The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

I’m super late to the party, but I want to write about Desktop Dungeons. Is that okay? Is that cool? Cool.

So, Desktop Dungeons. I gave it a go because of this nice little Let’s Play going on on the Talking Time. It seemed pretty cool, and I mean, the idea is genius. A whole roguelike you can complete in a few minutes is a fantastic concept that I am totally behind. Then again, pretty well any roguelike is one I can play through in a few minutes because I suck and die, but nevermind that.

It was immediately obvious why I had heard so much about the game. It’s really well designed. I feel like it can be even better, and they’re doing some sort of massive overhaul to make it an actual paid product, I believe, which will probably result in that happening, which is cool. I’d pick it up on Steam sometime for a few bucks.

The thing is, though, I feel like it’s really badly suited for Desktops. The interface uses nothing but left clicks. It seems like it would be trivial to put on an iPad, and that’s totally what I want.

Honestly, it’s amazing to me how much iPhone gaming has changed how I look at games. I see little but awesome things like Desktop Dungeons, and I immediately start thinking about how easily they could be converted into the much more convenient iOS platform for consumption. It just seems like such a great place for such development. The people who made the game could have been charging a buck for it on there from the beginning, and maybe would have earned some money for their hard work.
Granted, maybe without the free version it wouldn’t have gotten as much press as it did. That’s certainly something, I suppose. And, of course, it’s always nice to be able to develop in a fully open environment like the PC. I have no argument there. But dammit, it just seems so right. I have indie developers that I love and follow and support on iOS. That’s never really been something I even thought about doing for PC games.

I guess the extrapolation from that is how little I think about the DS and PSP these days. I’m playing Ghost Trick, and I tried to play Birth by Sleep, and it felt weird. I just play more games on my iPod more often. To be honest, an iPad seems like a much better gaming investment, at the moment, than a 3DS, which is certainly something I never expected. (Yes, Essner, I can hear you saying I could buy two 3DSes for the cost of an iPad, I know.) I could easily do that, and wait until the 3DS XL comes out. Or something similar. I mean, hell, Ghost Trick has an iOS version in Japan, which is probably going to show up here in a few months, and frankly, I would probably rather be playing that. I mean, I’d still have bought this DS version even if I had confirmation, because I am impatient, but I wouldn’t doubt that would be a potentially superior version.
Seriously, sometimes I think about how Apple has taken so much of my gaming time, and it still shocks me. Not that I’m unhappy about it. Quite the opposite.

Okay, I guess this wasn’t REALLY about Desktop Dungeons. But that’s a cool game. You could play it. And then maybe ask them to port it to iOS for me. Pretty please?

There was a time when I liked Kingdom Hearts. I remember this being the case. I thought Kingdom Hearts was fucking awesome. I mean, I have a Heartless t-shirt. The second game had a lot of bullshit story elements, but it, too, was awesome once you got out of the Twilight Town and into the game proper. I mean, you got to run around with Tron and shit. It was pretty awesome, right? Right. I certainly remember it as being such.

Therefore, when I heard they were making a Kingdom Hearts on PSP that used the Crisis Core system, a game whose combat I enjoyed, I figured this might be awesome! If it had the same great combat as Crisis Core and all the fanservice, I was sure I could dig it.

Well, it came in from Gamefly, and… I dunno. Have I changed? Or is the game just this bad? I have no idea, but I cannot stand this game.

The game started up with a bunch of Kingdom Hearts pointless story bullshit. It immediately grated on me. On top of that, there was a sequence where Roxas OOPS I MEAN Ventus is shirtless for no fucking reason. Like, seriously, absolutely no reason. It was then that I realized I could skip like a million scenes, and I totally did.
How long would this opening sequence had taken me if I had watched it all? Probably hours.
Eventually I got control of people, and it started flashing all kinds of tutorial information that made no sense because it had no context. Why do I have 3 different sets of abilities? I guess the abilities are like materia? You can level up and combined them and I don’t fucking know. The one thing I did learn, though, is that they loop. So using one readies the next in the list and so on. That’s actually a good idea.
Then it tells me that I can summon other people, but not really, I can just use their skills? Kind of? I have no idea why you would do this besides the fact that it heals you.
Also, after you spam combos, sometimes you transform for no reason for like 10 seconds, only it takes a long time to load.

I then end up at Cinderella castle, which is infested with not-Heartless. I was annoyed that they were there for no reason, but then I realized I skipped any explanation as to why they’d be there, so the game got a pass. In any case, you can’t go three steps without getting into a combat, and the camera controls are so shitty that I often found myself walking backwards after a fight, which meant I had to fight more guys. I basically just started dodging all combats until I got to a point where I had to protect a mouse with a key, which I constantly failed at, and then I stopped.

Was I insane in the past? I remember Kingdom Hearts combat being fun, and the interactions with Disney characters being entertaining, but man, this game is such bullshit. The thing is, it really seems like a good portable adaptation of Kingdom Hearts. It does everything I remember. I just hate it now. Man. I sit here, and I think about KHII, and the fact that I beat it, and I just can’t believe I played a game like that for the hours it would have taken me. I can’t.
Man.

I’ve been working on two games. One is Ghost Trick, a completely fantastic game in its own right and I’m sure to ramble on about forever once I finish it, and Kirby’s Epic Yarn. Both games are awesome, but currently I’m kind of blown away by both of their soundtracks. So I’m going to share some.

Ace Attorney had some great music in it, that really made the game feel more dramatic than, perhaps, the gameplay actually was. Ghost Trick, while being a better game over all, continues that tradition.

I mean, seriously, just listen to this. When this music kicks in, and the person you’re trying to save is about to die, shit gets REAL. It’s always amazing what they can do with the limited sound hardware of stuff like this. I always have such respect when a song really gets me going when I play a game.

On a different sort of note, though, the music in Epic Yarn just perfectly fits the game. It doesn’t really get you going, but it’s just so cute and so right. I mean, just listen to this. This music is played when you’re on the race car levels. It’s flat-out fantastic. A great piano piece that’s fun and upbeat, but still fitting the cutesy look of the game. It’s simple, but solid. The game is willing to mix it up, too, when the time is right, but in general it keeps it simple, and often goes back to the piano on the very next level. It really helps set the tone for the game just as much as the neat Yarn visuals do.

We live in a time when game music fucking rocks. I love it when a game takes the time to take its music into account when creating. It’s just… effective. It certainly keeps me listening as well.

I am angry at a Kirby game.

My Xbox has died, so I’m turning to other consoles and other amusements. I thought I would finish up Epic Yarn because of that, and sat down for a long play session.

Then I got to King Dedede.

He took me 30 minutes or more to beat, and by the end of it, I was so pissed.
Basically, he would do a couple things you’d have to dodge, then he’d hit the ground with his hammer. You grabbed a star that shot up, hit him with it, then you jumped atop him and used him to let you jump up and grab the Marionette controller controlling him. Pretty simple, right? The marionette would only swoop down for small periods of time, but for the first hit, it was doable.

The third and fourth hits, though, were nearly impossible. It would swoop in from the top of the screen and swoop right back out. It was seriously like half a second. I would jump on Dedede’s back and try to time it, but I kept missing, over and over again. I was screaming at the screen by the end of it. Never had I been so angry at a Kirby game before. Kirby is supposed to be light, stress free, and cute. This was just fucking frustrating.

I didn’t even get the patch to unlock the bonus levels after the fight. I was all pissed. I turned off the game.

Then I go and start ranting about how angry I was to pyro, and decide I’m going to show him a video of how bullshit the boss was. So I pull up this video and…
Shit.
Apparently if you do the weight drop on his back, it pulls down and stuns the marionette.

The problem was that I didn’t need to do that for the first two hits. It was fairly easy to hit. Thus, I never considered I might be doing something wrong, or there might be something else to the boss. Thus, I got caught in this endless loop of anger.
It’s so unlike a Kirby game, though. I really don’t know whose fault this was. I don’t feel like I was particularly dense or did something wrong. There hasn’t been an enemy before that which I HAD to use the drop down move on. I dunno.

I’m sure I’ll calm down and love Kirby once again, and with the actual method of beating him known, getting the patch will be trivial. But man. Anger.
Anger.

Tonight, at Droib’s, we finally managed to try some Goldeneye 007. You know, the new Wii thing.

This game seems like it was created to fill a niche. There are no real hardcore shooters on the Wii. This is because, to be, there’s no real need for one. The people who want those games should have an Xbox, right? But they thought otherwise. Surely there must be people out there with a Wii who would like an online shooter.

Those people will love Goldeneye. Everyone else will kind of wonder why they went to the trouble.

I mean, it’s all solid. We had some fun split-screen multiplayer times, reminiscing about old Goldeneye experiences. It’s a bit slower-paced than most modern shooters, but controls fine. You get to pick loadouts, which have perks that, I assume, you can modify playing the actual online mode. That’s cool. Most of the maps seemed okay? There were fewer remakes of classic maps than I expected. Maybe there are more on the online mode.

The real question was of controls themselves. I had a Classic Controller Pro, which seemed to be the way to go. The controls mapped in a pretty quickly learnable way. However, everyone else was using Gamecube controllers, which presented more of a problem. They mapped Z as a “modifier” key for many buttons on the controller. This works okay, but man, it was nearly impossible to figure out, even looking at the in-game controller diagrams. Once everyone figured that out, though, they could work things fine. It’s just not usual. Then again, the Gamecube controller is really, really weird, so it’s not surprising they had to resort to weird stuff.

We didn’t try Wiimote + Nunchuck because we aren’t stupid. Also we couldn’t find a Nunchuck.

Anyway, it was fun for the hour or two we played it, but I don’t know if we’d ever go back to it again. I certainly wouldn’t without the nostalgia factor. I kind of want to see what the single player is like, but at the same time, it’s not a priority. It seems like a solid product, but it’s not really aimed at me. It’s aimed at people with a Wii and nothing else. I’m sure as hell not that person.

We won our first game of Castle Ravenloft tonight, and I was attempting to think about strategy and what we did better. I’m also wondering if the fact that we only had 3 players made the game easier or not. I’m not sure.
In any case, here’s what lead us to victory, as far as I can see. Let me know if these tips are wrong, in your opinion.

1. Always Keep Moving: Encounters are the things that fuck you over. Monsters are mostly manageable. Thus, you need to do everything in your power to explore every turn. Bringing the Ranger to mop up enemies while still being able to explore with her special power makes this easier.

2. Use a Power Early: There are plenty of cards and effects that can let you restore a utility or daily power, so using one right at the beginning and making sure you keep one face down tends to be more beneficial than trying to save big powers for the end of the session. Fighters, especially, should use Unstoppable the moment they take two damage and try to keep flipping it back over to help their survivability.

3. Only Slightly Be A Team Player: Being close to other heroes gives buffs, but also makes encounters fuck you over that much more. One tile away from your fellow heroes is probably the best range to be, as you can still reach each other, but also aren’t on the same tile for horrible encounter card effects.

4. Rogue Kind Of Sucks: If there’s one class in the game one would want to leave out, I think it would be the Rogue. Many of the Rogue’s abilities are very situational, and are only useful when other heroes are close, which, unlike normal DnD, is fairly rare in good play of this game. Rogue has a distance at-will, sure, but Twin Shot on the Ranger and Magic Missle on the Mage are clearly better. Rogue has some decent up close attacks, but the Fighter’s attacks have way more use and the Ranger’s attacks do more damage. Rogue is really just not specialized and spread too thin. Still, if you have one, be sure to force use of Stealth, because that power is one of the best things the class has going for it.

Those are the lessons I learned, anyway. Hopefully, with these in mind, we can start winning some more games. That’d be cool.

Munchkin Quest does a lot of things that I am unsure of. It adds a lot of mechanics to the basic Munchkin play. One would hope this would make the game more strategic or more complete, but I’m really not sure it does. It requires more testing, but… hm…

First off, I’m kind of unsure what they were intending with how you build the board. Having rooms on both sides of the tiles makes it impossible to have a stack to draw from, and makes it really weird to decide which side to pick each time you draw a tile. The “connectors” also seem really odd. Many of them don’t seem to serve a purpose, and once again, they’re printed on both sides, making them more complicated to draw than is really necessary.

The dice rolls, too, really leave me pretty conflicted. Combat in Munchkin the card game goes pretty fast, and it’s normally pretty clear how things can be affected immediately. With these dice rolls, things are much more swingy, and I don’t feel like it’s really for good reason. Instead of other players fucking you over, it’s the dice most of the time. That’s not nearly as fun in something that’s supposed to be a game of backstabbing. It also makes your base level way less important than it is in normal Munchkin, besides as a counter towards victory. You’re more likely to kill your first monster through a lucky roll than actually being equipped for it, and monster boost cards are much less significant due to the dice rolls, even though they persist through multiple turns.

Finally, most of the wheeling and dealing of Munchkin is removed by the room layout. Since you can only support someone one room away, that means you can’t negotiate with everyone at the table for help against tough monsters. There’s normally only one person within range. You look to them, and they shrug, and then you go and die alone. It’s the player interaction that makes Munchkin a game worth playing, and this game removes a lot of that. You have much less incentive to fuck other players over or to work with them. It just doesn’t really click.

All of these are impressions based on our short learning game, of course. Maybe after figuring it out more, it’ll click more. As it is now, though, playing it kind of just made me want to play the card game. It’s more straightforward, and has way more chances for trash-talking. That’s always been the appeal, as far as I’m aware.

King of Fighters XII is pretty terrible.

It was never the sort of game I was going to buy, but I had it in my Gamefly list to give it a try. I enjoy King of Fighters. I was fairly decent at them at one time (Note: fairly decent means able to hold my own against semi-difficult computer opponents). It interested to see how they were attempting to update the franchise after Street Fighter IV was so fantastic.

I could only stomach about an hour of it. It was really bad.

I mean, okay, the graphics were pretty nice. There is that.
Okay, that’s all I got.

First off, how could you not have Mai? I mean, come on. It’s fucking MAI. Everyone’s favorite boob-bouncing hentai-bait. You have to have Mai for the creeps out there. Plus, I mean, I enjoy how Mai plays. That’s why she was one of my mains. I have no idea why she didn’t make the cut for this game’s roster.
Secondly, the menus are pretty godawful. I attempted to get into an online game, just to achievement whore, and the menus are pretty incomprehensible. Like, I joined a lobby, but that was like… the wait to join a lobby lobby? Then I joined one where I could actually play, but it was winner stays in and I couldn’t watch matches in progress. It was kind of a disaster.

The gameplay, too, just made me scratch my head. Granted, it has been awhile since I played a KoF, but oh my goodness, it just felt all wrong. None of the characters I knew felt right, and all the new characters I tried didn’t seem to do anything. I even turned on this “assist” mode that was supposed to make me throw out special moves all the time, but even this “easy” mode was so weird I couldn’t figure out how to use it well.

I guess it just goes to show what a fucking fantastic job they did with Street Fighter IV. That game immediately feels familiar, and yet is an evolution of the fighting game genre. It’s fantastic. It is everything King of Fighters XII is not. I sent that shit back the same day I got it.

I am very late to the party cause, you know, I just played Fruit Ninja.

I kinda get it, and I kind of don’t.

Half the time when I play these super popular app store games, I just fail to get it. There’s just not enough there for me, since I’m used to more intense gaming experiences. Cut the Rope is really the exception to that, but I was hoping for another one. I had heard people like Jeff Green saying fantastic things about Fruit Ninja, so in a moment of weakness I paid my dollar.

Basically, Fruit Ninja is an arcade score attack sort of game. Fruits and bombs flip up from the bottom of the screen, and you have to slash across them with your finger to cut the fruits. Miss 3 fruits, and you fail. Cut a bomb, and you fail.

And that’s it, really.

Granted, there are plenty of modes in the game, including a bombless timed score attack and an online multiplayer, which is pretty neat. There are lots of silly unlockables you get from cutting many of different types of fruit. But in the end, this is just not a game I could see myself getting addicted to unless I really had friends constantly competing with me for high scores. The game does its best to enable that, using Game Center and OpenFient to put friend leaderboards right into the game, but since I only had one or two people who had played the game, and weeks ago, it wasn’t really much of an appeal to me.

However, you do have to give the game credit. It is only a buck. I don’t feel cheated or anything, though perhaps the amount of variety is a bit low compared to something like, say, Hook Worlds. However, the game controls flawlessly. It is designed, from the ground up, for the touch screen. You feel in control and powerful as you play. The fruits cut apart in realistic ways based on how you slash. It does feel really good. They nailed that part. That’s probably why the game is so popular, and hey, it earned it. This is a game that anyone can get into. It just doesn’t go any deeper, like Cut the Rope does.

But everything can’t be Cut the Rope, I suppose. I’m glad I tried it, but yeah, I don’t know if I’m jumping for joy to suggest it or anything.

Because I enjoyed 999 so much, I was jonesing for more story-based games to play in bed after I utterly devoured it. It was then I remembered that I never did finish Professor Layton and the Unwound Future, so I polished that off.

Now, gameplaywise, there’s not much to say. It’s a Layton game. They did some smart things in this one, like adding “puzzle battles” to integrate puzzles more completely into the plot, which was a nice addition, but in the end, you’re walking around, getting some plot, and solving mostly unrelated brain teasers. That’s fine. It’s still fun.

The plot, though. Man.

Seriously, the robots in the first game were kind of cute, and made a sort of sense. It was neat. I was down with that. Then came the second game, where the explanation for a lot of the game was “EVERYONE IS COMPLETELY HIGH” which is a horrible explanation. Drugs simply do not work that way. Plus, it’s amazing how it doesn’t upset anyone to learn they’ve been high for hours, and hallucinating. No reaction. No “oh shit, what other horrible effects could this gas have?” Nope.

Anyway, I was expecting that kind of bullshit with this game too, and I got it. Really? A gigantic “movie set” the size of a lot of London underneath London? And nobody in it knows? Been there for a few weeks? I mean, seriously, someone must have walked far enough to see the edge of this cavern. Plus, the reason given for building this obscenely expensive place was not one that I bought in any way. The only way you can get scientists to work for you is to make them think they’re in the future? But again, I was prepared for that bullshit ending.

What I was not prepared for was them undoing their own bullshit ending and making its purpose even more stupid. At the end, they tell us that, hey, one of the characters actually HAS traveled in time. Time Travel is possible. All that stupid ridiculousness about building an underground city doesn’t matter that much, because hey, you can travel through time!
What the fuck.
The series is going so, so far out of its way to remove “supernatural” elements from its stories, even to the point of making these ridiculous explanations for what’s going on, and then they decide that, no, there really is time travel after they spent all that time telling us there isn’t for a really dumb reason. I just don’t understand it. The story would have worked if the time travel was real. Like, seriously, you’d need to change almost none of it. It’s all so stupid.

Again, I still love Layton. The games are fun to play. But blergh, that sort of thing really frustrates me. If you want more Layton fun, though, of course get Unwound Future. But man, that plot…