The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

Speaking of LoL, how about that LoL Turret Defense? It’s not so much Turmulent Defense as Tower Defense, and it’s on your i-type Phone and it’s completely free.

You could certainly do worse for getting a free fix for your tower defense love.

League of Legends: Turrent Defense is of the mazing flavor of tower defense. (The other flavor, in my opinion, being fixed path tower defense, if you cared to know.) You have a big map, and sprites stolen from League of Legends (Okay, not stolen, since Riot Games did this, too) run through, and you shoot them with your little towers, making a maze with them so that the baddies take a heck of a long time to get to the other side of the map. Sometimes, one of the League of Legend champions runs in there as a boss, and takes a lot more shots to kill. That’s basically it.

It isn’t the most complicated game in the world. There are only four types of towers. A basic tower, a slowing tower, an area of effect but ground only tower, and a slow to fire but high damage tower. Nothing fancy. There also isn’t a whole lot of options or anything. You can play for set numbers of levels to try to beat the game based on difficulty, or just play until you lose in an endless mode. Basically, this isn’t going to replace a more robust, paid tower defense game. It also isn’t going to really be anything fans of the PC game really have to play, as it has nothing to do with the DotA play of the PC game, besides being a free promotional tool. At the same time, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with it. Everything works exactly as advertised, and it gives you a very basic, but very functional game of tower defense, with a much better map than most on the iPhone, because it requires scrolling. It’s well-built, just not complicated.

If you’re sick of the completely excellent and certainly better Tap Defense and need another cost-less tower defense fix, LoL Turmulent Defense will do that for you. It also might be more enjoyable if you like the mazing as opposed to the fixed path that Tap Defense is. It’s at least a good hour or two of enjoyment, and at the cost of free, it’s kind of hard to turn that down. Download it on your phone next time you’re stuck with something better to do. You’ll have some fun.

I’m really kind of clicking with Janna.

I really don’t know why. I feel like I’m more in control with Nidalee, but I bought her and started using her, and I keep winning, so I must be doing something right.

Mainly, it’s her Howling Gale that’s so powerful. It’s a skill shot, but it’s so obscenely versatile it’s really all she needs. You can fire it immediately just to slow down enemies, or charge it up to decimate minions. You can also let it charge to set up traps, either into the Gale, or causing them to attempt to get out of the way and run into allies. Plus, it just does a ton of damage. Every time I pick someone off with it, I feel awesome, and since it goes through enemy groups, unlike, say, Nidalee’s Javelin Toss, I can do that more often.

Her other moves are just okay. Zephyr never does enough damage for my tastes. The slow effect is nice, but it’s at such a short range I rarely find it useful. It’s much more useful just as it’s passive ability to move faster and walk through enemy troops. Eye of the Storm works great offensively, helping Janna take towers down. I always forget to use it defensively, though, as it also throws up a damage shield. The games where I remember are the games I do the best.

Really, though, it’s Monsoon I don’t get. Monsoon recharges fast and does decent healing, although it’s HoT which is less useful. It also pushes enemies away. However, it just rarely seems useful. I get the most mileage out of it throwing it down after a tough, multi-person fight and healing my side. It certainly isn’t an “oh shit” button, so it doesn’t help me escape very well. It still kind of baffles me.

Still, I like her. He’s a pure spellcaster I get, which is nice. I need to remember to pick up Kage’s Lucky Pick more often, though. That’s so perfect for her. Yeah, that’s right, I’m also tailoring my in-game builds, too. I am kind of getting super into League of Legends.

Super. Super.

Hello. There’s a new IoTM in town. The town of Twilight. That item is the A.R.F. VIP Card.

Basically, if I wanted to be all minimalist or whatever in my description, I would say that this is the TH version of the June Super-content familiar in KoL. This opens up a big zone with lots of little goals and little puzzles to deal with, and it’s actually rather neat. It can either be used to give you a wide variety of buffs, or you can work slowly but surely to collect various scripts, combining them into other scripts, and then using them with Silver comPutty to make some really cool equipment. None of them are going to set the world on fire, perse. None of them are as good as other IoTMs or whatnot. But they’re all quite useful in their own right, and it’s just cool to collect things, yes?
Again, it’s all about long-term goals, and this thing has them. It’d take quite awhile to assemble all of those items. Granted, you do get 20 uses of the A.R.F. a day, but that’s still awhile to collect all of those, since you need to grab degaussers between each fight to collect the scripts.

Finally, of course, is the fact that this item is, much like those content familiars, open to all. Anyone can ask to trade for some A.R.F. passes and get in there. However, unlike a lot of the super-content familiar stuff, you’d need a much bigger stack of these passes. I think this is a good thing. Anyone can experience the content, but it also will create, eventually, at least, an additional market for the passes. One could imagine, anyway.
Erm, well, I checked the auction house, and the auctions are for like… stacks of 50-100, and not that expensive, so maybe I’m wrong there. Oh well. Still, it’s nice that all this solid content isn’t locked out.

Anyway, I think the A.R.F. card is good stuff. I really need to put more time into it myself, and really see everything. The fact that I need to do that is a good thing, I think. This gets my seal of approval. Not that you ever thought it didn’t, I suppose.

Yesterday, I was staring at the still unopened Amazon box which contains my copy of Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey, a game that, by all accounts, is completely badass, but is as of yet unplayed. There was a time in my life where I wouldn’t have been able to resist, a time in my life when I would have tore the fuck through that game and devoured it. I also thought about the fact that I’m still on the last case of Ace Attorney Investigations and haven’t played much Picross 3D.

It then hit me.

I’m not a portable gamer anymore.

A game used to have to be on a portable system for me to have any chance of beating it. I had the consoles, sure, but I got most of my gaming done on my GBA. I beat all kinds of portable games, constantly, because that’s when I had time to play. When I was home, I was talking with people online. I was doing other things.

Now, however, I find myself having to set aside time for games. “This is when I am going to play,” I say. As such, I have time to sit down in front of the TV and consume bigger experiences. I also have Gamefly, which brings a constant stream of cool new games to my door to give me something to focus on and work with.

Basically, I’ve completed way, way more console games than portable games in the last year.

Part of me feels like that’s really weird. I always thought that I’d always be a portable gamer. But I get most of my portable gaming in on my iPod now, little distractions to get me through the day, and when I really want to game, I’m not reaching for my DS anymore.

There’s nothing at all wrong with that. I just have to get that through my head. I play console games now.
Fair enough.

It was to try out Photo Dojo.

Basically, Photo Dojo is pretty awesome at the current price of 0 dollars, and you can easily get an afternoon of fun fiddling around with it. However, for it to really be a full product, it would need a lot of work. Luckily, again, it’s a 0 dollar download, so that’s not an issue.

Basically, you create a very simplistic fighting game by taking pictures of your friends and making them into fighters. They strike some poses, and you record some dialog, and then you can fight with them. Hitting a button makes them throw punches and kicks, up jumps, down ducks, Down and a button does their “special move,” which is based on one of four fighting styles you pick from, and back and a button throws a projectile, Hadouken-style. You can also taunt and use “Desperation Moves” with the touch screen. That’s basically it. There’s no blocking or combos or anything.
Still, the benefit is having fun making fighters with your friends. It’s a really silly affair, and a lot of fun trying to think of different positions and whatnot.

The main problem with the game is cropping. Basically, the game attempts to “crop” around whoever you’re taking a picture of. This might work, but the fact is that people want to do silly awesome things, not go with a set few poses. Even if they use those set poses, it’s hard to get them to fit perfectly in the cropping box. So you end up with a whole lot of background of the picture built into the “sprite” of the fighter, which looks kind of stupid.
The alternative, though, would be some very complex cropping tools in order to make the sprites look good. This wouldn’t be user friendly at all, especially on the DS. I’m not surprised it’s not in there. It’s just not that kind of game. It’s for an afternoon of silly fun.

In any case, Photo Dojo is a fun little distraction, and makes you go “Oh, okay, that’s why there’s a microphone and a camera on this stupid thing.” Since it’s free, it’s worth downloading if you have a DSi right now. Is it worth buying a DSi for? Fuck no. But eh, as I said, it’s an afternoon of stupidity with a friend or two.

Hey, look, it’s a hat you can put a familiar in.

I really like this. Mostly because it’s this huge, customizable thing you can do so much with. There’s plenty of cool messages based on the tons of familiars you can put in there, and plenty of effects to choose from that are nothing to sneeze at. If you’re sort of more optimal than me, being able to give the familiar in the hat some experience could also be a very nice thing, if it’s a familiar you only need to use every few turns or whatnot. Though, of course, the bonuses for those familiars (Say, the Llama Lama and the Green Pixie) are really low, so it’s a little harder of a sell, I suppose.

Still, compare this to, say, the movable feast. This is just a much more fun way of leveling up familiars. Is it as effective? I dunno. I had 0 interest in said Feast, and never got one. I bet that would be faster, and you wouldn’t be using your hat slot, which might be better in a lot of situations. But the Crown of Thrones is more entertaining, a cooler idea, and has more stuff for me to see, which makes it a completely better in every way kind of item. I really like it, and I can’t wait to really get to give it a go.

Basically, I feel this is completely worth it. It’s totally neat. It has the flavor and effects that I want from an IoTM. Huzzah!

Assassin’s Creed 2 was pretty great except when it wasn’t great.

I mean, it had a neat setting. Great graphics. You had this great side mission where you were upgrading this base town, which is always a lot of fun and they did that pretty well. You could collect lots of weapons and such. Seems like a great game, right?

Except, you know, the combat is awful. It is slow, tedious, and doesn’t feel satisfying in any way. It doesn’t help that the best way to fight is to have someone else distract the enemies and one-stab-kill them all in the back. You just stand there and guard until you counterattack, but eventually all the enemies take like 30 counterattacks to kill, so the combat just takes long and longer for no reason. It’s just really painful.

There’s also free-running, which is also kind of shitty. So often I felt like I had absolutely no control over what I was doing. Ezio would jump off of buildings to his death, and refuse to climb up the simplest of climbs without me babysitting him all the time. Sometimes, he simply wouldn’t do something I knew he could do, because he had done in a million times before. Case in point, there’s a sequence where you flash back to being Altair, and you climb a tower. At some point, there is a beam jutting out of the tower over the balcony, and you need to climb onto this beam. He simply will not do it. It took me literally like 20 minutes to do this, and even awhile after I looked up how to do it. There was no reason why he shouldn’t have grabbed that beam immediately. It was frustrating.

Moving in towns? Besides the control issues with the free-running, it’s also annoying because the towns are huge, there’s only fast-travel between the towns, and if you run, people get mad at you, and you have to get into more bullshit combat. So you’ll waste half the game walking around slowly, being bored out of your mind. Maybe you’ll pickpocket every person you pass, to try to make it less boring, but then you’ll just be attacked more often, and it’ll take you even longer to get to the next mission.

For some reason, which I understand that I’m probably not making this clear, I played this game for a long time. It was oddly compelling, if very slow to start, even though it constantly annoyed me. Then, I hit the last memory, and it’s like “Oh, you don’t have all the Codex pages? Go find them.” Fuck you, game. All you told me is that that increases my health. I didn’t need more health. I could never die. I didn’t waste my time with them, and now I need to go find 13 of those fuckers?

Needless to say, it immediately went back to Gamefly at that point.

I can see how people would like this game. Apparently a lot of people didn’t struggle with the controls like me, and maybe that made it worthwhile. I have really mixed feelings about it, and it probably ends up being negative feelings. There’s no way this was game of the year. No way. The fact that it was even discussed in that context shocks me, now that I’ve played it. That’s why I wanted to try it, and man, it just didn’t live up to the hype. At. All.
Bleh.

Last night, after having a nice visit with the kitty, who got back from her vacation, I stayed up later than I should have playing Space Channel 5 Part 2.

Why?
Well, mostly because of this.

Because Mamabliss is way too nice, that happened, as something to cheer me up, because I was all… whatever. And that is just so fucking amazing. It put a huge grin on my face.

So how could I not dig out my Space Channel 5 Special Edition discs and play a little on my PS3?

Space Channel 5 is so flawed in so many ways, but it has so much energy and style, I really just can’t help but love it, even now, so many years after the fact, when it’s problems are even clearer. It fills me with so much energy, and puts a smile on my face. If I had the body not to embarrass myself, I’d cosplay Ulala all the goddamn time. I love the games.

Needless to say, I went to bed tired, but very happy. I’m not saying it knocked me out of my funk completely, but… I got a night off. That was damn nice. So here’s a public thanks for an awesome picture. Thanks, hon! You’re awesome!

See, it’s supposed to be like Saddle, but I put LoL in there, because this post is about LoL.
Amazing.

Now that the school semester is over, I’m finding time to get back to playing LoL multiplayer and whatnot, which is lovely. I really do enjoy that game, more than I ever expected myself to when I installed it. It’s probably because I’ve got Essner and Jonathan hooked, so I always have actual teammates to play with. It also helps that I’m actually getting competent with people.

The first character I decided to main was Tristana. She’s nice, of course. I still enjoy her. But I really got the hang of her because she’s the first character where I really learned how to use all of her moves. I could do some serious killing.
Yet, that’s not really my style. I enjoy having a heal. But I never really felt like I was effective with any of the healers I had played, except maybe Kayle, but even then, she’s very “heal herself” focused and not actually for healing a group.

Then I tried Nidalee and fell in love. I purchased her immediately, and I haven’t looked back.

Now, I don’t really care for her flavor, perse? She also doesn’t look particularly cool. But her abilities just fit me perfectly. Basically, she can, when she hits level 6, shapeshift into a Cougar. This cougar has a completely different set of abilities: one created to kill people. As a human, her set is extremely support, although her Javelin Toss can do some decent damage.

This works just perfect for me.

Most of the time, I can be support and defensive. I can use Primal Surge to heal and Javelin Toss to finish off foes. Bushwack is great for tracking traveling foes as well, of course, though it’s never really a big attack. Still, useful. Then, later, when I want to kill something, I can switch to the Cougar. Takedown is REALLY powerful, Claws are fun, and Pounce works similarly to how Tristana’s rocket jump works, in that I can use it to help me escape from situations, which is awesome.

Basically, I know how to use all her moves. I know what they’re for, and most of the time, I can apply them. I feel like I’m doing things as Nidalee, and she fits my playstyle. It’s completely badass. I’m even getting to the point where I can actually hit people with Javelin Toss, which is extra awesome, as I’m not really the best at skill shots.

Yeah, it’s good to be playing LoL again, and now that Essner has a good computerbox and a headset, I envision many more rounds being played. I can’t wait.

I order Essner’s birthday present from Amazon I get this electronic mail that says that hey, I have $5 of MP3 credit for no apparent reason now! Therefore, I felt like I needed to go attempt to search for music. However, I’m horrible at such things. I ended up wandering around the site for a long time, but eventually I looked up My Robot Friend, and found their latest album, and… well…

Take a listen. And watch.

This song is amazing. It kind of sums up exactly what I love about Hot Action, their first album. It’s kind of creepy, kind of upbeat and kind of not, and it just hits all the important notes. The lyrics are just so awesome as well, and that video is kind of creepy.

Needless to say, that’s all I’ve been listening to since. Just that song, over and over and over again.