The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

Why do I want Persona 3 Portable so much?

Here is a game I have bought twice already, and I really, really, really want to buy a third copy? Why? Is it the portability? Is it because it sparked a long-time love with Shin Megami Tensei? Is it because I can play as a girl?

No, wait, it’s definitely that last one.

Persona 3 and 4 have been about having a character who is a stand-in for you. You build that character up your way, make connections with people your way, and act like yourself. Well, preferably, if you’re playing as you and not min/maxing. That’s part of what makes those games amazing. They took the whole “silent protagonist” idea and pushed it even farther, in an interesting way.

But you always had to be a heterosexual guy.

It’s sort of the same feeling I got the first time I played Harvest Moon. “This game is fantastic, but it’s a shame I can’t be a girl.” It’s a game that involves dating the people you want to date in a significant way, and it’s always a shame when you can’t actually date who you want because the character isn’t actually a stand-in for you.

So yes, I really want to play Persona 3 Portable because I want to play as the Female Main Character.

Maybe I’ll pick it up at some point. I wish I could say I would when it got cheap, but this is an Atlus game. I know I’m making the right financial choice, but it’s really annoying. I wish I didn’t have to make it. I wish I could listen to this track for a million hours while I fight shadows. I wish I had time to play the game to begin with. Yeah.

Traditional action games on the iPhone are hard, thanks to the fact that you don’t have buttons. Traditional platformers are even more so. The virtual buttons most games have just don’t give you the accuracy you need to be able to play these things. However, I’ve recently picked up Pix’n Love Rush on a whim and tried it a few times during breaks at work, and it’s pretty amazing how well it works.

Apparently this game is based off some French retro gaming series? I honestly have no idea. All I know it is stars a very cute little pixelated person who plays a very traditional platformer. You’re randomly thrown into little snippets of stage for short periods of time, and have to collect the little + circles and shoot the little bats in order to maximize your score. It’s very simplistic, but it has a great art style and a great soundtrack. That soundtrack is kind of key. Normally, I hate iPod games that bring their own music, because I just want to listen to my podcasts while I play, but this short action-y rush game is set up to use such music, and it really enhances the experience, I think. At the same time, once you get tired of it, you can always go back to your iPod music.

The main thing that’s awesome is how well it controls. The only button I have problems with hitting is the shoot button. It seems too spaced-out, but I assume that’s so you don’t hit it when you want to hit jump, which is the more important virtual button. Running and jumping is nearly as good as with actual buttons. I rarely felt like they were fucking me over. My own skill was doing that. It’s pretty impressive, and I wish all games that attempted to have virtual buttons had ones as good as these.

In any case, if you’re looking for a cheap little arcade-y blast of a game, Pix’n Love Rush is a great purchase. It’s only a buck, and it’s pretty well exactly the right amount of content for a buck, I think. Maybe even more so if you really enjoy setting high scores in games like this. Give it a try.

I am really loving Peace Walker, so I decided I wanted to play more of the Co-Ops. I sent out the call on twitter, and October Mermaid said “Yes, let’s play!” I figured it would just be us, taking on a few of the bosses, but when I booted up Adhoc Party and joined her, it turned out something else was going on.

We were going to play with randoms.

Now, this is something I would never even dream of on Xbox. Playing a co-op game with random jackasses from the internet seems like a great way to ruin your night. Still, I was already there, so I decided to give it a try.

It was fucking awesome.

I don’t know if it was the lack of good ways to communicate or just the community around Adhoc Party, but man, everyone I played with was polite and fun. Even after Maggie disappeared, I kept playing with people. My Snake was very under-leveled, and we were playing missions from the end of the game, so I wasn’t really all that much help. At the same time, I was having a blast, and people weren’t complaining that I wasn’t able to bring in key equipment, like the Ambulance Cardboard Box that everyone seemed to have. It was fun.

It was then that I realized that the Japanese really are on to something here. If I could do this with random people during my day to day routine, I would do it a lot. Especially things like DQ9’s tag mode: I would never not do it. It’s just plain fun. Adhoc Party was managing to bring a little of that to me, and I really appreciated it. I wonder if it’s always like this on there. Maybe I should jump on again soon and find out.

Flotilla is a space combat roguelike.

Sort of.

Basically, you go on an adventure. However, you have a terminal illness, so each one is only so long. You wander to planets and get into a series of random encounters. These could be space combats, or adventures where you have to make a choice. These choices affect future adventures. For example, if I happen to come Karaoke Champ of the Universe, then assassins wanting to claim that crown are going to come to kill me. You do your best to survive until your illness kills you, and rack up the most points along the way.

The combat itself is simple, and once you get the hang of it isn’t too hard, but it’s still very enjoyable. You move your ships in 30 second “turns,” giving orders, then watching those 30 seconds play out before giving orders again. You have different types of ships you can find and add to you Flotilla, like the “melee” Beam Frigates to the simple, missile-slinging Destroyers, each of which requires a slightly different strategy to effectively use. In the end, though, it all comes down to using the three commands you have to out-maneuver and destroy the enemy. You can Attack-Move, which has you move and attack a target, Focus Attack, which increases your rate of fire, but you can barely move, or Flank Move, which doesn’t shoot, but lets you move farther. You maneuver completely in 3-dimensional space, fight these battles, and win or lose.

It’s simple, but deep, and it kept me coming back for more, again and again. It starts as just a silly game with silly encounters, but as you see how the encounters affect future encounters, it quickly becomes very strategic as you have to plan ahead a bit based on how you’re doing at the time. This was certainly one of the best, if not the best, game I bought during the crazy Steam Sale. It is totally worth the 10 bucks that it’s asking for on PC, and I think it’s on the XBLA Indie Games thing as well for only 5. You should really pick up Flotilla and give it a try. It is a lot of fun.

On the fourth of July, I had twittered that I really wanted to try some Co-Ops in Peace Walker. It seemed like a really good time. Well, Lobst and Phenwah heard my cry, and we ended up giving it a try, thanks to the magic of Adhoc Party.

It was great!

First off, I’m just totally, completely impressed with Adhoc Party. It works really well. Basically, this is tunneling software that lets you play local-only PSP games online by pushing the signal through your PS3. With that and a Skype headset, it was like we were right there. There was no lag or anything. It was fantastic.

What’s more, Peace Walker is a ton of fun in Co-Ops mode. We played the boss I was currently on, and an annoying fight was turned into an incredibly enjoyable run thanks to the co-op. The game is obviously designed for it, to some extent, and it really works well. We were reviving each other, drawing fire, working together. It was neat. The only problem was the limited number of 4-player missions. Most missions are only 2 players, and we had 3. We exhausted our options pretty quickly because of it. We even ended up playing the Deathmatch mode, just for the hell of it. It’s functional, but not really thrilling. Still, it works, if you really want to get your deathmatch on.

I have a lot more to say about Peace Walker, and I will in the future, after I play through more of it. But seriously, Adhoc Party and Co-Ops is the shit. If you have a friend you can con into getting Peace Walker with you, do that. Do that so hard.

The Steam Sale was, as always, unavoidable, so I picked up a bunch of things. I’m sure you’ll see reviews of them over the next week or whatever. I was happy with most of my purchases, except one. That purchase was Beat Hazard.

Beat Hazard is attempting to use your music to generate, procedurally, a level of a twin-stick shooter. This seems like a great idea, and it is a great idea. It’s just a shame that Beat Hazard does such a bad job at it.

First off, for a game that involves playing your own music, you’d think they could have spent five minutes giving you a menu that lets you look through a music collection in a sensible way. I don’t listen to music, and I still have a ton of music to sift through, and the horrible menu for doing this in game is painfully tedious. I can only imagine how much it would suck for someone who actually collected music to find the track they wanted to play. Opening the standard windows file manager would have been better than what they have. In fact, I think that’s what Audiosurf does, if I recall, and that works great.

The other big issue with the game is the visuals. They could not be trying harder to give you a seizure. They are so in your face and constantly painful that, not only could I rarely tell what was going on as I played, but it also seriously put strain on my eyes. My eyes hurt when I stopped playing the game. And that was on Standard. They advertise MORE horrible light effects on harder difficulty levels. That is completely insane. I haven’t played many video games that it physically hurt to play, but this is one of them. On top of all that, the little space ship designs underneath the blaringly painful colors are really bland, uninteresting, and look out of place against the crazy-ass flashes of light.

If you really, really love twin-stick shooters, you might enjoy Beat Hazard. But hell, I bet I would enjoy playing Geometry Wars while listening to music more than this game. It’s just not all that great. Good for those indie guys for trying something and getting it out there, but sorry, it’s just not working. Maybe with some tweaks and refinements, it could be a great game.

I continue to be nothing but impressed with Season 3 of Sam and Max. Telltale was really dedicated to making every single chapter feel completely different, and they are succeeding in that. The mechanisms they use to do that are of varying quality, but each episode seems like it’s own thing, and it’s wonderful.

For example, during certain parts of this episode, I had constant conversation options of “Noir,” where Sam would go on Noir-ish rants, and “Nonsequitor,” where Max would just say all kinds of stupid things. It was wonderful. These were very entertaining options. The “beat up people for information” Noir sequence was also a nice change of pace, if not completely fleshed out. It was fun, and funny, but not perfect.

They do manage to be pretty tricky in re-using assets in a way that seems like they aren’t. I didn’t really see it until after I finished the episode, but they sneakily used a lot of the assets from Sammun-Mak in the last part of the episode. Intelligent on their part. Of course, I expect nothing less of them.

In any case, I don’t really know what else to say about this episode. It was solid all the way through, though perhaps more traditional than the last one in it’s puzzle structure. I don’t know what to think about the weird last-minute “Uh-Oh! See you next episode!” twist. It seems kind of lame. But I’m giving Telltale the benefit of the doubt. I’m sure it’ll be quite entertaining. They always are.

I really wanted to like Alpha Protocol, but it just constantly pissed me off, every single time I played it, and I had to send it back to Gamefly. It just wasn’t agreeing with me at all. I had heard it was unpolished, but fun in the dialog, and that was what I was expecting, but it just didn’t seem to do what it was advertised. I don’t know.

Everyone has talked about how much the combat sucks, and it really does. It’s like Mass Effect, only 3 times as shitty. I got around a lot of that by using Shotguns, which don’t work exactly the same way as other weapons and are still very effective, but it really didn’t save the combat. It’s just flat-out bad, and isn’t why you should play this game.

The reason you should play it, supposedly, was the interactions with people. You pick various approaches as you talk to people, which affects the plot and how they like you and treat you. This is good stuff! Making meaningful decisions is totally cool. However, I just felt there was a real break between the conversations and the rest of the game. In the game, I’m making meaningful decisions, I’m helping out, but at the same time, when I’m in the missions, I am killing everyone, even on Stealth missions, and nobody seemed to care at all. They’d still tell me what a good job I did.

The moment that really ruined it for me was when it hinted at me getting penalized in conversations for decisions, and then backed out of it. Basically, I wore my combat suit to go and talk to this guy at his office. He makes a passing comment about how inappropriate my clothing is. I gasped. “Finally, some actual consequence for me dressing up as commando dude and shooting people!” But the main character just cracked and joke, and everything continued as if it didn’t matter. There were no penalties. He wasn’t uneasy because I was fully armed in his office. It was pointless. I threw up my hands and said, “Whatever.”

Brer claims that part of the fun of this game is the planning. “What’s most important for me to do first?” However, I was never penalized for not planning (See the above example. I could have planned and wore business clothes, if I wanted) so I don’t understand why I ever would. The same goes for sneaking. Brer claims that sneaking vs killing every one does affect things somehow in later missions, but since it doesn’t in any of the tutorial missions, how was I supposed to know that was the case? He claims that the NPCs told me that during the tutorial, but damn, who believes NPCs speaking flavor text in a tutorial? I know I just approach games different than him, and maybe my own whatevers are just keeping me from fun, but I really feel the game could have been designed better to make you do those things, if those things were actually important.

So, yeah, I didn’t really care too much for Alpha Protocol. It was really rough around the edges. It’s a shame that Obsidian can never seem to pull off what they try to do, because they try to do some very wonderful things. Maybe they’ll get it right some day.

This episode has a really weird premise.

Basically, Sam and Max find a new toy, a projector, which gives Max the power of Astral Projection, which lets him control his ancestors as they go through a film of their adventures in the past. So, essentially, you’re playing through this past adventure with old-tymey Sam and Max, but at any time, you can pull back and switch between the various reels of the movie, to jump in between the movie’s timeline.

Therefore, a large part of the puzzle-solving in the game revolves around finding something that Sammeth and Maximus should already know, or something they can’t know until later in the film, and then going to that reel and figuring it out, before jumping back and using it. This is incredibly meta. It works in the context of the film where there’s something they should know from earlier, but Sam and Max don’t, so they have to figure it out? But in the puzzles where information kind of jumps forward through time, it’s really kind of weird. Only if you think too hard about it, of course. If you don’t, it just feels like you’re doing another puzzle. But it is weird, narratively. And apparently, there is one part where you can lock yourself out of beating the game if you complete reels too quickly. It wasn’t even remotely a problem for me, but still, that’s kind of annoying.

Other than that, there was one pretty weird puzzle which defied even the in-game logic a bit. Basically, and this is kind of spoilery, so skip this paragraph if you want, you have to cut this thing in half. There’s a machine that cuts anything that walks through the door in half. However, it’s a shitty machine. Just throwing the object through the door doesn’t do it. You have to be cursed with bad luck in order to make it actually cut anything. This doesn’t make much sense, because they never really establish the machine as incompetent, only the operator. It should cut it, even without the curse. It’s kind of a dumb puzzle.

Still, it was, once again, really quite enjoyable. None of the locations were re-used from the previous episode, which is a shocking change of pace from how Telltale games normally work. (Not that I ever mind when they do that, it just shows how much work and polish they’re putting into this episode.) It’s an all-around good time, and I recommend you play it, because let’s face it, you deserve to have an all-around good time, right?

Telltale has really come a long way. They’ve really made episodic gaming work, and they’ve done it in a vastly entertaining way. Now they’ve come back to Sam and Max, and the result is astounding. Sam and Max Season 3: The Devil’s Playhouse looks fantastic, and plays better than ever before. You can tell they put a ton of thought into it, and it really pays off.

I recently played through the first three episodes, so look forward to reviews of all of them coming soon. I’ll probably try to break them up with other random shit. This is just a review of the first episode, the Penal Zone.

In surprising fashion for an adventure game, The Penal Zone starts you with an abilitease. You learn how to use Max’s new powers to do all sorts of cool things, and then soon have them taken away from you. The fact that this has incredibly good narrative justification in the story, due to the Future Vision, is just icing on the cake. They really thought this out.

I also rather like Future Vision has a hint and puzzle-solving mechanism. It completely works in-story and it often is more humorous than a flat-out hint would be. Oddly enough, they kind of shy away from Future Vision as Hint Mechanism in future episodes I’ve played, but it works pretty well in this first one to get you ready.

On top of that, it makes really intelligent use of your small skill-set. The Teleportation power is great, both as a quick-travel mechanism and, in this episode, as a puzzle-solving device, and they pretty well use it completely. They get some mileage out of it, and by the time it starts to get a little stale, they decide to go to other sort of mechanisms, like the Crime-Tron, in order to puzzle the story forward. It works really great.

I was really impressed with this first episode. So much so that I went and immediately played through the other two I hadn’t got to yet. If you like adventure games at all, you owe it to yourself to play this new season of Sam and Max. Even if you thought the previous seasons were lackluster, this one might change your mind.