The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

I had heard many a thing about the indie game VVVVVV when it launched off of the developers website. It got some positive press! What wasn’t all that positive was the price. While I understand how hard, time consuming, and costly it is to develop a game like this, 15 bucks was a hard sell. I couldn’t make myself do it.

Thankfully, it recently showed up on Steam for 5 bucks. Now there’s something I can get behind! I snatched it right up.

VVVVVV’s claim to fame is that it looks like an old Atari game or something. The graphics are pixelized, but in a non-standard way. It looks more like one of those old computers than, say, an NES, the standard sprite style for these kinds of demakes. That’s a nice change of pace.

Of course, the challenge is pretty equal to those old games as well.

VVVVVV is really hard in that old school, memorize and do this the right way kind of way. Of course, it has nods to modern-ness in that there are checkpoints basically everywhere, so every time you die you only lose a tiny bit of progress. However, if you suck like me, You’ll die a lot. When I beat the game, I had something like 1180 deaths. That’s a lot of deaths! Especially considering I had about 3 hours on the game clock when I finished it.

Still, besides the last few rooms, which made me so angry I almost wanted to stop, the game is really well balanced. All you can do is reverse gravity, but the game takes that in every direction it can without getting too complicated, and it’s quite cool. It’s always throwing something new at you, all the way up to the very end. Once it runs out of new, novel ideas, it stops. I can appreciate that. It’s not a big game, but it’s a smart little game that uses what it has.

There’s also a plot. Kind of. It’s… weird. It’s kind of cute, and obviously not the focus, but someone took the time to attempt to give the crew of the space ship some personality for who knows what reason. I guess, in a way, it is a throwback to storytelling of those old games. It’s really minimal, but there.

In any case, I’m glad I played the game. It’s nothing fantastic, but I feel like I got my five bucks worth. If it’s interesting to you at all, pick it up and go at it. It’s solid stuff. A good indie game. Always nice to see good ones of those.

On Friday, we just picked up and went to Lambert’s. Just, you know, for the hell of it. But that’s not all. We also played some Race for the Galaxy. Upon flipping randomly through the rulebook, I stumbled upon a “Draft” variant I hadn’t heard of. It sounded fantastic, so we tried it. It really ended up changing the game in an interesting way.

Basically, we dealt out starting worlds, as per usual, then separated the rest of the deck into 9 card “draft packs.” We passed them around, drafting them like Magic cards. Once we’ve drafted the whole deck, we all had small, individual decks with which to draw all our cards from. Then we played the game.

It worked really well.

Basically, it removed a large chunk of the randomness from actually playing the game. For example, I had drafted mostly rebel cards, so I knew I was attempting to set up a victory via Rebel military, and thus evaluated the cards I drew differently. Jonathan, on the other had, had gone for Galactic Federation all out, and was trying to make developing work for him. It was much more like a game of Magic, where you had picked your strategy beforehand and was just trying to pull it off, as opposed to doing the best with what you draw. It kept the game the same, but changed it a lot.

Of course, one of the benefits of Race is that it’s a fairly fast game to play, once you figure it out. The drafting added a long, long time onto the gameplay. I had first surmised that you might negate that by playing multiple games with the same deck, but I kind of went back on that after our second game. If you hadn’t done well drafting, you just had no chance. Even if the person who one the first game got a bad draw, someone else probably would get a better one who wouldn’t be you. It didn’t seem worth it with so many people at the table. But eh, maybe everyone else disagreed with me.

I don’t think this will undo normal Race play for our group, but it is a really, really neat way to switch it up, especially if the goal of the night is a night of Race, as opposed to one quick game before bed, which it often is in our case. If you own the game and a few expansions, give it a try.

Blur is a really strange game.

I’m sure it’s been talked about before, but it’s hitting a weird middle ground in the racing space. It’s got all these power ups and car explosions and so on in the game, attempting to make it feel very arcade-y. At the same time, it’s full of real cars and it requires actual skill to drive, a lot more than most arcade-y racers I’m used to.

Seriously, it takes some serious skill to just turn in this game. I was having to pick cars with high handling just to get around turns, and even then I still hit the walls of the turns most of the time. I’m simply not used to driving games without a dedicated, unrealistic “drift” button. Without being able to “Power Slide” I just can’t maneuver on more complex courses. It’s not full-on sim, but it’s obviously trying to appeal to people who are at least partially in that crowd.

The power ups, though, are really smartly executed. I love their system. You can hold 3 power ups at a time, and can switch between them, toss them, and sort them easily as you drive through the course. Most power ups have two uses, too. For example, a Barge sends out a wave of energy in an AoE attack around your car, knocking other cars away. However, you can also employ it to take down projectiles that may be coming for you. It’s just really smart, and being able to hold three and pick which one you use at any time makes you be able to employ strategies like that, instead of just feeling screwed by the luck of the draw like in Mario Kart. Of course, there’s no luck element to power ups in the game either: specific powers are in specific places on the course. Once you learn the track, you can plan a route that gives you what you need at any time. It’s nice.

I played multiplayer for awhile with Cara and Cole, and it was really a blast. The Motor Mash “battle mode” is fantastic, and constantly entertaining, thanks to the very smart design of the power ups. Even the races get exciting and frantic when you have additional human players bitching about the constantly flying power ups and such on the course. There was also a lot of neat social features in the game. For example, I could pick a rival from the people from my friends list to compare all my scores to. Multiplayer is really what the game is designed for, and it’s fantastic.
The single player is almost an afterthought, and it’s nearly as well-thought out. I mean, it’s fine. There are a variety of challenges to go through. However, even on easy, the other drivers are pretty damn good. I was starting to have trouble in the races in the 3 area or so. That kind of kills any want of me to play the single player. Maybe if I could turn, it wouldn’t be an issue. Who knows.

But yeah, Blur is strange, but well-designed. I have no idea if it found it’s audience, but there has to be people out there who would be very, very pleased with this game. I hope they found it.

Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light is really, really good. Essner and I basically played through it in two very long sessions. We probably put, at the very least, close to 8 hours in on it. It was fun for the whole time.

It’s really good.

Now, I’m not someone who has ever really even played a Tomb Raider game. I certainly don’t have any positive feelings for Ms. Croft and her video game outings. But seriously, Guardian of Light looks fantastic, plays fantastic, and is really smartly put together. If you have a friend to play with in co-op, there’s no way you won’t have a good time. No way.

Basically, the game is one part puzzle-platformer and one part Diablo-By-Way-Of-Twin-Stick-Shooter. You run through levels, shooting demons with a variety of weapons in a Twin-Stick shooter style. You also solve “Challenge Crypts” and complete various achievements to get artifacts and relics as loot, which you can use to somewhat customize your character. It’s not a huge level of customization, but it’s enough. I could focus on single-shot weapons that did a lot of damage to one person while Essner could focus on SMGs and Shotguns to clear out groups. Or we could both do a little of both. Essner equipped artifacts that upped his damage potential and remote mine radius (mostly so he could blow me up again and again), while I was a bit more well-rounded and always had a defense buff on. Again, it’s not a HUGE difference, but it’s enough to make you feel like you’re playing the game your way.

The puzzles in the game are perfect. They are exactly enough to make you think about what you’re doing, and have to discuss them with your teammate, but not hard enough to hold you up for any length of time, so you can get back to more dude-shooting. Plus, exactly when you think the game has thrown all its tricks at you, it comes up with something clever. Even in the last dungeon, I was going, “Woah, that was clever. I wouldn’t have though to use that this way.” It’s also, as I kind of mentioned earlier, a very meaty game. I was shocked there were more levels for the last 3 levels. You are certainly getting your money’s worth.

From what I’ve heard, they’ve done a good job making puzzles designed for two players work with one player. There are also special weapons you unlock through score challenges, which are kind of impossible to get when you’re splitting points with another player. Those weapons probably increase combat variety when you’re playing alone. But I never tried it alone, and never will. It’s designed from the ground up to be played with two people, and that’s how it should be played. Find someone you can trap on the couch for a few game sessions and play this game. It gets pretty well the highest recommendation I can summon.

I don’t know if I’ve made it clear enough, but I really, really hate pointing the Wiimote at the screen. I hate it with a passion.

This is why it’s so shocking that I enjoy Trauma Team so much. Because I really do. Trauma Team is fantastic.

When I say Fantastic, I mean the gameplay is fantastic. The game gives you the option to basically skip all cutscenes and story bits, and after trying to watch a few, I just kind of had to. They’re cheesy and shit and badly animated. You can tell they were done on a budget. Nothing against that, of course, but it’s just kind of hard to watch.

The gameplay of Trauma Team is both similar and different from previous titles. You’re going through and doing various surgeries and medical procedures. However, Trauma Team mixes it up by having different types of doctors. This actually works really well. The first doctor you play as has the same sort of style as what I did back in the first Trauma Center on DS. However, I then switched to a paramedic, who was just trying to stabilize people on the scene so they could get back to the hospital alive, and had to juggle multiple patients in order to keep them all alive. Then I switched to a doctor doing procedures where lives weren’t immediately in danger, letting me take my time and giving me points for precision. I was shocked at how much they switched it up while keeping the basic gameplay the same. It kept me going for a lot longer than I thought I would playing the game alone.

The controls, too, are rather amazing. Yes, you’re pointing the Wiimote at the screen, but the game takes into account how shitty the wiimote pointer is. As long as you’re trying hard to be accurate, it works. Well, on Intern, anyway. I only played on easy. However, when doing this, the game becomes less a game of accuracy for the most part, and more one of time-management. Should you remove the glass shards first, or suture the cuts? Or are the vitals so low you need to use the green medicine before all that? It’s about striking that balance. As soon as I started playing, I didn’t mind pointing the Wiimote. This is quite a feat. Even games I love, like Shattered Memories, frustrated me to no end with pointing the wiimote.

The main reason I wanted to rent this was Co-op, and I have to say, that came through as well. I even played some with my Mom, and she was getting it by the end. Her main problem was selecting things with the analog stick, because she wasn’t used to using an analog stick, but she eventually figured it out. I just gave myself the more complex tools, and she was draining, lasering, and suturing well enough while I did the more complex processes. She was getting into it by the end! It was neat. It also makes the game more tense, somehow, having someone else there. It’s easier, sure, but going “No, wait, I need the drain!” and calling out requests for help just ratchets up the tension. It’s awesome.

Basically, Trauma Team completely impressed me. So much so that I ordered a cheap copy of Trauma Center: New Blood to go back and play. Considered getting Second Opinion, too, but I don’t think that has co-op, and that’s part of the fun. Still, especially if you have someone to play with, Trauma Team is fantastic. I very much enjoyed myself, even in single player, which I wasn’t expecting. Good job, Atlus!

Random thread on Talking Time lead me to downloading some more iPod games. One of them is called QRank. It is free and awesome.

Basically, QRank is a trivia game. Every day, there is a grid of 20 questions. 8 are 200 point “easy” questions, 8 are 400 point “medium” questions, and 4 are 800 point “hard” questions. These questions are in four categories every day. You pick 15 questions from the grid, and answer them in a multiple choice manner. Many of them hinge around current events in various areas: not surprising seeing as they have to have 20 good questions every day. It uses a point countdown, as a lot of trivia games do, where the faster you answer, the more of the “max” number of points you get. There are also daily 2x and 3x bonus questions hidden on the grid you can answer for extra points.

Then the game ranks you on leaderboards. It uses a friends list, if you want. It also ranks you locally, by state, and globally, using the location stuff in your phone to determine where you are. This works really well. I could never compete on a global level like some people, but hey, there’s a chance I could top the board for Cape Girardeau.

I’ve played for a few days now, and the questions are really good. The difficulties are nicely balanced. Easy questions are fairly easy, Medium is fairly medium, and the hard questions I normally miss, because I am not a trivia guru. I do like how I can strategize because of how the game is set up. For example, if, say, Science is a category that day, I may want to try to find the science question in the Hard questions, because I could probably get that one. If the Entertainment category is around, maybe I want to stay on the easier questions, because if that hard question is about celebrity gossip, I’m screwed.

The real benefit to the game, I think, is that it wants so little of your time. You can blaze through 15 questions in 5 or 10 minutes, no problem, and then the game requires no other input until the next day. It’s kind of like Words with Friends in that way. You enjoy it in small chunks of time, so it’s easy to keep going with it. Also, the fact that it’s free doesn’t hurt. I really enjoy the game, and I think anyone who enjoys trivia would get a huge kick out of it. So download it. And add me. I’m poetfox. Let’s trivia it up! You can trivia my ass.

Animus are always an issue for me. I do like them, when they’re good. The problem is that there is so, so much crap out there. I never feel like I have any idea where to start when looking for the really good stuff, especially when it’s the strange, weird things I enjoy. For example, stumbling into Saki was so, so lucky for me, and I loved that show to death. The method I used, though, was just randomly checking the anime thread on Talking Time, and seeing what showed up. Somehow, I found it.

Through similar means, I decided to watch Ouran High School Host Club.

First off, just look at that picture. Look at the show. This thing looks like it should be a complete and utter disaster. At a glance, you can tell it’s full of Reverse Harem tropes and potentially horrible fanservice, each character crafted to fill a specific niche fangirl demographic. It shares so much with so much anime crap out there.

But then you watch it, and within the first episode, not only does it point out which character plays to what stereotype, but it’s a show about a club attempting to be a Reverse Harem for people, to “bring joy to the ladies” as they put it, and is, at the same time, a Reverse Harem for Haruhi, the female protagonist.
And then it gets silly.

The show’s strength is that it knows it’s completely stereotypical in a lot of ways, and decides to just go all out and over the top with it, recognizing how it works. There’s a character in the show who shows up just to berate them on how shallow their characters are, and how they’re nothing like her visual porn novels. Most characters end up having a secret, but that secret is that they harbor ANOTHER anime stereotype, like the cute boy-lolita being a tournament-grade martial artist who people come from all over to fight.

At the same time, while all this is going on, it treats its characters with respect.

Let me go on a tangent here and talk about South Park. I once watched an interview with someone, I forget who. They were talking about why Jimmy and Timmy are okay characters for South Park to have. It’s not cool to make fun of people who are disabled in some way, right? But they said that the secret to this is that these characters are just people. Sure, those qualities are made fun of, but not any more than any of the other characters. They are treated exactly the same, even though they’re different. That makes it okay.

Ouran does this, too. Everyone is weird, or has some quirk, but it’s all treated as normal, even as it’s played up for laughs. The part that really impressed me in this is that Haruhi’s dad is a cross-dresser, and works at what the show calls a “tranny bar.” (It does bother me a little about what I would call the incorrect use of the word “tranny” in the show. Haruhi’s dad is still going by male pronouns, and still makes it clear that he’s the father. However, he’s clearly transgendered in some way, but is still comfortable, for the most part, with his male body. It’s likely that’s just what cross-dressers are called in Japan, or the translator made an incorrect word choice decision, as happened in an issue of Hourou Musuko. This is all kind of a tangent, though.) However, besides maybe one second of shock when he enters a scene for the first time, it’s treated completely as normal. “Oh, you must be Haruhi’s dad. I’ve never met a real tranny before. How are you?” And that’s kind of the end of the discussion. Nobody is freaked out by how he, and eventually his friends, dress. It’s just a thing, just like how Honey looks and acts pointlessly underage and the twins are constantly romancing each other just to get attention. Al these things do get jokes made about them, of course. For example, in a later episode, they end up waking Haruhi’s dad up early, before he’s shaved, and being a bit shocked about it. However, he’s just a person. That’s certainly the right way to go about it.

Anyway, I’m two episodes from watching the whole thing on Hulu, and I’ve very much enjoyed it. It’s made me laugh a lot. If you don’t have a strong working knowledge of the various shojo and reverse harem tropes that I do from reading tons and tons of manga back in the day, it might not be for you. Additionally, I hear the original manga isn’t nearly as tongue in cheek as the anime is, so that might not be a good choice too. But hey, it’s free on Hulu. Give the first episode a watch if you like this kind of stuff. I certainly enjoyed it.

There’s something inherently appealing about having a huge database of free, custom characters to choose from. I mean, it’s going to be a copyright-infringing nightmare for the people running the game, but it just seems like it would be tons of fun to be able to pick any character you want, and just play. This especially made sense to me in a Mario Kart clone, and so I was pretty excited to get to try ModNation Racers. It just seemed like a perfect fit. It also seemed to have some smart ideas about the various power ups that could make the game a much better racer.

However, I really didn’t find this to be the case.

I mean, it was pretty neat. I was an Eevee driving the Mach 5. There’s nothing at all wrong with that. At the same time, everything else just felt kind of generic. Not bad, but generic. It’s a bit unavoidable, but it just didn’t really thrill me. The “career” mode is pointlessly hard, too, especially if you want to unlock everything. The enemy drivers do not go easy on you. Four races in, and I was having to redo races to even pass in 3rd place. That’s just not what I expect from a Mario Kart clone.

What really got me, though, were the items. I thought they had a good idea with the “boost” meter. You get boost from drifting and other tricks, which you can either use to boost, or shield yourself from attacks. This seems like a great tradeoff to me. However, I found the shield almost impossible to actually use. You even get a warning when something is going to hit you, but if you hit the shield when the warning comes up, it will almost always wear off before it actually hits you. It just seems like they made their timing really weird just to be “hardcore” which just kind of ruins the point of a casual kart racer. At least to me.

On top of all this, I had serious issues connecting to their online servers. Apparently they do maintenance on like… 3 in the afternoon on Friday. That’s a really, really weird time to do maintenance. When I finally could connect, I got dropped from the server every few minutes while trying to look for things to download. I couldn’t even imagine what would have happened if I had gotten into an online race. I wanted to, but I was too scared that it would fail, and the obscene, minute or longer long load times would go to waste. Because let me tell you, this game LOADS. A LOT. It’s ridiculous.

These are the main reasons why I ended up unimpressed with ModNation Racers. It was pretty disappointing, I do admit. Maybe the sequel will be super-great. I’m sure that’ll happen at some point. As it is, though, I really felt like I had more fun with Sonic and Sega All Stars Racing, which is weird to say, but totally true. I’d just suggest playing that, if you wanted a Mario Kart Clone.

Alternate Title: Not Nearly As Justified As Advertised.

All the talk on the Gigantic Bombcast really had me excited for Just Cause 2. As you know, I really liked Crackdown, and Crackdown 2 was kind of a disappointment. (Have I written A reviewish thing about that here? Apparently not. I should. Expect that coming up.) However, people were talking about Just Cause 2 in the same sort of wording as the original Crackdown, with lots of mayhem, completely open objectives, and a grapple hook/parachute combo that really opened the world up. It sounded pretty great, and I wanted to try it. Gamefly let me.

I was really disappointed.

One of the things the original Crackdown did right was making travel fun. Getting from one objective to the next was quick and easy, but it was also engaging, because of those damn agility orbs. Just Cause 2 doesn’t have anything like that. You have this big island, and nothing in between population centers and objectives except a lot of boring trees. Sure, there is a fast travel option, but it only takes you to places you’ve been. If you want to undertake a new mission, you have to walk there, slowly. It is a huge, annoying pain in the ass. About 90% of my travel time in the game was spent moving from one area to another.

When I got to the new area, I was also disappointed. Combat in the game is pretty ridiculous. You can’t shoot very well, and there are tons of guys everywhere on normal. Fun stuff you’d like to do, like silly Grapple Hook tricks, often get you killed. Explosives are scarce until you grind up enough money to buy them from the Black Market guy, and so big explosions are hard to set off as well. In a game where the point is to set off lots of big explosions to create chaos, that’s just kind of weird. To top it all off, the mid-mission checkpoints are often way, way too far apart. I found myself having to replace sequences I beat, again and again, just because the next part was really, really annoying. I put up with that kind of thing in, say, Splinter Cell: Conviction because the combat itself was pretty fun. Just Cause 2 didn’t really offer me that to make up for these shortcomings.

It made me sad that the game disappointed me so much. I had played the demo and found it very fun, but it was in short bursts and they put you in a very populated area where you didn’t really have to travel. There was so much potential for a game where you can wreak havok with a grappling hook and many guns, but it just wasn’t working for me at all. It’s gotten mostly good press, so I’m sure some people can enjoy it, but it really isn’t for me.

Brer really wanted to watch Batman: Under The Red Hood. He said it was good, and he wanted to see it. So I said I’d watch it with him, so he saved it. And then I stalled for weeks not wanting to watch it, because I’m awesome. Then, last Sunday, we finally watched it.

So how was it?
Eh, it was okay.

Apparently this is based off of a really famous story in the comic books, and it really kind of shows. The story itself is just all kinds of fan service for very rare characters in the Batman universe. People show up just because. It tries to do flashbacks, and has a few very awkward pieces of exposition, in order to catch people like me up, but it only kind of works. As someone who had only really known Batman through the animated series and Batman Beyond, it wasn’t particularly easy to follow.

Luckily, though, I have very vague knowledge of Batman history, and a boyfriend who will lecture on anything, so I was taught the important information, and could follow the narrative. What’s there, though, is both good… and also just kind of indicative of how stupid comic books are. The story is a basic, and strong one, based around Batman confronting another element of his past, but it’s tied up in so much shit. The Joker is there, because the Joker must be in everything. Ra’s Al Ghul is involved, just because. None of this is important to the actual character stuff, which is the core of the narrative. It’s just there because it’s a comic book, and continuity, and bleh.

This stuff comes with the territory, though, and if you can accept it, it’s pretty good. There’s some solid fights, and some solid confrontations. One must applaud John DiMaggio for taking up the shoes of being Joker’s voice actor. It’s hard to follow up Mark Hammil’s near-perfect version of the Joker, but he brings a very nice voice to it. Much more “cold-blooded murder” than “crazy person,” and I think it works very well. He gets extra props.

In any case, yeah, it’s a movie based on a comic book. The animation is fine. The voices are fine. The story is… comic book. I enjoyed myself, but I have no need to see it again. If you were thinking of watching it, go ahead. You’ll enjoy it. But it’s not something to sell to non-fans. You know if you’d like this before you actually watch it. That’s just how it is.