The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

Star Trek is a movie that could have sucked so badly. It was taking a series that is not known for action and making an action blockbuster out of it. It was applying some crazy stupid time travel plot in order to bring back the original Kirk-era Enterprise and characters. It had someone nobody had ever heard of playing the key role of Kirk himself. There was so much stacked up against this film. So much that could easily go wrong.

And none of it did.

Star Trek blew me away. (IGN.com) It was, by far, the best remake/re-imagining/reboot of a series that I can remember.

Most of the time, when bringing a series to the screen or rebooting it, you are making a devil’s bargain. If you play too close to the original canon and concepts, you’re tying yourself up creatively, meaning you can do less that is interesting and effective with the film. Newcomers won’t be interested, because so much of it will exclude them. And no matter how good a job you do, you’re always going to get SOMETHING wrong, which will piss off the fans, who will always recognize every little mistake. On the other side, if you cast off everything the original had besides the premise, you gain some appeal to the mainstream, but you’re still going to turn people off, because they’ll assume they need prior knowledge. Additionally, your fans, who are your main source of income and who are the reason you picked up the IP, will hate it, and not support you. There seems to be nothing you can do.

Still, Star Trek found a way. If you were to read its time travel, alternate reality plot on paper, it would, seriously, sound like the stupidest thing you’ve ever heard of. However, they treated it not only with respect, but intelligence, and the result was amazing to behold. By establishing clear connections to the canon as well as establishing very clearly WHY what’s happening on the screen is not canon as the fans know it in very Star Trek terms, it freed up the movie to take any liberties it wanted. It let them make the movie their own. It let them set up a Star Trek movie that was full of balls-to-the-wall action that didn’t upset fans, and could even surprise them.
All the characters you love are here. The cast is amazingly well done. They are new takes by new actors, certainly, but they’re also very clearly the roles they are cast in. Each person is different, but completely fitting. They are who they are playing. Somehow, they even managed to fit in almost all of the characters’ well-known catch-phrases in places where it didn’t seem joke-y or like a wink to the audience. Hearing Scotty tell us that “She can’t take much more, Captain!” is awesome in a fan service way, but when he says it in a completely action-filled situation where it’s extremely visually clear that she really CAN’T take much more, you get to have your cake and eat it too. The only downside, really, is that you’ve got this great ensemble cast, but the movie is Kirk and Spock’s show. Everyone gets a little time in the spotlight, but it’s not nearly enough, especially for Bones.
The action, too, was really good action. I watched Wolverine: Origins, which was supposed to be an action-blockbuster, but it was downright tame compared to most of the action sequences in Star Trek. The fistfights were brutal, the firefights were intense, and the ship to ship combat was, somehow, exciting while not betraying the almost time-honored tradition of the ships seemingly staying in one place and just firing at once another.

Will fans as a whole bash the film? I don’t know. As a lover of Next Gen and general appreciator of Star Trek, I loved the crap out of this movie. I know Spaeth, who is a huge Trekkie, enough of one to watch all of Voyager and Enterprise, loved it as well. If an action-y Star Trek seems like something you will enjoy, I will tell you: This won’t disappoint. It is good stuff.

So, way back when, as you may recall, I bought a whole bunch of games on the cheap side from a Best Buy sale. What amazes me about said sale is that the one game I bought completely on a whim, Neopets Puzzle Adventure, is the one I’ve been playing the most. Sorry, other, probably better games!

The concept of the game is a simple one. “Hey, that Puzzle Quest was popular. Let’s take that and put Neopets in it to make it MOAR POPULAR!” It’s a recipe for success, honestly. I haven’t played Neopets in years, but from what I remember, it, as a franchise, is totally about little games like this anyway, and weird little plots. I am also of the camp that believes that, if you’re going to try to make a licensed game on the cheap, you might as well completely rip off a good game, so the game comes off fun. So I was all for this idea. In execution, there are many flaws in the game, but it’s so damn fun I find it really easy to overlook.

First off, I was unhappy I was unable to make an Aisha for my character. What Neopet you are has ABSOLUTELY no bearing on the game, but that’s the Neopet I had back in the day, and I even have an Aisha doll in my room. So I was kind of disappointed. The game does have an awesomely bad random name generator, though, which I enjoyed. My character ended up being named something like Aiirepyaa. A good random name generator is so much fun. I will forever thank Wizard 101 for giving me the name Rachel Sparklewhisper, for example.
Once you make some character, there’s some plot about getting a ship ready and then there’s some amulet summoning meteor monsters or something. It’s all pretty pointless, much like the Puzzle Quest plot. Still, again if memory serves, it seems pretty true to plots in Neopets, so I could see fans enjoying it muchly.

The game itself is a modification of Reversi or Othello. The rules are exactly from that game, and if you know how to play it well, you will win. There is an element of randomness, in that if you flip a whole bunch of pieces, you create a “shockwave” that flips over a random piece and can trigger others flipping, but this random element seems to always be in the player’s favor. I didn’t see any complete bullshit of the computer getting shockwaves and coming back from behind. Basically, if you don’t know how to play Reversi well, you will get totally destroyed. The first few matched I lost obscenely because I didn’t know the tricks to playing a good game, but once I figured them out, I never really lost.
The main problem and blessing of using Reversi as the base is that it’s a game that you can’t fiddle with much. In Puzzle Quest, you can have powers that drastically change the playfield because in a few turns, the playfield will be completely random again. In Reversi, changing too much completely and utterly breaks the game. The game attempts to mix it up by having different board shapes, which do help, But the powers, which come in the form of collectible PetPets you gather during the plot, are not very varied. There are only so many things you can do, and certain ones are clearly the best. Granted, anything with Stun properties were clearly the best in Puzzle Quest, but there were still other powers worth your time. Less so in this.
Additionally, leveling up does nothing to your character. Since there’s no “HP” or anything in a game of Reversi, I can’t see anything that gaining levels does for the actual gameplay. It seems to just be a method to unlock codes to get items in Neopets proper, which is probably a good incentive for someone who actually plays Neopets, but I basically felt gypped out of the feeling of progression I go to RPG elements for.

Still, I can’t deny that the game is really fun. It’s missing the “bullshit!” moments of the computer pulling out a win from its ass a la Puzzle Quest because Reversi is a game of complete knowledge, and the computer can’t screw you in that way. There’s also no denying that Reversi is just a fun game to begin with, and the perfect game to play while listening to a podcast, something that really elevates a game in my book. If the Neopets theme won’t drive you crazy and you’re jonesing for puzzle-y action, I can easily recommend this game. It might be a harder sell at the $20 it is on Steam, but at the $10 price point I got it at on DS, it was very, very worth it.

Oh, hi! It’s angry rant time! Yaaaaaay!

A long time ago, in an effort to promote awesome multiplayer gaming with the boyfriend, I purchased a copy of Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory for the PC. The Co-op missions are awesome, I heard! It was cheap, too! So I just picked it up (a special edition for cheap, no less, in a fancy case) and installed, ready to give it a try!

Ubisoft’s PC net code was so horrible, so god-awful, that not only was I unable to EVER play multiplayer with Brer, but both of us were never able to get into a multiplayer game PERIOD. It was retarded and frustrating, and contacting their customer support only told me to open all the ports. I did that already, jackasses! And I SHOULDN’T HAVE TO DO THAT TO BEGIN WITH!
The purchase wasn’t a complete loss. I went on to play through most of the single player, and since I had never played a Splinter Cell before, I had a pretty good time at it. But it made me kind of angry.

Now, I realized recently that Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter had a co-op mode. Now, Brer and I tried the demo for this in co-op a while back. There were some hiccups, but I assumed it was because my computer at the time really shouldn’t have been running the game. No, now I had a really powerful new PC, and I could run it fine, and it was a mere ten bucks on Steam. What could go wrong?

To attempt to figure out some of the settings in the game before we tried to hook it up, I booted the game up a moment ago. I go into the multiplayer, and it tells me to log in to my Gamespy account. Okay, I say. Sure. I log in. Nope, doesn’t work. Well, I guess I don’t remember it. Retrieve password… nope, no account. Okay, I’ll make one… I can’t make one because the account name is already taken. BUT there was no account. It couldn’t retrieve the password. Huh?
At this point, I log in to the GameSpy website. I do this fine. I have poetfox, the account on GameSpy. It’s mine. I go back to the game, having confirmed I got all the information right. It still won’t let me in.

At this point, I’m getting kinda annoyed. I am poetfox. ESPECIALLY when I have the account, I should be called poetfox in game, even if it’s just a game between me and Brer. So I go to the Ubisoft help site. It gives me this bullshit.

How the fuck can Ubisoft think such obviously intensely and incredibly shitty programming is okay? GRAW is a game INTENDED to be played online often, and they can’t even get a simple thing like the LOGIN working properly? Are you fucking serious? What’s more, I don’t have any options to create a game outside of using GameSpy. So now I have to make some bullshit throwaway account I don’t want to make just because Ubisoft is so fucking lazy.

I’m kind of fuming with anger right now, if you haven’t noticed. Ugh. The fact that I’ll probably have to make a THIRD account if I ever pick up GRAW2 just makes me seethe in anger all the more.

On top of all this, and this is probably the bigger problem, I can’t play the single player game either. Somehow, a patch to this game literally DISABLED the ability to command your squad, something you can’t beat the game without! The only solution is to manually edit settings files, which is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.

Fuck you, Ubisoft. Try programming your games sometime.

So apparently City of Heroes is 5 years old recently? So they sent me an e-mail informing me that, hey, free play for a week. Come see our new stuff. So, on a complete whim, I took the time to download the client and play a little more with Crossfox, my hero I haven’t played with in, gods, years.

It’s clear that they’ve added no less than like 4 million new features to the game. The moment I logged in, there were all kinds of pop-ups telling me I had access to things I had only heard about vaguely in press releases and whatnot. It was overwhelming. So I ignored basically all of them and just ran around and killed people.

It’s nice to know that my character, who is like… an Empathy/Psychic Blast Defender, is still completely useless in combat. Psychic Blast has a neat sniper power, but goodness, I can do NOTHING unless I’m in a group throwing down heals. I feel like such a complete pansy. Just like I remembered!
It’s also a bit unfortunate that some missions still don’t have very clear indicators of where to go. I have a mission that I probably didn’t finish back in the day for just this reason, which tells me I need to “Kill 7 Clockwork” in this area. But I wandered around aimlessly and didn’t see a single steampunk robot. It was pretty frustrating! So I did other missions. They did add indicators for stuff like stores and whatnot, though, making those easier to find. I remember having my mind blown originally when I was told there was stores. “What? I can BUY THINGS?”

City of Heroes is still a fairly solid MMO. You have so many movement options, it’s kind of empowering in that regard, and it’s the most customizable thing around. You can only do MORE of that now, with being able to have multiple costumes and, hell, the new mission architect that lets you make your own missions instead of playing the ones in game. I think it’s pretty damn impressive how they latched onto the fact that that is the key feature of their game and are really pushing the crap out of it. I think that’s really neat. I give the game my seal of approval.

Still, since WoW, I seriously can’t play MMOs. I’ve done about 3 missions, and I really doubt I will boot the game up again. WoW is a hard, apparently impossible, act to follow, and the fact that I get my level grind, lewt getting fix from KoL, Twilight Heroes, and the like doesn’t help either. Every time I try to play an MMO again, I realize I am never going back, even if I had a group of friends to party with. And you know? That’s probably alright. I’ll leave that to my brother. Yep.

(Pardon the long, rambling intro. This is a review for Rogue Touch. I promise I get to reviewing it at some point.)

I’m relatively new to the Roguelike scene. I played Chocobo’s Mystery Dungeon 2 way back in the day on the Playstation, but much like my first play of FFT, I didn’t get it, and I never got far.
Fast-forward to a year or two ago. I love Pokemon, and Pokemon Mystery Dungeon looked like fun, so I picked it up. I ended up putting a decent amount of hours into it. It was pretty easy, and since I knew Pokemon, I already knew all the moves and elemental charts and whatnot. I had a great time, and I picked up the sequel and had a great time with that too. (SMILES GO FOR MILES!) About that time, there was much talk and reviews on the Talking Time about Mystery Dungeon: Shiren the Wanderer. It was apparently the game that all Mystery Dungeon games were based on, and was more true to the Roguelike pattern than others. I tried it, and completely sucked at it! I went back to my easy baby Roguelike. But a few months later, I picked it back up again, and really started to learn it. It was good times. It’s still hiding in Best Buys for like 10 bucks, and everyone should buy it.

But yes, I’ve come around and I like Roguelikes. Which means when I heard that the original Rogue was ported to the iPod and iPhone for a buck as Rogue Touch, I decided that I could give it a go. I mean, it’s the game that all the other games are like, you know? I’d never played it. And surely, portable, with a different interface, I might be able to enjoy it.

I was completely right on that point.

The idea of Rogue is, of course, that you are a Rogue going in to the Dungeons of Doom in order to retrieve the Amulet of Yendor, and score some phat lewts along the way. It is the game that came up with the random dungeons, the randomized scrolls and wands you have to test, the cursed items… all those things that make up the strategy of most modern roguelikes are already here. It’s brutally hard, but I can already tell that it’s earned its reputation.
The game doesn’t use ASCII like a version one might play on the computer. It does use tiles. Personally, I vastly prefer such tile systems. I hated Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup until I realized how much help the tiles were and installed them. So yeah, I’ve no complaints about the tiles.

The controls, too, work surprisingly well. You tap to the sides of your character and he moves a square. Double-tap, and he keeps moving in a direction until you tap again, or he hits something like a door, or an item, or sees an enemy. He even automagically turns when moving down the twisty passages between rooms using this double-tap. Tap on him directly, and you get options like pulling up the inventory screen, descending stairs, and shooting a bow. There’s a button to tap to rest for a turn, and a button to tap to search. That’s basically it. It works pretty well, although not always perfectly. I’m sure it would be much less of a hassle to zap an enemy with a wand with a keyboard, since you could just hit a key or two. In this, you have to tap on the guy, then tap on inventory, then tap on the wand, then tap on zap, then tap a direction. Yeah. Still, I have no idea how it could possibly be better on the iPod. I’ve no complaints.

I’m still figuring out how to play the game worth shit, but I’m finding it as addictive as any other Roguelike I’ve tried. My best run so far is only to floor 17 (From what I understand, you have to pass at least 52 floors, maybe more, to actually win) but even then I was testing scrolls and potions and really getting going with my hero, whom I named @, actually. My main problem is probably that I fight too many things, but that’s just how I roll. I do find it funny that, due to all the fighting I do, sometimes the game changes my class to “Fighter” instead of Rogue. I don’t know exactly how it determines that, but it’s fitting.

Anyway, it’s certainly a solid roguelike experience on your iPhone or iPod, if that’s something you want. Apparently the sale that had it for a buck is over, and it’s three dollars now. But it’s probably worth that if you’re a fan of the genre. And hey, if you aren’t sure if it would be fun, you can always download the original game to your computer and try it there first, hm?

The semester is winding down. That means I’m almost out of novels from my novels class! One more after this! But I finished the second-to-last one, The Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier. And now I will blog about it.

If I were to describe the concept of this novel to you, you would be all “woah, what a great idea.” That’s because it is a DAMN good idea. Basically, souls of people that are remembered personally (aka met them in real life, not read about in a book or saw on TV) by those still alive go to a “City” where they live out their afterlives. However, the world is ending. There’s only one person left alive. This City is then populated by only people whom this last living human knew, and the book follows them as well as the last bits of the last human’s life. That is a damn compelling idea.

However, it never really works. There’s nothing particularly bad about the writing in this novel. Mr. Brockmeier likes his tangents, and the story often goes that way, but at the same time, it’s a tale of memory and remembering, so it fits the novel. The main problem is the lack of an overall narrative.
The story of Laura, the last person left alive, has a complete arc, but it has to end tragically. There’s little meaning to it. We struggle with her in the really harsh conditions she finds herself in, and we can sympathize with her, all alone, in the ice and snow. It’s beyond her to find sense in her situation, though. She’s just trying to survive a catastrophe she had no part in. She can’t make it mean anything, and I don’t expect her to.
No, it is the people in the City, who are looking on these events with much more knowledge from beyond the grave, who should be making all of this make sense. It should be in them, who are trying to figure out what to do with the knowledge that the only thing keeping you here is likely about to die, and what to do with what little time you have left in this second life, that gives the book an overall meaning and significance. However, it completely fails to do that. The chapters dealing with the City jump from character to character. Some people show up again and again, but we only get little slivers about what these people are thinking and worrying about before they are gone. They all have completely different goals, even when dealing with the same thing. I would normally be all for these different perspectives, but these perspectives completely fail to give any meaning to the events. The significance of their actual situations as souls in waiting really doesn’t matter to them at all. The fact that they are all about to be “evacuated” seems to matter even less. No attempt is made to tie a unified theme throughout, I suppose. That’s what I want. Maybe class discussion will help me find one, but I sort of doubt it.

It doesn’t help that the book ends so abruptly. Yes, it makes sense that the world will end not with a bang but with a whimper, but again, it just feels like a distinct lack of planning. The book just ends, with absolutely no guidance into what I should think about that or what to take away from it. Once could argue that perhaps that’s the point of the whole book. The whole idea is that death is ultimately meaningless, even after having lived through it once. But that’s giving the book a whole lot of credit, and it’s so much more likely that it just wasn’t put together well, wasn’t it? If that was the point, I should have felt it, right? I think so.

In any case, I can’t really recommend the novel. It’s not bad. You could read it and I wouldn’t stop you. Again, the idea, the concept, is amazing. I would have liked to have read a really good book based on that concept. I just don’t think that The Brief History of the Dead is that book.

Prismatic Sports Bra!

It’s good!

Join me tomorrow when I’ll tell you th…

Okay, fine, a little more.

First off, the idea of it being a “sports bra” is, you have to admit, pretty humorous. Even as a female character, the idea of fighting crime in just a crazy color-changing sports bra is funny. So it gets points there.

If you were thinking that there were similarities between this and the Amazing Technicolor Dreampants, you would be correct! This is not a remake of the crazy rainbow pants, perse, but a slight change on the same idea. Different equipment slot, a few different powers, same constant randomness of useful effects in combat. It also seems to combine with the pants fairly well. I’ve had both of them running, and the similarity of their powers means I am more likely to have one of the ones I really want hit every combat. (I assume for most, that would be the +PP effects, or maybe the +XP effects.)

The one new effect on the Bra that I especially like is the +sidekick effectiveness. I remember when the judo kid gloves hit, and I was really worried about them being useless, and then as I used them, I realized how badass powerful they were, at least for farming. I haven’t unequipped them since. And when, with those equipped and with the bra hitting the right color, I have seen some crazy chip drops. It’s totally sweet.

I also especially like, message-wise, the message after battle when you hit on the +XP color. The idea of a hero actually doing that just makes me grin.

The one drawback to this item is the lack of a -time piece of equipment in the slot. Ever since the Xentrium Breastplate existed, I knew there was going to be this issue: It’s hard to justify putting anything in the shirt slot that doesn’t reduce time per turn. It is an especially hard sell, to those who own most of the IoTMs like me, to replace the Letter Shirt and it’s -15 seconds. I still don’t know if it’s worth it for the bleeding edge types, but I found that the recent inclusion of the Xentrium ingot to make full sets of Xentrium equipment really helps alleviate this. I basically just put on Xentrium gauntlets and boots, two slots that I don’t have IoTMs for because I missed Roderick’s gear, and that basically fixed the problem. It’s not as good as just the Letter Shirt, much less that AND these gloves and shoes, but dammit, I’m casual. I’m having more fun with the Bra on. The Letter Shirt is just a pure stat boost, the Prismatic Sports Bra is fun. I don’t have enough time to play my turns anyway. Heh.

Yeah, I dunno. I like it. Random is fun, I suppose, and this is random. Plus, hell, the idea of being a constantly-shifting rainbow-clad avenger of justice is just awesome. Admit it.

When we last left our heroes, Lord Captain Alluishous had jumped directly into a slime and got his ass devoured. Luckily, since then, we got another party member… who was with us the whole time! Of course! Originally, I thought it quite unfortunate that he didn’t go Barbarian as I was expecting, but instead went Cleric. Yes, this brings our party to THREE healers and 0 tanks. But, it worked out well. He built him up as muscular, beefy, and hit-stuff-style as was possible, basically. It worked out well, with him on the front lines next to Spaeth, I think. With two melee-style people, we were looking a lot better.

This temple-thingy was the first actual “dungeon” I’ve probably ever been in while playing this stuff. We’ve been doing it wrong all along! Sort of. There was a fairly solid fight with some slimes and some rats, and a small little interlude with a Mimic of all things. It was good times. Still, I was OVERWHELMED by how badass Alena’s healing is. Man, I used my Spirits of Battle, and suddenly, healing the entire group was effortless thanks to my paragon path, since everyone was always in a zone of conjuration I made. It was kind of obscene. If I wasn’t so fragile, I’d say Shaman was kind of broken. As it is, I know if I was focused on fully, I’d go down like nothing.

I got to try out my Spirit of Shielding Flame, and it was as excitingly neat and as frustratingly situational as I expected! Still, I love the flavor. Setting up a protective barrier around a person that lets me burn anyone who hits them is fun, fun, fun for a healing/defense-oriented person like myself.

Mainly, though, there was problem-solving in this dungeon. And I amaze myself in how I work. Maybe it’s just because I was so tired, but man, the first thing I thought of to do was the solution, and then, suddenly, everyone starts coming up with humorous, silly ideas, and I get so caught up in playing along that I forget to even suggest what I knew, from the very first moment, we were supposed to do. I suppose it’s a good thing that we’re having such a good time and messing around so much. Fun is fun! Having fun is good! But goodness, it’s almost frustrating when I realize I’ve been sitting on the answer the whole time and I just forgot to say it while we were cracking jokes about my character stripping in front of everyone (to change armor, of course!) and people screaming at walls to create avalanches.
It’s also kind of amazing how wrapped up we can get in our own bullshit narrative around what the real narrative is. Every time I have to recap to explain what we’re doing (although I never remember any names or anything, so there’s a lot of “that dude” and “that one guy”) everyone is kind of amazed and finding it odd that that’s what we’re actually doing. Such bullshit we are spinning, let me tell you!

Still, our planar adventures are continuing. It looks like we won’t be able to play again for awhile, but hopefully this one doesn’t drop off and disappear. I’m having a really great time, to be sure, and I would like it to continue. Here’s to hoping scheduling prevails! Yay scheduling! I think!

I bet when you ask a wrestling fan what they want from a wrestling game, they would say they want all the moves, a hardcore fighting game where they can do everything from the show.

They’re wrong.

The wrestling part is such a small part of wrestling. The vast majority of these shows aren’t the fights. It’s the soap opera. It’s the backstage plots, the betrayals, the trash talking.

I don’t claim to know much about wrestling or wrestling games, but I certainly haven’t HEARD of a wrestling game that really covers all that backstage drama stuff. With TNA Wrestling for the iPhone and iPod Touch, that is the majority of the game. And goodness, it’s pretty darn awesome.

I’m sure if I were a fan of TNA Impact! I would probably love this game even more. It certainly seems to have a full list of people whose names I should know, who I can either insult, fight, or team up with and befriend. I mean, I don’t know these people, but it seems to have everyone, and after you beat them, then you get their signature move to use in the ring, which would please fans, I would think.
However, I can only look on the game as a fan of dialog-driven RPGs, and as one of those, this is by far one of the best gaming experiences I’ve had on my iPod.

You start the game by making your wrestler. There’s not an overwhelming amount of customization options, (You can only choose between three facial portraits, for instance, though they change color based on what you’re wearing, your hair color, etc) but you can choose all your colors and what kind of things you’re wearing, and generally make your guy look unique. I picked a really creepy picture, and created Taco, a wrestler with green hair for the lettuce, a yellow wife-beater and boots for the shell, and a pair of pink briefs, for this spicy hot nature. I then jumped into a world of wrestling and intrigue!

The majority of the game is conversations, which are very important. There are branching paths depending on your choices. You often have at least 3 dialog options any time the game stops you. Every time you say something, you get general XP, as well as experience in one of two areas: Face, where you are the kind of wrestler who the crowd loves and works the crowd to your advantage, or Heel, where you’re a villain character everyone loves to hate. These unlock various “Crowd Support” powers, depending on what you level up. You also gain new wrestling moves in the ring from your general experience.

The combat itself is completely turn-based, and is oddly kind of similar to Fallout. Every turn, you have a certain number of BP. You spend these BP on various actions. Slapping someone only costs one BP, but if you want to clothesline someone, you spend a BP to run and bounce against the edge of the ring, and then another to slam into them. As you level up, you unlock combos: lists of moves that, if you do all of them in a row, you do a special finisher. These start out simple, like grabbing someone’s head and slamming them to the ground, but end up, towards the end of the game, being things like throwing people out of the ring and then jumping off of the ropes onto them. Each of these moves requires a kind of “quicktime” event of sliding your finger about or pushing a virtual button. They work well and are pretty fun to do. (and having to hit two buttons at once for “Eye Gouge” is just too awesome.)
To counter these moves, each wrestler gets three “defenses” per match. These are gone once they are used, but can be regained with enough crowd support, though they can only be recharged once. Avoid simply makes you run out of the way, avoiding an attack. Counter turns an attack against your opponent, and Reverse not only turn the attack against your opponent, but ends their turn, even if they still have plenty of BP.
At first, you’ll feel like there’s no way you can lose. That would be fine for me, since it’s a pretty casual experience. But you soon figure out that there is much more strategy to it than you would first think. If you don’t use your defensive moves correctly, you WILL get schooled, and it quickly becomes very important to use your turns pumping up the crowd to use your crowd powers. It gets surprisingly tough. I kinda liked that.

What’s mostly entertaining about the game, though, is the dialog. I don’t know if wrestling is normally this bad, but EVERYTHING in this game is so ridiculous and stupid, it is hilarious. I constantly found myself laughing at the absurdity of it all. There’s something special going on when someone threatens to take you down with his special move, “Defribri-see-you-later”. The writing was entertaining. Oh yes.

So yeah, I have completely gotten my $5 bucks worth out of this game. It’s of a solid length, and it is funny and a lot of fun. Granted, it didn’t work for me immediately, but after some help on that front, I have absolutely no complaints. TNA Wrestling is a very easy recommendation.

I used to be down on IoTM equipment. “Why would I equip that? It’s just going to fill a slot that I could use for some other cool thing I found in the game that may be more funny.” Then again, I used to be down on IoTM familiars for the same reason. I came around on familiars because I realized that using a different familiar each run changed things up, and the IoTM ones did different things than the normal ones. Hell, all my IoTM purchases are mostly for this reason: To have an ever-growing list of things I can do, and figuring out how to use them effectively changes the game up constantly, much like the theory behind “Standard” in Magic. So yeah, when I got the Haiku Katana, that all changed, really. Here was a weapon that was fun, did funny things, and really changed up my Muscle class game. I’ve been leaning towards Muscle classes ever since it came out because of this. I’m eager to get other pieces of equipment to really change up my game. This month, KoL has the Elvish Sunglasses, a Moxie-based piece of equipment. I snapped it up.

Now, I’m still in basementing hell and ‘waiting for the Hamster Times” limbo, which is fine, because I barely have any time to play anyway. But that means I haven’t really gotten to try it yet, like so many IoTMs. (I’m going to have a series of very eventful runs once I start ascending again!) I’ve been using it for the Moxie boost for basement checks, but, you know, that barely counts as being put to good use. I mean, the stats on it are great. Who wouldn’t want those bonuses? The +pickpocket is especially nice, what with all the very important new pickpocket-only items that are now available. It’s a bonus-granted machine to the moxie classes.

However, I like a good bonus, but I like entertainment value more. The Haiku Katana gave me both: It’s got really strong boosts for a Muscle class, and it has all these crazy skills I can use and silly Haiku text to read. I like that. The Elvish Sunglasses leave a little to be desired in this department. It grants me skills I can use based on instruments I have equippped. Now, the +5 Substats for “Play a Guitar Solo” is completely awesome and useful. The stun with drums, delevel with Accordians, and extra sleaze damage with flutes are also appreciated. However, this is going to really restrict what I equip. Now, I suppose if I was making my Legendary Epic Weapon, I could use that for most of the run. Especially as a Disco Bandit with a Shagadelic Disco Banjo, I’d be doing pretty nice. At the same time, so many of the ranged weapons I have, in the past, used during a run are not instruments. I normally make heavy use of the Beer Bong, Grease Gun, and Potato Pistol during a run. These are some of the strongest items at their levels (or at least, last time I played a Moxie class they were) and they’re not instruments. The last time I really heavily used instruments as a Moxie class was during my Disco Bandit hardcore run, and that was because I couldn’t pull all my good weapons like I normally can in softcore.

Basically, the sunglasses are asking me to make a hard choice. If I want to use the skills, I have to pick inferior weaponry. I’m sure most of the more hardcore set don’t care: From what I understand, if you’re speed-running, you use your Legendary Epic Weapon for the majority of the run. But it’s unfortunate that I’m not going to have quite the access to it as I would like. Why not have a fifth “vocal solo” skill for when you don’t have an instrument equipped? It could be worst than the rest, but I would appreciate it being there.

Still, I very well might change my mind about it by the time I do a run with it. Just the bonuses could be a huge lifesaver, and perhaps I’ll find there are plenty of instruments to keep me going for the whole run. We’ll see. As it is, I’m slightly disappointed in it at the moment. Not a whole lot. Slightly. I do appreciate it making the basement a little easier, if nothing else.

EDIT! LATE ADDITION!
So, I just remembered they recently added a bunch of ranged weapons to the game. So I checked them out! So many of them are instruments, and so many of them seem totally worth it! Obviously they had thought of that before they released an IoTM so dependent on having good instruments for most of the run, huh? Silly me. This makes me much more excited to try it out, both because it’ll be more useful and because I just realized I have a whole bunch of new weapons to find and try. Neat!