The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

I listen to all those Asymmetric podcasts, and one of the games I’ve heard them mention over and over was Gemcraft. I didn’t know much about it, but I guess it was a flash game they really enjoyed, and it got mentioned a lot. One day, I noticed it was on the App Store. Gemcraft HD! I decided to give it a try. High definition crafting of gems! What could go wrong?

Nothing, really. It’s a fine tower defense game.

There’s a map with maps on it you play tower defense on. When you get there, you tower defense. But where the twist comes in are the gems. Appropriate, no? Basically, towers, which sit on the side of the path and shoot, and traps, which sit on the path and attack people walking over it, are powered with magical gems. These gems have properties, like Splash Damage, Slowing, Poison, or High Crit Chance. You have to build the tower or trap, but then you also have to buy a gem to put it in. These gems affect what kind of towers you have. Since the cost of building a tower increases with each one you build, making the towers you have better is of the utmost importance. Upgrading a tower simply requires putting a better gem into the tower. You can simply buy more expensive gems, if you want.
However, what makes it interesting is that you can also combine gems to level them up, Horadric Cube-style. Two gems of the same level can be combined to make one gem of one tier higher. What’s more, it’ll have properties of both gems. So if you combine a Poison and a Splash Damage gem, you’ll get a more powerful gem that does both. You can basically make towers that are jacks of all trades as you upgrade, having a little of all abilities, or focus just on certain ones. It’s a bit of strategy that makes for a nice Tower Defense change.

As you complete levels, you unlock new modes on that map, which is nice. You also gain skill points you can use for overall growth of your character, letting you lower the costs of towers and whatnot, which is appreciated, though not particularly overwhelmingly important, from what I played. There are a ton of levels and modes, too. This was a dollar well-spent, if I actually worried about amount of content.

In reality, though, I found the game really damn hard. Because you can mix and match your towers so much, and can’t cover your ass by building lots of towers, it makes figuring out what to build really hard. I quickly got to the point where I simply wasn’t mixing my gem types together enough, or was building just one too few towers, because I thought I needed to save my money to upgrade gems quicker. I understand that’s the strategy, but after the first few levels, you start to not have any margin of error. Maybe people who beat the flash games would be prepared for that, but I kind of wasn’t. I enjoyed making all sorts of weird tower combinations, but the game quickly told me I needed to min/max, and I wasn’t quite sure how.

I do have to say, though, that the fact that you can turn the game up to 3x speed, if you want, is a fantastic addition every tower defense game should have. Makes the game so, so much better to play. Being able to pause and issue commands was nice, too, though that’s not as required as the speed thing, as I could see why a developer wouldn’t want you to be able to take action while paused.

There is a shit-ton of tower defense here for a dollar. If you want some of that, go for it! If you enjoyed the Flash games, I’d think this would be a good way to give back, too. If you don’t like tower defense, though, this sure as hell won’t sell you on it. It’s a twist that makes tower defense much more finicky and such. I enjoyed it, but I put it down when I hit that wall. Got plenty else to play instead.

I have been watching Game Center CX a lot with Brer recently. It’s been fun times. However, it did get me thinking a little bit about why I’m willing to watch what’s basically a Let’s Play in Japanese about games I don’t care about when there’s so much quality Let’s Play entertainment out on the internet right now.

Earlier today, though, I feel like I finally figured it out.

You see, your normal let’s plays fall into some categories. You have people who are Let’s Playing things because that’s what you do, and those are awful and terrible and you shouldn’t watch them. You have people who are using Let’s Playing as a medium for humor, jokes, and entertainment. Those are the ones you should watch.

Game Center CX is none of those things. It doesn’t feel scripted, of course, but it also doesn’t feel forced. Arino is fucking genuine in everything he does. He is not great at games, but you can tell he has a passion for them. When he does things like read the dialog that’s on the screen out loud, it really feels like he’d probably be doing that, even if the cameras weren’t running. He’s a nice guy playing hard games. You want him to succeed.

It’s this genuine nature around Arino that makes it different than any other LP I’ve watched. Let’s Plays where people are dying over and over again and cussing games out and whatnot are kind of boring, and one-trick ponies. You don’t give a shit about the suffering, you know? (Unless, I dunno, it’s a dude I like like Brickroad dying all the time on Bomb-omb Battlefield.) With Arino, you do. You want him to win. You know he’s a nice guy who deserves to win. I mean, he’s willing to sit there and try for hours and hours for this show. He wants to enjoy and finish these games. He’s so charming, you feel for him.

That’s really the difference, I think. Whether that happens through solid show editing (which is possible) or just with Arino being awesome, I’m not sure. But it’s certainly a different experience, and one that I enjoy having.

I ended up subscribing to Amazon Cloud Drive for a year. We’ll see if that is ever actually useful. I’m not sure it will be. However, part of the shenanigans that lead to me doing that was me buying the album Turtleneck and Chain, which I’ve been listening to for a few days now.

I like it.

I mean, in general, a comedy album is only going to get you so far. You have to be dedicated to the joke, or be really catchy, to make a joke song worth listening to. Lonely Island is good at that. Classics like “Like a Boss” and “I’m On A Boat” meet those criteria. I was worried they wouldn’t be able to create good replacements on this new album.

It starts out weak, with We’re Back. I mean, it’s okay? It’s humorous the first time you start it up, certainly. I was worried. Even “Jack Sparrow,” which is just a fucking awesome video, loses something without seeing Michael Bolton dressing up in costumes. However, I started to hit the songs that are certainly my favorites. “Rocky” is hilarious and pretty catchy, and I really enjoyed it much in the way I enjoy Alberquerque no matter how many times I listen to it. It’s awesome. Similarly, “Japan,” “After Party,” and “No Homo” are solid tracks. I missed “Motherlover” the first time around, and it’s pretty fantastic to experience as well, and works completely without the video.

For sure, though, my favorite song is “Threw It On The Ground.” It’s a bad-ass sounding song, and the lyrics just make me laugh again and again. I watched the video, and it’s solid, to be sure, but it works without it. It had just about the perfect amount of fake bad-assery.

Anyway, I think it’s pretty solid. Not everyone is the sort of person who would listen to a novelty album like this often, but it’s solid stuff. Lonely Island knows what the fuck they’re doing. You have to at least give them that.

Alright, so I finished off Double Visions, the fourth episode of the Back to the Future episodic video game saga of video games. It was most certainly an adventure game that I played!

I would like to first start out that this is the first episode I didn’t complete in one session, so it’s the first time I’ve seen the little cute, subtle thing where when you reload the game, it shows you the date in the time stream you’re currently in. You never really jump around enough in the game for that to matter, but it’s a nice little touch.

Anyway, there were puzzles, but I want to talk about the plot.

I actually love where this went. It was so easy just to let Alternate Reality Doc be normal Doc, and forget about that, but they really put that into the plot. Although on board, in the beginning, how Doc slowly begins to doubt that this meddling is doing the right thing is fucking PERFECT. It adds some depth to all the fucking about you’re doing. It also forces Marty to make some interesting character decisions, when he has to basically tell Doc that what he’s doing is what he’s going to do, regardless of this new version’s wishes. It is just so telling of the subtext of these movies, where they’re all worried about fucking up the time stream except when it benefits them. To see them split on an issue was actually fairly meaningful and an interesting plot hook.

Similarly interesting was Emmett’s realization that Marty basically used Adventure Game Shenanigans (TM) to fuck up his relationship with Edna. So often Adventure Game Shenanigans (TM) basically go unpunished and unnoticed in an adventure game world. It was cool to have Emmett, a smart dude, put two and two together and realize how much Marty has been fucking around with his life. Of course, they end up buddies anyway, but at least there was that moment that Marty has been up to some serious fiddling in people’s lives.

Puzzle-wise, there was nothing too bad in all of this. The game did a kind of annoying thing where it would show you several items that are obviously puzzle items, but not let you get them until a little later. There was also this little light in the Delorian that basically signaled “Hey, you haven’t completed the puzzle you need to do before you send that item forward in time!” which, as someone who thinks about how games are built, was really, really fucking obvious to me. Maybe the target audience wouldn’t have caught on, though.

Anyway, on to the last episode whenever I get to it. Whee!

Many people on my twitter were always going on and on about how great Saints Row 2 was. They are super, super excited about Saints Row The Third. Having taken a look at how utterly ridiculous and stupid the game could be, I figured maybe I was missing something. I Gameflyed the second game to try. (Which was extra silly, as I own the game on PC due to some Steam giveaway.)

While I see the appeal, I didn’t get very far.

First off, their dedication to character customization is refreshing and enjoyable. I had a lot of options, many of them stupid, but it’s a pretty stupid game, so that’s cool. I only wish I could have customized my character’s clothes more without going around and shopping. I understand that’s one of the benefits of exploring, but I’d rather have a ridiculous badass right out of the gate, you know?

The story involved my character, which was nice, but was also stupidly “gansta.” It just seemed like someone who had looked at that culture in a movie and tried to replicate it. Which is fun in its own stupid way, I guess. It fits with how I’m doing minigames like driving around to brutally assault people in a cop uniform for a reality show, or riding a four-wheeler while on fire that makes anything I touch explode. I suppose it fits into that world, to be sure.

In the end, though, man, I just couldn’t keep playing. The fact that I couldn’t just start a mission whenever I wanted to really bothered me. I didn’t want to have to drive all the way across town, back to my home base, to start another mission. Traversal is boring in open world games. That’s the worst part! And it seemed like Saints Row 2 did nothing to mitigate that.

I saw what I wanted to, and got out. I can see why people would really love the game. It tries to basically take how people ACTUALLY played GTA3 and make it a game which supports it all the way. I’ll probably try The Third, certainly, but it’s not a game I am in demand for. I just can’t stand the boredom in between fun in games like that. I really can’t. Oh well.

Bulletstorm. The storm of bullets. Storm of the Bullets in the Bullet Storm. Penises. Bulletstorm.

For one, I feel like playing Bulletstorm right after finishing Shadows of the Damned did Bulletstorm a disservice. There was a game that stuck the landing on every single dick joke it dropped. It just worked for the crazy world the game was taking place in. Bulletstorm… well, it doesn’t, really.

The main problem with Bulletstorm is that… well, okay, there are a few problems with Bulletstorm, but one of the biggest hurdles you have to get across to enjoy the game is to understand that Bulletstorm believes it is telling a worthwhile and interesting narrative. Compare this to Shadows, where you have characters who are ridiculous, but real and true to who they are in the world they are. Bulletstorm thinks the story of Grey is interesting, when in reality he is Steven Blum who should be shooting people with crazy weapons and making dick jokes. It doesn’t understand that a player wouldn’t give a shit. The fact that it takes a long while of gameplay, going through story, before you have all the toys and fun things that make the combat in Bulletstorm actually fun is just flat-out stupid. This is a game that sells itself on letting you do stupid shit constantly. Why they tie your hands and keep you from doing as such for so long is really beyond me.

Once you get past that, though, the combat does feel a bit different and pretty fun. However, the weapons just aren’t badass enough. I don’t know. When the game doesn’t give me a reason to switch weapons, I won’t. The fact of the matter is that the Shotgun and Sniper Rifle are basically the best choices in the game. The Sniper Rifle has these guided bullets which are pretty fun to use, and is the option to go with when people are far away. The “charged” shot, which shoots basically a guided grenade, is also fun and effective for dealing with groups. When people are up close, you switch to the Shotgun. Because the game has so many environmental spikes and stuff with which to kill people, the Shotgun’s ridiculous knockback is more useful than your kick to impale enemies and deal with them quickly. On top of that the “charged” shot just flat-out kills the “tank” enemies in one hit. With those two, you can deal with any situation. Sure, there’s a gun that shoots drills, and a explosive bola launcher, but why would I ever use that when the other weapons solve my problems easier? I just feel like the only reason they gave me to work with the other weapons were to unlock the other skillshots, but you get so many points to buy shit that you only would even think about doing that if you’re a completionist.

The game made me laugh at times and was, overall, an enjoyable experience. I don’t regret playing it in the least. But it really seemed like a proof of concept that fell short of the mark. It should have been balls to the motherfucking walls of action and ridiculous nonsense, but instead fell into horrible video game plot traps and not enough weapon variety to really engage. If Epic knows their shit, Bulletstorm 2 should be damn fun. But who knows? That’s the company that claimed I would care about the death of Domwife. So they obviously don’t “get” how stupid their stories are. We’ll see though, I guess.

Yeah, this is a pretty lame song to get stuck in my head, but here we are.

I was linked this video showing a pre-alpha build of an upcoming My Little Pony fighting game. Yeah, so, that’s a thing, certainly. But what really got to me was how well-done even this pre-alpha was. All those sprites of Applejack are custom, but look extremely true to the show. Same with the background.

What really caught me, though, is the custom song playing behind it. It’s really kind of amazing. It is, at the same time, completely perfect for My Little Pony, having some similar little musical cues to songs from the actual show that you can pick out if you’re as lame as I am. At the same time, this is clearly, clearly a fighting game track. It has that light into heavy bouncing energy that a good fighting game track has, like, say, this one. It just works. You tell me this music is from a MLP fighting game, and I say, “Of course it is.”

It’s also catchy as fuck, too, which is why it’s been stuck in my head the past couple of days. Oy. Ponies. Amirite?

I saw Ok Go in concert, and I’m going to immortalize that in a blog post.

I’m not a huge band-going type. Ok Go marks the third band I’ve actually seen in concert, the others being They Might Be Giants many a time, and Franz Ferdinand once. They Might Be Giants is all about being fun, pleasing the crowd, and interacting with them. It’s a damn good time. Franz was very “we are playing music now” kind of band, and was less fun, even though I enjoy what they do musically.

Ok Go was much more in the fun side of things.

Seriously, not only were they rocking all the songs I loved from their earlier albums, thank goodness, but they really went out of their way to put on an entertaining show. They played a song completely on a set of handbells, which they described as “God’s Instrument.” They pulled a little kid out of the crowd to dance on stage, and a dude in a “Pugs not Drugs” t-shirt to play the guitar part in a song. A song was played right in the middle of the audience, an arm’s length away from me. They really seemed like they were in it for the fun, and really wanted to be there, which means a lot, because that energy is infectious. I started the show feeling kind of ill, to be honest, but when they really got going, I was really into it. It was fantastic.

Seriously, though, what really stands out is the amount of confetti they used. They literally had like an inch thick of confetti on the stage by the end of the performance. They were shooting off confetti cannons twice, three times a song. It never ended. Confetti. It was crazy.

But yeah, would totally see them again. A ton of fun, to be sure. Fun times all around, and I’m glad I took off to go and enjoy myself and watch. I’m also glad Jonathan did all the driving so I could sleep in the car. Thanks, Jonathan!

Back in the crazy days of Christmas, I got Shauna a copy of Mystery Express. She’s a huge Clue fanatic, and I figured a more complex version of Clue might be up her alley, or at least might be something that we all would enjoy playing together, so she could be included. Unfortunately, we never got around to playing it until Sunday, but hey, we finally did, and it was pretty neat.

The main difference between Mystery Express and Clue is that there are more than one copy of each card. Figuring out who did it and so on requires you to figure out which card there is only one of in circulation, instead of which card is missing. This means just because someone shows you a card doesn’t mean you can rule that out. You really have to attempt to pay attention to where all the cards are moving between players and figure out if that card you saw was the same one you saw last turn, or a different copy. It makes things much more complicated! It also means you need to take way, way better notes than you ever do in Clue. You need to keep track of things, and it’s not easy.

The cards get shuffled around by the various activities in the train, which each player activates by spending time on them. There’s one that makes everyone but the player who started it reveal a card to everyone, there’s ones where you swap cards with other players, there’s ones where you force players to all show you a different type of card, and so on. Of course, the super best one is to brown bag it, where a player hides an incredibly intricate luggage piece in one of their hands, and you have to pick which one it is in. If you win, you get to steal one of their cards at random. If you lose, you lose time. (That’s not actually the best one. It’s the most silly one.) The conductor is also in various places on the train, and if you do an activity associated with those places, then you can also trade a card from your hand with one that the conductor has in his “hand” on the board.

Really, the most crazy part is determining the “time” of the murder. The time cards aren’t like other cards, and during set points in the game, you flip through this deck of time cards (which have three of each time, except the correct time, which has two, unlike the other categories) and attempt to remember. These cards are hard to read: they’re analog clocks with no numbers on them, and the person dealing gets to choose how fast or slow the cards are flipped through, meaning if they’ve figured out the time, or don’t give a fuck, they can screw everyone else over and just flip super fast. I thought this part would be horrible, but it’s actually not THAT bad. You just really have to pay attention.

Honestly, that’s what I like about this game. You really, really have to pay attention. Clue, in a lot of ways, works on autopilot. You cross things off when you see them, and you make sure you show the cards you’ve already shown to everyone else to limit the information they have. Since Mystery Express has a discard pile, where once you’ve shown a card in a turn, you can’t show it again, you really can get lots of information out of people if you pay attention, remember what cards you’ve seen from them and what they likely got in a trade, and take good notes about where cards are. Of course, if you don’t, you’re completely lost. But it adds much more strategy and thinking to the game, which I really appreciate.

Shauna, of course, won our game, because she is the master of Clue. I thought it was going to come down to the tiebreakers, which are guesses everyone fills out before the final turn, but no, she just flat-out won. I thought I was in a much better position than I was, but I ended up guessing on a few things based on what I had seen the least. Seemed safe, and it got me the Modus Operandi, but it did not work for the location, which was one card I had seen a million times, but had been the same card flashed at me over and over again.

The remaining questions are those of theming. Why, for example, is one of the possible motives “Unknown”? You really couldn’t think up another motive? I guess that’s true because “Greed” and “Money” are separate motives as well. Spend some more time brainstorming these things! Also, passengers getting on the train after the murder happens have clues. Where did this murder actually occur then? Was it really on the train at all? This is the other great Mystery of Mystery Express.

Seriously, though. If you like Clue, I would recommend the game. It’s solid, and requires more actual detective work in your thinking.

I don’t do these very often anymore, but it’s the fourth of July and I kind of want to talk about it, so, you know. Let’s talk about the Operation Patriot Shield.

I’m rather enjoying it.

Normally I enjoy items that give me more content or jokes or entertain me or something of that nature. I’m not normally one for an item which such a pure benefit to stats and whatnot, but man, there’s just no hiding the fact that this shield is the Bee’s Knees. (I should be scared of those knees, since I’m still in Bees Hate You.) It just completely smooths gameplay. The shield throw is so useful you’re going to use it every fight, and it’ll always be useful in said fight. A one-turn stun, which might let a familiar get a free action, followed by a free crit is amazingly useful for taking on enemies you may not be able to handle otherwise. I’ve been equipping it with my Haiku Katana, so now I have two assured crits a fight, if I want them. This has been a lifesaver in Bees Hate You, as I’m now on the battlefield, where I have to lose tons of HP to Bee attacks every fight, and this assures I can still kill people.

I’m also just surprised that the simplicity of “different enchantments per class” hasn’t been used before. Most of them seem fairly useful for the class, too! Though I would probably want the Clubber’s enchantments when a Turtle Tamer, and the Disco Bandit’s when I’m an Accordion Thief. Then again, I suppose it gives me a reason to use Sing, so that might be worthwhile anyway. Either way, the class enchantments are all useful, and lend it a bit of variety, though the main use of +stats and the stun sticks around either way, so, you know, it’s only for a bit of flavor, I suppose.

Seriously, though, this reminds me of how excited I was about the stupid Pokemann Band-Aids that my pen pal keeps sending me. I started saying “fuck it” and using them, and having all that constant healing really picked my game up and made it more fun for me. It let me keep going, as these days I tend to just stop playing once I run out of VIP hot tub uses. Heh. I play the game out of habit, nostalgia, and wanting to keep up with the new stuff. I’m far, far beyond playing it for any level of challenge. This shield makes the game fun and easy, which I appreciate more and more. I’m never going to turn down more content, but I think that this is a pretty solid item. It’s certainly better than the Pilgrim Shield, which I guess this is supposed to be a replacement for. Well, I think it’s better. Shield throw. Fuck yeah.