play every single level. I’m not a completionist, but I was enjoying the game so much that I got every ending, every branching story path, every piece of equipment, and every party member, and I wasn’t bored of the game replaying those stages again and again. There’s just plenty of variety in what you can do to tackle them, and the game normally rewards you for trying to complete a mission a different way. The game is also great about letting you know what you could have done, with the little caravan at the end of each level telling you about hidden items and paths you might have missed and might want to try out.

This version of the game has some problems, but the visuals aren’t one of them. People were wary about the redrawn art style, so of course, the first thing I did was turn on the original, pixel art. However, it sucked: on an HD screen, the pixels are blown up so much that you can’t tell what anything is supposed to be representing at all. The redrawn, HD graphics, however, have a ton of character and look really nice. You lose a sense of where the grid is in the game with them, but that’s just about the only problem. They are way better.
The real problem is that this version strips out all the minigames from the original and replaces them with lackluster versions of the normal gameplay. In the original, you eventually unlocked stories about other characters. One was kind of tower defense, where you summoned monsters. One was a shooter, and so on. They all still had the whole 30 second thing, but they were some variety. In SMNC, this is just replaced with normal game maps that have the same plot as the levels in the original PSP game. The main mechanics are strong enough to carry the game. I love those. But having different sorts of gameplay would have made these characters seem different, made the Hero of Time seem more special with his speediness, and generally would have worked well. Especially when they went out of their way to make sure the original graphics were in this version, it just seems stupid that they did away with that.

Still, it wasn’t about to keep me from enjoying it. The game really hooked me, and I’m glad I randomly bought it in a moment of weakness. I really did just about everything you could in the game, and had fun the whole time. (I didn’t beat Hero 3, because fuck, that shit is CRAZY and I don’t have enough patience to practice that to get it right, even with a guide.) If you missed this originally and the second time, think about going back and grabbing this. It’s a damn fun and creative little game.