The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

What have I always said is the surefire way of getting me to buy a game on iOS?
That’s right, Asynchronous Multiplayer.

Ascension has that, which is plenty of reason to buy it on its own. However, it’s also a pretty awesome deckbuilding game, in the way that Dominion is a “deckbuilding game.” I like it. I mean, it’s no Tanto Cuore, but then again, what is?

I described the game the other day as a combination of Dominion and Race for the Galaxy. It’s certainly more Dominion than Race, but hear me out. A game of Ascension ends when all the “honor points” are depleted. These work basically like VP chips from Race. Cards in your deck are worth honor points, and you pick up honor points from the pool when you defeat monsters (or when a card effect tells you to). The person with the most honor at the end of the game, counting cards in their deck and their pile of points, wins.

There are two currencies that are emptied at the end of the round that cards can give you. They can give you money (I think the game calls it Runes? But it’s money.) or they can give you attack power. With attack power, you can kill monsters, take their honor bonus from the pool, and get whatever extra effect the monster has. With money, you can buy more cards to put in your deck. Unlike Dominion, there’s a set of five cards dealt at random from the deck in front of all players. When one is bought or defeated, a new card is drawn from the deck to replace it. I really like that. It makes the game feel much, much more dynamic than Dominion’s “pick some decks and that’s what you get!” There are also, of course, three cards you can always buy: a Cultist that you can kill easily, a Mystic which gives you more money, and a Heavy Infantry which gives you more fight power.

The deck is broken up into cards of four factions: Enlightened, Lifebound, Mechana, and Void. Each type has it’s own path to victory, and you’ll probably want to specialize in at least one during the game. Enlightened is Money-based, but has cards that let you kill some monsters automatically to help out with it’s lack of attack power. Lifebound is extremely Money-based, but has cards that let you basically buy honor. Mechana is very flexible, having many cards that let you pick between money and attack, and also loves Constructs, cards that stay in play and have continuous effects. Void is extremely attack oriented, and focuses on letting you thin your deck as a side bonus to many of its cards.

Again, the game feels really dynamic. You get into points where, say, no players are focusing enough on attack, so the stuff you can buy or fight is all monsters, and you have to make that choice if you want to try to diversify into attack power, or just wait it out. Similarly, you have to decide whether you’re going to force a strategy or try to just play it by ear. This stuff feels very Race to me, where you’re trying to read the board and the cards you’re getting to see what the other players don’t want so you can find your own niche and path to victory points. You get that, but Ascension is much simpler and faster to play than Race. It’s a smart little game, and totally worth five bucks because, you know. Asynchronous multiplayer, motherfucker.

Ugh what do I write about ugggggggh… List of topics, save me!

Tested does all these Apps. Sometimes they are of a week? Anyway, they talked about this game called Continuity 2, which seemed pretty clever, and was a buck. As you know, that’s all it takes for me to buy an app. Thus, I bought the app.

Apparently this is a sequel to something? I haven’t played the first. But the game itself is pretty straightforward. You are a stick figure dude. You have to run and jump to collect coins, get a key, and use that key to unlock the exit to the level. But, of course, there’s a twist. The level is made up of sliding block panels. You can zoom out and rearrange them as you’d like in order to get around the level. You can also change the level’s gravity by rotating your iDevice about. Basically, it becomes kind of a puzzle in figuring out how you can slide and rotate things to get to all the coins before you leave. Since, in order to make a working path, the walls have to match up on both sides of a tile, you don’t have as many options as you think you have, and you have to think about when to use what.

The controls are fine. You double tap to zoom in or out, hold to the left or right of your stick dude to walk, and swipe up to jump. Since the game doesn’t require quick reflexes or pixel-perfect platforming, these controls work perfectly. You’re never accidentally jumping off a ledge or anything. The rotation sometimes takes a bit longer to kick in than I’d like, but that’s probably an issue with the hardware more than anything.

You never die. If you kill your stick guy, he just respawns. The objective is to complete the stage as fast as possible. Each level has goal times you can work for, or you can just work to make sure you get all the coins on every level, as many are options and are harder to do than just getting the key and leaving. That’s mostly what I did.

That’s seriously all there is to this game, though. It’s very much “What you see is what you get.” I’ve played a lot of levels, and while they got more complicated (more tiles and more rotation required) they never really mixed up the formula or gave it a twist. It could have used one! But for a dollar, I definitely got my money’s worth. I do kind of wonder what the first one was like. This game is really very simple, in both visuals and gameplay. How could this be an evolution of something else? Is this just a level pack? I have no idea.

I really, really enjoyed Alice: The Madness Returns.

Trust me, I’m as shocked as you are. I watched the quick look and it looked visually interesting, at least. It also got decent reviews. I figured I might as well rent and try it. That’s what Gamefly is for, right? When I got hooked on it, though, I was shocked, but I enjoyed the whole game, really. Alice isn’t going to be Game of the Year or anything, but if you like 3D platforming, this is really quite a fun time.

The plot is that basically, Alice is seeing an odd doctor to attempt to make her forget the death of her family. However, the treatment seems to be having ill consequences: Wonderland is being destroyed as her memories are wiped clean. Alice, tired of this bullshit after seeing what this process is doing to her Wonderland, sets out to recover her lost memories and save Wonderland from the Demon Train thing that’s tearing it apart.

Most of the game is platforming, but it’s not frustrating at all. Alice is incredibly mobile. She has basically a quadruple jump, and you can hold down the jump button to do a Princess Peach Float in between the first three jumps. This lets you save yourself from jump miscalculations most of the time, and for when you don’t, the game has really good checkpoints that keep you from losing too much progress. You’ll also find little secrets, like shards of memory, hidden about behind breakable walls or secret passages you must shrink to get into. Par for the course for this genre, certainly, but the shards of memory are really interesting! There is another collectable, bottles, that don’t do anything, and any time I found one of them, instead of a memory shard, I was pretty displeased. I guess they just didn’t have enough voice overs recorded to make them all memory shards? It’s a shame. There are also little challenge rooms you can find that give you Rose Paint, the game’s version of a piece of heart, if you complete the challenge. This challenge can be anything from a “survive waves of enemies” challenge, a harder version of a minigame you played in the game, or a riddle. Honestly, I wish more of them would have been riddles. It fits the whole Wonderland thing better, and the riddles they did have were pretty cute.

Other than the platforming, there is combat, which is really well done. It is really skill-based, and while I set it on Easy, which I believe just made every enemy drop tons of health which was fine by me, I still had to learn it and figure out what I was doing to succeed. You really have to prioritize enemy targets and figure out who in a group to take out first. You also have to learn when to dodge and when to attack, and what weapon works best on what enemy. It’s fast-paced, enemies don’t seem to be damage sponges in general, and it’s a lot of fun.
The weapons are also pretty cool. You have the Vorpal Blade, a bloody knife that is your quick melee. You have the Hobby Horse, my favorite, which is this gigantic horse head on a stick that you slam to the ground hard, and is your heavy melee. It is incredibly satisfying. Alice wields it in a completely badass way, and it makes satisfying noises as you smash people with it. You have the Pepper Grinder, which is basically a machine gun, only it works on a cooldown and doesn’t have ammo. The last weapon is the Teapot Cannon, which is kind of a grenade launcher that requires charging, so it takes awhile to fire, but can be good at taking out enemies with multiple weak points or a group of weak enemies. While I found myself using the Hobby Horse and Pepper Grinder for most situations, all weapons had a place and they were all useful.

The game is both polished and not. The game is fairly long, and every room has brand new horrors and oddities to look at. They do a good job of showing a descent into bad stuff in most areas, with them starting tame, but a little off-putting, and then ending with them being flat-out creepy by the time you’re done with an area. I even took some bad cell phone shots of some of the statues, because I was so impressed with how they looked. Also, because they were naked lady bugs.
In addition, the music is fucking FANTASTIC. It is very low key and just there to create ambiance, and it doesn’t really get very busy. But it sets the creepy tone perfectly. For example, listen to the fight theme. I love this. You’ve got the evil ruin she’s fighting with the war drums, feeling very sinister, but on top you have these bells, kind of innocent and light, representing Alice herself. Love it.
At the same time, there are parts where the game is a bit buggy or off. I kept bumping into tiny invisible walls on things like stairs, so I had to jump up them instead of just walk up them. There seems to be a glitch with the Teapot Cannon that freezes you in place sometimes after using it. You can fix things by jumping, but it is a bit annoying in combat. Many of the minigames seem a bit odd and out of place. There are several Guitar Hero-like sequences for no reason I can discern which feel very pasted into the game, for example. The doll-head-roll minigame near the end of the game is particularly odd in it’s inclusion, and is, unfortunately, really frustrating to do. That part of the game probably frustrated me more than all the rest combined. There was also only one boss fight, at the end of the game, which is odd, because it seems like there were several parts that were SUPPOSED to be boss fights, but the area would just end. As I said, oddly rough in some parts, but it didn’t ruin the game overall for me at all.

Finally, the plot is not particularly subtle. But frankly, I like that. I feel if the game was trying to go super deep with metaphor and shit, it would have felt very fake, forced, and “Look How Clever I Am.” It’s all in front of you, and somehow, that makes it more fun. There are clear relationships between Wonderland and the real world as you see it, and even Alice knows that Wonderland is a level of escapism that helps her cope and deal with the world, because there she is powerful. I figured the game would fizzle out at the ending, but it didn’t. Alice wins and solves her problems both in Wonderland and the real world in a very satisfying and believable way.

I highly recommend Alice as a rental or bargain bin purchase if you can stomach platformers at all. I never expected American McGee to make a good game, but this is quite a solid product that’s worth your time. I found it really worth mine.

I’m still playing Tiny Tower. Like, every single day.

Why?

1. I’m still seeing new things.
Tiny Tower has nice pixel-style visuals. I like it. It looks cool. They put a lot of time and effort into making all those floors look really neat. Plus, there are a TON of them. At the time of this writing, my tower is currently 76 stories tall. There has, of course, been no repeats in the types of floors. Even stuff like the various apartment floors, which could easily have been repeats, are all distinct and different looking. And I know, from looking at the list of desired jobs and at friends’ towers, that I have not seen a whole lot of stuff yet.

2. Progress is really well thought out.
I really like that, even though my tower is huge now, and I’m bringing in a ton of money, my progress is thought out enough that I can still proceed. In most free to play games, you eventually hit a point where proceeding without paying is a tedious mess. The game is basically screaming at you to give them money, and lots of it. Tiny Tower doesn’t do this. Progress is still about the same: I can make enough to build about one floor a day. I could certainly build a lot faster if I didn’t, but I don’t have to. Since the game is so casual, a floor or so a day feels like perfect progress to me. I like it.

3. Availability of “For Pay” Content.
Tiny Tower loves to give you Tower Bux, the thing you can pay money for. It gives them to you quite often. It’s extremely nice. As long as you keep your spending of them to a minimum, you don’t have to be shut out of key features just because you didn’t pay, like upgrading your shops. Personally, I use my Tower Bux to move tenants into apartments (because that takes FOREVER without it) and upgrade shops that require a lot of constant attention: I only really check the game twice to three times a day, and shops that require me to constantly be fiddling with them are less desirable. Thankfully, they put in that feature so I could upgrade them and have to worry about them less! And because they’re so nice about giving me Bux, I can use that feature sparingly to increase my enjoyment of the game.

4. Inability to Lose Progress/Low Time Commitment
If I forget to check Tiny Tower in a day, I don’t lose progress. Everything I’ve done is still effective. My tower doesn’t rot, my wares don’t spoil. I can not touch the game for days, and it won’t punish me for it. Sure, I’ll be making less money and progressing slower, but I won’t be kept back. I won’t have to climb back up to where I was.
Because of that, and my upgrading strategy, I can play the game when I wake up and when I go to bed, as I have been, and not feel like I’m fucking it up. I can play this game on my terms. Many of these games try to set the terms for you. Tiny Tower makes suggestions of terms, but doesn’t stop you from making them yourself. I appreciate that.

Tiny Tower really is great. Some people hate this kind of game on principal, and that’s cool. Don’t play it. But I easily would have dropped a few bucks on this game. It’s just fantastic, and even better that it’s free. If they offered something to buy that wasn’t just the ability to do what I am doing but more, such as, I don’t know, a pack of new shops or something, I would probably buy it to support them.

I have no idea what to write about, so let’s look at the ol’ list of Blog Post Topics and see what the oldest one on there is.
Duel of the Planeswalkers 2012?
Alright.

Also known as Magic Roster Update 2012, this sequel to Duel of the Planeswalkers is… well, it’s okay. It certainly gives you access to more interesting decks right off the bat, like a super-annoying Vampire deck and a Metalcraft White Equipment deck. Instead of feeling like you’re playing with the most basic starter decks, like the first game, it feels like, instead, you’re playing with really solid preconstructs. Personally, I do feel like that’s an improvement, though it does make the game feel more unbalanced than the first. Some decks just seem to have little to no chance against others. Since I tend to like to just play my favorite deck and want to rake people over the coals if I’m playing against an AI opponent, that leads to unfortunate fights where my deck is just really, really ill-suited to the opposing deck. I could switch to another, but you get bonuses for sticking with one deck in the form of unlockable cards, so it makes you want to stay with just one.

Once again, you can’t actually build decks in the game, but in general, the customization is less stupid. In the first one, you couldn’t remove cards that were in the base deck, which was dumb, as many cards in the base deck were just obviously filler until you unlocked the better cards, and that made sure you always had a deck larger than 60 cards, which really sends the wrong message to new players. In this one, you’re basically building a sideboard of sorts for that deck, and can remove or add cards from the total collection of deck + sideboard however you want.

To be honest, though, this game didn’t keep my interest much at all when I got it. I don’t know if I was just in one of my Magic downswings or what, but I just didn’t want to keep at it and push through when my choice of deck seemed to have no hope. I was also very disappointed it didn’t have a 2-Headed-Giant campaign like last time. While I’m sure almost nobody used that feature, I thought it was awesome, and found it very fun when I played it with friends. It’s a missed opportunity, and part of the reason I bought it was because I assumed it would be there. I’m also sad that you unlock new game puzzles during the little campaign, instead of it being a separate mode. I enjoyed just playing through all those puzzles last time around. It was the first thing I did.

If you didn’t buy the first one, this is the one to buy. It’s inoffensive, and you pretty well know what you’re paying for. I just couldn’t get into it.

Twitter was all like “Oh man, Quarrel is like Boggle and Risk put together, oh man, Quarrel is so awesome you should play Quarrel!”
So, you know, I downloaded it.

First off, let me just say that the versions of the game are stupidly misleading for no reason. The game called “Quarrel” is just a demo. “Quarrel Deluxe” is the actual game. I just played the demo, though. It was fun, but I couldn’t see myself playing it enough to be worth five bucks because of issues.

Quarrel is a very good looking game. All the characters have lots of, well, character. They hop around and throw letters at each other. You also fight opponents with little animated expressions and reactions, which is nice. The gameplay really is exactly what it sounds like: Boggle + Risk. Each troop you have is one more letter you can put into the word. You spell words instead of rolling. The person who has the highest point total word wins the fight and takes out the other side. Point ties go to whoever entered the word the fastest. Winning gets you “treasure” which you can use at the beginning of a fight to call in an extra dude. You do troop movements like Risk, and you get one guy on each controlled territory at the end of every turn.

All that is fine, but it just didn’t catch me. When you can lose because you aren’t faster than an AI opponent, that takes a lot of fun out of playing against the AI, at least personally. The game doesn’t show me a countdown clock or anything, so I really don’t know how fast the computer is. The game even has a little mini game to play while the computer players are fighting each other. Why not just skip those fights? I don’t know. It’s a weird decision.

But the real problem is lack of multiplayer. I’m not talking about in the demo, that’s fine if it doesn’t have it there. But the full version doesn’t have any multiplayer either. This game would be fun as shit against actual opponents, but not being able to have any just makes the game a moot point. You can beat an AI that’s intentionally being stupid, and you will fail against an AI that always knows the highest value word because it’s an AI. It’s not a challenge. It’s just kind of a timewaster. Against real people, speed becomes a fun element. Against real people, strategy becomes more important. Against real people, this becomes and awesome game.

But it’s not there yet. Play the demo if you want. It’s free, and you’ll get some fun out of it. But goodness, I can just not see the full version being a purchase you can make without very, very robust multiplayer options.

I don’t have a separate tag for manga, so I guess anime will do. Does anyone care about my tags anyway? Who knows.

Anyway, Mightyblue on Talking Time mentioned this manga called Prunus Girl. His short description was “sort of a romance/slice of life between a guy and a trans/crossdressing guy without being overbearing or stereotypey about it.” Because I am incredibly predictable (but I mean seriously, let’s face it. We all like reading stories about ourselves, right? Is it really weird that I want to read a romance that involves a transgendered person?) that was more than enough to make me check it out. I hadn’t read any manga in a long while, so why not?

I really don’t know what to think about it. I don’t think it’s really all that great, but at the same time I read the majority of the comic in one non-stop sitting, so it kept me engaged on some level. Though not in the way it seems to engage random people talking about it on the internet, if Google searches are any indication. It seems to be a lot of debating if Aikawa, the transgendered character, is really male or female. He certainly teases about that fact a lot during the comic, but the fact remains: he tells everyone he’s male. Thus, he’s male. The fact that he’s very feminine and always wears female clothes doesn’t really change that. In any case, I could really give a shit about that sort of thing, though I would feel a bit disappointed if they finally got together and Aikawa WAS physically female, AND just shed being a man completely. It would sort of make Maki’s character arc of coming to terms with his feelings for a guy a really fucking moot point, and that’s all the story really has going for it. I guess Aikawa could be physically female, but a transsexual man, without me feeling cheated in that way, but goodness, I don’t know if this author could even attempt to handle something like that in an intelligent manner. But we’ll get to that later. Point is, Aikawa is a man and it’s dumb to debate it.

Even saying all that, though, I must admit I don’t get Aikawa much at all. I don’t understand why you’d go through all the trouble to look female (and it is a fucking lot of trouble) and then tell everyone you’re male. Granted, this is because I’m me, trying desperately to look female but still keep my look. He passes with ease, and I’m jealous and shocked he kind of throws it away constantly. I find it difficult to push through that and understand the whys behind what he does. Then again, maybe there’s nothing to break through and see. Maybe the whole thing is being played for laughs and that’s all I’m supposed to take away. But there’s hints of depth in the characters and the scenario, so I don’t want to believe that.

In general, the comic feels like it’s being created without a plan, though, which is a shame. There’s a lot of genuine drama you could bring out of this scenario (not necessarily doom and gloom persecution stuff, but more the fact that this DOES complicate a relationship. You could explore that. That’s one of the things Wandering Son does so well.) and a lot of it is left on the table so that the story can include more super generic romantic comedy antics. There are too many scenes where something is set up that would work with any romantic comedy couple, but not with this one because of the whole transgendered thing. But the problems with it are literally written off in a throwaway panel of “I don’t care, let’s do it anyway,” which really hurts the whole thing. The biggest example of this was a water gun fight, where one team was trying to get Aikawa’s white shirt wet so they could see his breasts. But he’s a guy, and the horny guys trying to do this know it. But they just say, “Eh, I still want to,” and they’re off. It’s like the author had a silly idea, realized it wouldn’t work, but just did it anyway. I’m not necessarily against wacky romantic comedy happenstances, but at least understand your own gimmick, author.

It also just falls into that trap that bothers me more and more when I read this sort of “romantic comedy genre” stuff. The “tension” supposedly leaves if the main characters actually get together. But it’s stupid they don’t. I kind of felt this in Sasameki Koto, but that was more feeling like characters were stupid for not just being honest, as opposed to stupid for them not being together. A bit different. In Prunus Girl, it was them basically going on dates, spending all their time together, and so on, but Maki won’t call it dating because that would “ruin” things. It’s so stupid. They like even go on a fake date for shenanigans at one point, and Maki notes that THIS IS WHAT THEY NORMALLY DO WHEN THEY’RE TOGETHER. THEY NORMALLY GO ON DATES. But he won’t call it that, noooo. It’s such an artificial thing. It keeps the characters from growing because they are stunted by this stupid decision to keep this “tension” going between them. There’s plenty of tension to be found if they START dating! Use writing! Bleh.

Anyway, yeah. Can’t recommend this one. There’s no planning to it, no real overall arc to be found here. I suppose I have read worse manga (yeah, yeah, I have) but still. There’s probably a better way to spend your time.

I was always a Street Fighter person, and never a Mortal Kombat person. Never really gave a shit about that series. However, that new remake came out, and with Giant Bomb going on and on about how it has an actually good single player story for some reason, as well as friends at work just being huge Mortal Kombat fans, I really felt like I had to try it. So, you know, Gamefly to the rescue!

I didn’t make it through the story mode.

I’m not saying the game is bad, I just lost interest! I think the game seems really good. There’s no doubt there’s like a million fucking modes in there, as well as strong online play and plenty of characters to work with. They’ve got, you know, all your favorites. If you have favorites. I don’t have favorites. Their use of a modified EX/Super meter seems to work well for the game.

But yeah, I just… I don’t really get Mortal Kombat. None of the characters seem fun to me. They are born of a time when I didn’t really care about blood and gore and shit, you know? I’m sure people with that nostalgia would love the shit out of these guys, but I just don’t have that. I especially don’t get why the moves are like they are. The Giant Bomb guys said the moves were easy to pull off, but man. Maybe it’s my years of Street Fighter, but I just can’t tap on directions like buttons like the game wants me to do. I had trouble with a lot of the moves, and I’d always end up only being able to use one or two. Personal problem, I’m sure, but it just seemed to go against what I think a fighting game is.

Really, though, the reason I didn’t finish the story mode was that it was too hard. I just wanted to see the stupid-ass story, you know? But I had it set to the easiest setting, and sometimes matches just would not let me mash. When they throw in those 2 on 1 matches, even the braindead level of AI becomes a huge problem, because you just can’t fuck up. If they land an X-Ray on you, it’s kind of over, and since I didn’t know the characters and shit, I wasn’t really equipped to dodge X-Rays. I didn’t want to have to redo fights. I just wanted to see the stupid plot. Eventually, though, I had to try, and I just wasn’t interested.

It’s not really the game’s fault, though! It’s trying to be a challenging, cool fighting game with a challenging, cool story mode. They are appealing to fans something HARDCORE and I could not be any less of a fan of Mortal Kombat. But good on them for making an amazing game for a series I, and I’m sure many others, had totally wrote off. It’s just not my thing. It’s on the way back to Gamefly now.

I’m up to the Five Mole bosses, all of which are Number Three, which is still a fantastic gag. Earthbound is still a great game.

While I’ve been playing through, though, I’ve really been wondering about the level ups in this game. They seem randomized, something I never really paid much attention to, but it’s coming out now because goodness, Jeff has been getting terrible fucking level ups this time around. I think I had two separate levels where all he got was +1 Max HP. No stat increases, nothing but an extra hit point. He was constantly getting one-hit-killed for quite awhile with updated gear and everything. Paula was a little better, but not by much. I know Ness has always been way more survivable than the other party members, but I just didn’t remember them being such glass cannons. Maybe I did even more grinding in my youth? Who knows!

One thing I know I didn’t use in my youth were Jeff’s gadgets. Last time I played through the game, I discovered the Slime Generator, and how it breaks the combat wide open with how obscenely useful it is. This time around, I decided that I might be missing other things just as awesome, so while I’ve been using the Slime Generator a ton since I got it again (because seriously, it is that good) I’ve been trying to remember to try all of Jeff’s other unique items that kind of stand in for him not having spells. So today I used the HP-Sucker. Uh, it’s no Slime Generator, to be sure. It’s pretty well completely garbage. Very low chance of hitting, and when it does you get like 10 HP. What a waste of a turn. Maybe it’s not surprising that I didn’t discover the Slime Generator so long ago. I seem to recall there’s an gadget that removes enemy shields, though. That one might prove as useful. I’ll try to find it. (I’m not using any walkthroughs or anything for this playthrough. Just pure memory.)

Really, though, Earthbound does have its flaws. The inventory system, while neat, is just so broken. Ness’s inventory ends up filled with so many stupid key items, like the ATM card and Receiver Phone, that you’re essentially unable to actually store anything on him. Still, it creates so many dumb little touches and cute things around it. For example, the For Sale sign. I love this item for no reason. In a game with such a small, shitty inventory, it just feels so powerful to be able to clear room by selling things, instead of dropping them. Find better gear? Sell the old gear immediately! It feels like I’m breaking something, though in reality, I’m actually letting my inventory be cluttered up with another item in the For Sale sign. Still, I always carry it with me. I can’t help myself. Using it to make a little room feels better to me than randomly eating a food item or something.

Anyway, my emulator keeps crashing on me for some reason, which slowed my progress today. Still, I’m going to keep playing. I still really enjoy the game, and if I can push past Fourside, I can finish. I always find that to be the sticking point. Once I get to Summers, it seems like the end of the game rushes to me.

Cut the Rope: Experiments is just more Cut the Rope, and that isn’t a bad thing.

Basically, the Cut the Rope people got tired of giving out awesome level packs for free and decided to make a sequel, to get more money. I’m okay with this: they really, really expanded Cut the Rope, and there is a lot of game there. It’s well worth a dollar. They’re surely going to do the same thing with the sequel here, and I can’t wait. I even splurged and gave them an extra buck for the HD version (which you don’t need to do, as it plays fine without even on an iPad) because I really liked Cut the Rope. Then I dug into this.

The “plot” of this game confuses me. The first game was that you got a mysterious box with a little dude who you needed to feed candy to by solving how the box worked. So you’re the owner of the house, and the Om Nom is just a little dude. Cool.
Now in Experiments, it’s like an alternate reality, where the Om Nom is delivered to a scientist’s house. He seems to be wanting to test the Om Nom’s intelligence. However, who are you in this scenario? You’re not the scientist, because he talks to you and encourages you. Are you the psychic force of the Om Nom, manipulating the contraptions? Are you still the homeowner from the first game? But if that’s the case, why is the scientist testing YOUR intelligence?
Of course, you’re not supposed to care about that. A cute guy wants candy, end of story. You’re supposed to play Cut the Rope.

The action in Experiments is much more fiddly, and I think that’s a good thing. The game has some tutorial levels, but it’s really clear that you should just play Cut the Rope first for the easier levels, and that these are for advanced players. It’s nice that they’re catering to people who bought the first game. The contraptions that each set of levels is based around are also quite fun. Introduced so far are tether guns and suction cups, and they all make for some interesting situations. I don’t remember, for example, anything having weight in the first game. Maybe some stuff did, and I forgot? But weight really plays a big role in these new puzzles. If you shoot the candy with a ton of tethers, it gets heavy. The force of the tether when it hits pulls the candy in its direction. Suction Cups have weight, and if you have enough of them on a bubble, the bubble won’t float up. You’re doing things like attaching and detatching suction cups to swing the candy across the level before shooting it with a tether to make it fall in the Om Nom’s mouth. You’ve also got all the toys from the previous games in play: you’re still cutting ropes, of course. It’s just Cut the Rope: Advanced, and that’s awesome.

Seriously, if you’re new to the game, get the original, or download Holiday Gift to try it. If you enjoyed the original, I think you know if you want to invest another dollar in fun action-puzzles. I did, and had a fun afternoon solving what they have in the game so far, with more to come. Good times.