The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2 for the 360 is fantastic, but man, Microsoft is screwing people over by forcing Valve to charge for all that DLC. I say this because I’ve recently played through The Passing and The Sacrifice with my brother and Brer, and while they are really fun little campaigns, I can’t help but feel like I would have felt gypped if I had paid 7 dollars for them.

If for no other reason, the Passing is probably the better DLC because it has so much fantastic dialog. Valve knows what it’s doing when it’s trying to create characters who are only built through realistic dialog. They’re fantastic at it, and throwing both groups of survivors together to talk was a great way to let the writers of the game have fun. There is some hilarious stuff there, and while I’ve only played through it one and a half times (the half was due to technical difficulties) I already heard a ton of different dialog. There’s some of that in The Sacrifice, too, but since there’s less people to play off of, it’s, perhaps, less obvious. They do give Louis some great dialog in safe rooms, though.

Lengthwise, neither is really long, though you can tell they put The Sacrifice together with the idea that it would be a shorter campaign for Versus. Nothing wrong with that, of course, especially since it’s free on the PC. Again, having to pay 7 bucks for it would be a little harder to swallow, but it’s still just fine. At the same time, there’s nothing particularly different about the levels: they’re just a different place to play Left 4 Dead on. They try to mix it up with a door you have to open that has a tank behind it, the “Sacrifice” mechanic, and the original Left 4 Deaders providing covering fire for you in the end of the Passing, but it doesn’t really change it much. You don’t have anything as sweepingly big, change-wise, as Hard Rain, or the first time you do the conclusion to Dead Center. It’s not a new game, so that’s probably too much to ask for, since, as I said, they did try to mix it up within the confines of the game, but I’m just saying, if you’re wanting something fundamentally different, these won’t do it.

But still! They’re fun! Plus, with Left 4 Dead currently being on sale on the PC for the same price as the 360 DLC will cost, well, you should probably pick it up. It was nice to get back to the game. I’m not going to be the sort who plays the mutations every week, but the game still holds up, and is a fantastic time with friends.

Costume Quest is fantastic.

I guess I should be more specific about that, though. Costume Quest is a great idea with mostly solid execution. It’s entertaining and endearing. It’s cute as fuck. It’s simple. It’s fun. I completely got 15 bucks worth of entertainment out of it. If you have any nostalgia for Halloween, it’s probably worth your time to play.

It’s fantastic.

It’s Halloween, and monsters are attempting to steal all the candy in order to appease a gigantic demon. In doing this, they accidentally capture your sibling, who was wearing a Candy Corn costume. Thankfully, due to being “really serious about Halloween,” you, and the friends you get along the way, can transform, using costumes, into awesome heroes, monsters, robots, and so on to battle the evil on the streets!

I personally love the fact that the only explanation given as to why your characters can transform is that they really like Halloween. It fits the setting perfectly. Of course, I’m not surprised that Double Fine had the chops to be subtle in their writing. Comedy writing is one thing they know how to do, and they continue to know how to do it well. Costume Quest has some great dialog. It’s not stand-up-comedy hour, but it is entertaining, appropriate, and will elicit a few laughs over the course of the game. The art and such sets the mood, and sets it perfectly, but it’s the writing that really cements this game and sells it. Basically, if you like the writing in the demo, the game is probably worth your time.

However, like other Double Fine games, it’s not completely there in other areas. The biggest, stupidest thing the game does is not let you save. The game uses an autosave system, but it doesn’t save after every battle. It only saves when you make progress on a quest, or travel between the different areas in the game. You can fight many, many battles in between finding quest items, and find many hidden things around the world besides. If you were to, say, open a chest with a costume part, then quit, you wouldn’t have that costume part when you booted the game up again. It flat-out sucks not being able to stop when you want to because you’d have to redo several fights, and it is a ridiculous oversight not to give the player the option of manual saving, or at least automatically saving after every combat.
Similarly, the combat is a little flawed. Well, okay, it’s not flawed, it’s just extremely simplistic. Each costume can attack, and has a special move that takes three turns to charge. Basically, you just stall with basic attacks until you use your special, and then the battle is over. There are other things you can do, of course. Battle stamps can give you other abilities and change how your basic attack works, for instance. However, those abilities are almost overpowered: the 2-ply TP power is just ridiculous, and basically lets you completely lock down all enemies so they can’t even attack. Most enemies were stun-locked the entire game thanks to my liberal use of this power.
Still, the combat looks cool enough and the game is short enough that it didn’t really bother me. In addition, the game really makes use of what it has for the boss battles: several boss battles required me to change my loadout and pick different costumes. For example, I couldn’t defeat the last boss until I realized I should use the Vampire costume, since its life-drain really helped with my need for healing in that fight. Of course, there’s only about five bosses in the game, but when they come up, it can get a bit tough.

Still, I totally feel like the setting and writing make up for the few mechanical issues in the game. I had a damn good time, and I have no problem recommending this game for $15 dollars. At $10, I would be demanding you pick it up. It is just so much fun, and it’s great to see Halloween getting its due this year. It certainly put me in much more of a Halloween mood, and I’m proud to have made this the second game where I got all the achievement points.

Apparently nothing can piss me off more in video games than poorly constructed mazes with no useful minimap.

I mean, first, I was doing the LotRO Harvestmath thing with Essner and Brer. There’s this haunted house, with a bunch of quests in it you do to get little coins you can trade for silly shit. Fun, silly times, right? Except this Haunted House is designed to be impossible to navigate. The mini-map doesn’t actually show all the walls, stuff is constantly jumping out at you and messing with your vision, and there are three doors to every location in the house, and two of them don’t work. Attempting to do these silly quests filled me with great, great rage. I just wanted a silly mask, game! Don’t piss me off! It also didn’t help that I felt fairly completely ill for a lot of us playing, as well. Either way, I logged out kind of pissed.

Then, a few days later, I start playing Dragon Age. It’s really good! But I decide to do the mage tower first, as I want Healer Mage. In this quest is a horrible Fade sequence that lasts way the fuck too long. In it, you’re dropped in several mazes. One of them has a bunch of nonsensical teleporters in it. I got so pissed at this area, you wouldn’t believe. Well, I mean, mad enough to get pissed on twitter. It also didn’t help that doing one of the things you need to solve the maze is completely unintuitive and kind of buggy, at least in the 360 version. Doing it throws up an error of “You can’t lockpick this” even as it’s functioning properly. If you don’t ignore the error and let it happen, you’ll be stuck forever. It’s really stupid.

Basically, I hate non-logical mazes forever. Teleporters that don’t follow simple “this door leads to this door” logic and instead does whatever it wants, depending, is a great way to piss me off, apparently. Fuck teleporters, and fuck mazes! If, you know, you find them sexually attractive. Otherwise, just hate them with me.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m still COMPLETELY EXCITED to play Gamma World this Friday with people. I mean, totally excited.
But man, the main rulebook leaves something to be desired.

I swear there is a chapter missing in this thing. The book makes references to things like “worldlines” and all kinds of crazy stuff, but there’s no section in the book which actually describes the setting. Now, I’m not a lore person, but still, you have to give me, as DM, something more than nothing so that I can create a setting that is thematically appropriate. All you really get is “crazy, destroyed world with mutant powers.” I guess that’s enough, but goodness, it seems a little questionable, especially when you have all these other elements showing up in your descriptions of monsters and gear which refer to things you haven’t referred to.

It also seems weird that, by using the rules in the box, you can’t create several of the player characters that the pictures in the rulebook show you. For example, there are several pictures of a mutated rat person, but following the rules, you can’t be a mutated rat person. You can be a swarm of rats. An entire swarm of them. But not a rat person. It’s just odd.

Still, I really like the card mechanic in general. I am looking forward to seeing how that adds random fun to the game. It should add some! I think that’s neat. I’m not so hot on the booster thing, but if it works fantastically well and everyone is interested? Well, who knows. Maybe. I still feel like they should have been stand-alone expansion packs of powers or loot, but I guess I don’t get to make the business decisions at Wizards, huh?

It’s pretty obvious to me, though, that Wizards has a potential hit. It does seem to be handled pretty badly, though. Hopefully they can turn it around. It’s still going to make for damn fun role-playing this Friday, though. I’ll be sure to let you know how that goes. There will be pews, pows, and things of that nature! Believe it! Like a Naruto!

I now dub this “iPhone Game Review” weekend, as I realize there are a lot of cool games I haven’t written about.

Like, say, Super Mega Worm.

Twitters was all going on about this game, so I had to pick it up. I must say, I’m glad I did. I’m not usually one for Arcade action, but this is a game where said action is too good to pass up. It’s hilarious, frantic fun, and a great time.

Basically, humans suck, and are polluting the earth, so Mother Nature unleashes you, the Super Mega Worm, to destroy all humans. You do this by leaping dramatically out of the ground to eat humans and destroy vehicles. You can bounce off of vehicles for extra air time, and can eventually fire EMP blasts and mouth lasers to help you destroy everyone. However, you have a life bar, and the humans don’t just sit there and let you eat them. This bar is constantly draining, and is hurt by attacks, but you regain life by eating humans and animals, and causing destruction. This keeps you from being able to turtle: you have to constantly be balls-to-the-wall destructive, which works, as I would hide and slowly pick targets if I was given the option. This would be a lot less fun in the long term than the crazy explosions and such that occur as the game is now.

The main benefit of Super Mega Worm is the progression. It’s an arcade game, sure, and designed around getting high scores. However, there is also a level progression, and your Worm levels up as you go along, gaining new abilities and increasing the power of old ones, while the human forces slowly amass more weapons and give you new challenges. This makes it so that even I, who doesn’t care about high scores, feel like I’m accomplishing something as I play. It’s a great way to meet people who don’t want to top a high score list halfway, and help them to enjoy the game, and I really appreciate it.

Like many iPhone games that are unsure what to do, Super Mega Worm offers many control schemes. I found the virtual d-pad the easiest, but that’s because I’m the most used to using such a d-pad. The slider option, as seen in the video, also works extremely well. It just takes a little to wrap your mind around how it actually moves the worm. Either way, something will work for you, and while precision is nice, most of the time you’re just trying to deal with so many things happening at once that it doesn’t really matter.

Super Mega Worm is just a distraction. It’s not “artistic” or even particularly unique. But it is just extremely polished, extremely solid, and full of amazing, amazing action. It is a fucking fun distraction. As someone who doesn’t normally get into arcade games, I played this solid for several days during my downtime. It was certainly worth my time, and I think it would be worth yours.

Back when iPhone games were a young market, one indie title stood out: Edge. Everyone was talking about it. I really kind of paid it no mind. Then a certain jackass started suing because he’s a jackass, and it got taken down. Then put back up. Then taken down again. About the second time it got put back up, it was on sale, and I said, “Hey, I guess I could figure out what that is.” I bought it. I tried the first level. I didn’t get it at all. I never played it.

Until recently, of course.

I was depressed and had only my iPod recently. I needed something to do, so I gave it another try, and you know what? The game is pretty fantastic. I’m on the last few levels, and I’m glad I picked it up.

I feel I have to start by mentioning the music. I’ve gone on record as not giving a shit about iPhone game music, because if I’m playing a game on my iPhone, I’m going to be wanting to listen to a podcast while I do it. However, I ended up actually listening to the music in this game, and it really is fantastic. There’s just enough tracks so that when one comes around again, you’re ready to hear it, and they are some fantastic chiptune songs. Just listen to the music in the trailer I linked above, and you’ll see what I mean. Smartly, though, the game lets you easily turn sounds off to listen to your own stuff too, so it’s good no matter what.

The gameplay is pretty simple stuff. You move a cube to a goal, collecting little rainbow bits along the way. Your cube can climb up walls the same height as himself, as long as he has clearance behind him. He can also “stick” to surfaces using the edge of the cube, thus giving the game its name. Using “edge time” is the trick to most of the more difficult levels, where you have to balance on the sides of moving platforms to carry you to new areas. The cube also has interesting moving physics which you have to master, as you need to know how fast it’s going to fall forward as you move across the stages.

There are three control schemes available. All work to some extent, but I found that, to use edge time properly, I eventually had to turn on the virtual buttons, as that was the only way I could properly grok the feathering needed to make it work. Give the other schemes a try, but you’ll probably end up just turning the buttons on, too.

The game is basically a time-attack game, designed around mastering levels and moving through them quickly. I have no interest in that, but thankfully, the game is designed in such a way that I can still have fun. The levels are all clever, with neat little gimmicks on the basic ideas of the game that make you smile. When I play, I just want to see what wacky levels I can see next. There’s constant checkpointing, and the only penalty for dying is losing time, so if you want to play as a tourist, like I do, the game is very nice in making that easy. Sure, you’ll get the “D” rank at the end, but you’re still upping your overall game completion, so you’re still getting progress.

The only problem with the game is that you have to complete a level in one go. Some levels, especially when you’re still learning the tricks and keep dying on attempts, can take awhile, so it’s a shame it doesn’t really do mid-level saves for when you need to exit into another app to do something real fast, like change the podcast you’re listening to.

That’s a minor complaint, though. The game is fantastic. It’s creative and fun, and completely worth a dollar. Of course, you’ve probably already played it at this point, seeing as it’s old as hell. Still, if you haven’t, get on the app store and grab it! It lives up to the hype.

The best news ever has been announced, by the way. Figured I should blog and let you know.

Level 5 and Capcom are making Professor Layton x Phoenix Wright.

This may be the best thing ever.

It’s no secret I love both series to death. It’s a crazy-ass crossover that makes no sense, but now that I’ve heard about it, I want it so bad. SO BAD I WANT IT. It’s going to be fantastic.

Just think of the possibilities.

Really, this announcement just makes me wonder why the hell we don’t have more fantastic crossover stuff out in the gamespace. Why is it only Capcom willing to make these deals? I mean, it’s completely fanservice-y, but it knows it, and it’s going to rock in that regard. I mean, look! It’s classic Phoenix! Not hobo Phoenix! There’s screenshots of them apparently being against each other in a courtroom! There’ll be puzzles! What more could a fan of these series want? It’s easy to do, once you get the deal figured out, and both companies get benefit. It just seems like it would happen more often.

Alas, most companies want to keep all their toys to themselves. Besides, I dunno, stuff like Super Meat Boy, and some fighters, it’s not in the cards. But I’ll love my crazy-ass dream game of my dreams. You know, the one I’m going to buy a 3DS for. Because I will. I will be all over that shit, and it will be marvelous. I hope this game sells well, to inspire more such shenanigans.

(Also, I think I stole that title from somewhere, though I’m not sure. If it was your genius, thanks! It is genius.)

Kane and Lynch were once dead men, but now they’re dog days. This involves them bang bang shooting guns in the third person cover based style of the era.

It was… okay?

Most shooters go out of their way to make you feel powerful. When you’re doing something right, it is clear you are a god among the peons you are destroying left and right. Kane and Lynch 2: Dog Days never makes you feel like this. Even as Spaeth and I played through on Easy, we were dying constantly, and I never felt like I was completely in control of what was going on.

Part of the reason for this is the visual style, which is the element that most people were paying attention to regarding this game. The game goes all out to look like it’s a youtube video, or something similar, with “buffering” screens instead of load screens, lots of shaky cam, and shitty effects over the action like it was recorded on a tiny pocket camera. It does look really striking at first, so in that regard, they completely succeed.

It also manages to completely disorient you at every turn. Often, I’d run at someone, planning on grabbing them, and would get completely turned around, unsure where the enemies were, and then shot in the back. Similarly, the weapons are also disorienting. None of them are very accurate, except for the rare few rifles you find near the end of the game. You never feel like you can really shoot a target, so you’re aiming wildly, trying to connect. The game never gives you options like grenades to solve difficult situations, either. You can throw things like fire extinguishers and shoot them, but often they barely work like a good grenade would in a Gears or Halo, and since you can only carry one and are slowed down when you’re hauling them around, it’s easy to say “Fuck this” and not even use them.

All of this leads to a feeling of helplessness in the game. You feel like some shitty criminals on the run, not some heroes. You’re barely keeping it together. You know how to fire a gun, but it isn’t your life. It’s just something you have to do, and you’ve never really perfected the art. The dialog, too, is fairly realistic. Lots of “fuck this, shit, going to kill you fuckers!” sort of uninspired but realistic sorts of combat dialog. It really does work. The people who made this game were attempting to set a tone, and I feel like they did. It’s uneven in places: the game can’t seem to decide if there’s actually a cameraman following you, or if it’s just a gimmick, for instance. Sometimes NPCs interact with the “cameraman,” and sometimes there’s obviously nobody there. Still, it does work.

I just don’t think it’s that fun to play. I do come to shooters for story, occasionally, but I don’t come to shooters for a feeling of helplessness. When, even on easy, I feel like I’m dying to bullshit deaths constantly, something is wrong. The fact that the combat never really varies itself through the whole story doesn’t help either. They slowly dole out more and more accurate guns, but the basic combat is the same. It also doesn’t help that, for a game attempting to have a story, the story itself is so nonsensical. There are times where it seems clear that they just had to add another level. There’s no good reason for Kane and Lynch to run the base of the guy trying to kill them, for instance. It’s just there because you have to have a big finale. It breaks character for these guys to do something like that. It really does.

The game’s short, and I’ve certainly played worse games, but it’s nothing special. Fragile Alliance, the multiplayer mode, is really creative, and could be tons of fun in a game with better shooting mechanics. As it is, though, it’s only a momentary novelty, because you simply don’t want to play the mechanics of this game any more than you have to. It’s a rental-quality game, sure, but I could suggest many better and more fun experiences for that, such as, say Singularity or Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood. Turn to one of those first, and rent this one only if you have a co-op buddy who really likes gritty crime stories. Then you might have a bit of fun.

When I get depressed, I spend money since, you know, owning things is basically happiness, right? Yeah, okay, it’s stupid, but at least I’ve started to focus my purchases into small ones. Like iPhone games. When I make one of these purchases, and the results are awesome, well, all the better.

My recent purchase in this vein was Game Dev Story, a simulation game for the iPhone. People were talking about it in the iPhone gaming thread, and linked a video, which I will now link to you here. It looked pretty fantastic, and I was feeling shitty, so I ponied up 4 bucks to try it. It’s probably the most expensive iPhone game I’ve bought in a long time, but seeing as I played it for literally like 7 hours yesterday, I kind of feel it was worth it, especially since I’m still wanting to go back for more.

In case you don’t want to watch the video, or want my take on it, Game Dev Story is a simulation game where you run a game company. The game runs through something very similar to the history of games. For example, you start with just an Atari stand-in and a PC as possible development platforms, but that soon balloons out to Genesis-alikes, NES-alikes, Virtual Boy-alikes, and so on. It deviates as some points for gameplay, but most of the time the systems released correspond to how they occurred in reality, and have similar benefits and drawbacks. It makes sense to go with the NES, for instance, because it’s just that popular. However, the game takes into account your games, and if you really want to make the Virtual Boy a success, you can pump tons of money into making a string of successful, Triple A Virtual Boy games, and give it a boost in market share. You can also play the numbers: a passable game on a system with nobody developing for it means there’s a fanbase whose more likely to buy anything put before them, after all.

You’re the manager, so you basically make decisions. What kind of games should be made? You can see demographics and information on popularity for various genres. Making games in unpopular genres means less cost, as you don’t have to keep up with the joneses, but you’re also cutting off some potential buyers who want another Samurai game, for instance. You also need to keep track of your employees. When do you hire? When do you fire? Do you spend money training employees, or level them up, causing them to have bigger annual salaries? Or just dump them and hire someone more qualified? Or outsource more important tasks? You also have to work with advertising and keeping the buzz going on your game, as well as keeping your company’s fanbase happy. Do you hire booth babes for E3, or don’t go at all? Maybe your fans won’t like it if you don’t make another RPG, even if you really want to make that Dating Sim. At the same time, unless you diversify and try different genres and types of games, your studio won’t improve and you’ll lose creativity.

I never had much problem being successful at this stuff, but it was still fantastic fun naming my games ridiculous things and seeing how they did. You pick from a genre and game type for every game, and I enjoyed trying to figure out exactly what the games were. For example, my “Historical Trivia” game became “Which Assassin?” a game of assassin trivia. My “Educational Romance” game became a sex ed game. My “Online RPG Romance” game became “Fetish Online.” The role-playing element of the game was entertaining to me as well.

Still, there’s some things I would have liked to see. For example, I can set anyone to be, say, the “art director” for a game. It would seem logical that someone who was constantly the “Art director” would eventually up their Graphics stat, but that wasn’t the case. It would have made sense to me to be able to level people by “giving them a shot” on less important releases. The advertising in the game also seems less important than it really would be. It tends to just be one score for everything, but it would make more sense to have advertising based on specific games coming out. Finally, the game doesn’t let you have a back catalog, pulling things from retail shelves after a few weeks of release, so I can’t try to do things with stuff like “Steam sales.”

These are all minor nitpicks, though. The game is really fun, and I highly recommend it, especially if you have an iPad. (the interface is a bit hard to use on my iPhone, but I doubt it would be an issue blown up on the iPad’s screen. Just a guess, though.) If you have any interest in the game development community at all, you’ll certainly find something fun in Game Dev Story. Buy it! Or at the very least, put it on your AppShopper watch list for a sale. It’ll be worth it.

Kale suggested we start playing more games together. I thought this a good idea. Why not? We both had Gamefly, so we co-ordinated rentals, and both got the PS3 version of Lost Planet 2. I’ve already chronicled my reactions to actually playing a PS3 game online for the first time, so I won’t go over it again, but, you know, that was a big part of my experience, anyway.

Lost Planet was really clunky, but was one of the only decent games available at the time it came out. Thus, I know people like my brother forgave a bit as they played. It also had grappling hooks and big robots, so that was also a plus. People liked it, and it sold well, so of course they’d make a sequel.

However, the decisions they made with it were kind of baffling. They didn’t do anything to the clunky controls, keeping them on-par with the original. They took out the crazy anime story and replaced it with a story involving multiple groups of generic people with no names, which basically just makes it not have much of a story at all. This was done so they could make the entire game four-player co-op, which is nice, of course, and the reason I was playing it, but they also made some sections so co-op focused and your AI partners so stupid that they’re really crazy do to by yourself. Finally, you top this all off with use, elaborate Monster Hunter-style boss battles, which would be nice except they can also be extremely tedious. That’s Lost Planet 2.

I really hated this game on normal. Everything was much too hardcore and took way too many shots. Since the game is so slow and plodding, it meant you could get fucked over way ahead of time, and not be able to do anything about it. I got to the end of one of those big boss battles once, and Kale and I died and failed the mission. The idea of redoing this half an hour boss battle was not appealing at all.

I asked if we could switch the game to Easy. We did. Then we had fun.

The game was still pretty hardcore, but the pressure was then off. Bosses went down easier: it almost seemed like all “Easy” did was reduce the amount of life enemies had, which, frankly, they had too much to begin with. This change let me enjoy how creative some of these big boss battles were. One of the most memorable ones was a battle where you’re on a train with a gigantic gun, and you’re less attempting to fight a giant worm, but are instead loading and firing the gigantic cannon to take the worm out. The AI did nothing in this battle: it would have been a nightmare alone. Kale and I, though, had no real issues overall. As soon as we figured out how it worked, I loaded and charged the rounds and he aimed and fired. It worked well. It was cool.

The game really expects you to play Multiplayer, which I really didn’t have much interest in. To that end, you’re constantly unlocking multiplayer things, and titles called “Noms de Guerre,” which are very silly. For most of the time, Kale’s Nom was, for example, “Hardcore to the Max,” whereas I jumped from things like “Snow Shogun,” to “Gourmand,” to “Quality Time With The Family.” They’re really very ridiculous, and kind of nice. All these unlockables seem like they’d be fun if you cared about the multiplayer. Again, I had no interest, so I can’t tell you about it.

Anyway, I had a really good time playing Lost Planet 2, but it was mostly because of the company. It’s a passable game, but not a great one. It has a lot of problems and really strange design decisions. I certainly wouldn’t have played all the way through it if Kale wasn’t involved. Still, if you were a fan of the original, I suppose you are getting the same game, only with Co-op, which is a huge benefit. That’s something, anyway.