The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

Gamefly sent me a double-whammy: Two dead games! Dead Rising 2, and Dead Space 2. Dead Space 2 I’ll talk about later (Spoilers, it’s fucking fantastic) but today I’m going to talk about Dead Rising 2.

I played it for like… 2 hours, and I was done.

Now, first, I suppose I should talk about Dead Rising 2: Case Zero. I played through all that, and got every single achievement. I loved every minute of it. It was a small, constrained experience that let the game emphasize what’s fun about Dead Rising. It was pretty well the exact right length, and I’d urge pretty well anyone who wants to try Dead Rising just to pony up the five bucks for that instead.

I got into Dead Rising 2, and it was constantly talking at me about plot. Not that there wasn’t plot in Case Zero, but it was pretty minimal. Build a bike, get out of the town. It was straightforward. You could skip all the cutscenes and not be lost. Dead Rising 2 started with a weird sequence of you driving a bike around and killing zombies in a competition (I guess this is from the multiplayer competitive mode that is included for no reason) and then you have to run away from an arena, and find Zombrex, and do all kinds of bullshit before you can actually play. It’s frustrating, because all you want to do when you put the game in is go dick around in the new environment. On top of that, the story in Case Zero was simple. A man cares about his daughter, would like her not to die. You liked Chuck Greene in that scenario. This ridiculous “being set up by the media” crazy bullshit really doesn’t make you care about Chuck at all, and the fact that I murdered many, many non-zombies who were looting Fortune City, just like I was, really makes me feel like Chuck is a much less likable dude this time around. Basically, what I’m saying is, I don’t give a shit about the story.

However, the game is mostly story. There is plenty of dicking around to be done in Fortune City, but the game doesn’t really reward you for it. Things like not being able to collect all the silly outfit parts to play dress-up, or being able to store stuff you find for later, really stops any urges a player might have to explore and just see what’s out there. Even the Combo Cards, the things the game wants you to collect and use, are just impossible to actually make use of in a way that’s any fun. It was more forgivable in Case Zero. It was a smaller game, and you had smaller combo options. There are just a ton of them in the full game, though, but you always just use nails + bat over and over, because that’s what’s easily available every time you exit the safe room. The crazy stuff would be fun, but you can’t depend on it in any way.

All that said, for the bit of running around, dressing Chuck up in silly clothes, and fighting zombies, I enjoyed myself. However, after visiting a sex shop, I walked into a building and met a guy with a tiger. I just wanted to see what was in the building. Apparently, what was in there was instant death via a boss battle I didn’t want to be in. I had even managed to make a light saber, but that broke immediately, and then the tiger pounced on me and I was dead. I then thought about having to start over, and looked to the other envelope on my desk with Dead Space 2 in it, and my mind was made up for me. I sent it back.

I don’t know. There is a core to Dead Rising that is fantastic, but it’s just not coming together into a game I want to play. I don’t in any way want to do the cases or see the story, and it doesn’t really want me to mess around. It’s just not a fun thing. More power to people who managed to push through it, but I couldn’t do it. I had more fun games to work on.

Sometimes people go “Let’s go see a movie!” and then I go see a movie because being active socially is top of cool. Sometimes, though, the movie I go to see in these sorts of scenarios is not really the sort of film that I would see otherwise. Priest was that sort of film. When I told Essner that I went to see this movie, his first question was, “Well, it was at least better than Legion, right?” To which I responded, “Yeah, yeah, it was better than Legion.”

Let me just set the tone for this film. The movie starts, and you see a bunch of monk-looking dudes in a cave. One of them says: “This place feels like our grave.” That’s the first line. That’s what they open with. I knew immediately that I was not in for a great movie-viewing experience at that point.

The film is based on some sort of Manga, and the movie tries really hard to stay true to this manga nobody has ever heard of. (Well, okay, I never heard of it, and didn’t know anyone who had before the film came out.) Like, there’s constant back story, and constant desperate attempts to fill in who these characters are, instead of showing us who they are. In general, it’s not super important, because everyone is a pretty straightforward archetype with no real depth, but they really want you to know that this is, like, a world, you know? So they go for it anyway.

Basically, there are vampires, but these vampires are just like Hunters from Left 4 Dead only with no eyes and no hoodies. So they screech and leap about, and sunlight lights them on fire, I suppose. They’re also kind of sticky. There’s a main character, who is a Priest. Priest is future-world for Vampire Hunter. He’s bound by the church to not hunt vampires, but since he’s a vampire hunter, he’s going to anyway, and UH OH the church doesn’t like that! Also, someone has been turned into a Human Vampire. So that’s… a… thing…?

There’s a love side plot, and everyone is related for no reason, and there are action scenes. I will give the movie this: the action scenes were not bad. Some of them were super ridiculous (I must throw my throwing stars into the air and then kick them at the vampires, instead of just throwing them! This makes sense!) and the end battle against the villain was extremely unrewarding (they just kind of decided that, oh, shit, we’re out of ideas, everything explodes), but it was indeed and action movie with action scenes, which makes it way better than Legion, like I mentioned.

The main “theme” of the movie, which they repeat constantly, over and over, is that the power of the Priests don’t come from the church, but they come from God. Which is nice, I guess. It’s nice to have a “corrupt church” plot where the characters still keep their faith. The institution can be corrupt, but the deity can still exist and be nice. It’s a change of pace, at least. But seriously, it is crammed down your throat, and makes little sense since, honestly, the church plays such a little role in the film you could have cut it out completely and still had the whole movie make sense. It wasn’t really an important conflict.

Finally, I saw it in 3D. That was a waste. Movies, stop being in 3D. Stop it.

Anyway, there are some thoughts. I can’t really recommend the film, but the people I went to see it with really seemed to enjoy it, so I guess it’s doing something right. I just like my action to not take itself seriously, a la Shoot ‘Em Up, or have some genuine, actual impact and relevance to a plot. This really did neither, being ridiculous and taking itself way, way, way, way, way too seriously. So, yeah. Wouldn’t recommend it.

Let’s talk about a more “normal” app from me, I guess. You know, a game?

There’s been this game on all the top bought app lists called Burn the Rope (not to be confused with You Have To Burn The Rope, which is totally different) that is all the rage. As such, like just about anything, similar games start appearing. At least, I assume so. Because I’ve been playing Burn It All: Journey to the Sun, which has a lot of rope-burning, and I have to assume it’s similar. Is it a rip-off? I really have no idea. I want to say not, as this game seems to have been made by the same people who made the very nice Pix’n Love Rush, but it certainly seems similar just by looking at it. However, this one had the main difference of having a recommendation from a Talking Tyrant, so of course, I bought it! I’m glad I did, too. It’s pretty entertaining.

The main idea is that all flames are actually the children of the sun, obviously, because the sun is the biggest flame of all! So you are trying to guide the little flames upwards so they can go meet the sun. You do this by burning everything. The flame starts on a little volcano, and you drag the flame to what you want to burn. It then hops back to the volcano and recharges after setting the fire, which will slowly consume whatever you lit up. You attempt to set fires to do this as fast as possible, while dodging things like non-burnable stone, and water droplets which will make you have to recharge early. There’s a timer, and if you don’t burn it all in that time, you fail and have to restart. Do it really fast, and you get between one to three gems for that level, a sort of standard rating system for games on iOS these days (I think Angry Birds started that trend, but man, I don’t like Angry Birds, so I don’t even remember. It’s not a bad thing, though. I rarely care about high scores, so I rarely try, but I respect people who want to “ace” each level, and that’s a good way to entertain those people).

The game does a really good job of mixing it up as you go along. You start by controlling a standard “red” flame, but eventually you have levels with a “blue” flame who can light ropes on fire in the middle, instead of just at the end of them, and a “green” flame, who can pass through burnable objects and light multiple things on fire, but who recharges super slowly. These mechanics changes really seriously come at exactly the right time. I was getting bored of the simplistic red flame levels when they came along, and they do offer a lot of different scenarios while having the same basic pieces in play. Apparently, the game mixes it up even more in levels I haven’t gotten to yet, adding even more mechanics. It’s great the developers aren’t just grinding out levels, which you could probably do for this game with little issue, but instead is focused on making sure to maximize player fun.

The game also looks very pretty, too. The little flames are nicely animated and have character, and the fire effects look neat when they really didn’t have to. It’s also a universal app, but doesn’t look like they just stretched all the assets or whatever when playing on the iPad. I haven’t tried it on my Touch, but it seems much better suited to the iPad, too, because you have more precise control of where to drag the flame on the screen with more screen real estate, and some of the later levels can require really pinpoint movements to be really effective.

Really, the only problem I have with the game is something the developers can’t help all that much. All the time I’d quickly be moving my finger about to solve a level, and find out that my flame got caught on a rock early on in my crazy movements, and thus didn’t move how I wanted. This was really frustrating, especially since movement isn’t really confined to when your finger is on the flame. You can set the finger down wherever and drag it to move the flame about (I assume this is for the iPhone version). Thus, you miss one turn, but your flame doesn’t stop, but instead goes careening into something you didn’t want it to hit. There’s no good way to fix this without tactile feedback, which the game can’t give me, but that was really my main source of frustration with the game. It’s not a game-breaker, but it provided moments of less fun in the middle of my fun.

It’s a buck, and currently has like 100 levels or something like that. (I’m only through about 50, or so.) Of course, it also has the other iOS “More to come!” world icon after the ones that are there, but even if they don’t, this is plenty of fun game for a dollar. Well, at least to the level I value my dollars. If a fast-paced little maze game sounds like fun to you, do check it out.

It’s the end of the semester. I wanted to shoot shit. Bang bang bang! However, Gamefly just won’t co-operate! Even though the top of my want list is filled to the brim with shooters, they keep sending me other stuff. For instance, they sent me Enslaved: Odyssey to the West.

I guess I shouldn’t complain, as it was a really fun game.

Mechanically, the game left something to be desired. It was basically a traversal game, a la a Prince of Persia, with a similar level of combat and some stealth sections where you had to sneak around automated guns and take them out. It didn’t do anything that really revolutionized this sort of gameplay, but it was completely fine.
One issue with the gameplay actually related to one of the game’s greatest strengths. This game is drowning in the work of Andy Serkis, who is the voice of Monkey, the main character, and did most of the motion and face capture for everyone in the game, from what I understand. You’ve got a pro in there, and everything animates beautifully because of it. Conversations look real, to the point where they can use expressions to get their points across and accent jokes: no small feat in animation, and fairly rare in video games. However, because everything is so beautifully animated, it doesn’t always play smoothly. Walking, running, jumping, all of these have beautiful animations, but they’re all pre-canned, so if you accidentally do the wrong thing (for example, you aren’t close enough to an edge of a platform to leap to the next, and accidentally roll instead) then you have to watch the whole animation, and no amount of jamming on the buttons are going to help you get things done quicker. It’s a minor annoyance, really. The only time it was really a problem that affected gameplay was when it screwed me out of an optional achievement you can get for winning a race in game. Minor in the grand scheme of things, but had I kept trying to get that achievement, it probably would have really frustrated.
The only other problem, really, was a silly oversight on the controls. Left bumper is “tell Trip to do things” which pulls up a radial menu. However, something like 70 percent of the time, what you want her to do is use her decoy power. Tapping the button to use the decoy would have made a lot more sense, and you could then hold it down for the rarer commands. Instead you had to hold it down and move to the left every time you decoyed, and it was a little annoying.

What really sells the game are the characters. Again, you’ve got an acting pro behind the wheel, and the other voice actors for Trip and Pigsy are fantastic as well. It really shows, as the characters say very realistic things, and you really buy their relationship. There’s almost no repeated dialog in the game (there are a few, such as the warning Trip gives you when her decoy charge is running out, but I didn’t find that to be jarring or anything) and everything they say is entertaining and endearing, really. I never felt like they were “telling” me these characters were close. You see their relationships build, and that is awesome and just so rare in video gaming.

Note that I said the characters are great. The story… well, it makes a really ridiculous turn at the end. I’m sure it’s the kind of thing that sounded so high and artsy and deep on paper, but in practice, it was just kind of a “what the fuck?” moment. That is really JUST the epilogue, though. Everything leading up to the after the last boss cutscene is just fine, and powered by that awesome character interaction.

Enslaved is a game worth playing if you enjoy characters, story, and things like that. A little love for traversal games like Prince of Persia will help, too. Although a lot of the elements, looking back on them, are pretty standard game fare, the game really, really feels unique as you’re playing it, due to it’s art style, the fantastic animation, the voice work, and the interesting world that the characters are in. It stumbles a bit at the end, but the experience is great all around.

Near the beginning of this semester, I invited Cara over for an experiment. I was in a mood, reading more stuff about Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, and wanted to see another ending. However, I had answered honestly and shit, and it seemed like it would ruin the magic of the game to try to, well, game it to get a different ending. This is when I had the great idea to let Cara make all the decisions, and I just drive. Then I’d get to see another ending, as Cara likely wouldn’t get the sex ending I got, and she could experience the magic. We sat down, and had a great time. We stopped, though, when we got to the Nightmare sequence after the most dramatic wheelchair scene. That nightmare is, by far, the worst part of the game, and I just couldn’t make myself keep going, especially since it was late. So we tabled it for later.

Months passed, and Cara mentioned that she wanted to finish the game off. I armed her with an iPad with a FAQ pulled up for her to help guide me through the stupid nightmares, and we polished the rest of the game off, with Cole joining in as spectator. I got to see a new ending (I believe we got what’s called the “family” ending this time) and we had a good time, so that’s nice. I thought I’d put down a few thoughts about the experience.

First off, it was interesting how much better of a person Harry was in the Family ending. He was still a person with flaws. He wasn’t some unrealistic knight in shining armor like in the video at the beginning of the game, of course, but he had much more genuine feelings for his daughter. While, perhaps, the more “normal” level of problem that Cheryl was facing of her father dying in a car crash right after he separated from her mother makes all the supernatural shenanigans slightly harder to buy than the pretty intense “evil” I saw in the sex ending, it still fit, to an extent. It certainly seemed like a happier ending for Cheryl, in any case, as she learned her father really did love her, much more than in the sex ending, where she found that she should leave him behind and move on. Though the big strokes of the story stayed the same, the outcome really was affected. It was impressive.

I also learned some interesting things about Cara’s gaming sensibilities. She couldn’t stand the mystery of what was happening for the whole game. Nearing the end, she really wanted it to be over so she could “get” what she was seeing. She wasn’t willing to wait for the conclusion, which takes a lot of time to get to in a video game, I admit. Much more than a movie or whatever, even in a short game like Shattered Memories. She also lacked the general idea of what was “interactable” and what was not, especially early on, when she’d see things and want me to do stuff with them outside of “shine a flashlight on it” and “call the phone number written on it” which really isn’t what the game does. Still, that meant she was engaged in the narrative, so that’s fantastic.

The second playthrough really made the flaws stand out all the more, though. The Nightmare sequences are just flat-out bad, which is acknowledged. The rest of the game is so good, though. Great, creepy as fuck narrative, storytelling, and presentation. It was enjoyable to experience a second time, though having a fresh pair of eyes on the game really was a big part of my enjoyment.

Tonight we played a game of things. That game is called The Game of Things. It is certainly a party game! We had a lot of fun with it, but I really wonder about how it’s built and if it could be built better.

A Game of Things is strongly based on that fantastic party game Balderdash. One player will draw and read a writing prompt. It will be something like “The worst thing to fall into” or “The best gift for a mother” or whatever. Each player, including the person who drew the card, will make up an answer and write it down. The person who drew the card is the “dasher” and will read out everyone’s answer, including their own, to each player. Play goes around the table, and each person tries to match one answer to one writer (the person reason is not someone you can accuse, so their answer is simply a red herring for the round). If you’re matched up, you can no longer accuse anyone when it becomes your turn. Each time you successfully make a match, you get a point and get to go again. Also, the last person to make a match gets two extra points, just because they weren’t already getting enough points for getting a freebie final point. Then you pass the reader role onward, and continue this way until everyone has read once.

On the surface, this seems like it could be a lot of fun. Trying to out-think what your friends would decide to write for these sorts of questions is a fun social game with a good crowd. However, it really lacks what Balderdash has: objectives.

In most of our games of Balderdash, things get super silly super fast, and we end up throwing around inside jokes and writing things down to make the dasher say embarrassing things and so on. That’s all in good fun, and why I enjoy playing so much, but all the while, there’s still an objective involved. There’s always going to be one or two people who actually attempt to create a fake definition, since you know there’s going to be the true one in there, and you might as well grab a ton of points from being one of the only two legit options. The basic game objective isn’t completely forgotten.

In Game of Things, there is really no motivation to actually responding to the prompt given. You can write anything, and it doesn’t affect the game at all. As long as your ridiculous non-sequitur could have been written by someone else, you’re home free. The “dasher” honestly has even more motivation to write something not at all related to the prompt, as it makes which one is the red herring all the harder to deduce.

Again, I will say, it was a fun time. We laughed a lot, and I was very entertained. But a game that kind of actively encourages not actually playing it doesn’t seem like a good game to me. At that point, we were just enjoying the witty brainchildren of the other players, and the game was just kind of an excuse. It wasn’t a game at all. At the same time, forcing everyone to play it straight wouldn’t have been nearly as fun, whereas I could see a “forced seriousness” game of Balderdash being quite entertaining and strategic. It just comes off seeming like a hollow excuse to socialize, instead of an actual game. But hey, sometimes, that’s what you need, I suppose.

Let it be known: I love my mother.

Let it be known: I do not really like my mother’s tastes in romantic comedies.

After having watched The Backup Plan last night and loving it, my mom decided that we should all watch it on Mother’s day. I think she just thinks the guy in the movie is attractive? He’s okay. Anyway, she thought it very funny, and put it on, and we all then watched it.

This sort of stuff just really makes me wonder about how I view media. I mean, I want characters, you know? I want meaty characters who are motivated by motivations. I want what people do to actually be how people react when put in situations like they are. I want things to work in a way that actually has impact. I love romances when they’re done with these rules, because they tend to be genuine and interesting. Sex and romance is just cool like that.

Every major issue in the movie that the characters had to come up with was almost totally caused by the female lead doing something completely nonsensical and then attempting to rationalize it. It’s just frustrating to watch something when all the tension comes from contrivances that only exist so that the couple can have some problems before they inevitably get together. The movie attempts to rationalize these actions by explaining that she is someone who wants to be self-reliant and who believes that all men will leave you always, and thus leave them first. I could buy this if this was played for laughs, but that part of her character was the realistic part. That was what we were supposed to empathize with as viewers. Then again, this is also a character who admits the only reason she got herself pregnant is so she wouldn’t be alone in the world. She admits this to her best friend, one of a large number of friends she seems to have. So, you know. Totally alone without kids.

The male lead’s major problem in the film was dealing with these random changes of heart, which makes him also pretty one-sided, though sympathetic. We see that he’s worried about having these kids. Like anyone would be. Also, he’s a male in a romantic movie. That’s pretty well all he is. I guess the fact that he’s a goat farmer living in New York City is interesting, but it doesn’t really play into his personality or anything. I probably wouldn’t date him.

All this is interspersed with scenes of this crazy single mother support group that’s funny in a completely over the top ridiculous way. Again, that would be cool, but the world of this movie is fairly down to earth, and thus they really kind of stand out. It almost felt like they were going too far for the joke for most of the movie, which was proven the moment the movie got to this ridiculous scene of a birth party where they’re watching this woman have birth and she’s making crazy animal noises because that’s funny, right, and everything got stupider from there. Thank god for that.

To be fair, the movie did try some things that almost worked. Her dog begging for food was an attempted symbol at how she’s not willing to give anything to anyone and keeps it all for herself, which is kind of fair, I suppose. Except, you know, she shouldn’t feed her dog scraps, so it didn’t occur to me as a symbol until they went OH HAY THIS IS A SYMBOL at the end of the film. There was a parallel between the female lead and her grandmother that would have worked had it not been incredibly heavy-handed. As my mom liked pointing out, the dog was very cute.

But yeah, it was mostly pretty painful to view. I don’t really mind that my mother likes it, though I wish I knew of a good counter she would enjoy. They have to be out there. There have to be good romantic comedies made for women out there in the world. Okay, I guess, like, Stranger than Fiction is, at its core, a romantic comedy, and that’s fairly fantastic. There’s a counter, though I suppose it’s not really aimed at the stereotypical female demographic. Still, they have to exist. They have to.

Afterwards, my general response was that I went back upstairs and watched an episode of Paradise Kiss to remind myself how you write deep, interesting, and complex characters wrapped up in romances. May I never have to watch a movie like The Backup Plan again.

Natalie, way back in the day, got me into The Sims. She was a big fan of fucking around with the original, and had all the expansions and so on, and in the course of dating her, I learned what all the fuss was about. I was never super into it, perse, but as soon as I got past what I thought everyone did with it (ridiculous murder of people) and figured out what people who enjoyed the game did with it (working to make characters and build stories around them in the dollhouse framework of the game) I started to dig it. I did so so much that I bought The Sims 2 the day it came out, and had a lot of fun with it. I never dug into all the expansions and shit, but I’ve played Sims products off and on, and I always tend to have a good time.

That’s the background to me playing The Sims 3, if you didn’t understand. Again, they’re not huge games I play forever, but I enjoy fiddling with them. Upon watching this Quick Look and learning that the console versions were full-featured this time around, I figured I might as well Gamefly it up and give it a shot.

I really must say, I was pretty impressed with The Sims 3 on 360. It really was the full-featured game. You had a full house-builder, all the menus and options of the full game, and so on. You could even design your own clothes and patterns inside the game, and if you had EA’s Project Ten Dollar code, could connect to their online database of more stuff to download and customize, which is not something you see on a console game very often. It even has pretty good support for controlling multiple Sims. From what I understand of previous console versions (I never played those), you could only really have one Sim in those. This game actively tells you to make a big family, which is certainly an interesting touch.

I had a good time, making my lesbian couple (Why do I always make lesbians, I wonder? My theory is because I want a household with romance, but I also want to personally associate myself with all my Sims, even though part of the game is telling stories about people who aren’t you. I guess I ignore that part.) and their son, and setting them out on their way. The little Perks system and Lifetime Goals actually add a lot to the game. It adds a more game-oriented system to what you’re doing than in previous games. Sims 2 had a “want” system where you had this list of constantly changing wants that you could succeed in to make your Sim happy, but these are much more far-reaching. The Sim will tell you their wants, and you can decide whether you slot them into the four “Wish” slots each Sim has. Complete a Wish, and that Sim gains Lifetime Happiness, and what wishes the Sim has come from the various personality Perks you pick when building the Sim. (It also affects their AI, of course.) It’s a lot closer to making an RPG character, actually, but not in a way that’s intimidating. Everyone knows what the “Flirty” perk is going to do, where they might not know what a skill in an RPG does. You can try to create a Sim that is perfectly suited for attaining their goals, or pick a weird variety of perks and see what happens. It all depends on your approach and what you want out of the game. Personally, I always just make my Sims grind lots and lots of skill points. I’m just wired that way as a gamer. It also just kind of shows off what I could accomplish if I wasn’t spending time with stuff like The Sims 3.

In any case, it’s obvious, no matter how impressively complete the game is, that this game is made for a mouse. Building a house is painful using a stick, as the interface just isn’t optimized for it. I had real trouble adding an extra bedroom onto the house I bought because it was just wanting me to use finer control than the 360 stick could handle. I found some workarounds eventually, but it took me way, way longer than it should have. If you’re one of the people who really likes building a dream house, this version may make you really frustrated. Similarly, there are a lot of load times in this game. I had it installed to the Hard Drive, but there were still serious loads while you jumped around town to get shopping and such done. One of the PC version’s goals, as I understand it, was to have a seamless world between house and town and such without load times at all. The console versions really don’t make that happen. It’s not the biggest deal in the world, but when you accidentally pick the wrong menu option and have to go through two load screens to get back to where you were, it is sometimes frustrating.

In the end, I enjoyed fiddling with it, but I’m glad that’s all I did. Frankly, I got more enjoyment out of the one dollar Sims 3: Ambitions I bought on iOS. (Okay, that was an on-sale dollar, but come on, everything on iOS is on sale for a dollar fairly often.) It has most of the features of this full version (They split some features among three different versions for some reason, but as long as you do some research about what features each version has or doesn’t, it’s no problem) and has a much better interface. You can build in the iOS version much easier than in this one, and it still gave me more than enough of that Sims experience to sate my own personal craving for it. (Note that I’m someone who played a Sims GBA game to completion. This is much more a Sims experience than that weird game.) Sure, you don’t have quite the range of clothing and such in it, but it’s still enough for you to do some nice customizing. At the same time, if you’re a hardcore Sims fan, and do like having every option in the world, you’d be better suited just getting the PC version, I’d think. I suppose there might be people out there who liked the original Sims, but don’t have a good enough computer to run Sims 3, and I suppose the console version would be right up their alley. It’s not a bad product, but there are better versions of it out there.

I am trying to make the whole “If I want something done, best to just do it” kind of mentality make me life work. As such, I decided that, shit, instead of worrying about when I was going to make this Paranoia game I promised Cara happen, how about I just do it today? I send out the call, and go to the store and bought supplies and even baked a cake. And we played Paranoia.

Jonathan ended up as the team leader character I made, who was ordered by his secret society to basically be an internet troll, which he did constantly. He actively gave orders that inspired anti-team behavior, such as delegating all paperwork for the entire team to one person, and then punishing anyone who wanted to fill out their own forms. He also tried to enforce very strict communications chains to Friend Computer, seeing as “that’s the communication officer’s job.”

Essner spent his time as Loyalty officer constantly writing hilarious notes incriminating everyone (even himself sometimes) as well as higher-ranked citizens, which would not bode well for him. He started time-stamping his entries for awhile, at least, which was interesting to experience when going through the treason log at the end of the game. He also got to fill out most of the forms, and only drew a couple penises, honest.

Kevin tried really hard to follow orders. I mean, really hard. He took his dedication to equipment seriously, and his devotion to Friend Computer extremely romantically and inappropriately. He coined the phrase “fuck you in your ports,” but unfortunately attributed it to Essner’s character, so he doesn’t get the credit he deserves. He was also very dedicated to using a bucket of soapy water as a weapon, so there is always that.

Cara really, really didn’t want to use her laser and really, really wanted to stab people with paperclips. She insisted on using an orange pen, which is an ink her Red Clearance troubleshooter shouldn’t be using, to send all communications to Friend Computer, which was unfortunate for her health. She also may or may not have been named “Pete” and may or may not have been turned into a camera cyborg.

I basically decided that since I had picked a definitely short mission, I was going to be extremely lethal, and tried to kill everyone more than I find I usually do when we play. Even then, I couldn’t bring myself to do it as everyone worked themselves into bigger and bigger corners. It was too entertaining trying to see how they were going to attempt to bluff their way out of being stuck in an Infrared Dorm room with an army bearing down on them. (The solution was to make two of the guards they had knocked out look like they were kissing, while a third knocked-out guard was made to look shocked that this was going on while holding onto a Communist Manifest from a Communist Trading Vessel. Well, their solution, anyway. Didn’t actually work out well for them.) Still, more people died than normal! And there were quite a lot of laughs. It seemed like a pretty good introduction to Paranoia for Cara, and a fun time was had by all.

Also, I didn’t ruin the cake I baked, so that was nice.