The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

I really wanted to try WWE All Stars.

This seems weird to me, but I don’t know. The quick look on Giant Bomb just made it look crazy insane and flat-out fun, and I have been subjected to so much wrestling stuff through a certain person (*cough*Joe Drilling*cough*) that I was just really interesting. Luckily, this is exactly what Gamefly is for, so I put it on the list to try it.

Personally, I think WWE All Stars is a fantastic game. There are things to say about it that are negative, I guess. The art style on the characters is kind of weird, to be sure, but I don’t think it isn’t fitting for caricatures of wrestlers. I suppose most wrestling games have a complex character maker mode? This one has a shitty one bolted on. Again, I feel that’s okay, because this is much more a “fighting game” than what wrestling games normally are, from what I understand.

If you come into it with that “fighting game” mentality, which I did, the game works fantastically like that. You have dudes with special moves and combos that you can pick from. The action is very fast-paced and completely ridiculous, with you being able to do things like short air juggles and basically slamming people to the ground so hard they rocket into the air. They’re trying to make the game fun, and less what wrestling actually is and more what the wrestling in your mind would be. It totally works. I dig it.

I did have problems with it, though, which is why I didn’t play very long on it. For people who are actual wrestling fans, or just fans of other genres, I don’t think these would be much of an issue.

The first issue was targeting. You get to do these matches that have more than one other opponent in there. You switch between targets with the right stick. I never got the hang of this. I just found it kind of frustrating. Why couldn’t I just grab the dude in front of me? Plus it seemed to cycle, and it just took forever to change the focus to where I wanted it. I feel like wrestling people probably deal with this all the time, and are used to it. “Full” wrestling games probably have this. It’d be fine for them. It just didn’t work for me.

Still, I could get used to that. The part I couldn’t get used to was how counter-based this game is. Now, don’t get me wrong: an active counter system makes PERFECT sense for wrestling, and adds a lot of skill to the game. But fuck, I am always terrible at games that required timed counters. I tried, I really tried, to counter stuff. But once the opponents got hard enough that I had to counter them to have a chance at beating them? I no longer beat them. I just couldn’t do it. I am not that kind of gamer. That was it.

It’s not a game for me. But it really seems like a fun game. I dunno if I’d pay full price for it, knowing the stupid amount of features that are in the normal, “full” wrestling games? But for a fan who picked this up for like… 30 bucks? That’d be a damn, damn good purchase. It’s exciting and arcadey and I am glad I tried it.

On The Stick did an SNES draft. It was totally fun, just like their NES draft! But it had one huge flaw.
No Earthbound.
Blew my mind. I mean, Final Fantasy 2 is a fine game, but when you’re picking that over Earthbound? You’ve got your RPG priorities wrong. I wasn’t really mad? But the idea of doing a “protest” and replaying Earthbound stuck in my mind. Then I started thinking about the last time I replayed Earthbound, and what a delight it was to revisit it, not being completely useless at RPGs. So I decided to do it. I started playing Earthbound again. Named my party Alex, Cris, Brer, and Ecks, and set out. Then I was thinking about commenting on twitter, but that seemed more a thing to do here. So here I am.

Today I played up to getting the Pencil Eraser. Here’s what I noticed.

The game, as it always has, has a lot of heart, but I personally enjoy the way that the game does the “chosen hero” thing. Buzz Buzz mentions you’re a chosen hero, but you don’t really tell that to anyone, and nobody but Pokey really even knows about the prophecy, though of course that is relevant. At the same time, it’s like your parents always knew. When you head out the door after the meteorite crash, your mother tells you to have a nice adventure. She knows you’re now an adventurer. It’s just kind of accepted. Same with your father. He just accepts you’ll be traveling about to save the world, and makes sure you have the cash for it. It’s like… it’s like Ness had always wanted to be an adventurer, in the same way someone has always wanted to be an artist or something like that, and his parents are ready to encourage him and support him because they know he can do it if he sets his mind to it. It’s just really endearing. You really like your parents in the game. It’s cool.

When you get to Twoson, the game really takes the kid gloves off, though. Even grinding up to the point where I didn’t even have to heal during the Frankystein Mark II fight, the Ramblin’ Mushrooms and Walking Sprouts are just brutal. Hitting your single character with the “Feeling Funky” mushroom debuff and PSI Magnet is really kind of cruel, especially since there’s nowhere to buy better weapons and armor in the Twoson. On top of all this, Twoson is where you get things like the Bicycle, Pencil Eraser, and the Receiver Phone, which basically make Ness’s inventory all but useless and full of key items. You need Paula desperately, if just for the extra inventory space, but they just take awhile giving her to you. Which is weird, because you get Jeff like… immediately afterwards. Well, after his little side thing in Winters, anyway.
In any case, I think Twoson, almost single-handedly, is why I thought this game was so hard in my youth. It just doesn’t let up! Of course, being smarter now, more willing to use PP to kill regular enemies and whatnot, it’s a bit less of an issue, and once you manage to get to Happy Happy Village, the difficulty calms down a bit.

But I’ll have to experience that another day. Time to bed. We make a great team, don’t we? Be sure to turn the power OFF instead of just pressing RESET, alright?

Borders is dying. You might have heard. There was a Borders I always bummed internet from when I was in St. Louis, and now it is leaving! Boo! But I went to pick clean it’s carcass, of course. I was hoping for RPG sourcebooks, but had no luck there. However, at some point I went, “Wait, TMBG have a new album out,” and wandered to the music section. Then I bought it. On physical media. Crazy. But I told you that already.

I had heard Join Us was a better album than The Else, and I didn’t know what to think about that. I really hated The Else in the beginning. It just didn’t click with me at ALL. However, after a long downtime, I came back around to it and really ended up liking a couple tracks. I’m Impressed and Take Out The Trash, for instance, are pretty solid, and I enjoy them. It’s not their best album, but it was alright. However, people were talking about Join Us as a return to form, and that worried me. I enjoy a TMBG that rocks, not just one that makes silly songs.

I need not have worried. Join Us is a callback to some of their older stuff, but they still bring excitement.

By far, my favorite song is When Will You Die. (That is a pony video, but it’s the only one on youtube with the song! So, yeah.) It is just SO FUCKING UPBEAT and it’s language is so hateful. It is just so classic TMBG, and it’s so catchy on top of it. Lots of nice horns. SO GOOD.
I also really like The Lady and the Tiger and Cloisonné as well. Both interesting musically and catchy. I also like that they’re trying the weird round thing they do in Spoiler Alert, although that’s not one of my favorites. (Sorry, no good Youtube of that one.)

Really, though, what puts this album higher than The Else is that I find the whole thing listenable. I can pretty well go through the whole thing without issues. I especially like how the last track fades very interestingly into the first, if you have the whole album on repeat.

I don’t think Join Us is going to make new fans out of anyone who wasn’t into the Giants before. But seriously, even if you’ve kind of fallen out of love with them, this is worth a listen. It’s a fun little album that I’m glad I bought. I have bad taste in music, but this is good stuff.

I had heard lots of good things about Age of Empires Online from Giant Bomb, and I wanted to try it. Since it is free, that seemed easy to do! So I went to the website, where I clicked a button that said “Download now!” It downloaded a little thing which, when run, downloaded another thing, and had the game installed, which then needed to patch, but that’s cool! Once it was all patched up, I could play.

I get into the game, and click to start. It asks me to sign in to my Live ID, which I do just fine, but then it asks me for a “Live Access Code.” I have no idea what that is. I go to the main website of AoEO again, and it doesn’t mention anything about an access code. What the fuck? So, of course, I go to the forums, because surely there’s a solution there.

You see, the Access Code is basically a CD key. You get one when you download the game through the Games for Windows Live Marketplace. You can look it up there.

I didn’t get the game from there. I used the button on the website that it was telling me to use very eagerly to try the game. It gave me nothing. When I opened the Marketplace, it didn’t show that I had downloaded AoEO. It didn’t have a code for me. I had to download it AGAIN, though the Marketplace, to get a code to be able to start the game.

Nice going, Microsoft!

(The game’s kind of cool once you get into it, though.)

They mentioned Godville on a podcast I listen to and so I downloaded it. Because I am a sheepfoxbunny who will buy any iOS game I’m told to. Of course, it was free. You can also play it on the website, I guess, but I’ve only really played in the iPad app.

Do you remember Progress Quest? This is basically just Progress Quest. But it’s like… bad. I remember when I first played Progress Quest. I found many of the items and shit funny. Then again, maybe that had something to do with how the game taught me awesome words like Vambrace. In any case, the mechanics within were kind of novel and a solid critique of the time, and I found the writing funny for the bit I played the game.

Godville just doesn’t have that. I mean, I appreciate they’re good enough to give credit where it’s due to Progress Quest on their website. I can dig that. But it’s just not funny. All the monsters and little comments my hero makes just don’t make me smile. They are like, the very worst jokes. They are like 4th grade jokes, and not even dirty ones. It’s really kind of a shame. I hear many of the items, enemies, and so on are made via a player submission system, which is probably why they just aren’t up to snuff. I just really expect more actual comedy from my comedy games.

Godville does attempt to mix up the formula. You’re a god or goddess, so you can send messages to your hero for minute amounts of control. You can Encourage or Punish them. You can revive them if they die. You can shout messages from the heavens at them. You really don’t get to do this enough for it to be engaging, though. The Encourage or Punish just… I don’t know! They probably only affect your hero’s motivations at specific points, but the game doesn’t make that very clear. Similarly, I looked up on the wiki what words made your hero do something, and it is a very small amount! What’s worse, often the hero will ignore them because she’s doing something else, or started an action as you sent the command. You can pay them for more power to give these commands, but eh. I don’t know why you would. They don’t do enough!

I dunno. It doesn’t need much interaction, I suppose, much like Progress Quest, so that’s nice. You can check on it every day or every week, and it works, I suppose. The reward would be looking in on your hero and going “Oh shit, that is one wacky item or skill you’ve learned, hero!” But they’re just not that well written, so it doesn’t give me that.

It’s free. You can try it. But I’m really not impressed with it. Oh well.

I fell asleep during Conan.

I feel old.

Then again, I did go see it really the fuck late and night, and Molly woke me up at like 7 in the morning so it’s not like I slept much. But yeah, I saw Conan, which was quite a change of pace from the large amounts of My Little Pony Fanart I was looking at before I left for the film. There was a lot of bloods and there were many decapitations. There were also tits, but for better or worse, those were in some of the fanart, so it wasn’t that much of a change of pace in that regard.

Anyway, enough ponies while talking about Conan.
I feel like this is a hard movie for me to really give a good whatever about, not just because I dozed off. It was just so violent and so predictable, but at the same time, that sort of thing is what one would seem to be coming to see a Conan movie for. It’s certainly what Cara was coming for. She said it had all the boy eye candy and murder that she was hoping for, so good for her! I’m glad she liked it.

Seriously, though, it was pretty intense on the violence front. I can’t remember the last movie I watched that was so brutal directly. Guys had their heads smashed in on concrete in full view. You get to see lots of decapitated heads with nice entrails and shit. There were certainly a few times where I flinched away from the screen because of the violence level.

But yeah, plotwise, nothing unexpected happens. Conan’s father needs avenging. Conan ends up doing it, but first he accidentally ends up teaming up with a pretty lady type person to do it, who then gets captured, and you know. All that stuff. I couldn’t help but think about Glistening Chests while I watched, either. A personal holdup, sure.

The one thing I will mention that I was really impressed with is that the movie made damn sure to get those book cover painted vistas in there. To the point where they looked painted and obviously green-screened, but still. Certainly set the tone right, you know?

Anyway, yeah. It was an odd experience for me. Not a bad one, perse? But I certainly didn’t feel any connection to anyone in the movie. It seemed to offer up all the right visuals, but I wouldn’t call it a great film. Still, if you like Conan, I bet you’d like it. It would be fun. I think. This has been a terrible review, all infested with ponies.

P.S., Ponies.

Well, last Steam Sale, I bought Atom Zombie Smasher, the newest joint from Blendo games, the guy who did the completely awesome Flotilla. I loved that! I wanted to try this! So I did.

There’s a lot of nice stuff here, but ultimately, I think Flotilla is a superior experience.

Basically, like Flotilla, Atom Zombie Smasher, at it’s core, is one type of combat randomized and thrown at you again and again. You are given an area of city. In this area are Zombies and Civilians. You have to land helicopters and lift out as many good guys as possible, while setting up Marines and traps and stuff to slow the Zombies so you can actually get to the Civilians while they’re alive. The game randomizes the kind of units you can have for each mission. There are some that are super useful, like Artillery and the Marines, but there are some that are useful, but not nearly as useful as other units and make the challenge quite hard if you get them, like Roadblocks. In any case, you set them up before the mission, but some units are active, and you can reorganize and regroup as you play, moving the Marines around, re-aiming your snipers, changing the landing zone of your helicopter, and so on. You can retry as many times as you want, too, so if your strategy is bad, you can adjust.
Sometimes, it’s just impossible, though. Areas have infection ratings, and if you go into a high-infection area with a shitty loadout, you are just kind of all-around screwed. Don’t do something higher than one if you have roadblocks! Just don’t.

The game runs on a scoreboard. Clear an area, and you get points. Fail, the Zombies get points. Infected parts of the map generate points as well every turn, but liberated areas generate points for you. The first to fill up their meter wins. It’s important to focus on keeping the Zombie scoring capability down by clearing out higher-level missions so that outbreaks don’t fuck you over as much. It’s an interesting dynamic, to be sure, and eventually you’re rescuing scientists to upgrade things, and killing Zombies to charge orbital barrages… it’s fun.

Like Flotilla, though, eventually you figure it out. Once you’ve figured out the combat in Flotilla, it’s pretty trivial: you either win, or you are so outgunned you were going to die no matter what, really. Atom Zombie Smasher is much the same way. Once you figure out how to keep the Zombie meter under control, and how to use the units effectively, no encounter is really hard. However, Flotilla was much more random. There were many random events, and several storyline plots you could fall into as you played. The game felt fresher for a ton longer because of that, because I wanted to see all the content. Atom Zombie Smasher advances on a very clear timeline, and that wacky “what’s going to happen?” thing just isn’t there. Once you’ve mastered the combat, that’s pretty well all there is, unfortunately. There are little storyline bits that show up at random, but they don’t swing your game at all. They’re just kind of funny. It’s a shame.

To it’s credit, though, Atom Zombie Smasher has a ton of options to customize your experience. You can make the game super hard, super easy, or whatever you’d like. Would you rather pick units for each mission? You can turn that on. Would you like to take less units into each mission? Possible. There are tons of checkboxes to make it fun for yourself, which I do appreciate and got some mileage out of. There’s also a super-interesting Development Diary that unlocks the first time you complete a runthrough, and it’s cool to see how much work went into this game and how it came to be.

Anyway, it’s a great little indie game by a cool guy. It’s totally worth picking up. But if you were only to get one Blendo game, I would still suggest Flotilla. There’s just more game there. Still, I can’t wait to see what else he makes. He’s pretty awesome.

I never watch television, but sometimes something comes into my field of vision and then I watch it. All the nice IRC people who originally got me to take the Pony Plunge and really fall in love with Friendship is Magic pulled me into another viewing party the other night, and showed me something called Regular Show. I had vaguely heard of this, but I knew nothing about it. However, just watching a few episodes with them made me fall in love. I watched basically everything else there was. It’s a pretty fantastic show.

Here, experience it for yourself.

Nothing about it is particularly like… laugh out loud hilarious? But there’s just a level of insanity that somehow is completely logical in the setting, and a pushing of what you can show in a TV PG show, that just makes it quite enjoyable. I mean, just take a look at the first episode. There’s absolutely no explanation of anything, really. This episode could appear anywhere in the show’s run. Yet you never really feel like you don’t have a grasp of what’s going on. The characters are so realistic to how people act, but yet they’re in a world that’s just fucked up. That’s pretty cool to me.

The show is very formulaic in a way. Something completely mundane or not sensible happens, and eventually some sort of supernatural or otherwise thing is born from this scenario, and the cast has to stop it. I can see the formula, but at the same time, it’s still surprising each time. Because everything is so disconnected from the logic of our reality, you’re never sure exactly what kind of monster they’re going to be facing. Yet, again, somehow it all makes some sort of sense. It’s pretty amazing.

I also just like how much it pushes the boundaries. The characters are obviously getting drunk fairly often, and there’s pretty clear sexual references, though just not explicitly. It just feels like a show that, if you added a few more cuss words to it, would probably stand up just fine on Adult Swim. It’s cool. Give it a watch.

I think I’ll just continue clearing down my list of topics for awhile… let’s see here…
Okay, Super Stickman Golf. I can do that.

Super Stickman Golf is kind of neat. It basically has absolutely nothing to do with golf. It’s kind of a very strange platformer, and it’s clever, fun, and chock full of tons of content. If that’s your thing, this is a game you should pick up on iOS.

Basically, what you have are platformer levels, from a side view. Your little golfer is trying to put the ball in the hole, of course, but it’s all about traversing cliffs and platforms, instead of the normal “ball control onto the fairway” sort of thing that actual golf involves. There are sand traps, of course, but those are actually more useful than “trap” in this game, because it’s a safe place for the ball to stop without rolling, for example. Water Hazards and similar are as per normal. You try to shoot for the “par” score on each hole, like in golf, though many levels have floating icons that subtract strokes from your score for making difficult shots, so you can try for them, if you’d like, and make Par that way.

To help you, you can pack a number of special power balls with you for each course. The simplest is the mulligan, which just lets you take a shot over, but eventually you unlock things like the Sticky Ball, which will stick to whatever it hits, even a wall, and stop there, or the Ice Ball, which freezes water hazards into a platform. Eventually, it becomes a hard choice. Mulligans are so useful that you want to take a lot of them, but without the special shots, some holes become extremely hard or nearly impossible to do at or under par. The fact that you have to pick them before starting a round really adds a little bit of strategy to the game. I like that.

There are just a ton of levels in this game, too. From what I understand, this game basically has the entirety of the previous game (which is just Stickman Golf), and then two more sets of levels just as long. It was getting fairly hard near the end of the “beginner” courses, so I can’t even imagine how hard it would be once you get to the high-level courses. It requires skill and precision. It’s fun, and easy to pick up and play. The only thing that seems a waste is the multiplayer mode, which isn’t hotseat for reasons I can’t even begin to understand. But it doesn’t matter. It’s a fun game with plenty of shit. Ignore the microtransactions and just play. You’ll find plenty to entertain you without paying for early unlocks.

Let’s see, what’s like, the oldest thing on my to-write-about list…

Oh wow, Dungeon Raid. How have I not talked about that?

Dungeon Raid is an iOS game you should buy. If you liked Puzzle Quest, but wish the outcome of games would be more in your hands, Dungeon Raid is a game for you. While there is no “quest” with a storyline you will skip, Dungeon Raid keeps randomish matching gameplay, but never feels like the computer is purposely screwing you over. Sure, eventually it gets to be a war of attrition that you have trouble beating, but you never feel like “that’s bullshit that the computer just took four turns in a row!” or whatever.

Basically, there’s a grid. This grid is filled with Gold Coins, Shields, Swords, Health Potions, and Skulls, which represent enemies. You pick one piece, and trace your finger along similar pieces until you can’t go any farther, then release to clear all those pieces. Clear gold, and you get gold. Clear shields, and you repair your armor and get “gear EXP” for enchanting your equipment. Clear health potions, and you get healed. The only thing that’s different is skulls and swords. Each skull has HP, needed to defeat it. After you take a turn, each skull on the board attacks you, with damage mitigated a bit by your armor value. Each sword you trace through increases your attack power, so you trace through swords AND skulls, and kill them to get EXP. Sometimes there will be special skulls on the board, which do special things. One “breaks” swords so that the swords stay on the board, but don’t do anything if you collect them, for example. One teleports around. One can only be hurt if it’s not the last skull in your line that you’re tracing, and so on. These bosses give you more EXP, of course.

The only weird part is the level system. You have several equipment slots. Fill up your gold meter, and you’re given a selection of equipment to buy and replace your current gear, which will hopefully improve your character. Fill up your “gear EXP” and you can add an effect to an item you own, like Poison, or +HP, or something like that. Level up, and you can pick a new spell or ability. These do things like turn all skulls into swords, collect all gold on the board, and so on. They’re actually dictated by what class you are, and you unlock more classes as you play through the game. The thing is, what the game offers you is random. If your level up offered you a +Luck stat boost skill one time around, there’s no promise it’ll be there next time. Same with equipment. You can’t count on anything. It’s sometimes frustrating like that, when you want to buff a certain stat and the game just won’t give you the option to.

Still, this is a great little time-waster. It requires focus, but not TOO much focus. It’s not a huge commitment: you can play a round for a few minutes, and pick it up later, and not be lost on what you’re doing. It’s just really good game design, and totally worth the three bucks I paid for it. I’ve stopped playing it now, but I really played it solid for a few weeks when I got it. Do consider it! It’s good.