The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker is out, and people were saying it was really great! I was like, “Man, I’d like to play a good Metal Gear game again…” and then I realized I had MGS4 just sitting on my shelf, and I had only played the first chapter. Then I played through it and beat it. I’d just like to thank Peace Walker for getting me to beat Guns of the Patriots. Thanks!

Then I’d like to punch Kojima for being so stupid.

Seriously, the ridiculous horribleness of this plot cannot be overstated. Kojima decided that literally every single little stupid thing should be relevant in a really stupid way. Every single character from MGS3 is somehow relevant to this world-wide conspiracy bullshit… it’s just lame.
Here are two minor spoiler examples. The DARPA chief from the original game is SIGINT… just because he had to be involved somehow. Not for any reason reason. Also, Johnny, the guy who exists JUST FOR POOP JOKES gets a ton of time devoted to giving him a happy ending. FOR NO REASON.

What the fuck, Kojima?
Every time a cutscene started, I was overwhelemed by how stupid it was. I mean, MGS has always been a bit over-dramatic, but rarely has it been this in-your-face with stupidity. It beats a player savagely over the head with it for hours on end. Ugh.

When the game actually lets you play, though, it’s really damn fun.

I think my playthrough benefited from having watched that MGS3 LP. It basically showed me how much fun fucking around and not trying to play the game the “right way” with all the sneaking and stuff could be. As such, I actually used guns and killed dudes, and it was a ton of fun running around with the huge arsenal I had, playing with enemies, and being a very old murder machine. With the polygonal head of MGS1 Snake on.

Similarly, the boss fights were a ton of fun, and really well designed. They all took a certain amount of strategy to beat, which was nice. (Granted, since I was playing on easy, I could Kamakaze and dodge some of that strategy if I got annoyed, which was nice as well.) MGS has always done boss fights well, and MGS4 was no exception.

It’s just a shame the game didn’t focus more on the gameplay. I hear that’s what Peace Walker does, and if it can deliver this kind of gameplay without quite as much bullshit, I will be so there. MGS4 doesn’t dethrone MGS3 in any way, but it is pretty solid, if you are willing to skip cutscenes, or go get a snack, or even better, play through with someone else’s save that already has all the guns. Savor each moment of awesome gameplay. It’ll be good, I promise.
Just prepare for Kojima bullshit. Maybe this was his goodbye to such convoluted, unrealistic madness. That’d be cool.

The free version of Eversion has been sitting on my desktop for months. Everyone was telling me I needed to play it, but I continued not to. Probably not out of spite. Probably.
Then it showed up on Steam, and I was making a Steam purchase, and I’m like, eh, okay. So basically, I spent $5 on a game that used to be free that I hadn’t played. I assumed this would get me to play it, and it did. I plugged in my Fight Pad and played through it right then.

So how was it?

First off, I do have to say that I feel like I didn’t get my money’s worth, if I’m just trying to go for value. Yes, I like supporting indie devs, so I’m not mad or anything, but if you were thinking of actually buying the game, I’d wait until the inevitable 1 or 2 dollar Steam sale. At that price, it’s great value, and totally worth it.

Now that I got that negative out of the way, I just want to say that you should play it. The paid version adds some better graphics, achievements, and a few more secrets, if you’re into such things, but the free version would be just fine too. Just give it a try. It’s fun.

The game is based off of a “twist,” and if you’re heard anything about the twist, you know it’s coming. It doesn’t make it any less cool, though. It’s done in a very intelligent way and it does work as advertised, even if you have a good idea that it’s coming. It’s got solid platforming, and a nice style to it. It’s a fun little romp, and if you take the time to collect all the gems and beat the secret last level, it’ll take you a little bit. I think it took me like 3 hours to completely beat the game, but keep in mind that I TOTALLY SUCK at platformers in every way, so your mileage may vary.

It does seem a little split in focus, though. It’s like it can’t decide whether it’s a puzzle platformer, or just a platformer. I suppose it’s a little of both, but it’s actually kind of off-putting to me to have such hard platforming in a puzzle platformer, because the puzzle part means once I figure out what to do, I want to be able to execute it without difficulty, which isn’t always the case in Eversion. Still, I’m probably just a wuss, and I’m sure there are much, much, much harder indie games out there. Just my personal opinion. My personal “sucks at platformers” opinion.

I don’t know what else there is to say about Eversion, so I’m going to stop saying things about Eversion. It’s not perfect, but it’s a fun little indie game, and I like fun little indie games. So there.

I am so good at fucking up rules.

When I played my first game of Thunderstone, I read it as “Go to the Village, Go to the Dungeon, AND Rest every turn.” It’s really “Or.” That’s kind of a big deal.

Still, though, Thunderstone is as advertised, and I was pretty pleased with it.
How was it advertised?
Basically, as Dominion, but with a more clear theme and monster fighting. That’s basically how it works out, too. You’re building up a deck which you shuffle a lot, and you’re killing monsters to earn victory points, which go in your deck and clog it a bit, but you need it to win.

Still, I can see why people really dig Thunderstone over Dominion. It has a much cooler theme, and does seem more well-thought out. However, there are some issues, at least from a first playthrough. As expected, the cards aren’t very easy to read. There are a lot of symbols that aren’t very clear that you have to figure out, which is unfortunate. It’s not Race for the Galaxy bad, but it isn’t great, either. Dominion is much easier to pick up.
The “light” mechanic seems a bit weird, too. Basically, you have three depths of monster you can fight at any time, and there is a light penalty to attack them, which you have to get rid of with light sources. There’s no markers for this light penalty, which seemed to make it hard for people to grasp that it was there. Some sort of play mat to put the monsters on would probably make that clearer. It also just seems weird that it’s there at all. It’s like they were really desperate to make another type of card to buy.
Finally, people claim that the low number of heroes, which everyone needs, that is in every game is a problem. I haven’t played enough to say, but I can definitely say that there was a big shortage of them. I can see people getting annoyed at that. Such shortages aren’t much of a problem in Dominion, because once three piles run out, the game is over. However, in Thunderstone, if nobody is attacking monsters, many piles can run out and the game can still continue for awhile. It makes the shortages a little harder. I feel like this is a feature, and not a bug, but it’s weird.

The biggest problem with Thunderstone, though, is the box. What the fuck were these people thinking? They’ve obviously played Dominion. Why isn’t the box built like that? There’s no good way to sort the huge number of decks in the game in that box, and that is just annoying as fuck. It’s going to make setting up games last much longer than it should, and they should be ashamed for fucking up such an easy, obvious thing.

Still, I had a good time, and I want to play more. Additionally, unlike some claims I’ve read, I don’t think that Dominion is obsolete because of this game. Dominion is “pure,” it is the essence of an idea, and that’s always fun to get back to. It’s easier to pick up and play, and there’s plenty of strategy. Thunderstone, though, has a theme, and more deep mechanics. It’s pulling from the well of Dominion to a different purpose. That’s cool. But it’s a very different beast from Dominion. I think they’ll catch different groups, but I can enjoy both, certainly. Both are fun, but Dominion is lighter, with more variety in what happens, and Thunderstone is more involved and detailed. That’s totally cool.

Anyway, those are my thoughts after a game. We’ll see what I think after I’ve run through all the different cards and stuff after a few more playthroughs.

The Road is a fine film.

This is mostly due to it being based on a fine book, but it was also put together with love. I see that, back then, I was very doubtful that the movie would be any good. I think I was both right and wrong. The Road is a good viewing, but it does lose a bit of something that makes the book so good.

That basic lost feeling is that of desolation, despair, and constantly running time. You get the feeling of how long it takes to get anywhere, and how horrible and pointless it all is in the book much, much more than you do in the movie. Little montages between key scenes just don’t display that quite as much as the long descriptions in the book, and it’s that feeling that really helps to add to the hopeless atmosphere of the book.

The other thing, and one we talked about a lot while watching it, is how Hollywood loves to put in a major female character, even in a story without one. They really do play up the man’s wife in the movie, much more than in the book. However, none of it really felt out of place. He is described as having flashbacks while dreaming all the time. It makes sense to play those out in the movie a bit more in movie form. They worked. They didn’t detract.

Other than these changes, though, it was really accurate to the book, and it made for a good film. All the actors did acting, and did it well. The boy was played by a really good child actor who pulled the difficult role off well. It hit all the major beats of the book, and was very true to them. It was also depressing as fuck, just like the book. Basically, it was exactly how you’d want such a book adaptation to be. Anyone could “get” it, and it was true for fans.

That makes for a boring review, I guess, but it was true. That’s how I felt about it. It was a really great adaptation. It didn’t make me jump up and down for joy, but I appreciated that it was put together well. That’s all I could ask for, and I’m glad I checked it out. If you liked the idea of the book, but don’t like all those words and lack of quotation marks, then you’re good to go on watching this. Go right ahead. I don’t mind at all.

It’s not easy being a Bard/Rogue with a bow.

For one, sometimes a bunch of lizardpeople attack the town when you’re just trying to get a fucking drink, and you have to shoot them up with arrows. That’s something.

For another, you could be teamed up with a band of misfits who decided to name their adventuring company Balls, LLC.

Yeah, I played DnD again.

I was under the impression we were going to be a big more serious, so I tried to create a character and play it as such. However, Essner made a character who was just named his name, which was really kind of silly, and Spaeth was playing a Shardmind who couldn’t decide if he was British or not. Kenny was silly, but was actually roleplaying, I thought, so awesome. He even had a little voice for his Gnome.

Jonathan did a wonderful job as always. He’s a solid DM. The game itself moved a little slow, though. We were in a single combat for something like 2 hours. Granted, it was supposed to be a huge setpiece, with people of the town being attacked around us, but that long in one fight can grate sometimes, especially with Essner. I didn’t really mind too much. I really enjoyed my Bard Arrow powers. None of them hit hard, (Almost all of them did 1W+CHA) but most of them had really great buffs on them. I especially enjoyed Rewrite the Future, where I’d roll an extra D20 and could assign it to someone’s roll before my next turn.

Everyone was very “Let’s just go kick some ass,” which my character had to keep complaining against. I didn’t see her as a reckless person who took risks for no reason. I spent a lot of my RP time arguing with people at the table. I’m sure that’s probably a good thing, but man, I kept “Inspiring Competence” so that they’d see how stupid their strategy was. I’m unsure it worked.

Still, it was a fun time. Hopefully we can get more done next session, though who knows when that will be. Hopefully soon! I can hope for things!

Remember when Pokemon first hit it big, and suddenly, everyone had to have a Pokemon clone? You couldn’t walk into a store without tripping over 14 games that were trying to replicate Pokemon’s success. This has mostly died down now, of course, although every so often someone gives it a try (a recent example would be Spectrobes, I’d think). Monster Racers is one of those tries.

Strangely enough, I can’t find a website for this game. It was published by Koei, but the internet is treating it like it just appeared out of nowhere. I certainly hadn’t heard of it until Val mentioned it, and I threw it on my Gamefly queue at random. When it showed up, I was incredibly surprised. The game is really competent. It’s core idea is, perhaps, stretched a little thin, but what’s there is a really good game. I could see a younger version of myself really getting into it.

The basic story is that, at some point, people found Pokemon. I mean, monsters. The one thing all these monsters had in common was that they love to run. I mean, like, seriously love to run. So, of course, people race them. You’re either a boy or an underage cheerleader girl who wants to be the best Monster Racer in the world, and beat the Star Seven! So you go out on a quest to do that.

Instead of fighting, though, you race. Now, I had this originally described to me as Pokemon meets Mario Kart, but honestly, it’s a bit more Pokemon meets Canabalt. You can slow down and even run backwards, unlike Canabalt, but that’s mostly to your detriment. You’re mostly running full speed forward, jumping over gaps and dodging things and other racers. If you jump on top of another racer, or ram them from behind, you stun them for a moment. As you run, you also build up a Turbo meter, which you can use to pull off a move that’s unique for each monster, but normally involves blasting forward at an even faster pace for awhile.

The game is constantly pulling beats from Pokemon. There’s a definite “got to catch them all” mentality to the monsters, as you get a Handbook, which is basically a Pokedex, that will put a little star next to monster’s names that you’ve caught when you encounter them. To capture them, you have your monster slow down like crazy to fire their MonStar (I wish I was making that name up, ugh) in a random race to make friends with them. It’s really, really easy, and there’s no reason you won’t capture every single monster you meet on the first try.

Still, it gives you a reason to want to do the random races. They are different, but they do get tedious. It seemed like the designers knew this, though, and put in several features to try to make the game more friendly. One feature is that you don’t have to complete a full race against wild Monsters. If you pull ahead of them by a certain length, they give up, and you win. This makes random races take 20-30 seconds, instead of the 2 to 3 minutes a full race would take. This is nice. It’s also obscenely easy to dodge random races as you walk around. Other Monster Racers don’t do the eye thing like in Pokemon. You have to challenge them. You can also see random monsters on the map, and they move very slowly in obvious patterns, so they’re easy to dodge.
All that would be great, but the problem is that you do need to keep doing those random races to level up your monsters so that they can be fast enough for the various cups and whatnot you need to complete to become the best racer. Thanks for trying, game designers, but you didn’t quite nail it.

Overall, though, I was shocked and impressed by Monster Racers. If you were to play it for, say, maybe 15 minutes a day, I doubt it would get old anywhere near as fast as it did for me. (I put in like… 6 hours, most of that in one sitting, so it got stale quick.) Hell, if you modified the racing a little to be even more Canabalt, I bet you could get this game on the iPhone and make a mint. It’s pretty charming and cool. If you ever see it in a bargain bin somewhere, pick it up. It’s certainly worth bargain bin prices. If I could have kept it for that price from Gamefly, I totally would have.

Darksiders succeeds at what it sets out to do.

Basically, it wants to remake Zelda, but it wants to make Zelda with dark, brooding characters one might see on some sort of metal album or really “badass” fantasy setting. Nobody may smile, everything is dead, everyone destroys. Demons rule the world, you messily kill people again and again. This is an “adult” Zelda.

At the same time, though, it’s really kind of childish. It’s a young person’s idea of what adult is, and while some people obvious can get into that (For example, I know Cole really liked the art and setting and whatnot) I found it really grating. Every time there was a cutscene, I was just “I GET IT, YOU’RE WAR AND YOU’RE A BADASS.” It was tiring. It certainly wasn’t why I stuck around for as long as I did.

The reason I stuck around is because this is a really, really good Zelda clone. Make no mistake, it is a Zelda clone completely. You get a new heart, or Life Stone, each time you beat a boss. The first dungeon contains a Boomerang. Sure, the combat has some God of War trappings, but the actual gameplay is a Zelda puzzle dungeon crawl, and it does it really well. If you want more of that, you really need to play Darksiders.

However, I didn’t really want more of that. As I progressed through the game, I realized why I hadn’t really played a Zelda game in a long time. The formula is just kind of stale. Since I didn’t enjoy the new coat of paint, I was looking past it to the same formula I’ve played through again and again since Ocarina of Time. Eventually, I got tired of that, too, and when I realized I wasn’t going to boot it up again, I sent it back to Gamefly.

Still, the reasons I stopped playing it are purely personal preference. Darksiders is a great game, and if you know what you’re getting into, and that sounds good, you really should play it. It’s obvious this game was made with love and with a strong reverence for the source material it’s sort of stealing from. It’s great stuff. Just not stuff really made for me, I guess.

I had promised people from school some DnD action, and so, seeing as we couldn’t get Jonathan’s campaign going on Wednesday, I decided that would be as good a day as any to get my own little campaign with everyone started.

When I had originally proposed this campaign, I had given a general outline: James L. Harner, author of this lovely book, has an evil library, and you’ll fight through it. Of course, bringing that to life is a bit harder than saying it. Especially since I ended up with a party of nothing but Strikers, and players who really enjoy lore, which has never been my strong suit. I needed to make something I’d enjoy running, but also something with enough backstory and sense built in to make the kind of people who wrote 3 pages of character backstory when asked for a “quick character idea” happy.
Oh, and I’d also have to teach everyone how to play DnD.

In the end, though, I feel like things went really well. Everyone was put on the spot when I asked them to roleplay, though they eventually got into it. Spaeth and Cole were doing most of the roleplay, even though Cara and Josh were the ones with all the Charisma. People also had a bit of a problem grasping the basic combat mechanics. I thought the power cards would make that easier, but they didn’t really. Just a little. I was glad Spants was there for that, because as the DM, I didn’t want to railroad them with advice, so having Spaeth be able to say “That really doesn’t seem like a good idea” and stuff as part of their team was better, I think.

In the end, Spaeth had to Lawful Good Stop Cole from stealing money back from a shopkeep, and Josh kept running in circles around a tree to dodge arrows. Spaeth also almost left a dude to die, even though he had magical healing powers. My enemies hit REALLY hard, but went down like chumps too, since there were so many Strikers. I felt like I actually hit a pretty good balance in my monsters this time around, because it was really close, and they were being hit hard, but weren’t in any real danger, either.

Basically, I think I kicked ass in the DM department. Or at least did competently.

I want to wrap this plot up in another session, or maybe two. Not too many, because I don’t feel like I can be counted to do that many. We’ll see how it goes.

Having Cara about creates situations to play games I never really put much time into. She wants to play games, but it’s not like we can play Call of Duty or whatever, nor does she want to. I’ve had to think of other multiplayer things we could play. This has caused me to return to two Kingdoms I barely put much time into: The Mushroom Kingdom, and Dokapon Kingdom.

Frankly, I never put much time into the MarioWii. I mean, it’s good. Don’t get me wrong. It’s great old-school platforming, but for whatever reason, I just couldn’t find time to pound away at it myself. Cara knew how Mario worked, though, so I thought we’d give it a try.

New Super Mario Brothers Wii is hard.

I mean, we were playing it, and we got somewhere. We beat World 3 playing together. But it was tough. There were a lot of deaths, and I was having to carry us, even though I’m not all that good with platformers. It also didn’t help that the world we were on was an Ice world, so we were slip-sliding about the whole time. Still, fun was had. Apparently I got really serious sometimes, but that’s just because I felt like I needed to keep making progress for Cara not to be discouraged, so I was putting on my game face and really trying to succeed at the game, more than maybe I would if I was, say, playing with Jonathan.

It’s a good game, but it was too hardcore, honestly. Playing with another gamer would be fun, but I just wasn’t skilled enough to carry both of us, seeing as I could barely carry myself. Next time I went looking on my self for something to play, I was looking for something a bit more casual.

So we played Dokapon Kingdom.
Which honestly isn’t that casual.

It plays like a board game, so it’s slow-paced, but so much of the game is based on RPG tropes that I don’t feel like Cara really understood. Still, I felt like she had a fun time with it. I mean, she beat me in the short game we played. I was honestly being too confident and getting my ass kicked too much. I also was playing a thief, and I probably should have been a warrior. In any case, if she did like it, maybe we’ll start up a story mode game and keep pounding away at that for awhile. I think that would be fun times. I suppose I should probably ask her if she agrees.

In any case, those are two games I went back to and experienced, partially through casual eyes. It was interesting, and certainly fun. Hopefully Cara is enjoying herself… I always worry. I’m so weird and geeky, but also a girl, and I feel like sometimes she doesn’t know what to do with that intersection. Not that it’s a problem.

Ramble.

On to the American footingsball, or as I’ve heard I was supposed to call it from now on, tackleball.

Something like that.

I was pretty excited about the Blood Bowl game. I had heard great, great things about the tabletop version. It was very well loved, and had a big cult following. I was looking forward to trying it in a completely affordable way on the 360.

Unfortunately, it was just not to be.

It’s clear that the people who made the Blood Bowl 360 game love the original game. Like, seriously and completely love it. Their goal was to set out to create a game where fans of Blood Bowl could play Blood Bowl online with minimal problems, and that’s pretty well exactly what they did. However, they took exactly 0 steps towards accessibility.

After doing the tutorial, and playing several matches, I still have very little idea about how the game’s mechanics work. This is a very complex game with lots of dice rolls, but it only shows those dice rolls when you fail them, and have a chance to reroll, or in a tiny window in the corner where they scroll past without explanation. It makes it extremely hard to pick up exactly why you’re failing to tackle people and so on. I was sure there was a perfectly good reason why I was failing, but the game really wouldn’t clue me in on it. It assumed I already knew.

It’s even worse in the “real time” mode. I figured this would be something to fuck around with, like a really shitty Madden or something, but no, the game just starts rolling dice in real time, and you still have to issue commands, except that it doesn’t make sense how to issue commands. It’s even more confusing than the normal game.

I’m sure, for a fan, this game would be completely amazing. The announcers are funny, but can also be turned off, which I’m sure is nice after you’ve played 50 games. The visuals are actually pretty good, and have strong style. You’ve got all the customizations options you’d want, and you can set up online leagues with your friends, or just practice against the computer. But man, if you don’t know how to play Blood Bowl already, this game is just going to seem completely incomprehensible, and I can’t really recommend it. I sent it back to Gamefly on the quickfast.