The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

Little Big Planet 2 just came out!

So, uh, I rented Little Big Planet for the PSP.

I had basically just wondered what the fuck this was. How would it even work on the PSP? It was a mystery! So I went to give it a go.

First off, this game has some seriously technical weirdness. First thing it does is tell me to turn my PSP’s wifi off of “power save mode.” I have no idea what this is, but I have to quit the game to check. I look all over the options, and can’t find anything like that. I eventually just ignore the message, as I don’t know what the hell it meant.
Secondly, this is the first PSP game I’ve ever played that required an update, a process which I had to quit out of the game to do, which was also baffling.

Anyway, it’s kind of appropriate that my PSP was acting even more like a PS3 for this miniaturized PS3 game!
I kind of hate Sony’s tech sometimes.

The game itself, though, is impressive and fun. The built-in levels are all new, and, personally, a lot more fun, because all checkpoints are infinite life checkpoints, unlike the bullshit in the original game. This really cut down on frustration. The bullshit lives were why I never actually beat the original’s campaign.
For the most part, it really looks like Little Big Planet as well. There are only two planes in this version, instead of three, but in some ways that’s actually better, as the levels are much less confusing because of it. I never completely bought the planes thing. When they worked, they worked, but it seemed like so often they didn’t! They didn’t bother me here, though.
The levels themselves are nice and varied as well. There’s a chase sequence stage that’s pretty cool, and some very puzzle-y levels that are quite clever, from what I played. There’s also a ton of “cute” racism! Everyone loves that, right?

I logged onto the Playstation Network to see what kind of levels I had access to… there were some! But the method of playing them was cumbersome. I had to download the files to the memory stick. I couldn’t just pick them and play like on the PS3. I didn’t really try out the building tools, because if I was going to build something, I’d try it on the PS3, you know?

I guess that’s really my thing. It’s a very well done game, but for most of it, I admit I was just kind of wishing I could like… export this level pack into Little Big Planet proper and play it that way, with access to all my costumes and co-op and such. The new levels are nice, but this game isn’t something that a LBP fan needs to have. They already have what they need, you know? I guess it’s for people who don’t have a PS3, of which there are some? I suppose those people exist. But to get the most out of the game, you’d need to be in wifi range, so…

I don’t know. It’s a mysterious game. Not bad. Pretty fun, really. Has all the charm of its big brother. At the same time, I’m unsure who would rush to buy it. I’m not sure who would need it. It’s a strange little game. Hmm.

I’m currently enjoying the shit out of Bayonetta, a game I am a year late getting to. I’m sure I’ll ramble more about how fantastic that game is later, but the more important part is… well… I don’t feel like I’ve missed anything.

I’ve passed that hurdle.

I’m sure I’ve talked about it before here. I really want to be involved in the gaming discussion. It’s something I like to be able to do. That pushed me to buying a lot of games in the past. I had to get this or that game in order to talk about it right when it was happening. I needed it to be relevant.
Because of that, going back and playing older games, like Bayonetta, was always an issue. There was something new I had to focus on, and even if I played it and enjoyed it, there was always an air over it of feeling silly for waiting so long, or feeling pressured to move on to something new.

I’m not feeling that with Bayonetta. I’m just enjoying the shit out of it. And similarly, I’ve become really interested in Dead Space 2, but I find my general reaction to be “that’s going to be great when Gamefly sends it to me in a month or two.” It’s okay. That’s fantastic.
I don’t know. I’m not completely out of the video game conversation. The games I really, really will want to talk about, I am going to still buy. Like, say, Marvel Vs Capcom 3. No way I’m not buying that, and that is a game I would feel left out of talking about. Most of these games, though, I totally wouldn’t. They’re fun, but they’re not those key games that I obsess over, and thus I don’t need to have them day one. Plus, when I do want to sample, I can sample, and send the games back the moment I am tired of them. It works so much better that way than paying for this stuff.

And now it feels better, too. Fantastic. I’m proud of myself. Well, a little bit, anyway.

Now, if you want a free app worth shit, you should probably look at Textropolis. Parish reviewed it back when 1up was a site worth looking at and I enjoyed their iPhone coverage. I remembered it when I randomly saw it on the free app list, and picked it up. It’s nothing particularly fancy, but it’s a solid way to waste some time, certainly.

The game is really simple. It’s basically a variant of Boggle, where you have a pool of letters and have to spell as many words as you can with them. The twist, however, is that these pools of letters are the names of cities. As you find more words out of the name of a city, the city increases in population, and starts building itself up. You only have to build up to a two-star city to unlock the next, but there is a running count of how many words, total, one can spell, and you can keep working towards that and try to get full stars on each city, if you’d like.

The interface is nothing crazy, but it works. You tap the letters to spell words. As you spell, it gives you a readout on top of what words you’ve already spelled that include the letters in the order you’ve hit them so far, so you don’t repeat. It also has a “Last Word” button after you enter a new word, which is handy to quickly input the plural forms of words after you get the word itself. It’s not going to make you say “WHAT A GREAT INTERFACE” but it’s nicely done.

That’s… basically it? But seriously, while simple, it is a fun game to pass the time with, if you’re a word person. It also works great as a multiplayer experience. Cara and I played for awhile, with both of us tossing out word ideas. It was fun. It’s free. It’s quality. What more to you want?

Whenever I’m bored, I sometimes boot up the ol’ appshopper and see if there’s anything free out there that looks interesting. A recent thing I grabbed was something called Doodle Fit. Now, for no good reason, I really fell in love with LetsTans, a simple, free Tangram game. It didn’t require much thought, but was just enough to not be completely boring: a great thing to do while listening to a podcast. This game, in its description, reminded me of it. I’d need to fit blocks of different set shapes that I couldn’t rotate into a bigger picture. Fair enough. Sure, it was one of those stupid games trying to cash in on the popularity of Doodle Jump, but it was free, so why not?

Of course, you get what you pay for: it’s not that great.

For one, the interface is kind of awful. Instead of dragging the pieces into place, like a sane game would do on a touch screen, you instead tap to highlight a piece, and then drag your finger around like an analog stick to move a shadow of it into place. Then you let go and it places itself. I really have no idea why the designers would waste the touch screen like that. They have great one-to-one interaction with blocks like this. The iPhone and such is MADE for this shit. It baffles me that they could get it wrong.

I also found that the puzzles themselves did not have a lot of variety. They were just different boxes with some spaces pre-filled in. With Tangrams, it’s fun trying to see what ridiculous thing they are claiming what you’re making is a picture of. In this, they kind of give up on that like 8 puzzles in, where they have a puzzle named “We have no idea” for what it is supposed to be. Good job on that one, developers of Doodle Fit.

Finally, I don’t know what it is about tangrams in general, but they have just the perfect amount of difficulty. You don’t always know the solution immediately, but once you start trying things, you figure it out fast enough. I didn’t find the puzzles in Doodle Fit to have this quality. Either I knew the solution immediately, or it took me FOREVER to solve it. I’d keep trying different organizations, and nothing would even get close. I couldn’t get any clues. I’d just kind of fall flat on my face and get frustrated.

Yeah, I can’t really recommend it. I guess it’s trying to sell puzzle packs, like LetsTans. Granted, I never bought one for LetsTans, because they were really good about putting out little free puzzle updates on a regular basis, but I might see me buying a dollar puzzle pack for LetsTans if I was really bored. I got tired of Doodle Fit before I completed the beginner stages. Not worth your time.

Today is spoiler time. Don’t spoil yourself on Ghost Trick. It’s fantastic. Go play it if you haven’t.

Ghost Trick does a fantastic job of being both silly and serious at the same time.
Now, Phoenix Wright does this, to an extent. Characters are ridiculous, but the situations they are in tend to be dire. However, as much as I love the series, it’s really more of a rough transition between the two. Maya says something really stupid, and then soon after Phoenix is all distressed because some innocent person is going to be jailed! It doesn’t completely work.
Characters in Ghost Trick say silly things as well (Missile in particular has some great lines), but they never really break character for joke time. The humorous bits are normally directly related to the crisis at hand, and make sense based on the character. Missile, for example, is a good example. He’s the Top Pomeranian, of course, but he’s also a dog. He’s excited easily, but doesn’t understand exactly what’s going on. He does know that he wants to help. So while he’s saying weird things, he is still helping, and very concerned about keeping everyone alive. It really works.

Of course, the big thing was the twist at the end. I feel like it completely worked. There were plenty of hints that Sissel wasn’t human throughout the story. He kept attributing things to his loss of memory which made no sense, such as his inability to read. The other major twist, that of Ray’s identity, was also strongly foreshadowed in a solid way. None of the twists were unearned. They all worked, and worked well.

The only thing people seem to have issues with is that of the magic Meteor that brings the story together. I personally have no problem with a game, based on Ghost Powers, having those sorts of supernatural elements. They do a damn good job of making the meteor more than just a random explanation for these powers. It is a focal point of many of the character’s stories, and it isn’t just some throw-away fact. I can appreciate it on that basis.

The story is set up for both a sequel and a no-sequel, and I thought it did that very well. There’s nothing wrong with Sissel still being alive and around with Ghost Powers. None at all. His current situation really does open up some interesting gameplay possibilities for a sequel, as well as the possibility of Sissel being able to create more ghosts with powers, and thus have more potential puzzle options. I am really looking forward to more, if they make more. It’s not a game which completely ran it’s course, though it does feel like a complete package. Nothing would be missing if there wasn’t another game. But I’d like one. The writing, the everything is so fun, and I enjoy fun, strangely enough. I do enjoy fun.

I’ve waited for the right day but, let’s face it, it’s not coming. Only one thing to do. Write about Ghost Trick.

Ghost Trick is, easily, the most fantastic game I’ve played this year, and I’ve played New Vegas this year. It is the best Adventure-style game I’ve played since I picked up the original Ace Attorney, and it is a game everyone with a DS should consider playing.

Today I’m going to talk about mechanics, and tomorrow, story spoilers. So, you know, be prepared for that.

One of the best things about this game is how it takes normal Adventure game mechanics, but both streamlines it and makes them unique. Since you’re a ghost, you don’t have an inventory, as such. At the same time, you can move between objects, and what you’re inhabiting is what you can interact with. Most objects in the world have some sort of interaction, and you have to use these interactions to both move around the world (because you can only jump between objects that you can grab with your limited reach and use phone lines to move around) and to solve the puzzles before you, which is normally preventing the death of a character. You’re never overwhelmed with options, but at the same time, the 4 minute time limit and having to wait for certain things to happen in the world make it so that these situations are extremely tense. You can start over and over again, and pause the action at any time by going into the Ghost world, but you get the music ramping up, and if you can just get over there this time you can make it happen! It really works well at splitting the difference between accessible and interestingly complex. Plus, once you start having to juggle two different spirits with different powers, the complexity of the puzzles also ramps up in a very satisfying way.

The mechanics of the story, as well, are really well done. Each chapter starts with a Noir-like text crawl to make sure you remember what’s going on. Since most of the story occurs during these 4 minute sequences, rarely do you feel like you’re taking a break for the story to ramble at you in between gameplay. It’s really well combined into what you’re actually doing and trying to accomplish. I never really felt like “here’s a puzzle because it’s time for a puzzle” was going on. It all makes sense, at least in the logic of the game world.

But seriously, the main reason you’d play the game is for the story. It’s great everything else works, but it’s the story that really makes the game shine. We’ll look at that tomorrow.

My Xbox returned! Happy day! That meant I finally got to polish off Fable 3!

It was Giant Bomb’s Disappointment of the Year, and while I don’t think it’s a complete failure as a game, it is a pretty big disappointment. I mean, Fable 2 blew me away (IGN.com) when I played it. It was a fantastic game, with fun but casual combat and a story where it really felt like your decisions mattered. The property-buying distraction was also enjoyable. It was a really great game. The idea of more of that, but better, was so awesome.

However, Fable 3 simply doesn’t do that. The combat is almost too casual now. They removed the scarring system from Fable 2, giving you no real reason to actually heal yourself in battle. Dying had consequences in Fable 2. In Fable 3, you lose your progress to your next bit of level up currency, which never seems like much of a penalty. Sure, there’s an achievement for finishing the game without dying, but that’s only for the sort of people who would play through the game multiple times. I had a huge stockpile of potions I never used because I wasn’t risking anything to try to cut it close without using one. The tension of having something to lose by dying is apparently the key between combat feeling fun and combat feeling like a boring button mash, though. When you hit the harder enemies that block you in Fable 3, it just feels so frustrating, because you just want to get on with it and see more of the writing and such. I never remember feeling that way in Fable 2.

Similarly, they made some mystifying decisions on how you affect the world in Fable 3. Instead of having it happen all throughout the game, like in Fable 2, it’s all basically boxed into the last hour or so of the game. This makes it so you don’t actually FEEL the consequences, because by the time there are consequences, the game is over. Instead of seeing a world change over time, you just feel like you’re making a bunch of arbitrary good/evil decisions. It just doesn’t quite work.

Finally, the creative menu system in Fable 3 just doesn’t really work. It’s cool in theory. Having an actual space act as your menu makes a certain amount of sense. However, in practice, it’s slow and cumbersome, and the extent they went to in order to make it work means that you lack useful menus for things where you should have had them. For example, you can only go to the “Road to Rule” to level up when the game decides to randomly pop up the icon for it. There’s little reason why it decides to except it decides then would be a good time. It’s really just kind of unfortunate.

To top it all off, the storyline is a bit anticlimactic. The enemy is like… Ansem. It’s just a generic, formless evil, and the last boss fight is not anything special at all. It takes like two seconds, and then whoops, game is over.

All that said, I did enjoy the game. There are a lot of good quests and good dialog to be enjoyed throughout it, and the combat is fun, although perhaps only in smaller-sized doses. I’m not about to claim everyone needs to play this one, though. It’s, unfortunately, a misstep. Hopefully they can fix it in the next game, as I would love to play a real sequel to Fable 2. I really would.

Here’s my one sentence review of MAG: MAG is just like Battlefield: Bad Company 2’s multiplayer only a bit slower and you can’t team up with your friends if you don’t pick the same faction.

But yeah, I don’t know.

There’s nothing wrong with MAG. Like, seriously, the big problem I have with it is that I kind of hate playing shooters with the Dualshock 3, but that’s not MAG’s fault. It’s perfectly acceptable objective-based multiplayer. It has skill trees and slow as hell weapon unlocks. If you liked the idea of MAG, and bought it, I’m sure you were very happy with your purchase.

Still, I put in a few hours on it, and I couldn’t help but compare it to Bad Company 2’s multiplayer, an excellent multiplayer that also comes with a single player campaign that is pretty fun, unlike MAG. Bad Company 2 is much faster paced than MAG. Unlike MAG, where you don’t feel like you have any good weapons at the start, Bad Company 2 starts you with some decent weapon options. Yes, it would be nice if the assault rifle had a scope, but you’re pretty good to go at level one. (Well, if you have the Veteran bonuses anyway. It may be a bit lacking if you didn’t start with the class features like I did.) Both games can have an issue of being sniped over and over from nowhere if the other team has a decent sniper who is being protected, but it just seems way, way worse in MAG, where it’s much harder to tell where enemies are on the battlefield. I even tried to upgrade my radar so I’d have a better idea, and I was still clueless. Bad Company 2’s class system is such that people actually play classes, for the most part, though apparently people tend to favor certain classes. MAG is completely skill-point based, meaning there is likely an optimal build I am not aware of. Certainly everyone who was not low-level like me that I bumped into was all carrying the same gun, some sort of LMG with a scope.

MAG is trying to do some cool stuff, granted. They’re really trying to bring MMO stuff into a shooter, even more than games like Modern Warfare have. You earn money to buy new gear, and can buy custom camo patterns and armor to make your guy look the way you want. Granted, I think this doesn’t go nearly far enough, because all the options looked like “Army guy!” but then again, I love playing dress-up. Maybe the target audience just wants badass, I dunno. You also respawn as an entire squad, not as individuals, meaning that the game feels a bit different in that there are always surges of other players approaching, because they all spawned together. This would potential help team tactics, if I was one to try to communicate with people.

But still. You can buy Bad Company 2 on the PS3, can’t you? I mean, MAG seems pretty cheap at this point, but so is Bad Company 2, more than likely. I’d way suggest that over this. It’s a fine attempt, and hey, maybe it’s doing something I’m not aware of to SUPER appeal to the SOCOM fanatics that apparently exist. But man, Bad Company 2. That’s where the gunshoots is at, really.

Besides having a fantastic soundtrack and amazing presentation, Kirby’s Epic Yarn is also a video game that you can play. However, so much of the appeal of the game comes from the presentation that is can’t be overlooked.

I mean, the game is gorgeous. It looks fantastic. The entire world really subscribes to the “yarn” thing and it uses it all over the place. In the Snow Land, enemies are throwing snow balls that are actually cotton balls. Cannons shoot buttons. The sparks coming from an electrified floor can be pulled taut so that they’re just a floor. They don’t just pick the look to have a look, but they let it affect how the game works, and that’s really great.

The story, too, is presented in a way that makes me grin. I mean, it’s a Kirby story, so it’s not great. What it is is a children’s story, so that’s how the game presents it. You have a nice-sounding narrator who reads the story like it was a storybook, and does special voices for each of the characters, dropping down low for Dedede, talking a little higher for Kirby, and so on. It makes you feel like you’re sitting on the floor, listening to story time, and it’s exactly what the game needed.

The gameplay is different, but still very Kirby. Kirby, instead of inhaling enemies, grapples them with a string of yarn and balls up the yarn they’re made of to make projectiles. It’s actually kind of like Klonoa with longer range and without the jump-aiding capabilities. He can float by holding the jump button, and if you press down in the air, he does a sort of ground pound. It’s all very basic, but they use everything he can do to great use. Some levels, for instance, have wind that affect Kirby when he’s floating as a parachute. There are buttons around for him to use his string like a grappling hook and swing around. They take the mechanics about as far as they can go in the game, and it’s fun.

It is a Kirby game, meaning it is easy. You can’t die, really. When you die, you just drop the beads you’ve collected for that level and keep going. If you just wanted to blaze through the levels, it wouldn’t be difficult at all. However, there are treasures to find on each level, and Gold medals to get for having a certain number of beads when you beat the level. This gold medal is especially important on bosses, because getting over that score nets you access to additional levels in that world. These sorts of things offer up challenges if you are the type to want them. Still, from what I hear, if you want a platforming challenge, go see Donkey Kong Country Returns. This isn’t your game.

The whole game can be played in a co-op mode, which is fun enough, but to be honest, creates problems. It’s way too easy to accidentally pick up your co-op buddy when you mean to hit an enemy or grapple point, and it’s way harder keeping enough beads when you have two people who can be hit. It’s like the dickishness of New Super Mario Brothers Wii is there, but since there’s no penalty for dying, there’s no fun in actually screwing your partner over, so it just creates issues. Still, it’s a nice addition, just not as amazing of one as the co-op was in, say, Kirby Super Star.

Epic Yarn isn’t revolutionary. It isn’t trying to be. Instead, it’s going for being an insanely polished game, and it definitely is that. If you’ve played previous Kirby games, you’ll know if this game is for you. They pumped some production values into one of my favorite franchises, and frankly, I enjoyed it a ton.

I bought the Carcassonne iPhone app right when it came out. I love the game, and it supposedly had asynchronous multiplayer, something that way, way more iOS games should have. Unfortunately, when I booted it up, I learned that to play online with your friends, you have to use the e-mail account set up on your iDevice. Because having my e-mail on my iPod seemed stupid, I balked at the idea, and I never really got too much use out of it, even though it had hotseat. A few half-started games while waiting for movies to start, perhaps, but that’s about it.

Then, at Jonathan’s birthday party, Spaeth was playing the game. Apparently he got his sister and her husband hooked, and was now playing online matches with them. This made me say, “okay, fine, fuck it.” I hooked up my Gmail, which was as stupid and pain in the ass as I expected. Then I started games with Spaeth, and some people on Talking Time.

I was quickly reminded how fantastic of an implementation of Carcassonne this is. I mean, asynchronous multiplayer does automagically put it above other versions in my book, but it’s not just that. The interface is fucking fantastic. It’s classy and stylized, but at the same time, completely unobtrusive. You never have any problems doing the actions in the game, and all relevant information is instantly available. It does nice little bonuses like showing you positions on the board where it is impossible to put a tile, based on the distribution left in the draw pile. It even has a special little sound for when you get a Push notification of your turn coming up, of a polite gentleman going “It is your turn now.” It’s just a classy app, and Carcassonne is a great game anyway. It really makes me wish that more board games would come out with multiplayer versions like this. Imagine, say, Ticket to Ride played this way! That would be fantastic.

Yeah, keep being awesome, Carcassonne app people. And if you haven’t bought it, do it! It’s excellent.