The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

I kind of completely hate Russel T. Davies. I mean, okay. The man brought back Doctor Who, and then I fell in love with the new Doctor Who, but goodness, he just cannot write to save his life.

I caught up with the new series, after missing out on a year of specials. I had thought that the fourth season, where he kind of screwed over my favorite character, was going to be the last thing he did with Doctor Who, especially since he went so stupidly far out of his way to wrap up plots that didn’t need to be dealt with. But you know what? After so many awful, awful season finales by him, I was willing to give him one more, and then have him get out of the way. I let his one little thing pass. “Just a little indulgence,” I said.

But apparently he wasn’t done, because oh crap, The End of Time was like… the very worst thing. Ever.
Let me count the ways.
1) He gives fanfiction-style closure to every single thing he added to the series. Literally every single one. Even ones he already wrapped up at the end of season 4. He goes for them AGAIN. It’s ridiculous and ruins any drama the end of the episode may have.
2) The two-parter spends an entire episode just to set up one of the worst jokes I have heard in a long time. They even have people dye their hair for no clear reason JUST TO MAKE THE JOKE MORE EFFECTIVE. It is mind-boggling.
3) It explains things that would better be left unexplained. By the end of it, characters that were cool are not, thanks to over-explanation. Way to be.
4) It ties up plot points from the history of the series, seemingly just so whoever comes after him can’t use them, and it doesn’t do it in any interesting way.

I’m trying to be spoiler-free, here, as I know Brer still hasn’t seen the episodes, if nobody else. But every bit of it just seemed to have Mr. Davies going “LOOK HOW CLEVER I AM I AM SO AWESOME” all over it. And it wasn’t. It was selfish, and way out of the reach of good taste.

I hope the new Who is better without him about writing really awful overall plots and stuff. But I just feel like he’ll be back. He won’t be able to actually stay away. Ugh.

And that’s how I feel about the last season of Doctor Who, the end.

I’ve probably put way too much brain processing power into the sex element of Mass Effect 2.

I mean it. I’ve been thinking more about the logistics of having sex with Garrus, about how that’s going to affect Shepard’s relationship with Liara, and if I can get Kelly involved in some three way action basically more than the actual plot. I mean, I guess some people are getting abducted or something? But that’s just the battlefield where love can bloom, apparently. That’s not what I’m thinking about.

This is just another reason why I should never, ever be in charge of people in tense situations. Because I would worry about these inter-personal relationships more than, perhaps, what’s going on. Okay, I suppose it depends on what the actual goal is. If it’s something stressful, which I’d want to get away from, you better believe I would focus on such things instead.

But seriously, I’m spending way more time thinking about the fact that Garrus said “if we can figure out how to make it work” and what that means for the actual sex. What kind of weird alien cock are we talking about here, where it’s some sort of issue? It’s almost a Yoda’s Penis sort of situation, although Garrus is certainly a more attractive alien than Yoda. Would clearly be better in bed, I would guess, even if you took force powers into consideration. I bet he would be a biter. See, look at me. Thinking about these things.

It really is almost two different games for me. One’s a shooter with some RPG elements which is fun, and then the other is this weird dating/life sim where I’m talking to people and learning their histories and things. It’s so disconnected. I would like each game by themselves. But I’m engrossed in both. I dunno.

Space fucking, you know?
Apparently hot.

With the idea that my body will soon be something that, perhaps, I don’t despise to the very core of my being, I have started thinking that, maybe, I need to take care of myself a little. Granted, I’m not going to go all crazy with it. I can balance, say, the health benefits of not enjoying candy now and again versus the benefits of doing so, and doing so wins out every time. I’m going to drink my caffeine drinks and eat what I want. Going without just doesn’t seem like a good plan.
Still, my body is now something I may want to keep, so I have started looking into maintenance, like exercise. I am too crazy busy to go to a gym or whatever. The thought of making time for that just makes me depressed. I looked for other, lower-impact solutions, and I ended up picking up Personal Trainer: Walking, the most X-treem walking game you’ve ever seen for your Nintendo DS.

Okay, so it’s not really very X-treem. It’s full of that kind of mostly bullshit Japanese philosophy about things you see in stuff like Brain Age. Apparently I’m walking so that I can have a proper “life rhythm.” Yeah. Okay. Sure. You also do things like put stamps on a calendar and get your life rhythm measured every day. (Mine tends to be Evening Horse style, apparently.) None of that is very useful.
Also, it’s not a game in any way. It’s mostly a program for tracking data over time and giving you little goals. These goals are kind of silly, too. I think my daily “mini target” is to “make a comfortable, friendly environment for those around me.” Yay? Really useful in keeping you walking and stuff, huh?

But again, that’s not the point. The point is that the activity meter that you just keep loose in your pocket keeps a fairly active count of your steps as you move around and exercise. It keeps track of active periods and calm periods, and it has a little LED on it. If it’s red, you haven’t met your daily step goal. If it’s green, you have. I actually like this vagueness. It keeps me going longer than when I hit green, because I don’t know how much more I have to walk. I currently have my goal set to 5,000 steps, but you can set it to whatever you want in the game, or have to set it to your average steps over a long period of time.
The game comes with two activity meters, so you can compete with a friend or significant other or something. I gave the other one to my Mom. Talking to her about it seems to have spurred her to be more active, too, so that’s good. Of course, I’m doing a lot more than her.

I really like Personal Trainer: Walking. It’s giving me a reason to walk more, and I’ve been doing so, walking while reading assignments, always taking the stairs, and so on. That’s a good thing. It’s not going to get me super-healthy, but at least I’m doing a bit better than I was. For the cost, I very much recommend it. Combine it with a Pokewalker when Heart Gold and Soul Silver comes out, as I plan to, and you have some serious Watts you’ll be earing, let me tell you!

Now returning, in what is apparently a series! (probably only a two part series) You demanded it! (you didn’t demand it) So here’s another Mike and Ike review.

Tropical Typhoon is much better than Berry Blast.

It’s a mix you might worry about, due to it’s heavy dependency on Banana flavors, seeing as two of it’s five flavors have the word Banana in their name (Strawberry-Banana and Kiwi-Banana), and you would be right to worry. Those two flavors are, by far the weakest of the set. You wouldn’t necessarily want to eat them alone, though the banana part of their flavor does fade away nicely when mixed with other flavors. I prioritized these for mixing, and it worked out okay. They just weren’t optimal.
However, the other three flavors more than make up for it. They have the robust, powerful flavor that Berry Blast completely misses, especially in the Punch and Mango flavors. You’re drawn to want to search and dig out more of those. They’re really great.

The only shame is that I rarely see Tropical Typhoon about. It’s always Berry Blast and Original Mix. It’s a shame, because I would certainly pick it up more often as a viable choice for mixing it up otherwise. I won’t waste my wish on that, though: Obviously, if I had to pick one Mix to show up all the time, it’s Lemonade Blends, all the way!

…I like candy, okay?

I enjoy candy.
I’m not really a chocolate person. I more lean towards either your pure sugar candies (Pixie Sticks, Nerds, Sweet Tarts) or more your fruit-flavored candies (Spree, Fruit Mentos, Skittles). One of my go-to candies of the latter variety would be Mike and Ike, which are those wonderful little wax fruit-ish candies that always come in a movie-theater-style box. I tend to go with the standard flavors of course. It’s their standard mixture for a reason. It’s got good variety, and you can enjoy them mixed, or individually with little trouble.

There are variants of Mike and Ike. Obviously, the best is the excellently citrus and sour Lemonade Mix. But I only know of one place to buy that, and I’m rarely there. So I’ve been attempting to branch out and try the other, easily available mixes.

For example: Mike and Ike Berry Blast. I see this basically everywhere I see the standard Mike and Ike Mix. I’ve been picking it up instead recently to give it a go.

It leaves something to be desired.

I mean, I like berry stuff, certainly. Not as much as citrus, but berry? Good. And this mix has Blue Raspberry, and I have a huge fan of Raspberry. It seems like it would be pretty great.
However, I find that, individually, each flavor lacks punch. They’re all very dull, slight flavors on the tongue. None of them are disgusting or bad, mind you. We’re not having a Banana Runts situation here. But none of them make you want to pull another out of the box. They’re just weak.
Mixing them in twos or threes does help to alleviate this, but when mixed, they tend to form one combined flavor, instead of being a mix of tastes. This, again, doesn’t taste bad. But it doesn’t leave me wanting to buy another box of them or anything.

I’ll eat Berry Blast. It’s not bad. But I should really stop buying it, I think. I’ve given it a chance, but it just isn’t as awesome as the standard mix.

Also, side note: Look at the Mike and Ike website. Oh my goodness. And what is up with that music player? I have no idea. But I highly suggest you change the music to “Baller.”

I… think I just don’t get this month’s Twilight Heroes IoTM. I mean, okay, it’s obvious that the Stainless Steelbreaker has some good stats. The Weakens Opponents is really useful, especially if you’re doing the crazy high level stuff.

But man, I don’t know.

There’s just nothing really thematically interesting, to me anyway, about an offhand dueling knife. I’m really more of a shield person, myself. It’s got a nice little bit of story in the description, of course, but if I equipped it, it just wouldn’t stimulate the silly part of my brain that kind of roleplays while I do such things.
It is also just one of those items that is only good stat-wise. There’s nothing mechanically new about this item. It doesn’t spring up any interesting effects during combat or anything. It’s just a really good offhand item, a slot which I already have a much more fun item for, Zorromir’s Double Tower Shield. Am I going to give up my battlecry, SMILES GO FOR MILES, just for slightly better defense and chance of enemy fumbles? Eh, probably not.

This is pretty well the first TH item I haven’t picked up in a long time. I’m sure it has its place, and I’m sure there are some people who just much optimize and have it. But much like the VR Helmet, it just does nothing for me, and I’ll save my money. I already gave Ryme a bunch of extra for all the new yearly Talismans! Hopefully he won’t starve this month because of that. Heh. (And thank you for the event, by the way, Ryme! I’m glad I noticed it in my busy-ness before it totally disappeared.)

I have played some Split-Screen 360 Borderlands!
It leaves something to be desired.

For one, you can’t do system link split-screen or online split-screen, so my dreams of buying a second copy and setting two people up in Spants’ room and two up in Jonathan’s were dashed. Still, I’m glad I found that out before I wasted the money on it.

Secondly, the split-screen is really oddly implemented. Basically, it doesn’t resize the menus for you having half the screen. They’re the same size, and you basically have to move the camera around to look at the whole menu with the right stick. It’s kind of the experience of using Mobile Safari while you’re really zoomed in. It’s incredibly sub-par. I mean, it works, but it feels so very, very pasted on. You often can’t see what item your cursor is on or near because you had to move your camera down to where the item information box is. It’s really weird.

Still, it luckily doesn’t hinder one of the very best games of last year enough for anyone to care. It’s still a ton of fun in Co-op. I’ve only really played a Soldier, so I rolled a Hunter this time, since I sniped so damn much as a Soldier anyway, while my brother rolled a Siren. We both ended up really liking what we were doing. Jonathan enjoyed the Shadowwalking or whatever the Siren ability is called… internet search says it’s “Phasewalk.” Okay then. Phasewalk. Jonathan was really digging that, and he was murdering everything with shotguns.

Me? Well, I had heard a lot of questionable things about Bloodwing, the birdie that the hunter throws out as his ability. So, of course, I was dedicated to using the “Rogue” tree, since Pandora apparently exists in an alternate world where “Rogue” means “Bird-trainer.” Luckily, though, I ended up really liking the skill. Swipe is really quite awesome, I’m going to love when he steals health starting next level, and I enjoy the fact that it recharges amazingly fast. At least compared to the Soldier skill, anyway, which took a very, very long time to get up and running. With the Hunter, I can start any combat by critting someone with my sniper rifle, and then throwing out Bloodwing to take out a guy running for me while I snipe the other one. Plus, constantly using abilities is just a nice change of pace, since I’ve obviously shot all the guns in the game a ton when I was beating the game on PC.

But yeah, Borderlands: Still fucking awesome. I’m so fucking busy, I don’t know when I’ll get in another session with Jonathan, but I do hope we make it happen. It’s good times.

Take a moment, and listen to some of the music of Halo 3: ODST right now. Listen to this, and this, and this.

You’ve basically experienced the best part of the game, in my opinion.

Seriously, that soundtrack is amazing. It takes a game series where my brother and I, when playing through it, would yell “GUNS! WE MUST SHOOT OUR GUNS AT THINGS THAT ARE BAD” during cutscenes and dialog because that was all that was going on. It takes a game that is basically that, and makes it intensely atmospheric.
Then, of course, you get into the flashbacks and you have more normal fare. Alright, but not mind-blowing.

Other than the music, though? I dunno.

Playing so much Halo 3 with the Talking Tyrants was a shit-ton of fun, but it made me intimately familiar with the workings of all the weapons in Halo 3. This caused me to hate them so much. Maybe you can only pick Halo or Call of Duty, but if that’s the case, I’ll pick CoD every time, because your weapons feel powerful. Sure, it’s a LITTLE arcade-y. People still take more damage than they actually do. But if you snipe them, it’s one shot. You can kill a person with less than one clip of ammo with all but the weakest pistols against the heaviest-armored opponents, and even then you can negate that bonus by getting headshots. Compare that to the Halo Assault Rifle, where it takes at least 2 clips to kill another player. It’s just so frustrating and stupid to attack people in Halo. It makes me mad that I can get the jump on somebody and lose, because it takes so many shots.

And so, through all the matches, I began to loathe all Halo weapons. Odious Tea did nothing to negate that.

The game really makes me wish that Bungie had gotten to create something else. The game does a shockingly-good job of being atmospheric in the Rookie segments. It feels like a game I want to play. But then I come upon some Covenant and it becomes a game I’ve played to death and is really annoying to me. I really couldn’t get over it as I played. It was so frustrating. A non-Halo game like this I would probably fall in love with.

Still, I was going to hold out up until I learned that Bungie hates people playing their game the way they want to. I have never played a Halo game by myself, and yet I was going to play Odious Tea in that way. I die constantly on Normal in Co-op, so, of course, to play alone I set it to easy, to which I was greeted with a description that “the game basically plays itself.” Thanks, Bungie. Needed that insult. But I continue on anyway, until I realize that I am not getting a lot of achievements. I check them. Apparently you can get the achievements on anything BUT easy. Any other difficulty, but they don’t allow easy for absolutely no damn reason for achievements that are just “Beat Level 1,” “Beat Level 2,” etc. I’m not a complete achievement whore, but I do very much like achievements. I like earning them. They do give me incentive to keep going. I was very pissed Bungie so desperately wanted me not to play their game the way I wanted that they removed that incentive from me.
So after that big fuck you from Bungie, I didn’t feel like pressing through the mechanics I didn’t like any more. I sent it back.

If you can still stomach Halo combat, I bet ODST would be a really, really damn good experience. It’s certainly paying much better attention to story. But it’s pretty obvious it’s not for me.

At times, one Matthew Essner can get crushing really hard on fairly cool actors, and follow them into movies that he knows are going to be god awful, just because he’s there. This happened with Paul Bettany, and thus I found myself going to see the movie Legion, which, by all likelihood, was going to be a horrible piece of garbage. Still, I go for the company, and I hoped that it would at least be a silly, over-the-top piece of garbage that I could laugh at and still have a good time.
Legion completed failed at that. Completely.

In fact, it failed at whatever it was trying to do so badly, that I don’t really know what it was trying to do. I’m interested to know what the people who made this movie thought it was. Was it an action movie? Was it supposed to be horror? I’m really not sure. It doesn’t do either very well.

It’s not a very good horror movie because the “monsters” were completely lame. The transformation sequence of them shaking their heads with a stupid little effect was not going to strike terror into anyone. It is a stupid and cheap effect. The possessed people themselves have also just put in dark contacts and are wearing fake teeth. It looks like an effect I could create for a movie we were shooting for fun. It would be impressive in our movie. It just adds to the “budget” feel of the film here, especially since we’re talking about a film with one location for the entire thing.
The movie also attempts some elements of psychological horror. People die, and the movie attempts to make you connect with them in some way before that happens. However, it is done via what might be some of the worst dialog I have seen in a movie in a long time. Every single character has a speech that follows this pattern: “When I was young, every night, as I was tucked into bed, my mother would tell me that I need to be good, because if I’m not, God will be very displeased with me.” Something like that. They all are a parent pulling them aside every night, and almost every single statement is one that, if you told a kid that every night of their life, it would really fuck them up. Seriously, telling a kid every night that he needs to think about what he does because it may be his last day on earth? That could warp somebody. There were other examples too. The writing is so bad, and yet taken so seriously. Put in a different light, it would be funny. As it was, it was just painful. So, no, you don’t connect with any of the characters, and there is no mental horror aspect to the film as well.

That’s fine, of course. It doesn’t have to be a horror movie. Maybe it could be an action film. And, frankly, during the few times the movie is showing fight scenes, it is at its best. The fight scenes are no better than the dialog. They often don’t make any sense, and people use the very worst tactics. However, they do tend to be over the top and fun. Paul Bettany lighting the stream from a gas pump on fire by firing a pistol in order to set a van on fire so that he could pull someone out of the van? That shit is crazy, and is fun to watch.
However, the problem is that there is so very little of that. There’s only one other sequence of fighting along those lines, and that’s the finale. All the rest of the movie is people, in this diner, talking to each other very seriously about God, and things their parents said to them. If they had embraced the “badass angel fucking shit up” angle that the movie seemed like it would go for, it would have been a fairly entertaining movie, though pretty stupid. Like, let’s say, how G.I. Joe was. G.I. Joe was successful, and was a much better movie than Legion, because it didn’t take itself seriously and let itself be fun and stupid. Legion is so, so serious, and you will be left scratching your head as to why it is.

Add into all this sort of thing some fairly large plot holes and an awful, awful case of “we desperately need to set up a sequel even though the concept of this movie getting a sequel is fairly laughable” and you pretty well wrap up how much of a trainwreck this movie was. I had a fun time because I was sitting there making fun of it with Essner and Mason the whole time. If I hadn’t been, I would have been in constant pain. I don’t know what they were trying to do with this movie, but it’s pretty clear they failed.

I have played John Woo Presents: Stranglehold. I have shot tons of dudes with guns. I did not beat the game. After two levels, I was kind of fed up with it. And what do we do with games we are fed up with? If you said “Send it back to Gamefly” you win!

I remember really liking the demo to this game when I played it a long time ago. That’s why I wanted to play it again. I wanted to rent it and play it. It seemed like a simple fun action shooting extravasperiance. If nothing else, shooting people in the cock with “Precision Aim” was really satisfying.

However, it turns out that the game is really only interesting for that sort of demo period. You get more skills, but honestly, none of them are more useful than healing yourself and the precision shot. You go to new locales, but all that does it create an opening for the game to create awful objectives that are no fun to go after.
Example: in the second level, you are tasked with doing things like placing C4 and destroying a certain number of little drug labs. Now, you’d think that wouldn’t be too bad. But the game is really hard to navigate. There’s nothing like a map of any sort to help you, and the camera works so it’s really close behind Tequila so that you get a better view of hiim leaping about. It’s not built for exploration. Add that to the fact that the destructable enviroments, while cool little extras while you’re in combat, become a “puzzle” that is really hard to find, comprehend, and execute, and you have a recipe for annoyance. Twice during the second level I missed one objective and had to wander about for 15 minutes trying to find it. There were no enemies. I had already killed them all. I just had to wander around the enviroments and do nothing until I stumbled onto it.

The idea of doing that for the remaining levels ruined any fun the combat might have been. The combat shows off well in short spurts. It’s fun to jump about to and shoot the crap out of everyone in a world where everything reacts to your guns. After that initial high, though, you realize how simple and uninteresting it all gets, and the game only throws annoyance at you to try to fix that.

Yeah, didn’t really like this one. Sent it back. Can’t recommend it. Still, it was fun to rent. I like renting. Let’s me play stuff like this and realize how much I hate it!