The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

Through Kale’s way-too-niceness, I have had a copy of Borderlands on the PC for awhile now. Sunday, instead of doing my homework, for instance, I played Borderlands for like four hours. This has been happening for awhile! The reason is because the game is fantastic.

Now, this isn’t fantastic like, I dunno, Red Faction: Guerrilla is fantastic. It’s not a one-player game in any sense of the word. (Brer will try to tell you otherwise, but I think he’s a little crazy in the head. I’m sure it’s passable as a single player game, but that’s not the appeal.) No, this game is awesome like how, say, L4D2 is awesome. (Which I guess I need to write up, too. But I’d like to beat the last campaign before I do that!) This is just a fantastic multiplayer game. It is action-based, so you’re always doing something, but it’s slow-enough paced to facilitate talking, if you’re into that, and with its RPG mechanics, you are always making some progress, even if you’re failing, so you never feel like you’re wasting effort. It’s just really great.

The center of the game revolves around Diablo-style loot. This mechanic is just as addictive as ever. They’ve done a pretty good job of making every individual gun you pick up look slightly different, even though they fall into 7 or so categories. (Shotgun, Repeater Pistol, Revolver, Sniper Rifle, Combat Rifle, Submachine Gun, Rocket Lawnchair.) Even within these categories, though, you have sort of… subclasses. For example, in Combat Rifles, you can find burst fire weapons, assault rifles, and even some actual machine guns. In Repeater Pistols, you can find Automatic Pistols as well as normal ones. In any case, even though you’re probably never going to keep a weapon based on looks, it’s nice that when you get a new gun, it does look different from the one you currently have.
At the same time, many weapons have special, unlisted abilities. These are shown through cryptic messages. These actually work really well, as you just HAVE to equip them to figure out what’s up. I had a sniper rifle with the message on it “FOR THE MOTHERLAND!” It turned out that ability made pulling out the weapon and reloading it lighting fast. I could reload faster than I could fire the gun. It’s neat.

There is also plenty of customization of the characters and character classes. There are only 4 classes, and each one has three skill trees, which, over the course of the game, you will probably master one and dip into a second one. This gives you a decent amount of build customization, but the genius thing they did was to have items called “Class Mods” that you can find in the world. These actually change your class title and give you very specific attributes. They really change how you play. For example, Kale and I are both playing Soldier class characters, but our characters play completely differently. I focused on the healing and support tree of skills, and he focused on the damage tree. He is using the “Support Gunner” class mod, which lets us all regenerate ammo, while I’m using the “Leader” class mod, which gives us all extra experience and lets our abilities recharge a little faster. As such, even though we are technically the same, we play differently enough to be distinct, which is awesome. There are plenty of other class mods for Soldier we’ve found that we could be using as well, such as “Shock Trooper,” which makes us a Shock-element attacker, or “Tactician,” which helps the team’s shields recharge much faster, but we’re pretty happy with what we picked. Still, even an entire party full of Soldiers could have a lot of variety, and that’s pretty awesome. Of course, each other class has their own set of different class mods to choose from, so each other class is just as customizable. And since class mods are simply an equippable item, if you need to “respec” to be a better member of a different team, you just have to change your equipment. It’s well thought out.

Basically the only thing I don’t like about the game is the vehicle stuff. That kind of sucks. Luckily, the game forces you to only use the vehicles to get to the next “dungeon” or arena of combat, and will block off places with barriers so you have to get out. It’s not that big a deal. It is kind of annoying, though. Still, one minor complaint in a great game.

Yeah, Borderlands is pretty much completely awesome. It’s certainly one of the best Co-op experiences of the year. If you like Co-op, there’s no reason for you not to own it at this point. I wouldn’t necessarily suggest the PC version? It’s pretty clearly a 360 port, though it plays just fine on PC. (The water effects, for some reason, are totally glitched. Most of the time I can’t see water when I play. This is a minor annoyance and doesn’t really affect fun at all.) It’s just, you know… split screen is awesome, and the 360 version has it. If you have gamer friends, you should play the game. You really should.

While walking through Best Buy before the giving of the thanks, I was going through the PS3 aisle. See, I was sure there were more PS3 games I should pick up, now that I had one. It was there that I passed a big box labelled Buzz! Quiz TV!. I knew this was the old version for PS3, as I had watched an excellently entertaining Giant Bomb quicklook of the new one. It didn’t seem like a great game, but still something my friends and, more importantly, my parents could get into. I’m always on the lookout for games I can play with my parents. It looked like the perfect thing to play over Thanksgiving!
The kicker, though, was the price. The boxed set with all the little Buzz controllers was on clearance for $30. That’s a value. I bought it.
Obviously, I was sick in bed over Thanksgiving, and we really didn’t get to play it then. But I have gotten some games in since with the parents anyway.

The game itself is, well, a trivia game. It’s fairly straightforward in that regard. Some of the categories, however, do rely on some gamer skills. For example, there is a category called “Pie Fight” where you have to time button presses to take out other opponents. For a gamer, it’s not hard to time this to take out who you want. My parents, however, had great trouble with it, and it is perhaps a round that is a little less casual friendly because of it.
The other major complaint is simply one I have with a lot of games nowadays. The text in the games is fairly small, which is an issue when you’re trying to read answers quickly. Again, I didn’t have TOO much problem with it? But my parents often had trouble figuring out what the answers were. There really is no reason that text couldn’t be bigger on the screen, as there is a lot of empty space.

The buzzers themselves, when compared to, say, the Scene It! buzzers, feel really cheap. I mean, they’re not bad. They haven’t fallen apart or anything? But they lack weight that makes them feel like toys. They also give the impression of being complex to set up. They aren’t really that bad, but since they have to do this weird wireless syncing thing (as opposed to the simple RF of the Scene It! buzzers) it feels like a pain to get them going. You certainly have to devote some time to setting them up, which you never had to with the Scene It! ones, and there’s no way to know which controller is the “first player,” etc, until you’re setting up the game and see which one responds to which. The tiny USB dongle seems much easier to lose than the RF receiver for the Scene It! buzzers as well, which is something to think about.

Overall, though, I think I am totally getting my $30 worth from the game. It’s really hard to mess up trivia, and Buzz pulls it off fairly well. Still, if you aren’t finding a copy of Quiz TV! in a bargain bin somewhere like I did, it would probably be in your best interest just to get the new one, Quiz World. From that quicklook, it certainly seems like the more polished product, with less bullshit round types, not to mention that people like my parents would get a kick out of Buzz saying their name in game. That’s a benefit that I think could probably be overlooked, but shouldn’t.
But yeah. Buzz! is pretty nice. Now I just need to find a set of wired PS2 Buzz Buzzers I could buy for cheap so we could play the game with 8 players.

Some people just want a hardcore experience. Some people just pine for a time when you had to play sections of game over and over again in order to memorize and master concepts. They just get off on that feeling of mastery, that feeling of doing something perfectly and knowing that they are basically the gods of this or that discipline.

I’m not one of those people.

I mean, I can enjoy a good roguelike, say. But there’s a distinct difference between a roguelike and what I am talking about here. In a roguelike, things are always randomized. You aren’t memorizing locations, you’re learning a set of skills that applies overarchingly, and having to make decisions based on those skills on a regular basis.

The kind of game I’m talking about, like, say, Demon’s Souls, is not like that. It’s about learning the mechanics of the combat, yes, but it’s also about memorizing that there is going to be ambushes here, here, and here, and I need to fire a spell blindly down this way because a guy will pop out, and so on and so forth.

I mean, Demon’s Souls has some great production values. It’s dark, but it looks awesome. It’s got some really creative ideas about what an online game should be, and it has an interesting mythology going over it at. But when I got it from Gamefly and was playing through it, I couldn’t help but feel like it was just memorization I was going through. Sure, I was slowly figuring out how to kill enemies in a more efficient manner, but mostly, it was figuring out exactly what enemies were going to attack when through trial and error. I worked hard to memorize the first little dungeon, and kept plugging at it until I reached and beat the first boss. Then, looking at the other levels and knowing I’d have to do it all over again, I immediately returned it. I just couldn’t take that. Plus, I had just gotten my physical body back. Might as well leave while I’m on top and alive, hm?

For people who get off on the concept of mastery, and I know they are out there, Demon’s Souls is probably the greatest game to come out in a long time, and I’m very happy for them to get to play it. But these days, I set games to Easy or Casual and just want to experience them. There were some cool experiences in my time with Demon’s Souls, running across a bridge while being attacked by guys on all sides and a dragon doing fire-breathing bombing runs being one of the neatest ones. But I just can’t take the frustration to see more of that. I want relaxation from my games.

Such is the magic of Gamefly, though, that I get to approach it that way. Try it and get it out of the way. I wanted to try the game, and I did. I’m glad I did. But now I can move on to other things.

I’ve been wanting something new to listen to musically because… I dunno. I’ve been listening to the Presidents of the United States of America literally all semester. It was time for a little change. I was trying some Oasis, but it wasn’t working. I mentioned to my brother that I was looking for something new, and so he hands me a CD by a group (okay, actually it’s apparently just one dude) called Owl City.

I kind of love Owl City. He’s got this very poppy, synthy song, and all his songs are sugar sweet but genuine and emotional. I’m falling in love. But most important, I have gotten one of his songs stuck in my head horribly, and that song would be Fireflies.
Got a pretty good music video, yes? It also has a good beat. Mostly, though, what’s getting to me is the lyrics. They’ve just got this very strong emotion behind them that, for whatever reason, is really affecting me right now. I mean… “I’d like to make myself believe that planet earth turns slowly” is such a great line. So full of hope, and yet sad, a statement of trying to force will against the inevitability of time.

Things just slipping away, as you dream, and try to turn things into something you want, but everything is never as it seems.

Yeah…

I am now someone who owns a PS3, and so there is now a wealth of old PS3 exclusives for me to go back and play! So I put a bunch of them up on my Gamefly, and the first one to come in was inFamous, Sucker Punch’s super hero open world game. Note the very important spelling as inFamous, with only the F capitalized. Very important, apparently.

Haven’t not played Prototype, I can’t make any statements on that now old debate. But this certainly did seem the better game, and it certainly was pretty solid. You don’t really expect it to be a 3rd Person Shooter when you go into it, but even though you’re throwing lighting bolts, that’s totally what it is. It pulls all of that off pretty well, too. There’s no problems there. You feel just about the right amount of super-powered and fragile, and you eventually get some good movement things going.

But there are two main reasons why I only beat the first island of the three before returning the game, and that’s the incredibly badly handled morality stuff and the repetitious nature of the game.

First off, that Penny Arcade Comic? It nailed how stupid these “moral” choices are. They are so heavy handed and so… dumb. Even the more interesting ones are ruined by the main character going “I could do this… or I could do… THIS WHICH IS EVIL!” in a little game-pausing internal monologue, which just makes the decision seem stupid. For example, early on, there’s a barricade you need to get past with a crowd of protesters in front of it. You can either open fire on the guards from the crowd of protesters, so that the guards focus on the crowd as its enemy, or you can walk in front of them and start opening fire from there, making yourself the clear target. This is a very interesting decision. I could see myself being shocked and genuinely moved by firing from the crowd and realizing that was an “evil” decision. However, without the sense of discovery or actually having power over your actions that the internal monologue outlining the decision takes away from you, it’s ultimately meaningless. All the choices are “Do I want the red powers or the blue powers?” That’s all it is. It’s a really stupid story thing, and honestly brings the game down more than it helps it.

The other thing was the repetition. The game gets into this serious grind. Go do this stupid underground climbing thing to turn power on. Do a mission. Go home. Rinse. Repeat. If the underground missions weren’t exactly the same, maybe that wouldn’t have been so awful, but they pretty well are. After four of those, I was kind of done with those missions forever. The other repetitious part are the side missions. “Just ignore the side missions!” you say. “If they’re repetitious, just don’t do them!” But not doing them is much worse than doing them, because that is how you stop the random enemies from spawning around the city. Each one you do extends the “safe area” where your superpowered heroism has influence. Moving from one place to another with enemies about is VERY ANNOYING. Killing guys isn’t a joy like it is in Crackdown, it’s fairly difficult, and these guys can pot shot you to death and completely distract you. You want them gone, badly. Thus, you do the repetitive side missions, which sometimes have variety, but often don’t, and then you get bored of those too.

It’s a shame, really, because the core mechanics work pretty well. It’s just that the game itself doesn’t offer up enough original content to keep you going the whole time. If you’re someone who wants a game that you can wring all kinds of gameplay out of and get so many hours of play for your buck, I suppose inFamous would help you out with that. These days, though, I don’t have time to put up with that kind of bullshit. I want compact games that are interesting and fun the whole way through. inFamous wasn’t. Still, I’d be very interested in an inFamous 2. They’re set up a very good groundwork here. If they can give things more variety, I would be totally down.

While I was in Arkansas, I needed something to play. I picked up and played most of the rest of the way through Mario and Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Story, a game I had set aside for no good reason. When I got back, I finished it. Now I am finally writing a review for it. Yay.

Mario and Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Story is a great game. A really great game. It’s just held back by a few really, really stupid decisions. For one, there are a lot of little mini-games to break up the action. However, it’s clear they spent less time perfecting those than they should have. Some of them are near-impossible to control, and make you fail constantly. (the nasal passage game is particularly bad in this regard.) Some, like the Revival Boats, are just kind of annoying since you have to do them all the time.
Also, I didn’t technically “beat” this game, as it pulls the same bullshit that all of the Mario and Luigi games have pulled: The last boss has too fucking much HP. I fought the last boss for 20 minutes straight, and then died, and I’m not sure I was anywhere close to beating it. I said “fuck this shit” and counted the game as beaten. I’ve done this on every game but the first, and the only reason I didn’t on the first was because I was really, really bored and tried it like 4 times.

Besides those two annoyances, though, this is by far the best game in the series. The writing is top-notch, and with so much Bowser, who’s character I love in the Mario RPGs, I was grinning almost the whole game. His combat is extremely rewarding, just as much so as that of the Bros, even with just him in it. His touch-screen “minion” attacks are decent. They’re certainly better than the minigames, and they are a nice change of pace from the timed button mashing of the Bros attacks.
The game does so many smart things with the two screens, too. Just little subtle effects, such as when Bowser is walking around when Mario and Luigi are inside him, and you can see the “interior” map of Bowser’s body? It bounces as he stomps about very slightly. It’s a neat effect. They also do some really clever things in the cinemas with the two screens. It’s very clear that they’ve mastered the use of the system since Partners in Time.

One of the best parts, though, is the fan service return of Fawful from the first game. He makes a great, entertaining villain, and I was grinning when I saw him enter the scene for the first time. In the end, he ends up being second-place to a main boss again. but it was fun seeing him come into his own as an evil mastermind.

The game does beg the question, though: How many more star-based MacGuffins can the people at Nintendo invent? The “star cures” you are collecting in this game seem like a huge, huge stretch. Where can they go from there? All MacGuffins must be star-based in the Mario world! This is a potential issue in the future. Might I suggest “Star Map” or “Star Chart” next time? That could be entertaining.

In any case, Bowser’s Inside Story is Nintendo designing for the hardcore at its finest. You really should play it. It feels very fresh from the other games, very creative, and is just a lot of fun. Just don’t feel bad if you can’t beat the last boss, okay? I certainly won’t think less of you.

APPARENTLY IT’S THE LAST DAY OF NOVEMBER AND I HAVEN’T REVIEWED ANYTHING AND I WAS SO DEAD SET ON THAT AWFUL JOKE YESTERDAY I COULDN’T DO IT THEN AHH.

But that’s okay, I don’t know how much I have to say about either. Mostly because I, uh, don’t have much experience with either.

For example, the KoL IoTM is the first one in a long, long time I haven’t picked up. It’s the Movable Feast. It’s… kind of mind-boggling. Sure, it’s an all-around familiar equipment. Sure, it lets you buff up your familiars, I guess, and it adds some damage and familiar experience. But man, I just don’t know. It only seems worthwhile if you’re switching familiars a lot. At the same time, if you’re playing softcore, you’re PROBABLY playing casually and don’t switch familiars all that often, and this doesn’t do much to entice you if you aren’t trying to train up multiple familiars concurrently. It’s just kind of uninteresting to a casual player, which is who I always think about these softcore-only items being aimed at. It’s especially less useful when I have a Mayflower Bouquet, which, while more random, I feel is better in pretty much every way for my purposes. And while I passed the little box of fireworks up for a similar reason that I passed this one up, it’s still extremely close to the cost of 1 Mr. A in the mall and still seems way, way better than the Movable Feast in every way.
So yeah, I just don’t get who this is aimed towards. So I didn’t pick it up.

In Twilight Heroes, we have the Atmos Spear, which works both shortened and extended!
Twilight Heroes kind of likes these changeable morphable items like that. As is, in the current gamestate, it seems like the extra chips from the shortened version seems like your best bet, as it’s clearly the best weapon in the game at the moment with that kind of enchantment. And the flying on both versions can be useful to free up vehicle or other slots, not to mention the lighting strikes.
I just, I don’t know. I’m kind of burned out on the grind of Twilight Heroes. If there were some way to redo the quests, I’d probably check in more often… it’s a great game, that’s why I’ve supported it for so long. Just… yeah. I can only grind for so long! Especially when I have so many other distractions.
Still, you should at least read the utterly ridiculous story that Cris wrote about the thing. Because it’s pretty awesome. The idea that something I can go buy in a store is so important is kind of silly. And awesome.

Anyway, there are some thoughts. DECEMBER, HO!

Mega Man ZX Advent is a game for the Nintendo DS Portable Entertainment System. It is a sequel to Mega Man ZX, which I got for 9 dollars at Toys R Us once. I enjoyed it, as one might expect that a combination of Mega Man and Metroidvania might be enjoyable, but it made some really, really dumb decisions. The biggest one was that it didn’t have a map, so much as a very vague screen that it called a map. This map showed “areas” and where these areas could connect to, but gave you no information about the areas themselves. So while I knew that, say, Area A connects to Area B, it gave me no information about how to get to the exit in Area A that lead to Area B. It was really stupidly hard to navigate without having GameFAQs open with an actual map.

I assumed that, seeing as this was a huge problem, that they would fix it in the sequel. But when I got it in from Gamefly and booted it up, I found out that that is not the case. The map is slightly more useful, splitting the areas up into multiple, smaller areas, but it still doesn’t give you an actual map. You still have no idea where the hell you’re going half the time. To make matters worse, they added some awful, awful voice acting. Now I can hear some really bad voice actors saying some of the really awful dialog that I wasn’t playing the game for anyway. Whee.

The game did some cool things, like letting you turn into bosses instead of just taking their powers, which was a pretty neat idea. But the first time I got lost because the map was so useless, I couldn’t help but say “fuck it,” and I sent it back immediately. Come on, Capcom. You can do better than that. I’ve played games where you’ve done better than that. So, so much potential wasted. Ugh.

While I was sick, I moved the PS3 into my room in order to actually have something to do. I played inFamous for awhile (which I’ll talk about later, I’m sure) but then wanted something a bit more hands-off to do. That’s when I remembered that CJ, who sold me the PS3, had left a copy of The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters on the machine for some reason. I had always meant to watch it, and this seemed like a great excuse, so I started it up.

This is a pretty amazing documentary, and deserves all the praise it got. There are a lot of weird people in the documentary, sure, and there are definitely some things that you will probably laugh, or at least grin at for being so absurd. At the same time, it tells a really great story. It’s all about Steve Wiebe attempting to attain the international top score in, what else, Donkey Kong. There’s this almost hilarious sequence when people are talking about how Donkey Kong is “the hardest game ever” which just seemed so surreal, even if I didn’t doubt that, in the context of these kind of competitions, it very well might be. Wiebe’s quest is fraught with problems, though, as it paints the man who held the top score since the 80’s, and who is famous for being the first person to “beat” Pac-Man, Billy Mitchell, as being a huge douche and a complete villain. I know it’s possible that he wasn’t QUITE as much of an ass as the movie paints him. Editing can do some amazing things. But man, it makes for a compelling story, seeing him snub, refuse to face, and embarrass Wiebe from a distance the entire time. It is one of the best put-together documentaries I’ve ever seen. It does a really good job of establishing what’s important, and why it’s important. It also does a great job of drawing these weird-ass “professional old-school gamer politics” lines, where some people are Billy’s henchmen, almost, and some just want to take him down. Lines are drawn. It’s just… really way more dramatic than a movie about playing Donkey Kong has any right to be, and does it without being forced the majority of the time.

The only downside to the movie is that the ending is a bit anti-climatic. I mean, I’m sure they couldn’t do anything about it. It seemed like the circumstances of the ending came about after they had basically finished, and they felt it important to tack on this extra bit of information, but it’s certainly less powerful than the rest of the film, and leaves you with a weird feeling.
Still, the overall experience is excellent. I feel like I’ve done an awful job of explaining it, though. But oh well. You should watch it anyway. It would be a great rental, and a great time. Go for it.
And thanks, CJ, for putting that somewhere where I could enjoy it.

While I was sick up in bed, I decided, hey, I should beat things. So I did. I beat Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box.

Honestly, I don’t know what there is to say about the game, though. If you liked the first one, or you like the idea of a whole bunch of brainteasers and puzzles being tied together by a very nicely animated plot, then this game is probably for you, and you should buy it so they bring over The Last Time Travel and The Specter’s Flute in a much more timely fashion than the last two games. Buy buy buy, by my whims to get the games I want to come out. Go.

But yeah, the plot seemed more intense and involved this time. They really tried to give a much more interesting plot to the thing. I don’t know if it worked as well. To avoid spoilers, I won’t say much, but I will say I rather found the conceit that caused there to be a whole town full of puzzle-lovers in the first game much easier to buy than the reason in the second game, much less the fact that Layton travels to multiple places, all with puzzle-fanatics. But eh, it’s a world concept, and I’m generally fine with that. At the same time, the games go out of their way to try to explain it, so I feel like they should have to explain it in a satisfactory way. If they’d never explain it, it wouldn’t be a problem.

The game does tie more puzzles directly into the action. Sometimes they aren’t a direct one-to-one puzzle connection, but often you have to solve a puzzle to do something that Layton needs to do. To navigate a dark forest, you have to complete a puzzle about placing lights in a dark forest. To prove a murder wasn’t suicide, you have to look at a room and find out what’s wrong in it in order to prove there was a murderer who escaped from it. These really do tie you into the story very well. There’s even a puzzle that involves a physical object in your instruction booklet, which is pretty bold of them.

But yes, the game is really more of the same, but that is not at all a bad thing. If you like puzzles, and I do, it’ll keep you entertained for quite awhile. I’m kind of glad my sickness gave me a reason to get back to it and finish it up. Now I can wait for The Last Time Travel (which is actually teased at the end of the game, so it better be coming!) eagerly, without a guilty conscience.