The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

Apparently I didn’t write a blog about it, as my search for one is coming up short, but let me just make it clear that I really, really enjoyed Sonic and Sega All-Stars Racing for the 360. It was, by far, the best Mario Kart clone I’ve ever played. It’s better than, say, Mario Kart Wii. If you like that kart-racing, power-sliding kind of game, and have any affinity for the likes of characters like Ulala at all, it is a game worth playing. You could probably pick it up now on the cheap, too.

Anyway, I just wanted to say that because that’s part of what prompted me to pick up Sonic and Sega All-Stars Racing for iOS. The other part was that it was getting a ton of positive buzz as being basically the best racing game on iOS. The third element was that it was on sale. Isn’t that always the reason I buy something like that?

It’s really good on iOS, too.

Basically, the iOS version has all the features of the full console version. The races, powers, and so on basically work exactly the same. Of course, it smartly uses the auto-gas that many iOS racing games use, but you have a “drift” and “brake” button on one side of the screen, and your items on the other. You turn by tilting. It was well-calibrated for me right from the get-go, and felt quite good, even better than, say, Hot Pursuit. I was pulling off power slides like I do in the console version with little effort. The controls are fine. The courses, from what I’ve seen so far, are exactly the same as well. I am getting something extremely close to the full game experience for my two dollars. That’s really just kind of amazing.

It’s not the complete game, though. You’re missing several cups worth of courses, though you do have quite a few to play in the game. You’re also missing some of the racers. Ulala not making the cut hurts me deeply. There’s still a good variety, since they smartly decided to weed out a lot of Sonic characters like Amy and Shadow, and I have Beat from Jet Set Radio to fall back on as my go-to racer, so I suppose it’s okay. Maybe they’ll add more courses and racers in updates? I don’t know. There’s still tons of kart racing to be had here, though if you liked a specific course from the console version, you may be out of luck. You also will have trouble playing online matches. I tried to quick match a few times against online randoms, just to try, and it never found a game. iOS multiplayer just never quite works well enough like that. It does have local bluetooth stuff, though, so I suppose if you’re lucky enough to have friends around with the game, you can at least do that.

Seriously, though, if you like Kart racers, this is a fantastic fucking value at the sale price I bought it at. It’s probably worth more than two dollars if you like racing. Sega did a damn good job with this port, just like they did a shockingly good job with the original game. It’s worth a look, if it sounds like something you need in your iOS life.

Multipong!

The name kind of says it all.

Seriously, though, Multipong is kind of cool. It’s Pong Meets Warlords. You basically play Pong in a square, with four players. Using the power of MULTITOUCH, you can actually set your iPad down and have four people move their own individual paddles and play. This, and it being temporarily free, was what drew me to it in the first place. As you play, powerups appear that do things like lengthen your paddle or turn on “gravity” towards one player, so the ball “falls” towards their goal, making them have to be hyper-defensive for awhile. Sometimes the playfield also changes, adding pegs for the ball to bounce off of, or areas of “Fog of War” to keep you guessing. When you let a ball go past you, you lose a life. The last player with lives wins, of course.

It’s really simple, but it is really good at what it does. For example, the music in the game is actually pretty good chiptune-type stuff. I dig it. They also have many themes that you can skin the game with, but the default theme, which looks like old wood panel furniture meets pinball, is so classy and awesome I don’t know why you’d switch it to something else. Still, if you want it to look like actual Pong, you do have that option. There’s even a single player mode, and while I don’t know why you’d really invest much time into it, it does do it’s best to throw a variety of scenarios at you to keep you interested while you play. The developers really wanted to make a complete, polished package, and not just put a quick and dirty game onto the app store, and it shows.

With a name like “Multipong,” I wasn’t expecting much, but this is a really well-done little app. It’s never going to be something more than a silly thing you break out with your friends for like, one round while waiting for popcorn to pop before you movie or something, but for that sort of use case, it’s actually quite a lot of fun. I do recommend giving it a try.

Rango is a really strange film. It’s one of them that I watched with Brer, and while it was certainly entertaining, I really had to question a lot of the general world concept.

I mean, okay, this is a world with humans, who live like humans do, but it’s also a world where animals can build a tiny human-like town and live like townspeople? It’s not animals with human characteristics, these are basically humans, only they’re animals of various sorts. They’re living an old west life in the modern day as well, for some reason. There are little bits of scavenged human technology, like the big water cooler bottle in the bank, but they’re also clearly making their own glass bottles and jugs. These animals are in a complete society, not a scavenged from humanity one. I guess I think too much about that stuff, but it really kind of bothered me. The setting was so weird.

The core of the story, though, was fairly interesting. You’ve got Rango, who is a lizard who, due to insanity from living in an aquarium alone for so long, has decided he is an actor. When he ends up stranded and in the town of Dirt, he puts on a role as one of the most badass cowboys who ever lived, because acting is what he does. Of course, he isn’t. Hilarity ensues! What fun! Ha ha! But yeah, actors called upon to actually be what they’re used to acting is a tried and true storytelling device, and it works well here, even if it really paints Rango as just a completely, completely insane individual. You just get the feeling that, even when he’s inspiring people and doing good, he really has no idea what he’s saying at all. He just keeps rolling with it, because that’s what he does. When he goes back to save the town in the end, thanks to a completely ridiculous plot contrivance of summoning a bunch of mobile plants to help him for some reason, he doesn’t seem like he suddenly has it together any more than he does before. At the end of the film, people still love him for his lies, and you get no indication that that is going to change. He’s still going to be the terrible law enforcement officer than he was earlier in the film. It’s just such a strange place to leave things, I guess.

The other thing that kind of stood out to me during the film was the number of “jokes for the adults” that I saw. I mean, I get that Shrek made that a thing that people do. But it’s still kind of sad that people can’t make a movie that’s interesting enough for kids AND adults, and instead have to attempt to throw in jokes that are over the children’s heads, but entertain the adults forced to watch the movie. Granted, there’s nothing wrong with Hunter S. Thompson and Clint Eastwood references, but they were just so in-your-face. Just seemed to be screaming “HERE IS A JOKE FOR YOOOOOU!” I dunno. Lame.

Overall, though, it really wasn’t that bad. I guess I mostly did complaining, but a lot of that was hindsight. While watching it, I was entertained. I have certainly seen much worse animated movies. Still, it didn’t really blow me over like people were saying it should have. I was much more surprised and entertained by, say, How To Train Your Dragon than Rango. Oh well.

Today is a day of story spoilers for L.A. Noire, including, potentially, all DLC, because I’ve played it all. If you have any inclination to play the game and haven’t yet, do it, and don’t read this, please. Mechanical discussion was yesterday: feel free to peruse that if you want to know what the game is all about.

Okay, we all good? Okay. Spoilers start now.

I was, overall, very satisfied with the overall plot. I really liked how it hinted at its existence with the newspapers at the beginning, and by the time you got to Vice, it was slowly creeping into the actual cases you were doing until it basically took over the narrative full-force. I love the switch in player characters as well. I wasn’t expecting it, and it gave the story a lot of much-needed perspective, as well as showed how Cole and Kelso differ as people even more than the flashbacks did. There were some things that I felt could have used a bit more clarification. For example, I would have liked to see a bit more of Cole’s home life, in order to understand a bit better why he cheated on his wife, or be able to more accurately guess if he did, or if Roy used questionable circumstances in order to make it seem as such, and once he was outed in the media, he just went for it. I like Cole, even if, in a lot of ways, he’s the annoying side of Lawful Good. I wanted him to justify himself, but it leaves you really separated from his home life. It’s an interesting idea: you only control Cole’s professional life, not his personal. You can only watch that. It puts you in an interesting place as a player. I’m not sure if it totally worked out, but it was good to attempt.

I was also really impressed by how well the DLC cases integrated into the story. None of them had “important” story beats, but most of them (with the exception of, perhaps, Nicholson Electroplating, which kind of pulled you out of the end sequence for an inconsequential case if you played it during the story) felt like they were part of the whole game, having some conversations that tied into the overall plot while not being something that you would have felt like you missed if you didn’t have access to them. They were pretty well the perfect DLC, as far as I was concerned. I wanted more L.A. Noire, so I got more L.A. Noire. It was awesome. I do recommend them if you like the game, though now that the Rockstar Pass has increased in price over the 10 bucks I paid for it, it might be a slightly harder sell.

Really, though, this game shines with its characters. The arc of Galloway as he changes from a guy with all the answers to someone who respects Cole’s detective work and realizes he’s more the muscle than the brains is really awesome. Watching Roy Earle do the shitty things he does while Cole’s Lawful Good clashes with his Neutral Evil is just flat-out entertaining. Watching Hershel change from his “hunker down and just survive to retirement” mode in a dead-end desk to “we could actually accomplish something here” is also just fun. It’s those interactions that really sell the game and make it something special. Rockstar brought the cash to let Team Bondi get top-notch actors who sell everything they do in the game. You aren’t suspending disbelief on how characters feel because it’s a video game. It’s well-acted, and well done. It’s something that’s unfortunately rare in the video game space.

I also thought the game did a mostly good job of cluing you in to what it was doing at the appropriate times. For example, during the Homicide Desk, it gives you a case called “The White Shoe Slaying” where there is a missing white shoe. You never find it. It was then that I realized there were missing pieces of evidence at every single case before that. I could have noticed it earlier, certainly, but with that title, it made sure I recognized it before it became a big part of the story. I liked that. It made sure I had the a-ha moment. If I had already figured it out, it wouldn’t have bothered me or stuck out, but as someone who hadn’t gotten it yet, it worked perfectly as it should have.

The ending was… fitting, though perhaps a bit anticlimatic. It was the sort of thing Cole would do, and was not unbelievable. It wasn’t satisfying, perse. It does clear the way for Kelso to get with Elsa, I guess, which gives him a happy ending of sorts. But seriously, seeing Roy give the Eulogy at Cole’s funeral was just like man, this Cole guy cannot catch a break. That’s what you get for being Lawful Good, Cole! You get fucked over. Better to be Neutral Good like Kelso, eh? But so it goes. Cole served his country and the city, made mistakes, was kind of an uptight dick, but accomplished a lot of good and got screwed over for it. That’s what happens to good guys, I suppose. As I said, I didn’t mind it, but it didn’t blow me away either.

I loved L.A. Noire. It’s going to be one of my top games of the year, to be sure. It’s such a solid narrative experience that really immerses you in a world and a story. Apparently developing it was really shitty, but the game created was really great. Really great.

There’s been a trip in the way, and work, and well, I was waiting for all the DLC to come out and such, but I think it’s about time I talk about L.A. Noire. I’ll be doing it in two parts: tomorrow is spoiler day, so if you care about the story, I’ll be talking about it then. Today I’m just going to talk about the mechanics, as I tend to.

I just want to say that what I’ve heard about L.A. Noire has been shockingly mixed. There is a camp that thinks this is one of the best games to come out in a long time (and I am in that camp) and there are those who think it is complete and utter garbage. I will say that I understand the “garbage” side, but it really comes down to a difference in what you want from a game.
The people who don’t like L.A. Noire talk about how un-interactive it is. The story stays mostly the same no matter what you do, and all the actions sequences can be skipped in game, if you fail at them a few times, with absolutely no consequences. This bothers people. Games are about challenge, right? It’s about overcoming stuff like that. Without completing tasks like that, the game is meaningless.
I just really disagree. I play games on easy because I want to be what Battlefield: Bad Company 2 calls a “Content Tourist.” I just want to see what happens and what I can do. If I suck at a driving portion, I don’t want to to be stuck there, and I appreciate them giving me an out. (To be fair, I never took the out, and completed all the action sequences in the game, but I really appreciated the option.) L.A. Noire is also a game that can very easily appeal to people outside of the gaming space. Cara is very interested in it. My mom really got into it when I showed it to her. The fact that they’d be able to complete the game thanks to those skips is a very positive thing to me.

Really, though, I think the main reason people are down on this game is that they were expecting a GTA and got a Phoenix Wright. This game is extremely Phoenix Wright. Everything from gathering clues to interrogating witnesses is right out of Phoenix Wright’s playbook. Of course, the production values are much higher. The world is scarily realized. The characters use that face capture to look very realistic. The menus are contextual, using Cole’s hand moving around the world as a cursor. It’s not the silly anime world of Phoenix Wright, it’s a mostly real world, but the gameplay is the same.
That does create some of the same issues that Phoenix Wright has. For example, you may want to call someone on a lie, but the evidence you want to use is actually used on another statement, and you’re “ahead” of the game’s logic in your own thinking. To be fair, this happens way, way more often in Phoenix Wright than in L.A. Noire, but it’s still there. Beating every single Phoenix Wright game, as well as how the game continues on and gives you consequences for losing, instead of just making you go again until you get it right like Phoenix Wright, makes L.A. Noire cause me no issues, but someone who’s played GTA and not these sorts of games would be easily put off, and I can understand that. They tried to address this with how, when you pick the lie command, there’s a short conversation that makes it very clear what you’re trying to prove with the evidence. “You can’t prove that I knew the guy!” or “How do you know I was at the scene?” That’s good, but not always as helpful as they want.
Similarly, instead of tapping around for hotspots, you’re walking around at random listening for tones to search for clues. This has been described as “boring,” and it is, sort of. But the fun comes from actually finding the clues, and trying to figure out where they fit into the overall narrative. The first time you find some random things that Cole notes in his book, I always sit there and think “hmmm, how is this going to be relevant?” It’s interesting to me. If you don’t find that interesting, I guess that this is just not your game, and that’s fine.

The rest of the mechanics are fine, I guess. The shooting is kind of slippery and off from other third-person shooters, but the game never requires such pinpoint shooting as to make that a real problem. I am terrible at driving (and so fucking glad I could hand the wheel over to my partner most of the time) so I don’t know if the driving controls are awful, or I am. Probably a combination of both, leaning more towards me being awful. Intuition is a good idea, but mostly useless, in practice. I barely used it, and whenever I did, it felt like a waste.

In the end, though, L.A. Noire is a game about following a set story. If you aren’t into that, and don’t want to guide Cole along to see what happens, you will hate the game. Don’t even try it. When I started playing the game, I remarked that this is the highest-budget adventure game I’ve ever played, and that I loved it for it. I still do.

Epic War TD is a pretty pretty and solid tower defense title.

It’s also a blatant ripoff of Starcraft.

I mean, seriously, you take a look at the units running past you, and they are pretty well exactly Starcraft units with little changes. Oh, look, here’s some Zerglings, only they’re slightly glow-y. Here are some Battleships, only the stripes are a bit different. Here are some Thors, only they’re just a little boxier. It’s kind of amazing in that way. What’s more amazing is that the towers aren’t really Starcraft ripoffs too. I was shocked by that.

Still, if you can get over someone painstakingly remaking the enemy models from Starcraft, this is a really solid tower defense game. Many tower defense games will get you into a situation where, even though enemies have weaknesses, you can mostly just spam one tower and win. In Epic War, enemies are near impervious to damage that isn’t by their weakness. You could take a guy down with just machine gun towers if they’re weak to missiles, but you’re going to need a shit-ton of towers, and they’ll probably go down so slow you’ll let several slip past in the meantime. You really have to make sure you have a wide variety of towers, and look ahead to incoming waves to see if you need to build more of a certain type to survive it. It’s pretty useful that way.

The game also has a pretty nice tower upgrade system. In most tower defense games, you just upgrade when you have spare money, and it’s just a straight bonus. In this, you upgrade damage, fire rate, and range separately. The costs jump up very quickly, but an upgraded tower is much better than a couple of towers with no upgrades. It makes decisions hard: do you need another tower, or should you save up for another boost to the towers you have? It’s solid.

Other than that, it’s just tower defense. There are maps, and difficulty modes. The interface on my iPad works fantastically. I haven’t misclicked anything yet. It’s not reinventing the whole tower defense thing, but it’s a really good tower defense thing. It’s just a shame it’s such a Starcraft knockoff. If they had just taken the time to come up with their own enemy designs, it would be much easier to recommend. Still, it’s not bad, for the dollar I paid.

I have finished the Back to the Future saga! So that’s a thing.

Let’s take the ending separate from the basic plot. As I mentioned in the post about Double Visions, I really liked where the plot went. The inherent selfishness of what Marty and Doc do with the time machine was addressed in a logical way, but not one that makes them seem like monsters, perse. They do what they do because they feel it’s the right thing, but it let them see what gets caught up in the wake of them doing it, much more than I remember being addressed before. That’s super cool, and this episode, where Alternate Universe Doc decides to just go all out, and tries to manipulate his past self. just falls into that perfectly. It’s just a really good idea for a series of puzzles and encounters, to be sure. Later on, having to stop Edna yet again? It also worked for me. It was great. You even get a bit of a callback to Part 3. Smooth stuff. I was enjoying it. I was even down with Edna getting a “happy” ending, of sorts. Makes Marty and Doc not seem like monsters, and Alternate Universe Doc gets what he wanted. A bit convenient, but not a big deal.

But man, the ending.

I mean, I know it’s supposed to be a callout to the way the first movie ends and stuff. But it just seemed like “Fuck, we have Michael J. Fox? Let’s use Michael J. Fox.” It felt completely out of place, and how they deal with that situation that comes up, where they drive off and fly away FOR NO REASON, just… it was stupid. Very stupid. They can do better than that. They had been all season! I was saddened by this.

Still, though the puzzles had rough spots, in general, this is a game that people who enjoy Back to the Future should play. It is fun. It is, for the most part, well-written. I certainly don’t regret picking it up. But it could have used some help, certainly. Telltale seemed too tugged because pleasing it’s Adventure Game fanbase, and attempting to please a bunch of new people who don’t know about Adventure Game genre conventions, and just want another Back to the Future experience. It’s probably a good thing that they’re completely revamping things for that Jurassic Park game. I hope that turns out alright. I am still a huge Telltale fan, for certain. They make something, and I will play it. While not their finest hour, I had fun. So there’s that.

There was a fourth of July sale on the app store, because seriously, any occasion is a reason for an app store sale. I had been talking to Cara about games she should get. I knew she liked driving games, and I saw Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit HD on there for a buck. I really enjoyed the console version, so I figured it was worth a try for a dollar, and maybe I could recommend it to her! So, of course, I bought it. Come on, I buy everything on iOS. Are you really surprised?

Hot Pursuit on iOS is fairly impressive. The visuals are very high quality for the platform, and it has lots of the features of the normal game, like an Autolog that you can use to compare scores with your friends. Well, if your friends are actually on an EA account and have friended you. It’s a shame it doesn’t use Gamecenter. But yeah, it’s got all the little things you’d expect if you’d played the console game.

The game controls well, too. It defaults to an “auto-accelerate” mode, which is really just the best for the way racing games on the platform work. You can swipe up on one side to use your turbo, tap buttons to drop your spike strips or call in roadblocks, and pressing on the left side is your break, for tight turns and such. Oh, and you turn with motion controls. They all work pretty great, though the default setting for the motion controls is way, way too insensitive. It’s hard to make careful turns with it on the defaults. After I cranked the sensitivity most of the way up, though, I didn’t have many problems. Well, besides my normal lack of driving game ability, anyway.

While it is quite fun, there are bits of the game that really stick out, because the rest is so polished. The cars, for example, have no damage modelling at all. You “wreck” a car, but it doesn’t look like it’s been harmed in any way. I suppose that’s just a compromise they made to make it run smooth on iOS, but since the game does the same sorts of “LOOK AT THIS CRASH!” slow motion camera moves that the console game does, it really kind of sticks out. The other part that sticks out is the track design. After playing a bunch of rounds, it becomes clear that the game consists of a lot of track “segments” that they stitch together in different ways for the various courses you race on. It wouldn’t stick out so much if some of the segments, like a bit where you go through a tunnel, weren’t so distinctive to draw your attention to it. The segments are also fairly long for something that wants to be remixed like this. It’s a strange decision, to be sure.

Basically, it’s a nice little port of the console game. It works, and it is fun, though there are more straight-up race missions than the console version, and since I only like to blow up cars, it didn’t last as long for me. It’s not the kind of completely new and really polished and fun game experience as, say, Dead Space was, but EA knows how to make an iOS counterpart to their games, certainly. If you wish you could drive a car on iOS, this seems a damn fine option, especially at a dollar. At the normal price of ten bucks, it’s a bit pushing it, though. But again, any excuse will be reason for an iOS sale, so throw it on App Shopper and enjoy awhile from now!

I gave up soda.

Yeah, me. I did that.

Can you fucking believe it?

In any case, I drank straight water for awhile, and while that was fine, it also felt very forced. It didn’t replace the feel-good that came from cracking open a Pepsi, since it wasn’t all that enjoyable. Thus, I started making Crystal Light Lemonade, because I had enjoyed that in the past. (Of course, I always used twice the powder back in the day. I used the recommended dose this time around.) It was a good substitute, and while not water, was way, way better for me than soda.

Of course, the pack of lemonade mix we had from who knows when eventually ran out, and I went to the store to buy some more. When I got there, though, I noticed that the Schnucks brand was like… way cheaper. Three for the price of two cheaper. I decided it was worth a shot. However, there were three lemonade variants available: A “Natural” Lemonade, a “Natural” Pink Lemonade, and a Raspberry Lemonade. Of course, I bought all three to give them a try.

The first one I went with was the Raspberry Lemonade, because that seemed the most interesting. I love citrus, love lemonade, and rather enjoy things that are raspberry flavored. However, past experiences with Raspberry Lemonade had been poor at best. They just tasted like shitty weak lemonade that someone dropped a raspberry in.
This, however, didn’t. It was a rather strong lemonade, which I appreciated, which just had a little bit of raspberry on the back end to cut the sour slightly. It was rather good, but it’s not something I’m going to drink every day. Still, I had high hopes for the normal lemonades, as that one turned out quite well.

The standard lemonade wasn’t nearly as good, though. For whatever reason, it just tasted artificial. It had that sting that artificial sweeteners have. Granted, this is supposed to have artificial sweeteners, but I kind of hate that taste. I guess the raspberry was hiding it in the previous mix. With nothing to mask it, it was out in full force. It was drinkable, but not optimal, by any means.

The pink lemonade, though, is probably the one I will keep buying. It undercuts that artificial flavor with the sweetness of pink lemonade, and does it without, you know, making it not taste like lemonade like the raspberry does. It’s a solid and cheap drink mix. I like it.

Overall, though, these are pretty decent products, which surprised me. For example, I have bought the Schnucks generic Chex Mix before, and that was a god awful mess nobody would ever believe is Chex Mix for a second. Tasted horrible. These are fine, though.

Yeah, I wrote about drink mixes. I dunno, it was on my mind.

One of the Free Apps things mentioned one day that Backbreaker 2 was free. I seemed to recall Backbreaker being a big name attempt at sort of recreating NFL Blitz, and that sounded like an entertaining little game, so I picked it up. Why not? It was free, and while I don’t give a shit about football, I did enjoy Blitz, so who knows?

It’s not really anything like a game, really.

Backbreaker 2 seems to be two minigames that are vaguely football themed. You make a little football dude with some very limited options. (But it does put your name on the back of the jersey, so that’s kind of cool.) Then you either attempt to make touchdowns, or tackle people making touchdowns. Both games are basically the same. You use tilt to move your dude around, and to its credit, it responds pretty well. If you run over colored parts of the field, you get extra points, but you’re mostly trying to dodge defenders and get to the guy you’re trying to tackle or the endzone. In the standard mode, you also can “Showboat” and “Super Showboat” for lots of points, but that slows you down a lot, so you have to decide if you’re safe enough to do it and for how long, which I suppose adds an element of strategy to scoring points? Something like that. You can also spin or sidestep with buttons on the screen.

That’s really it. There is “Endurance” and “Challenge” modes, but I see no difference between them. I guess Endurance will continue forever if you don’t fail? I don’t know. There’s also a huge ad for some XBLA Backbreaker game every time you turn the game on, so that’s fantastic.

I can’t complain, as it was free, but this really wasn’t what I wanted. I wanted a silly, fun Football game. I could see a game with heavy hits like Blitz that I played by drawing plays on the iPad or something. I envisioned a game that was way more than this is. It’s just a high score fest, and since I give no shits about football, it really doesn’t have any appeal with it’s theme to keep me coming back. I wouldn’t tell you to pay money for it, even if you were a football person though. There has to be a cooler, actual football game on the service. I just don’t claim to know what it is.