The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

People on the Podded Casts had mentioned that Roogoo was not shit. I had played the demo of it on XBLA, and gave them props for trying to create a new kind of puzzle game, but it didn’t hook me. Still, hearing a bit of the hype about it, I decided to throw the new stand-alone version, Roogoo: Twisted Towers for Wii, into my Gamefly queue to see what was up, and if it would really hook me.

I still have to give them props for creating something original, but dammit, they really went out of their way to fuck this up.

Quick description of the game: Children’s shape blocks fall from the sky through little discs with proper sized holes. You have to constantly rotate these discs to get the Star to go through the Star hole, and the Square to go through the Square hole, etc. It’s a different kind of matching gameplay, but still standard puzzle fare, in the end. If you let too many shapes bounce off of the discs and fall into oblivion, you lose the level and have to restart.

It is no secret that I hate with the burning passion of a thousand suns pointing at the screen with the Wiimote. I figured there would not be any of that in this game, besides perhaps the menus. It was a puzzle game where you rotated little discs about. That happens with buttons. I didn’t think it would be a problem.
However, the developers decided that this was a Wii game, so you had to do Wii things. Constantly, little butterflies fly about the screen, and you have to point at them with the Wiimote to catch them in your net. Bosses will do all kinds of things that require you to point at the screen to shoot at them, or will fog up the screen so you have to run the pointer over where you want to see to wipe the screen clean. This is all extremely annoying and extremely frustrating, as you have to do most of this while still trying to play the game normally.

Mixing it up in a puzzle game “story mode” is all well and good, but in the end, you need the basic puzzle gameplay to be there. It needs to be something that I can pick up and play mindlessly for an hour or so while listening to a podcast. It needs to be something that can get me into a groove. All these constant stupid Wii-styled distractions just ruin this for me. I can’t stand it. It just makes the game less fun.

Maybe on XBLA, where the game probably has less gimmicks, Roogoo would be better. However, I would have a very hard time recommending this Wii version to anyone. It just fights you every step of the way. It is unpleasant. If the developers had just tried to make a good game, as opposed to trying to make “an amazing Wii game that uses all the Wii features amazingly!” then they probably would have caught and fixed these problems. As it is, it’s just kind of a mess.

Cthulhu wins.

There, I said it. Are you happy, Great Old Ones? Are yah?

But I suppose I should start at the beginning. Essner was all like “We haven’t played Arkham in forever!” and I was all like “How about Wednesday?” and everyone was all like “That seems like an okay day to play!” So we played.

I ended up playing Mark Harrigan, the soldier. Normally, anyone who starts with a Flamethrower is going to be an asset in combat, but with Cthulhu as the great old one, Mark was really way too fragile with his 2 Sanity. Of all things, I ended up being the main sealer of gates. I got two, and almost had the last gate needed before Cthulhu was summoned to the table. It was kind of frustrating like that.
Everyone did a pretty good job holding their own, though. Spaeth was not completely useless, though he was probably the most! But no, he sealed a gate and did some stuff, no worries. Essner, strangely, barely got into any combat at all, and mostly ran around and sealed things as well, though he stalled on a gate at the Black Cave for like, 4 turns.
Jonathan, though… he got a Healing stone, took a beating, but kept on going and going. He got a madness and an injury, and still managed to kill over ten monsters and close (though not seal) at least 3 gates. He was a monster. Darrell Simmons had never done so much, let me tell you.

The weirdest thing, though, was Cthulhu’s stronghold at Miskatonic U. At one point, the Miskatonic U streets had 6 monsters on it. They just kept constantly piling up. It was a bit ridiculous. It took most of the game to clear them out and get to the gate at the Science Building which had been open the whole time.

In the end, however, we just couldn’t keep the damage up against Cthulhu’s healing ability, even with my Grapple skill. Me blowing 5 clue tokens without a success didn’t really help, either. So, you know, as I said, the world’s destroyed. Yay.

What’s more important, though, was a very significant loss. Molly got into the game box, which Jonathan was leaving on the floor for no reason, and managed to destroy several game pieces, most notably the piece for everyone’s favorite researcher with a nice rack, Mandy Thompson. It was a sad night. We will persevere, though. Somehow, we will continue to fight the forces of darkness.

Somehow.

So, on a complete whim, Essner gets invited by Mason, one of his awesome Film class friends, to go see Inglorious Basterds. I was in the middle of purchasing a Birthday present for my mother months early and then renting a film with Spants, so we decided just to switch over and join them and watch that. And, of course, Essner sat in the stupid front row of the theater grr. But so it goes.

In any case, I thought I knew exactly what to expect from this film. I figured that I would see lots of pointless gore and that there would be many Nazis killed, and that there would be some humor, but it would mostly just be a sort of crazy mindless action thingy.

I was completely wrong.

Inglorious Basterds is all about dialog. Long, long bits of dialog, drawn out longer and longer for dramatic tension until you can’t even stand it anymore… and then there’s a gunfight that’s over in about 2 seconds. That’s basically what you SHOULD be expecting. I mean, there’s plenty of points of humor in these long, long bits of dialog, but it’s mostly a dramatic device.
Another thing you may not realize about this movie: Brad Pitt’s character is not really the main character. Even though he’s the one in all the previews, on the movie poster, and so on, it’s really a story much more about The Jew Hunter. (I forget his character’s actual name. I am so awful with names.) The movie is significantly more about his exploits in trying to further his own agenda than it is about Brad Pitt’s band of Americans kills Nazis. And those exploits are pretty awesome. They have an almost Death-Note-like quality, where it’s all kind of ridiculous mind games, but presented in a way that you’re constantly riveted, even though you know it’s a bit ridiculous.
Granted, there is still plenty of over-the-top violence. Nazis are scalped right in front of you, knives are stabbed into people… I had to look away from the screen many, many times throughout the course of the film. But that wasn’t the focus.

I’m really unsure what to say about this movie. On the one hand, the fact that the movie surprised me, and turned out to be more about things that I like than over the top gore and violence pleased me. On the other hand, I don’t understand why there wasn’t more with the Basterds, more humorous introductions of their characters, and more focus on them. I loved the crap out of Mr. Jew Hunter’s character, and I rooted for him. But at the same time, there are going to be plenty of people walking into that theater who aren’t going to want to accept him as the protagonist, and are just going to be left confused as to why the “main characters” have such a small role in the film. The people that the trailer would have brought in to see the film are more than likely going to hate the long, drawn out bits of dialog. The movie seems to fail at what it’s trying to be.

Still, I was very pleased with my decision to go see it. It’s one of those movies I never would have even considered viewing if my friends hadn’t dragged me along, and I left the theater surprised and entertained. I probably never need to see it again, but it was a good experience. If it interested you at all, and the fact that there is gallons upon gallons of dialog in the film doesn’t immediately turn you off, it should be at least worth a rent.

I am a fool.
It is amazing to me how much enjoyment I am getting out of my Gamefly subscription, and so ridiculous that it took me this long to try it.

I mean, I’m a gamer. I enjoy playing the various vidjeo gamez that are out there in the world. But most of all, I want to be involved in the video game conversation. I want to have opinions about games, and be able to talk about them with some level of authority. This means I want to play most games that come out, even if only for a few minutes, just so I can have that experience.

Before, a game came out that I wanted to try, I would either buy it day one, which is really a waste of money, especially with a game I just want to try and not, you know, know for a fact I want to play through and beat, or sit there and wait to waste 20-30 on it some other time. Either way, chances are I would get that game, play it for a day or two, and then something else would distract the shit out of me and it would just sit there.
Compare this to Gamefly, where I can hear about any game I’m even vaguely interested in, put it in my Queue, and get it, play it for half a day, hate it, and immediately send it back without feeling badly at all. I get to try so many things at the fraction of the cost. And if a game really does catch me? I can buy it at a reduced price, or I can just keep it and play all the way through it. It works so well, and it should work so well, and it kind of blows my mind that it took me this long to try it.

Of course, there are downsides. I’ve always rather liked the fact that I have what basically amounts to a huge lending library of games that people can come over and borrow. I like being able to provide that service.
But man, the money. The money I am going to save. Just think of the money. I’ve already started holding myself back on some games. I mean, some are inevitable. But I’m pruning down what games are must-buys. It feels so good.

Oddly enough, it feels so good.

Excitebots is pretty cool.
It just frustrates me.

The game concept is solid. “How about we make a racing game where getting first place is less important than what you do in the race?” They asked this question, and they came up with a game where everything you do, from solid turns, to jumps, to spinning about, to crashing your vehicle, all earns you different numbers of stars. At the end of the race, it’s the one with the most stars that wins, not the one in first place. Granted, winning the race gives you a hefty star bonus, and that shouldn’t be ignored if you want to win. But it’s less important than what you do in the race. Much less.

It does some really crazy things, too. Instead of standard attack items, when you hit a present box, sometimes you’ll get a tambourine, and have to tap out Shave and a Haircut to get a nice star bonus. Or you’ll grab a dart and have to throw it at a target as you drive past. Question Marks on the field make hills appear out of nowhere, or a set of bowling pins ahead of you that gives you stars if you drive through them for a strike. It’s these crazy mini-games in the middle of races that make the races themselves exciting, not to mention how much your little robot bounces and flies around constantly. It’s a lot of fun.

But when I have trouble beating the second to last course of the second set of races, something is wrong. This is a Wii game. It should have a hard difficulty mode, but it shouldn’t be so hard that I have to try a long race a number of times in the double digits to beat it. It should just be fun, let me play, and unlock things. If I don’t win, who cares?
But this game cares. And it makes me unhappy. I wanted to see it all. But I have no want to perfect my skill at this game. I just wanted to play stupid racing game for awhile. The fact that it doesn’t support 4 player split screen means I want to play it even less, because I can’t drag a nice group of friends over to play it.

No, this game has some really great ideas, but it doesn’t really know what people want in difficulty. Okay, not what people want, what I want. So I’m pretty completely done with it.

It’s frustrating when such a nice, core casual experience goes sour like that.

I’ve said that I’m a fan of the animes that involve Mah Jong. For whatever reason, these shows continue to be mind-blowingly entertaining to me. But it’s only so much fun to watch a game being played, even if it’s being played intensely dramatically. Eventually, you want to play it yourself. But damn, Riichi Mahjong (the Japanese variant used in all these shows) is very complex, and whats worse, it’s almost impossible to find a place, in English, to play it, especially against a computer. (Seriously, you Google Mahjong, and it’s all Solitaire. All of it.) I tried the main online Japanese site to play Riichi Mahjong, called Tenhou. But there’s a big language barrier to get into games, not to mention that games on there are played with an incredibly strict time limit. Like, discard in 10 seconds or we discard for you. Completely not conducive to learning the game.

But I didn’t let that deter me. If I wanted to learn the game, I needed to play it, and that required some little tiny portable game. What better place for such a game than the iPod Touch? So I poked around, and looked what Riichi games there were on offer. Most were all in Japanese, and the rest were Solitaire or shitty. But there was one game, simply called “Mahjong Mobile.” The description in the app store is some incredible engrish. “And the slider is done in the tap and the tile is discard.” Intense. But I don’t mean to make fun of this guy. What’s important is the English in the game, and it’s completely correct and understandable. His app is totally worth the 3 bucks if you want some Riichi Mahjong practice.

The previously mentioned slider is actually, from what I hear, a very nice innovation. Since so many tiles have to be on screen at a time, it can be difficult to actually tap the tile you want to discard. The solution Mr. Matano came to was a slider, which you move along the bottom of the screen. As it moves, it points to the various tiles. Tap the slider to discard the tile it is pointing to. Simple.
The game also has many features perfect for the English speaker learning the game. For example, it lets you use the “American” tileset instead of the traditional one. This one is so much easier to parse because, instead of having the symbols on the tiles, which is especially hard to figure out in the Character suit without experience, it just has a little symbol for the suit and the number of the tile. So much easier to figure out and read at a glace. It also does the thing (which I hear hardcore players don’t like, but I appreciate) where it labels all discards that come from a draw as opposed to from their hand. The tiles players threw away immediately, in other words. This is a huge help in learning to read player’s ponds to figure out what to discard. I’m still rubbish at it, but it’s nice.

But yeah, it’s a solid game. It’s all understandable, so I can tell what it’s saying when it’s trying to tell me I don’t have enough fan to actually call Ron or Tsumo. It gives a results screen that can help explain what fan you have and such so you can figure it out. Sure, it isn’t as good as some sort of dedicated tutorial, but it’s a nice trial by fire, and since I don’t really give a shit if the computer embarrasses me and beats me, I’m having a good time learning it, playing a few hands here and there. It’s also a very podcast-friendly game (although it does the annoying thing where it shuts off the sound when you boot into it. But you can pull up the music controls in-game and just start it back up.) which I always appreciate. It doesn’t have many bells and whistles, but it’s a very solid program that sets out to do one simple thing and does it very well. I can highly recommend Mahjong Mobile to anyone wanting to try the Riichi rules out. It’s fun times.

Mirror’s Edge was a game that was kind of exciting to look at from a distance. Here was a game that not only looked unique, but was bringing mechanics you just don’t see anywhere to the table: first person parkour. Oh man, new and experimental, exactly what gaming needs, right? I mean, it’s going to be a bit rough around the edges, but it’ll still be fun, right?

Mirror’s Edge is not a game that likes you.

Maybe it’s because I’ve played Prince of Persia so recently, but this game just doesn’t want you to play it. Sure, Prince had some missteps. Combat wasn’t interesting, for example. But it also wasn’t frustrating, and the actual action of running, swinging, and jumping was completely enjoyable, if a little on rails.
Mirror’s Edge doesn’t let you get any fun out of running fast and making cool jumps until you’ve practiced and run through the level a time or two. Getting into a new area in Mirror’s Edge is mostly fraught with confusion about deciding where to go. This is supposed to be fixed with Runner’s Vision and the B button, which gives you a hint, but the hint just makes Faith look in a random direction and is completely useless, and Runner’s Vision only seems to highlight things when I don’t need it to. So many times I had no fucking idea where to go, and the game did absolutely nothing to help me. Even with a FAQ open, it was hard to figure out. I hate that.

But not running blazing fast all the time, that could be forgiven if the game would actual focus on that. That’s its appeal, and that’s why you want to play it. But the game has all kinds of arbitrary fight scenes where you have to use intense precision timing to disarm foes and then gun them down with horribly-implemented shooter mechanics. Hopefully you do them perfectly, because even on easy, I died constantly. Easy was supposed to make the combat easier, and yet I would fail time and again. I can’t imagine how pointlessly hard it is on other difficulties. To make matters worse, the checkpoint system is so bad that, even if you manage to survive one of these gun-firing combats, if you fail the jump right after it, which you might do, depending on how complicated it is, then guess what? It’s time to re-do the fight.

It was in just this situation, in the 7th level, that I said “Fuck this noise” and sent it back to Gamefly. I don’t need games that frustrate me. My leisure time need not be filled with things that make me angry. So fuck you, Mirror’s Edge. You had so much potential. Come back when you want to entertain me, eh?

I saw G.I Joe: The Rise of Cobra!

It was shocking.

I mean, seriously, the trailers looked horrible. Like some bad son of Transformers that was going to be painful to sit through the whole time. And yet, my friends decided they were going, so I decided to come along.

Maybe it’s just the power of lowered expectations, but goodness, I really enjoyed this film. I mean, don’t get me wrong. It is dumb. Completely stupid. But man, unlike so many things that are stupid, it KNOWS its stupid. It knows it is based off of a cartoon that was created just to sell action figures. The Joes have no less than 4 million vehicles, some of which have parts that do nothing. (At one point, they get on these snowmobiles that have wings, which, after jumping like three feet out of the transport they were on, detatch. What’s the point of that?) There are crazy lasers and weapons, there are always random armies of guys about whenever someone needs a fight scene… it’s just so dumb, but it knows it. It embraces it. Why not have a weapon make an entire floor explode one minute, and then bounce off of the hero the next for no reason? Why not have a nonsensical “nanomite” weapon that is sometimes dangerous and sometimes not, whenever it’s appropriate?

This movie gave me much of the same rush as Shoot ‘Em Up did when I saw it in the theater. Constantly I was going “That makes no sense!” and “What the fuck!” but at the same time it was so thrilling and just unashamedly fun that I didn’t care. I was thinking I wasn’t going to like the movie going in, and apparently that was a bad plan. When I got there, my expectations were surpassed.
The only letdown was that there wasn’t a PSA after the credits. What a complete waste of a perfect opportunity.

But yeah, no. This won’t win any awards. I will probably never watch it again. But it was just a fun, stupid evening of action and explosions, and I had a shockingly good time. Watch it to MST3K it, or just watch it to watch things explode, and you won’t be disappointed.

One of the things that’s sometimes kind of nice about how I listen to music is the fact that I can “discover” something I’ve had around for like… years. Since I listen to one to two tracks on an album endlessly, forgetting all the others, I can sometimes stumble on a “new” track that I’ve had all along, but never actually gave much time to.

This happened recently, and I was pleased. Back on Election Day, when Rock Band put out it’s Presidents of the United States of America pack, I was like “Hmm, these songs are pretty good. I wonder what else they have.” And then I very quickly became a huge fan of the band. I devoured their work, eventually lingering on their last album, These Are The Good Times People, and mostly listening to that. But so much of their stuff was worth my time. It was exciting. It was entertaining. I was entertained.

The other day, I was preparing for my trip to the City Museum, which I told you about already. But, at the time, I was unsure whether or not I’d be driving up alone or not. So I felt it time to stockpile some podcasts, and that meant not playing podcasts while I played my games. So I dove into my library to try to find some music to listen to, and stumbled upon the POTUS (as hip fans call them, I guess) album, II. I had never really given this one a chance, so I put it on.

By the time the second track came on, I was in love with the band again. Man, they are just so good! They’re just the right mix of pop and odd and clever and rock for me, and I just love the crap out of them. I’ve been listening to that track constantly, but Volcano, Mach 5… the whole album is solid. It’s just wonderful stuff.

So huzzah for discovering music I already have, I guess! Huzzah!

Thanks to Pepsi, I have like a million Wii points (okay, as of this writing 8700) so I decided to spend some on a game or something. Cause, you know, what else am I going to do with them? I want to save some for the new Pokemon Mystery Dungeons and Pokemon Scramble and, of course, Cave Story, but I’ve still got plenty. Might as well enjoy something, right?

So I jumped into the painfully-long-named Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a Darklord since I had heard some pretty decent things. Those decent things were pretty correct, but man, it’s a little harder than I had hoped.

First off, I just want to say, and this is kind of a stupid problem, but I am really unhappy to find I was playing a character. The game is called “MY life as a Darklord” and the whole game mechanic is very abstracted. I expected to type in a name, and have little minions talk to me through the television screen and whatnot, but instead I get to play as this annoying girl. Yay.

Still, it doesn’t really affect the gameplay, which is quite good. The game is a Tower Defense game, because you are defending your magical, evil, flying tower. It uses some ideas from traditional Tower Defense, and is very similar, as you’re setting up things ahead of time and letting them happen, but it is very much its own thing, which I appreciate.
Basically, you build floors to your evil tower. Each floor type has a different evil artifact which can give various effects to the floor, such as dealing damage to adventurers who enter it, or protecting your monsters. Then you summon monsters onto the floors to fight the adventurers. They have a simple R-P-S system in place for weaknesses and strengths of these monsters: Melee beats Ranged, Ranged beats Magic, Magic beats Melee. Etc.
So, okay, you’re setting up “towers,” essentially. Big deal, right? Well, what makes the game interesting is how adventurers climb the tower. They show up either individually, or in parties, and try to scale to the top to break the Dark Crystal. When a “good guy” gets to a floor, they will turn on their combat timer (which is different for each time of adventurer) and then get into combat with the monsters on that floor. After the timer runs out, then they scamper up to the next floor. The catch is that only one adventurer can be on a floor at a time. So if another adventurer, done with a battle, tries to climb up to a floor where his buddy is already doing battle, he just skips it and goes right on to the next floor. So when a party of three adventurers rolls in? Well, I hope you have a lot of floors, because they get to skip quite a few of them.
It’s this mechanic that really makes the game feel unique. If I put a lot of monsters on a floor, I can deal more damage to the adventurers, but their combat timers stop when attack animations are going off. That means I can stall people on the floor for a long time if I use a quick monster that attacks many times for little amounts of damage, but that can also be a hindrance, keeping the adventurer from moving on while three of his buddies skip the traps on that floor. It’s actually quite a lot to have to try to juggle.

What gets me though, is the game’s difficulty. It is pretty brutal. You really have to learn exactly what types of adventurers are coming on a level and how to stop them, or you will, very quickly, continue to fall flat on your face. I’m already having trouble and I’m not very far in the game. I suppose I could buy some of the $60 (!!) of DLC for this $10 game to make it easier, but… no. That’s retarded. Extremely retarded. At least the obscene amounts of DLC in My Life as a King (which I still need to try sometime, too) gave you more and more stuff to do in the game the more you bought.
Then again, I plunk down money every month for IoTMs that make KoL easier. But donating for something in a free, indie game made by a small company just has significantly more feelgood value than giving the Squenix behemoth money for content they didn’t put in the game.

Still, I think it’s a fairly neat game, and if you’re the kind of person who likes trying many different things to figure out how something works, you’ll probably love this one. I honestly just kind of hope they port this to the iPhone. It would work really well there. The way the tower gives the game a vertical look, especially. And surely Squenix wants that money! But who know.