The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

We drafted Magic 2011, the 12th edition that comes out in 2010 today. In a surprising upset, Jonathan was the complete loser, and everyone else tied for first. (This is the problem with a four-person Round Robin tournament, though it’s not like we particularly care.) Everyone actually had a really well-done deck this time, even if we teased Spants on kind of falling into his. (He opened like 3 huge White bombs.) Once again, this is kind of strange, as normally one person has one deck that is just far and away the best. Everyone was rocking different strategies, but everyone had a pretty functional deck that held it’s own.

The draft itself was fun, but it really made me think more about how much I like what they’ve done to the core set. I have made many a joke about the horrible naming of the new core sets, but I think they’ve done a fantastic job. No longer is the core set just the place where you get the expensive dual lands you need. They’ve stepped up the kind of cards they put in there, and started creating new ones for it. They’re still less complicated than the other sets, but they are much, much more dynamic than playing with the old core sets.

In fact, what you end up with is a strangely “pure” Magic experience. When playing in block, the game is normally about trying to exploit the various specific mechanics that only exist in that block to your advantage. When you do that, you lose a little something. You lose a bit of what made Magic cool in the first place. These new core sets feel more like playing Magic back when I started. The game becomes less about getting the most of certain toolsets and keyworded cards, and more about monsters banging into each other, and making sure you have everything in the proper ratios to make that work. There’s enough variation and strategy to keep it interesting, but it’s much more “Magic how you remember it” and less “Super-boring simple Magic.”

In a world when I don’t play Magic much, and don’t have a lot of time to devote to deck building, I find that really cool. There’s still plenty of other cool Magic things out there, of course. But that’s pretty neat.

Even if I poke fun, I approve.

Harmony of Despair, or High of Definition if you’re so inclined, is a lot of fun. This is despite how poorly put together it is.

Basically, you gather five other people, who pick a Castlevania protagonist, and then run through stages together in a sort of boss rush. The whole thing is timed, so using teamwork to get all the chests and use all the machinery you need to defeat the boss really helps you get done quickly, as well as take the boss down without casualties. Then you go ahead to the next level and do it again. As you play through, you pick up food that gives you permanent increases to that character’s stats, as well as level up their abilities and skills in a way appropriate to the games they were in. For example, Soma must still kill enemies to collect souls to use, while Jonathan has to, once again, use his subweapons over and over in order to upgrade his proficiency in them.

This is all well and good, but it’s unbalanced as fuck.

The five playable characters just aren’t equal. It is such a pain in the ass to collect and level up Charlotte’s spells that you can’t do them during a normal run, for example. You have to level them up to have her be a useful character, but you can’t take the time to level up her spells with other people around, because they’ll either kill the enemies or you’ll just be bringing down the whole team. This means you have to grind in single player, which is much less fun, in order to be effective. At the same time, Shanoa is just obscenely the best character, due to her Magnes glyph. She can use this to go into areas that no other character can reach. She’s the only one with a movement power like this, and oftentimes having a Shanoa or five on your team can make a run go a whole lot better. The other characters fall somewhere in the middle of this scale.

In addition, as I mentioned, the game really isn’t fun by yourself. Sure, there is a single player mode, and you probably could beat all the chapters, if you had the skills, but it’s obvious the game was designed with multiple players in mind. Enemy HP and stuff scales for more or less players, but not enough to make it really viable as a single player exercise. No, Single Player is just there to let you grind skills, as, unfortunately, you just don’t get powerful enough fast enough. Important spells and items have very, very low drop rates, and you’ll have to run through again and again just to pick up the stuff you need in Chapter 2 to make Chapter 3 easily doable. Eventually, you even have to kick up the difficulty to get good drops anymore, which is understandable, but annoying for someone who isn’t hardcore like myself.

All these complaints are completely legit, but I find myself constantly going back to it. The basic Castlevania combat and increasing your skill set is just lots of fun, to the point where something phoned in like this still is enjoyable to some extent. And, as per usual, adding more people makes a mediocre game great, and if you can get a game going with 3 or 4 friends, it is a complete blast. I just wish more balancing thought had been put into the characters and such. It’s so close to being great. As it is, it’s just good, but if you have the money and love Castlevania-style action, I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.

I’ve been playing Persona 3 Portable, so I was once again struck by the most amazing of battle themes. No, not Mass Destruction. After the Battle, the fight victory music. Maybe this sounds weird, but this is by far my favorite bit of music in the game. Give it a listen while I ramble about it for a bit.

I feel like this little song is a success on so many levels. It fits perfectly with the whole music themes of the game for one. It has the sort of hip, pop-y sensibilities of the rest of the game in the guitar bits that come in after a little bit. It’s also completely functional battle victory music. But I feel like it does more than that. I feel like it reflects the themes of the game in general.

Most RPG victory tunes are extremely happy. I mean, you know, like, the classics of Final Fantasy. These songs say, “We did it, we won, everything is awesome now!” It’s a celebration of an accomplishment. Ironically, any single battle in most of those games ISN’T an accomplishment, even though it treats it like one.

Persona 3 takes a more sinister take. It’s darker. There’s a bit of that “we won” excitement, eventually, but that isn’t where it starts. It starts with a very dark little melody and goes downward. While Final Fantasy is trumpeting the victory from the heavens, Persona 3 is saying, “This is only the beginning.” The fight is over, but the battle has yet to be won. It’s pessimistic, like most of the game it’s around. Because, let’s face it, there’s always going to be another encounter. There’s always going to be another fight. The game knows it. It uses it.

I just find that refreshing, I guess. It’s different. This is the track, more than anything, that sticks out and stays with me from that game. (Well, besides Mass Destruction. Nobody can escape the BABY BABY BABY BABY BABY!)

I’m like “You know what gamez are fun to play with peoples who maybe don’t know so much about games? Rail shooters.” So I used my awesome Gamefly powers to Gamefly up a copy of Dead Space: Extraction for my Nintendo Wii.

We played it for an hour or two, and then I sent it back.

It’s obvious the people who made Extraction had good ideas and high hopes. They were looking at the Wii, and how shitty actual shooters were on it, and they thought, “Hey, we can make a light gun shooter that has depth like a regular shooter! And tell a story!” These sound like great things, you know? In reality, though, it just ends up being really stupid.

First off, the storytelling just isn’t compelling. This is mostly because you almost always have a target icon on the screen while people are talking. So you do what anyone would do. You flail it about on the screen, and fire shots near people’s heads that they ignore, and generally completely break immersion. I don’t often say this, but a cutscene would have been much more effective during these sequences. It’s also extra-annoying when you’re character looks around, because he almost always isn’t going to look at what you actually want to look at, which is the powerup in the corner of the screen.

Speaking of powerups, the game rewards you mashing the A button constantly to try to grab things completely at random. I got way, way more ammo that way than actually attempting to pick up ammunition. This is yet another annoying thing you do during boring story bits that just completely breaks it apart.

Basically, what I’m saying is that it’s a huge, huge mistake to let you fire your gun at all in these sequences. The targeting thing is huge, and a big distraction, even during actual gameplay. Putting it up there when I’m supposed to listen to people talking just makes me want to shoot people in the head. It’s not a good idea.

The actual shooting isn’t bad. It’s normal light gun fare. But when you have to go through all these talky bits that constantly break up the action so much, there just seems to be little point to going on with it. You can have the same fun faster by booting up House of the Dead: Overkill. You’ll actually laugh at the little tiny bits of plot in that game, too.

They tried with Extraction. They really did. But the game was just boring. You pick up a light gun game and expect to shoot things. Exploration where you aren’t actually exploring just isn’t any fun. Not being able to shoot things isn’t any fun. It could have been a lot better than it was. I didn’t feel bad sending it back.

The thing that really kept me going through most of Dragon Quest 9, though, was the story.

Now, one might thing one can’t have a super-deep story with a party of completely created people. I agree that this is a challenge of sorts. Having that character customization is important to the gameplay, but you can’t completely forget the story. The choice the designers of Dragon Quest 9 went with was to have a bunch of little tiny stories going on that you are on the fringe of in each town you go to. This worked fantastically.

Dragon Quest has always had a knack, at least since I started playing it, of doing very simple, straightforward, but touching stories. Each town in Dragon Quest 9 does this rather well. Since you are an angel who, for the most part, exists to do good things, going into towns and attempting to fix what is wrong there is really easy to narratively justify. The game itself takes plenty of time to flesh out the characters in the towns as well, and make them complete people of a sort. Sure, eventually you’re going to have to go into a dungeon and fight a dude. That’s just the kind of game it is. But at the same time, you’ll be, at some point, helping a husband grieve by showing off the good he’s done and playing detective at a school. These things really do work. They straddle a fine line between cheesy and simple, and pull it off. They were enjoyable to experience.

At the same time, the whole concept had, for the most part, run its course at the end of my 49 hour run through the game. They were classy enough to know when the story couldn’t sustain itself any longer, and let it come to an end. This is something I completely, fantastically appreciate. So few things know how to end.

Of course, it doesn’t really end. There is an insane amount of post-game content in the game. It’s just nothing I care to dive into. All the quests in the game were overwhelmingly annoying. All incredibly luck-based for the most part, or just flat-out time consuming. There are surely some interesting ones, sure, and the treasure maps are interesting as well. But even those require a lot of grinding to be relevant. To get good drops, which is the point of them, you have to beat them over and over and over. That just isn’t my bag. More power to people enjoying it though! Me, I am going to move on to something else… like… a game I’ve already bought two copies of and just bought a third copy of. Yep.

Whenever I beat an RPG, it’s cause for celebration, because I never beat RPGs. It’s also a sign that said RPG is really fantastic. Dragon Quest 9 is really fantastic. It is, without a doubt, one of the best games you could pick up for your DS, even if you don’t like Seth Green.

If you haven’t played a Dragon Quest, you might think, as I once did, that the actual gameplay of a Dragon Quest is incredibly old school and very boring. This is not true. While it is very traditional in many ways, Dragon Quest is smart enough to know how to mix things up and keep things different. Unlike some RPGs, you really put to use almost every spell you learn, for example. Status effect spells like Sleep can be extremely useful in some situations. Overcoming fights with proper use of skills can be just as useful as pure levels.

Additionally, Dragon Quest 9 is a return to the job system of some earlier Dragon Quests, and that adds a lot of depth to the game. Basically, you can switch jobs just about any time you like by going to a place called the Alltrades Abbey. These jobs work kind of like FFXI, although not quite. When you switch to a job, you start as the level you’ve gotten to in that job. So if you haven’t used it before, you’re at level 1. This seems like a horrible idea, but honestly, it’s not hard to boost people back up, which surprised me. You can go crazy with grinding, sure, but it’s less important than it initially seems. You don’t carry over spells or stats when you change classes. What you do keep are your abilities and stat bonuses you have bought with skill points. As you level up in jobs, you get these points, and can invest them in various weapon or class skill lines. Some are stat boosts that affect all classes, like “+30 Natural Strength” which makes you always have 30 more strength than you would have without that boost. Those are probably the ones you go for the most. However, there are also a wide variety of abilities that can be used in combat or out. The one I probably got the most use out of was the wand skill Caudecus, which worked like a slightly more powerful version of Heal, but which my spellcaster had access to as long as she had a wand: She didn’t have to be in a class like Priest who had healing spells to heal that way. Skill points don’t have to be spent immediately, nor in the class in which they are gained. As such, the game rewards you for leveling a few levels in a class you never expect a character to use, and then taking those skill points back to the class you want them to be more powerful in and spending them. At first, the whole system seems really clunky, honestly, but after you play with it for awhile you begin to see how smart and well-thought-out it is.

On top of all this character building, you also can equip crazy amounts of gear. All of it shows on your character, which is totally cool. You can focus on dressing up and looking neat, or you can focus on pure stat-gains, if you want. I did a combination of the two. The result, though, is that your party is very customizable, and very much yours. You’re completely tailoring their skills and classes and wardrobe, and you really become attached to them because of that. It’s awesome. I can’t remember a set of generic characters I’ve gotten more attached to in recent memory.

Of course, it’s taking those characters through the story that really makes the game awesome. But that kind of stuff I’m going to talk about tomorrow. That’s right, I’m doing two days of DQ Review. Deal.

Starcraft 2 is out, I’m so close to the Dragon Quest 9 endgame I can taste it, and I spent an evening trying to play Yu-Gi-Oh 5D’s Stardust Accelerator: World Championship 2009. Now there is a title!

But yeah, seriously, I was thinking about CARD GAMES ON MOTORCYCLES and I realized it had been a long, long time since I played a Yu-Gi-Oh game. I do love cards games, you know. I’ve also really enjoyed past Yu-Gi-Oh games that just let you play the card game without buying the cards. I figured it was about time to try it again, so I threw one of the more recent ones onto my Gamefly queue.

I’ve always been kind of at awe with the people behind making Yu-Gi-Oh work as an actual card game. They have so much bullshit to contend with that they feel they have to be accurate to from the show that it has to be impossibly hard to make work. The fact that it kind of does work for the most part is crazy awesome. Doesn’t make it a great game, but it’s neat that it does.
I felt like I understood how they had warped the rules from the show to make the game work. I used to anyway. But as I sat down with this game, I realized I must be missing something. I couldn’t figure out how to sacrifice monsters to play other monsters, which is kind of 70% of the game. I have two theories on why this is the case. The first is that I simply don’t know some new rule. It has been years since I played a Yu-Gi-Oh card game. Maybe the rules have changed fundamentally since then. I kind of doubt something to core to how the game was designed has changed, though, but who knows.

The second theory is that I can’t understand the interface. The interface in this game is crazy. It is trying to display so much information on a little DS screen, all of it tappable, that I never really had any idea how to do the things I needed to do. Everything does something. I understand this is a fairly complex card game, but I never remember previous games behind so hard to comprehend, and many of those I played on the GBA, which doesn’t have the benefit of a touch screen, which should make it easier to understand, not harder. Okay, that sentence was horrible, but you get the point. Especially for a game they iterate on every year, there’s no excuse for the interface being as horrible as it is. Or maybe that’s why it’s like that: People who play every year have already figured it out. It’s pretty horrible for a newcomer, though.

There might be a great game in there, or at least a fun little thing. But man, I had such trouble trying to just use the game that I gave up pretty quickly. Especially in the face of all the other wonderful things I could be playing, I just don’t have time for that.

(Cris gets credit for the title. Heh. Couldn’t pass it up!)

Yesterday was Starcraft Day! As of this writing, I don’t have Starcraft 2 yet. It’s coming later this afternoon.

But I’m not really excited or anything.

I don’t know. I have wonderful, wonderful memories of the original Starcraft. I remember playing the ever-loving crap out of it back in the day. There is absolutely no doubt that it is a completely fantastic game in every respect. There’s a reason why South Korea loves it so much. Blizzard only makes quality, and there’s nothing to make me think that this new game won’t be completely fantastic in every regard as well. I should be excited about getting to play a good game, right? I mean, I even installed Windows 7 on here in order to get prepared for Starcraft!

But yeah, I’m not particularly thrilled. Maybe it’s just because it’s taken so damn long. I mean, how long as Starcraft 2 been in development? Like 10 years at least? A long time. In that time period RTSes went from something I did nearly every day, certainly once a week, with people like Essner to a genre I no longer have any interest in and don’t really play. I really got into Dawn of War II, of course, but not the actual RTS mode. Just the RPG-like story mode. Granted, I think Starcraft is going to have a little of that, but, well… it’s Starcraft. It has to stay Starcraft, for the most part, or South Korea will declare war. Or something. It’s a game with such a rabid fanbase that they can’t really change it fundamentally. It’s not going to be significantly different. Granted, it’ll be good, but where I sit now, it feels like a known quantity. I may feel different after playing it, of course, but that’s how it comes off.

While internet is at a fever pitch, I’m kind of not. That’s okay, of course, and I’ll play it. Oh, will I play it. I just don’t mind that I have to wait until late afternoon to do so, I suppose.

At some point I took a break from Dragon Quest IX (I’ve put over 30 hours into that game so far. Man, it’s got me hooked!) to play through Splinter Cell: Conviction. I had heard a lot about the game at this point, and most of it was positive, though not like… life-changing. Just a fairly good experience. My experience was both good and bad, but overall positive, certainly.

Brer had some big problems with the game because of the plot. He really liked the character of Sam Fischer and disliked what they did to him. I didn’t have this problem because I didn’t pay attention to the plot at all, but if you like Mr. Fischer then maybe that’s an issue. From what I did catch of it, it was pretty ridiculous.

But no, what I enjoyed was shooting dudes in the head, and this game does lots of dude-head-shooting. The game is basically trying to be a combination of the stealth sections in Arkham Asylum and Gears of War, and honestly it works pretty well. For the most part, you feel like a total badass sneaking around and killing dudes without detection. Even when you are seen, there’s often good options to have some fun. One thing I figured out late in the game is how much fun remote mines are. When scene, there’s a little shadow of you where the enemy thinks you are. Throwing a remote mine there is tons of fun. And when you blow up the first guy who comes to check? You can mine his body, and his buddy will probably come to check on him and you can blow him up too. It never got old for me.

There were some issues, though. I put the game on “Rookie,” because I didn’t want to have to replay sections over and over. Even on Rookie, though, I found the game pretty hard. Granted, I’ve never been very good at stealth stuff. I tend to be too Kamikaze. But if more than one guy saw me, I’d basically die immediately, and have to replay sections. What made it so bad was that the checkpoints in this game are all over the map. Sometimes it’ll have checkpoints exactly where it should, and sometimes you’ll go three encounters without it doing a checkpoint save. It’s frustrating having to re-fight the first two of three combats over again and again just because you have trouble getting to the third. It wasn’t enough to get me to stop me from finishing, as the game is pretty short, but it was the source of much annoyance.

The guns, also, were really weird. You had a huge variety of guns to choose from, but they were all useless. All pistols have unlimited ammo, and are just better for being stealthy, which you have to be or you will die. I ended up carrying a shotgun for most of the game, because when I was seen, running straight backwards and firing shotgun blasts tended to deal with the problem pretty well. Still, the majority of the time I used one silenced pistol. It’s just weird, because there’s this weapon upgrade system, but you only need to upgrade that pistol, so it is a system with seemingly no purpose. Kind of strange.

Conviction really is the picture-perfect example of a great weekend rental. It’s fun, it’s short and doesn’t overstay it’s welcome, but it’s a little too off to really want to add to your collection. I am sad I never got to play the co-op, because I hear that’s pretty fun too, but maybe I will sometime on PC with Brer when it goes on a super-sale. The single player, though, was fairly good times. I enjoyed myself.

Inception was a fantastic film.

When seeing previews of it, I was kind of bleh on it. I mean, it had nice visuals, but it really wasn’t giving me any indication of what it was about. There was a lot of hype around it as well, due to the director apparently being awesome. It was only when Essner went and said that it lived up to the hype that I took notice and knew I had to watch the movie. And when I did? Well, I was highly entertained.

The movie basically has one concept, the idea that you can hook people up to share one dream using this little machine in a briefcase. Doing this, you can trick an unwilling dreamer into sharing all kinds of secrets. However, if you’re bold, or daring, or just a bit insane, you can attempt to plant an idea into someone’s subconscious by going layers deep into someone’s mind.

Basically, the movie takes this idea, sticks with it, and creates a fantastic heist movie around it that’s elevated due to the premise and mind-games built into the premise. It is a ton of fun, and has some great acting within it. It is highly recommended.

But hey, here’s the spoilar line.

SPOILARZ START HERE.

Yeah, I guess what people are talking about is the ending. It almost seems… gimmicky. I mean, it’s not out of place to me. It is a perfectly valid way to end the movie that makes you think. In the same way, it just feels a bit tacked on because you have to have some sort of “twist” or something at the end, right? It really didn’t seem to have the impact that I thought the people making the movie thought it would have.

Then I listened to Overthinking It, and a bit of their discussion made me realize why it works better than maybe it seems initially. The point of the ending is less that “MAYBE IT WAS ALL A DREAM” and more “he no longer cares anymore if it’s a dream or not.” This is an interesting change, since so much of his own personal holdups were based around determining reality and fixing his reality. At the same time, at that point in the movie, he’s dealt with the issues that were keeping him from enjoying the dream world. He’s not going to be haunted any more. He can see his kids’ faces now, at the very least. It isn’t so bad anymore. I don’t know. It’s just an interesting flip-flop. I don’t think it’s completely out of character, but it is interesting.

Hm.

Anyway, go see Inception. Go on.