The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

So I managed to play a bit more Killing Floor. It’s still not a bad game. But man, some of the choices still bother the crap out of me.

I mean, okay, here’s Left 4 Dead. Casual is set up for people who have never played an FPS, which is fine. That’s why it’s called casual. If you’re a gamer and you want a “casual” experience, you can play Left 4 Dead on Normal and have a fun, very casual play experience with your friends. You can’t completely zone out, and are challenged sometimes, but are never completely crushed or anything. It’s good times. If you would like to be challenged, Advanced is a decent jump up, and Expert is really damn hard. You have options for how much skill you want involved in your game.
Now here is Killing Floor. The easiest mode is a complete joke. If you can fire a gun in an FPS, you can complete it, no problem. Now, you jump up to Normal. The game is incredibly difficult. Certainly harder than Advanced in Left 4 Dead. You’re lucky if the same team who passed through Easy half asleep could do much of anything on Normal. It’s just kind of ridiculous. I really dislike that about it. Maybe it’s because I’m not playing with a full 6 players, but one of the touted game features was that it scaled based on the number of players, so I don’t really buy that as the reason.

But wait, you say! This is a mod-able game! You can install a mod to make it easier! Say, one that doesn’t take away your money when you die or gives you more HP or something!

Well, I would, but those mods would not be “white listed.”

See, one of the game’s features is a level-able set of Perks. These give you goals to go for, as you build them up, and give you various advantages based on the play styles you like to play. This is a very good thing.
But if you use any mod that isn’t on their approved list (Read: Any that would actually change how the game plays) then Perks are turned off. You can’t gain experience in them. You can’t even use them, I don’t believe.

What the fuck is the point of that?

People are going to grind for levels no matter what you do. People are stupid like that. Put any restrictions in place that you want, people will find away around it. They will sit for hours, boringly grinding away. Look at the Achievement servers on Team Fortress for just one example. There are Perk-grinding servers of Killing Floor set up.
So why, Tripwire, are you keeping me from enjoying the game the way I want? What are you gaining by keeping me from getting levels by playing the way I enjoy? If I want to make the game super stupid easy, or give myself tons of money every level, why do you care? Why do you keep that from being a fun option, or a diversion I can turn on every once and awhile? Why did you make this “whitelist” to keep what could have kept your game going from actually working?

In a single-player experience, I get locking away content. Well, to an extent, with certain kinds of games. Leveling up in an RPG unlocks new spells and abilities. It’s important to the design of the game that that happen, and is part of the fun. This is good. The single-player game can’t exist without it. I don’t mind the developers locking that away.
Now, if, in that same game where I had to slowly unlock things, I go into Multiplayer and I cannot just play the way I want? That’s kind of bullshit. Street Fighter IV unlocks? Bullshit. You’re ruining the fun me and my friends can have. We can’t play the way we want, and it’s your fault. Same with Smash Brothers unlocks. Basically, anything that keeps the fun away until I jump over hurdles is bullshit.
That’s exactly what this whitelist is. Instead of letting me make the game I want, and play it, I am forced to play their game, exactly their way, or they take the toys away. Seriously, why even allow mods if you’re going to do that. It’s like ordering a burger at Logan’s. When they ask me how I want it cooked, and then don’t give it to me that way, I am angry. If they just hadn’t asked, I wouldn’t care. If I didn’t think the game could be modded, I wouldn’t be angry. But it has those hooks all over the game. It can be. They encourage it. But then they give me my burger burnt to a crisp, and turn off my toys.

Bleh, fuck you, Tripwire. Let me play the game I paid for my way.

…apparently I am angrier about this that I thought. Huh.

Are you feeling down? Uninterested? Thinking that the world perhaps just isn’t awesome enough? Just a little?

Then may I present Robot Dinosaurs That Shoot Beams When They Roar.

It’s so short, and it’s so silly, but dammit, it just makes me smile. The idea is awesome, the execution is awesome, the game mechanic of the beam deserves more exploration, the music is pretty intense… this is pretty well the definition of a good flash game, you know? I mean, I might have a few things to say about the guy who made it. He deserves a high-five. Definitely.

So there. There’s a little smile for you on your Sunday, hm? Have an awesome day.

…Roar.

Speaking of games I bought on the iPod for a dollar, let’s talk Star Trigon.

As per a lot of my iPod game purchases, this started with a twitter tweet. Once again, I’ll try just about any game for a dollar, and I had recalled reading about Star Trigon on one of the 1up Blogs, though fuck if I can find the post because 1up’s search is so god-awful. In any case, I bought it. And then never booted it up for days. And now I have.

Verdict: Totally worth a buck.

Apparently Star Trigon is an old arcade game of Namco’s that was made by the Mr. Driller team as some sort of side project. Now, I kind of extremely disliked Mr. Driller when I finally got to try it with a cheap copy of Mr. Driller Drill Spirits. Going fast got you crushed, going slow got you suffocated, and it never managed to get me into that “puzzle game groove” that I can get into with, say, a Puzzle League. I know it has its fans, but it wasn’t for me. Luckily, this game doesn’t carry much over besides the art style, which is awesome, and the air mechanic, which is… an okay mechanic, I suppose.

The game works like this: You’re some crazy space rescue guy. There are these little cute aliens floating in space. You orbit around planets. By bouncing between them, you can form “Trigons,” which are just triangles. Any aliens inside the triangles are rescued. You rescue all of them, you move on to the next stage. Simple enough.

There’s only one thing you can do in the game: Go. Thus, it works pretty perfectly on the touch screen. You just tap anywhere to send your little spaceman flying through space. It is a game of skill, much more action than puzzle. You have to be able to time your little spaceman’s flight to go the direction you want and hit the next planet’s gravity field, and it’s not as easy as it may look. On top of that, you have to complete the level before you run out of air, or pick up more air that the people you rescue drop, and as you keep playing, your guy speeds up faster and faster, making it harder and harder to make the jumps. There’s actually differences in the characters due to this. One has a huge air supply, but speeds up extremely quickly. One has almost no air supply, but never goes to fast. The third is right in the middle of those two. So the character you pick can really change up your game, actually.

It’s all really simple, but honestly, they do a pretty good job mixing it up. As you get going, there are different planet types, like a sun that you can’t orbit and bounces you away, or a poisonous planet that drains more air if you orbit it. There are aliens that require multiple triangles to rescue. All the while the levels are getting bigger and bigger, so you have to balance your air supply and work faster and faster… it’s pretty fun stuff! The levels are short enough that you can knock one out in a few seconds and go back to what you were doing, a good thing to have in a portable game as well.

One thing that really confuses me, though, is that you can’t type your name in in the score list. What? There’s a high score list, which is good for arcade games of this type, but you can’t enter your own name, it just lists the character you used. I want to at least know if I beat my friend whom I handed my iPod to to try it, you know? That just seems kinda odd.

Still, it’s a solid, well-rounded experience for a dollar, I think. I’m sure if you were a fan of the original game, it would be worth more, as it seems like a pretty solid port. (Again, hard to mess up a game that only requires one button, eh?) But I feel like I’ve gotten my money’s worth in the couple hours (read: probably barely 2 and thus qualifying for the word “couple”) I’ve played today, and I can see me playing it a bit more. At least until I beat all the modes. (There are four “difficulties” but which are actually sets of stages. I wouldn’t mind seeing all of them.) But again, it’s not hard to make a game worth a dollar. Still, I love getting an actually solid title for that price. I think Star Trigon fits the bill. It’s probably too arcade-y “the fun is in beating your best” for me to have paid any more, but I’m glad I tried it.

If you clicked on the link in Tuesday’s post, you might have noticed that Monster Trucks Nitro has an iPhone version. It’s true! And since it too, was on sale, and was only a dollar, I also gave it a try. If you make an interesting-looking iPod Touch game for a buck, I almost certainly will buy it. I’m like that.

The game actually works pretty well. On the screen, on the corners, you have a little virtual brake pedal and a virtual gas pedal. There’s also a Cruise Control button, if you’d rather not hold down the gas, which is a nice idea. To lean your car, you just rotate the iPod. It works really well, though you get some weird views you don’t get while playing the PC game because of it. Nitro, instead of being deployed by the player, is now just sort of a generic speed boost, much like going over a set of arrows in Mario Kart or something. That takes a little of the finesse of using the nitro in the PC version out of the game, but at the same time, I don’t have any idea where you’d put a button for that that would work well, so I don’t have a problem with it.

Visually, the game looks almost exactly like the PC version, though a little dumbed down. If I didn’t have the PC version’s stuff maxed, it would probably look pretty similar. It looks nice, though. The iPod Touch is kind of a hoss like that. The wheels on the monster trucks do seem very oddly detached from the trucks themselves in this version. They get really out there! But it doesn’t really affect gameplay, it just looks funny.

Gameplay-wise, most of the “tricky” levels seem to be missing. These levels are designed purely to test your skill with keeping up your speed. The goal times are much harder to achieve because of this, as well, with takes a little of the casual feel away from the game. You really have to know exactly how to lean your truck to maximize your speed and whatnot. It’s still plenty of fun, though, and as I said, it controls impressively well.
Still, it’s hard to overlook the fact that there are only 8 tracks in this release. At $1, I have no problem with this at all. Especially if you want to go for the gold times for each different truck (which all do handle a bit differently) you can get plenty of fun out of the game, and each level only takes 30 seconds to a minute, which makes it perfect for just picking up and playing. But I have no idea what the normal price for the game actually is, and I would have a hard time recommending it at anything other than a buck.

Man, there are so many neat little games like this out for the iPhone and iPod touch, though. Maybe I’ll spend some time reviewing some more of them this week. I really do need to find myself a good review site for these things… there has to be one out there.

Much like last year, Talking Time got a chat room and watched all the press conferences for this year’s E3 together. It was hilarious and awesome times, even if I accidentally slept through the first part of the Nintendo conference. But man, overall, the showings of the Big Three were much better than last year. Of course, a lot of what excited me wasn’t even in the press conferences. What excites me? Well…

Starting with Microsoft, they announced Shadow Complex with Epic. It’s a game that looks like pure Metroidvania, and it’s coming out on XBLA this summer. I can’t wait for that.
They also showed off enough Beatles: Rock Band to have me learn that the game has THREE PART HARMONY on the vocals! I am in love.
Of course, the biggest news from their conference was the news I heard right before that didn’t have anything to do with Microsoft: Telltale announcing Tales of Monkey Island. Holy shit. Holy. Shit. I’ve already preordered.

On the Nintendo front, they, outside of the conference, confirmed Layton 2 for early August, and that 3D Picross and Made in Ore (coming over as Wario Ware: DIY) were coming over to America, which pleased me.
I’m interested in 4 Player Co-op Mario Brothers, too, although questionably. Could be great. Could be not so great.
I didn’t much care about the completely fucked-up new Metroid game by Team Ninja? But Parish just tweeted this, so… maybe it’ll be great.
I was also excited about Galaxy 2 on Jonathan’s behalf, since he’s played through that game, what, three times now?
Also, before the conference, once again something unrelated made me happy: Atlus is bringing over Shiren on the Wii. I’m thrilled.

Sony had a new PSP Metal Gear, which is nice I guess, and nothing that will sell me a PS3. Certainly no price drop. So that’s… nice…? I think that’s nice.
The Last Guardian, of course, looks fucking beautiful, though. Who knows when it will be released, however.

But yeah, the real joy of E3 was making fun of all of the silly bits of the press conferences with all my good internet gamer friends. THE TIMES WERE FUN! They were fun.

E3. Man, I am going to spend so much money on games this year. But we knew that already, didn’t we?

RedLynx makes games that I never would have expected to enjoy. However, one might recall how much I loved Trials 2. And I did love it! Would I have paid full price for it? No. But it is a damn fun little game. So when I heard that RedLynx had put out another game, called Monster Trucks Nitro, I was intrigued. It looked like a game that worked on the same basic control ideas as Trials 2, but put them in more of a racing setting, in order to, perhaps, lessen frustration and maximize feeling like a badass. I wanted to try.

But for $20 bucks? No way.

Then, last weekend, Steam had a “Bone-breaking Racing Package” that had both Trials 2 and Monster Trucks Nitro for only $4.50. That was a much more palatable price to try out Monster Trucks Nitro, and hey, I’d get a free copy of Trials 2 to give to Brer or something! So I bought it. Unfortunately, it is apparently only Valve games that do the “gift your extra copy” thing, and my extra copy of Trials 2 has gone completely to waste. A shame. But Monster Trucks Nitro is still pretty well worth that price of admission.

The game was pretty well exactly what I was expecting: It is a more casual, faster version of Trials 2. You accelerate with up, reverse with down, and lean yourself back and forward with the left and right arrows. You race down crazy tracks, which start out mostly as time-trials, but soon become as tricky as some of the stages in Trials 2. Along the course are Nitro canisters, which you can pick up and then deploy with Control for a boost of speed to help you up ramps, over gaps, etc. Much like Trials 2, it’s a fantastic podcast game, and it looks really nice, with weird crazy physics as you crush cars and slam into piles of tires to push them out of your way, while being on a 2D plane.

Still, you can tell that Trials 2 has been around longer and has much more support. The amount of levels in Trials 2 is pretty staggering. There are quite a few, and they continue to release downloadable level packs. Monster Trucks Nitro is still fairly new. While I have no doubt that they’ll put out more levels, I’ve almost beat all of them already. Granted, I think there is also something to be said about how long it takes to defeat a Trials 2 level as opposed to the easier, more casual Monster Trucks Nitro levels, but it is slightly disappointing. I don’t feel like I got cheated or anything, however.

As it is, for 5 bucks, I think that Monster Trucks Nitro is a great purchase. However, by the time you read this, it’ll probably be back up to $20, which is kind of a ridiculous price. $10 would be justified, but $20 is just kind of crazy. I’d wait for another sale, and then pick it up. But I’m having fun with it, and that’s what matters.

So if you look back, you may remember me talking about the Browser RPG of my dreams, the one I have planned out in my head that I wish I had the skills to make, called Small Souls. Or maybe you won’t. In any case, I was all about making this game with branching paths and a card-based battle system, and it was going to be totally awesome. I guess.

Man, Metroplexity is going off of a very different thematic base, but it is DAMN close to the game I was dreaming of.

Of course, I”m very late to this party. It was at least a month or two ago when I heard about the game, but I only started playing it now that the semester is over, simply because I didn’t have enough time to play the games I was trying to keep up with, much less start a new one. Val was even telling me I needed to try it after that. Well, I finally did. And it’s very good stuff.

Basically, what separates this game from others is the fact that you can fail missions. The vast majority of the time, if you get into a tough and plot-important battle, and fail it? Well, you fucked up. You don’t get to try it over and over again. The hostage died, or the evil corporation managed to do what it needed to do and left while you were on the floor bleeding. The plot changes based on how successful you are and decisions you make in this regard. This might frustrate completitionists. I mean, hell, I am the sort of person that, when I like something, I do want to see as much of it as possible. I want to see everything that can happen. But the game has a variation of an “ascension” mechanic built in, where once you get to the end you can start over, make different decisions, and see what happens this time. That’s a huge incentive to keep playing. I like that very much.

The combat, too, is combat of my dreams, because it involves building a deck of cards and then playing them. Basically, the combat works like playing straights in poker or something. Abilities have a number, from 0 to 9. You draw a hand of 5 abilities each round. Either going up or down, you can play as many as you can string together. So you could play 4->3 or 1->2->3->4 or 9->8->7 or whatever. The more you can play, the more actions you get a turn, so it’s to your benefit to build a deck to be able to chain together multiple actions. The various moves also often have special effects depending on where they are in the combo. For example, I have a move called Kidney Punch (1). It does significantly more damage if it’s the first move in the combo. I also have a move called Lash Out (2) which is most effective as the last move in a combo. So 1->2 using those moves would deal a whole lot more damage than comboing them 2->1.
On top of comboing, you also have attacks in various disciplines. There are four main ones, from what I can tell: Melee, Ranged, Etheric, and Stealth. Melee, Ranged, and Stealth are pretty self-explanatory. Etheric refers to the drug-and-nightmare-fueled “magic” of the world. I don’t have many Etheric or Stealth powers at the moment, but what’s interesting is that Melee and Ranged powers don’t overlap. You don’t find Ranged attacks in the 0 to 5 range, and you don’t find Melee attacks in the 6-9 range. Since you want to spec out your equipment to help the moves you’re using, it makes it more difficult to use a mixture of Ranged and Melee attacks effectively. I kind of like having to make those kinds of decisions. I’m using a Melee-based deck myself, at the moment.

Like most of these browser games, the amount of turns you can play is limited by your energy. You get some back every day. You can also get extra turns by using up your Hunger and Body points. Hunger is just like Stomach in KoL. You eat various foods, which use up different amounts of Hunger to give you more energy. Body is more like KoL’s Spleen. It’s about how much you can push your body before you can’t take any more. So you can use your body to take caffeine pills or drink coffee and get more energy, or you can use it for various other buffs and things to help make the turns you have more effective. Pretty easy to figure out.

There’s no chat or anything in this game. Even more than other browser RPGs, it’s very much trying to be a single player experience, though I can’t fault it for that. I mean, although I’m lucky to have found some good friends in these games, they started as a single-player sort of thing, and will probably always be, for the most part. But man, it’s just amazing how well thought-out Metroplexity is. It’s a really good game. I hope that it gets to a more complete form and keeps being worked on. It comes highly recommended.

I am not really a music person. My parents are the sorts that listened to Talk Radio when I was growing up, so I was never really exposed to music until I was introduced to They Might Be Giants during my high school years. Even then, I myself almost always listen to my generation’s version of Talk Radio, podcasts, and never really tend to attempt to broaden my music listening experiences.

Thus, it felt like kind of a big deal when, listening to this Radio Lab’s podcast, I got introduced to a musician that I have very quickly fallen in love with: Juana Molina.

Seriously, just take a moment, go to her website, and take a listen to the little player that plays, hm?

The first thing you might think of, if you know me, is that this doesn’t normally sound like the kind of music I listen to. I enjoy very quick, energetic, pop rock kind of music. Say, a little Franz or Flans-centric TMBG or whatever. But damn, I don’t know what it is about her music that really gets to me. I mean, it’s really fucking pretty. I doubt few would argue with that, but why do I like it?

I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that it does have a constant repetition and beat. This is due to the fact that all the songs are made with just her and her guitar, and then using this looping software where she plays a bit, clicks a button and it just loops, and then she adds another layer, and so on. So it has this constant beat I can get into.
That’s my theory, anyway.

No matter what the reason, I love this stuff. After hearing the podcast, I went and grabbed her latest album, Un Dia, and have been listening to it constantly. According to iTunes, I’ve listened to the whole album… let’s see… at least 6 times. I never listen to music this much. It’s something special. And I feel like I need to share it with everyone.

I have big hopes for this album. I hope that I can write while listening to it because it doesn’t have lyrics I can follow. (I’m one of those people who can’t write while listening to music with lyrics, you understand. I want to sing along and it just breaks my flow.) But I’m listening to it while writing this blog post, and it seems to be going okay. Huzzah!

But yeah. Juana Molina. Awesome.
Yep.
(I will end every blog post with “yep” now. Yep.)

When I last talked about GRAW, I was a little pissed, as you can tell. The game still is a pretty glitchy, horrible mess. On a lot of missions, Brer and I will get into a co-op game, and then fall through the world geometry and have to restart half the time. It has crashed many times. It’s just pretty badly put together. I keep being told that GRAW 2 is better in every way, but dammit, it’s still $20, and I had GRAW. So that’s what we’re playing.

There are plenty of problems outside of the glitchy-ness, too. There is a really small selection of weapons. There’s only like 6, and several of those are extremely situational. There’s no respawning, so when you die, you’re dead. This actually makes two players the optimal number, I think, because if there are AI partners and you die, you take over for an AI. So playing 2 player basically makes you have two extra lives for your team. Still, it’s not really optimal, especially since when you’re playing co-op games, there are no mid-mission checkpoints. So unlike playing them in single player, you can’t save in the middle. You have to complete the entire mission in one perfect run. This means you never complete missions unless you’re some sort of god or something. I mean, we’re playing on easy, and we only got close to beating our first mission the other day, and we still didn’t pull it off.

Still, I can’t deny I’m having a good time with it. I wasn’t sure I would. Brer is a very controlling perfectionist, and past games that are his games that we’ve tried to play co-op, I kind of hated because he was basically treating me like a little smarter AI partner, you know? We work alright in Left 4 Dead and Killing Floor, because they’re very arcade-y in a way. You have to use strategy, but you’re mostly running and gunning, and everyone is yelling out strategies and having to change them on the fly. I mean, I enjoy my games a bit more on the arcade-y side in general, where people go down with only a few shots, like in GRAW, but where you can take many, many more, which GRAW is not like. You can easily get ambushed and die before you even see there’s someone there. That’s the kind of gameplay Brer likes. I thought that, because this was his game, it would probably end up with him working in that controlling, no fun for me way.

But I think Brer either decided he wasn’t going to do that so I would enjoy myself, or the way I play made him change his gameplan, but he just decided to play extremely aggressively instead of slow and steady, and we clicked very well. His aggressive is my normal pace in such games. So as we started pushing forward, we really started clicking together as a two-person team. We’d call out enemy locations. We’d split up the jobs, with me doing most of the sniping work and Brer handling figuring out where to maneuver and ordering the AI around and whatnot. Even though we haven’t beat a mission, I still keep finding accomplishment in those moments when we are working in perfect harmony. It’s pretty damn awesome when it happens, and the more we play, the more it happens. It’s fun.

There is also one thing that GRAW did so well that, when I realized it, it blew my fucking mind, and that is the aiming. If you hold down the “look through scope/iron sights/aim” button, then when you release it, you go out of aim. If you tap it, then it toggles you in and out of it. I personally hate toggle aiming, having been trained the other way through so many console games, but I know Brer hates the “hold down” aiming. There are times when both are useful, but normally you have to chose. The method in GRAW is so fucking seamless that I was toggling sometimes and holding others, and it took me many, many sessions to realize what it was doing, and only because I had recently had conversations about having to set that up in Killing Floor. Bravo to GRIN for that bit of control decision. Every shooter with that kind of aim button should work like that.

Still, I don’t know how much I can recommend the game outside of a neat control thing and that I was having fun with it. Co-op can make anything significantly more fun, and I don’t think the game would be very much fun, at least to me, without it. I mean, I don’t have any interest at all in the game’s “die constantly, memorize enemy locations and move super-slow” gameplay outside of co-op, and the co-op really doesn’t work that well. You’d probably be better off getting GRAW2 for co-op, or anything, really, if it’s as fixed as I’ve been told. Still, it’s got me interested enough to wish for Steam to discount GRAW 2 and Rainbow Six: Vegas and Vegas 2 down to $10 so we can try those co-op as well. Hell, if Steam wanted to have some sort of GRAW 2, Vegas 2, HAWX discount bundle, that would make Brer’s co-op day for me to pick up, and I’d love to.

TL;DR: Co-op is Fun.

Hey, I finally completed the latest Wallace and Gromit episode, The Last Resort! Just in time to get the next one and not complete that one in a timely manner, I imagine.
How was it?
Well, it was definitely an episode of a Telltale adventure game, I’ll tell you that much! Which basically means “entertaining, but not really hard or anything.” Which is just fine with me. Here are some impressions which I am now realizing are kind of disjointed, but oh well.

I still know why I have to move Wallace and Gromit around with the WASD keys, which is so they can make the game more controller-friendly so they can sell it on XBLA, but it still kinda frustrates me. There seems such little reason for it, especially since I’m mostly just moving to get stuff into the screen so I can then click it, and they walk to it… it’s kind of awkward. But nothing that ruins the game or anything.

In past Telltale series, the first episode has always tended to be a little weak, and you could tell it was in the second or third that the series hit its stride. I honestly don’t think that’s the case for this. There’s nothing wrong with The Last Resort. It was a fun time. But I can’t say it was the leaps and bounds better that the second Sam and Max was over the first, or Strongbadia the Free was over Homestar Ruiner. It did benefit from having the supporting cast introduced, as you had to use what you knew about them to make them happy at the little resort, and then fiddle with them during the whole “murder but not really” mystery section. So I guess it’s a benefit there.

I think I’ve talked previously about how Telltale tends to put its games into three acts: An introduction, a center bit where the locations are slightly changed from the introduction, and a “boss” or grand finale. This episode actually had four acts, and just flat-out stated them as such. I think the game was all the better for just admitting it was in this format, and it worked very well.

Wallace and Gromit’s puzzles seems to depend a whole lot on “pointing towards objects for inspiration.” This is not a bad thing, and honestly, it feels a bit unique. There was a section in Baddest of the Bands which worked like that, (though with an extremely Homestar bent) but they are really all over this episode, in particular, and it stood out. It really seems that Wallace is the kind of person who looks around desperately for inspiration on what to say. These kinds of puzzles can be entertaining, and Telltale does them well. But they’re also extremely easy to solve, because it’s completely a multiple-choice test. At least in most Adventure game puzzles, you don’t know all the possible solutions. If you get stuck, you can attempt to take every item and use every item on everything, yes, but there’s always the possibility that there’s another item out there you didn’t think of using to let you think outside the box a little. There is no such thing in these puzzles. I basically fail them once, figuring out what exactly I’m doing, and then solve them the next time. I suppose I could try every fail case for funny dialog, which would be funny, I know, but once I solve a puzzle I just want to make sure I’m right, so I never do. Oh well.

…I can’t think of anything else to say about the episode, so I bring the disjointed rambling about said episode to a close. Seriously, any of Telltale’s stuff is completely worth your time, and Wallace and Gromit is no exception. The Last Resort is good. I just, perhaps, think a lot or too much about my vidjeo games. But you already knew that, didn’t you?