The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

I’m playing this game of Arkham Horror over a forum, and it’s a lot of fun. But recently it’s just kind of occurring to me how messed up the gameplay of this game is as compared to the flavor.

My character in this game is Minh Thi Phan. She’s a secretary who stumbles across a copy of The King in Yellow, according to her bio. She’s also a spell-slinging, monster-murdering badass warrior lady. Well, so far. Maybe she’ll be organizing some files later on in the game. I dunno. But the point is, who she is on the card is nothing like her in-game stats and gear. I’ve armed her for war, and I’ve gone out and done war with her. Kamikaze attacks. Murderous rampages. That sort of thing.

Arkham Horror is based on these stories of people fighting against insane odds and taking on the unknown while probably losing. The little story snippets on the investigators and things like that really highlight that sort of thing: these are supposed to be, with a few exceptions, normal people thrown into extraordinary circumstances. That’s certainly, say, the theme of Call of Cthulhu, if you do it right. You’re fucked, but you’re struggling: you don’t fight head-on unless you’re in a really shitty, desperate situation. Sure, you can take it in a more pulpy way. In some ways, the cover of Arkham Horror does this. But all the flavor suggests the sort of desperation of normal people against the supernatural.

Basically, Arkham Horror is a game that doesn’t know exactly what it wants to be, flavor-wise. Even with the “weak” characters, if you make it a priority to be a murder machine, you can make that happen, usually. The “unknown” is pretty known, most of the time. Enemies appear and you steamroll them or dodge them with ease. Really, you’re more in danger of forgetting to play exterminator, which will you over because of the Terror Track, than dying from enemies the majority of the time. All that’s fine, mechanically, but when you’re also supposed to be roleplaying a, say, lounge singer that wants to find out what killed her boyfriend or something, it kind of strikes a weird tone when she’s going around slaying demons with a broadsword.

I’m probably thinking too much about it. But that’s sort of the problem with all these games, conceptually. I have such a great time, say, roleplaying Trail of Cthulhu games where everyone is actually as weak and in as much danger as the situation suggests. That’s really satisfying. But the mechanics of Arkham Horror, with the mass slaughter of enemies and collecting of their heads for fabulous prizes… well, that’s nice too. Still, it seems like there would have to be a way to flavor the game to make those mechanics make more sense. I dunno.

I mentioned I hadn’t watched Chinatown when asked by my boyfriend if I had seen Chinatown. Then I was forced to see Chinatown immediately. I didn’t mind.

I’m probably lame, but since I played L.A. Noire I could not help but compare the game to the film as I watched it. It was just so obvious how many millions upon millions of cues that game clearly takes from this movie. It looks basically exactly the same, and not just because if the era. It seemed to be that the game was really trying to ape shot style and even the kind of grain I thought I saw. The music is like the same goddamn music. Same kind of stings, and everything. It was kind of crazy in that way.

Seeing Jack Nicholson being all young and shit was really weird, too. It was clear he wasn’t carrying all this baggage with him from his career, unlike in other films I have seen him in. That was pretty neat to experience, certainly. He was all being awesome and generally badass.

Overall, though, I have to admit it was a pretty fucking great film. It was a bit slow, but that’s because modern movies have killed my attention span, and it was totally worth the slowness. (Unlike my experience with, say, The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, which I just couldn’t stand because it was so slow.) It also made good on a lot of the memes and references I’ve seen out of context over the years. They still totally paid off.

So good job, Aesa. You won with this movie pick! Yay!

I watched this movie with Aesa last night. It was some famous Korean film. I do not know the title. It will probably show up in the next sentence well after I have written this review thing. Something like Mr. Vengeance? (Aesa says the correct title is Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance. So.) Anyway, it was a really fucked up movie, and not in the “oh, that is a fucked up movie” kind of way. Like… I just really didn’t understand what it was trying to do.

This film set up literally every single character in it for failure. Every single one. Nobody who was a character was in any way alive by the end of the film. It was all just sort of “last person is dead, so roll credits, we’re done.” It was almost like a snuff film or something. “How miserable can we make these people before they die? You’ll want to see that, right?” That’s supposed to be the point? Watching all this stuff is supposed to have a point, right? There’s got to be some sort of artistic vision going on here, right? But I just have a hard time figuring out what it could possibly be.

One of the first things I would try to teach somebody about writing a story is that you have to have somebody who you can root for: somebody that you want to succeed. You can want them to succeed in spite of what that actually means: you can associate with terrible people, and often that creates some pretty compelling narratives. But in general, to get someone engaged, you have to let them relate to somebody in the story.

I could not relate to basically anyone in this story.

The “main character” with the green hair seemed like a guy I should relate to, but if I’m being completely honest, his disabilities made that tough. His character was not much deeper than just those flaws, to me. I could never really see what made him tick. The movie sort of went out of its way to make him seem dragged along by circumstance, instead of his own decisions. Even the big decision he makes, kidnapping the girl, was really more him just agreeing with his girlfriend more than anything. The girlfriend was a plot-forwarding device for most of the movie, as was the sister. Neither of them felt really developed. The little girl felt like more of a character in a lot of ways, but she didn’t really seem to desire anything. She was just kind of there. The father figure is probably the one that’s easiest to potentially connect with, but I still had trouble because it just felt like he jumped to murder so quickly. There was never a doubt in his mind that he was going to throw his company, everything he worked for, away and do some killing the moment he found his daughter dead. It makes it hard to sympathize with him. It’s not like he didn’t potentially have other venues to deal with this. He found all this info. He could have went to his police contacts with it. But then everyone wouldn’t have died, I guess.

Even in a story where everything is terrible and nobody gets what they want, though, normally SOMEBODY gets what they want, just not anyone who we as an audience gives a shit about. A corporation, the guy who’s kind of an asshole… someone triumphs. Literally nobody triumphs in this story. Nobody in it comes out better than they were before. Everything in this film is downhill.

I just don’t understand what I as a viewer was supposed to take away from this movie. I mean, make depressing stuff, sure. And maybe if I had a knowledge of Korean film-making this would fit into a mold that would make more sense. But it just seemed like someone set up dominoes to fall down perfectly until they were all gone. It didn’t feel like real life. I didn’t feel like I could learn a lesson from it. I was just flummoxed.

That was a thing I watched! Uh, yeah. So. Next time we’re watching a comedy. Heh.

No spoilers.

Despite issues involving random card packs of upgrades, I have been really enjoying the multiplayer of Mass Effect 3. I like shooting dudes and casting spells and so on and so forth. It’s fun. It’s exciting. It’s exciting fun. Plus, you’re earning this Readiness rating, which could potentially be a nice bonus for the single player.

So I played a bunch, and then I dug into the single player. Then Aesa showed up and I kind of took a break.

Then I came back, and my Readiness had fallen about 8 percent.

Why the fuck does it fall so fast? I’m okay with the idea of playing multiplayer to up that rating, but why does it fall at all? Mass Effect 3 is a game people are going to replay. To ask them to put like 4 hours into the multiplayer every time they want to play through the game again to get that rating is FUCKING INSANE. What’s more, it doesn’t decrease if you don’t connect to the online server: Chris at work maxed it out, and then disconnected because he doesn’t have internet at his house, and he’s still at 100%. As long as he doesn’t play ME3 online, he’ll always be at 100% readiness. The game is encouraging him not to play the multiplayer or use any online feature of the game, basically, so he can do his multiple playthroughs, which seems like a bad move on EA’s part, and that means it’s impossible for him to waste money on their stupid microtransactions. What the fuck.

Anyway, I decided this is a thing that I have to deal with either way, so I get this ME3 Datapad app to play this minigame as an alternate route to upping that number. I try to log into what is apparently now my Origin account in order to hook the minigame up to my main game. I have no idea what the password is, though: EA always just logs me in to that stuff automatically. So I try to do a simple password reset.
It keeps throwing “server errors” at me, and telling me to try again later.
After about 15 minutes of this and being frustrated, I decided to try typing in a different password.
It changed.
My password wasn’t meeting their password requirements. But it was never going to tell me that.

Fuck EA and Fuck Origin, is basically what I am saying here.

When I got my PS3 from CJ (not the CJ I’m now living with, but another good friend CJ) it had a bunch of random movies left on the hard drive that he told me I could enjoy for whatever reason. I never really have, though. I mean, I watched the one that most interested me (The King of Kong) and The Room is on there for some reason, and I know what that is, but I’ve never really watched any of the rest.

However, when we were just sitting on the couch wasting time, CJ (this one is Aesa, not the CJ I got the PS3 from) went “what are these?” and looked through the movies. And then we ended up watching Rad.

It was pretty rad!

Words cannot truly do this masterpiece of a film justice, so I’m just going to suggest you watch this key scene of how Rad does romance. I’ll wait until you get back.

Now just imagine an entire movie basically exactly like that, and you have the movie Rad.

Seriously, though, as a movie, it’s just kind of crazy. It’s like the writers knew what the tropes and such of a gimmicky movie like this were, but they had no idea about how to use them. They piled in tons of cliches, none of them made sense, and then just made everything around them either ridiculous or unrelated to what was actually going on. It’s kind of fantastic in that way. If someone was paying me to put together a BMX movie as quick as possible to cash in on a craze, I would have never come up with a movie like this. Bits and pieces that were in this movie would have appeared: a big race, local guy who knows he can make it big, mother disapproving because her son should go to college instead of doing BMX, asshole professional coming in to town, and so on. None of them would have been anything like the bizarre configuration this movie put them in. That’s what it’s such a great view.

I certainly recommend Rad if you like really, really bad movies that just flummox and perplex. It is quite an experience, and one I’m glad Aesa and I ended up having.

What is there to say about Earthbound? Earthbound is a basically perfect creation. When I was younger, I might have disagreed. I’d have thought Earthbound was way, way too hard. That’s because as a young person, I was an idiot and never actually used spells and items. The game is pretty damn balanced, a lot of fun, and super creative.

The setting itself is just unique. So few jRPGs would even pretend to set themselves in modern day. While the world of Earthbound clearly isn’t modern day as we know it, being really quite crazy in a lot of respects, it’s this weird idealized modern day through the lens of like the 50s that just works perfectly. It’s a world that seems perfectly normal, yet it also seems perfectly normal for kids to be fighting sentient taxi cabs with psychic powers and frying pans. It’s pretty wonderful that it can pull off that odd sort of tone in setting. The wackiness is just how the world is. Nobody takes it as anything but normal. If anything, the general “innocent seriousness” of all the main characters just kind of supports that. It’s awesome.

The writing, too, is just… so rarely do you have a game with such creative and solid writing. You can tell that someone who actually knows how to write a thing was involved in the creation of this game. It’s hilarious in a very subtle and surreal way most of the time, and even the littlest things, like using a Protractor in combat, have funny messages for no reason other than to be funny. Being able to subtly capture strong scenes, like the first time Jeff meets Dr. Adonuts, which are funny, but also kind of have actual emotion involved is just… yeah. Great. Part of that has to be credit given to the translation team, who clearly put a lot of love into the game to make sure the jokes and style made it across to the English version, but it’s just top notch all around.

Even the combat system’s subtle changes on the Dragon Quest formula really make it interesting to play. Little things, like the fact that one of your characters probably has the Franklin Badge and is immune to lightning, but which one should it be, and bringing Teddy Bears along to distract the enemy really add depth that isn’t immediately apparent. The breaking of standard genre conventions in the game is weird. Paula has no defensive spells, and Jeff, the character without spells, is only stronger in physical attack power than Paula, and really relies on what are basically spells in the form of gadgets to be effective in combat. (Slime Generator always and forever!) The rolling HP meter adds so much drama to the game, it’s not even funny. Killing easy enemies without actually going into combat is something so wonderful, you wonder why games today don’t do it. Even the condiment system, which honestly is not something you should really deal with in a playthrough, is creative and fresh, at the very least.

It’s just fantastic. Just fantastic. I will offer the general advice that if you want to roll through the game with little to no combat issues, it is a good idea to grind up to level 10 before facing Frank at the beginning of the game. Someone taught me this trick, and in my replays (yes, a game I have actually replayed! That’s how you know it’s good) this, and actually making use of Jeff’s gadgets and spells, makes the game way, way easier than I remember it being in my youth. But seriously, I would not touch anything about this game. There are little flaws, sure, as the aforementioned condiment system that is too cumbersome to actually use. But all the flaws add character to the game, and don’t detract, at least in my opinion. Earthbound is a game I would ask anyone serious about video games to play, if I had to force one really long gaming experience on them. It’s great. Great. Great.

You’ll never guess what I’ve been doing! Playing Mass Effect 3! Well, not a lot of it yet, but, you know. I’m working on it. In any case, I just felt like making a little list of what I am liking and what I am not liking and such right now. I will try to be spoiler-free, but, you know. Maybe something super small in there will bother you? And let’s make this clear: I’m enjoying the game, and think it is worth my time. I just, you know, have complaints. Who wouldn’t?

What I Like About Mass Effect 3 Thus Far

The Multiplayer: I really think the multiplayer is a lot of fun! It’s not the sort of thing that is going to keep people coming back for like, a year, to be sure, but it’s a really solid horde mode, and I can’t wait for this proposed LAN with people from work to really blow this shit out and play it.
There are problems of course. The microtransaction bullshit is pretty bullshit! I normally like cards, but I don’t like card packs, and that just seems like a really terrible way of putting this multiplayer together. I may never get the better pistols while I play this thing. That’s sad to me.

The Weight System: When I heard about this, I’m like “Eh, pistols for lyfe.” But now that I’m playing, I really appreciate it. I love that my secondary weapon can be the lightest assault rifle (burst fire one, no less!) instead of the stupid SMGs. I love that when I really want to incinerate people constantly, just carrying the pistol gives me like 200% increased cooldown speed, and I can just spam the motherfucker. The weight system really lets you play the way you want to play. It’s neat.

Vega: I guess people were worried about him, in the same way they were worried about Jack last game? I think he’s pretty cool, at least so far. He’s very likable.

That This One Male Crew Member Mentioned His Husband: It’s done pretty matter-of-fact and throwaway, as opposed to THIS IS A BIG DEAL. You don’t even have to hear about it if you don’t question every member of your crew. It’s nice.

What I Don’t Like About Mass Effect 3 Thus Far

Shepard Is Earth-Centric: In previous games, Renegade Shepard only really cared about humanity, and Paragon Shepard looked at the big picture. Now my paragon Shepard is whining about Earth and talking to aliens like Earth is the most important thing ever constantly, and it really frustrates me. Where did my other Shepard go?

Shepard Is No Longer A Battle-Hardened Badass: Seriously? The tutorial events traumatize you? Give me a fucking break: Shepard has seen crew members liquified before her fucking eyes. I can’t believe she’d be so shaken as to affect her and her mission. They always did a great job before of making her a person while also making her a soldier first and foremost, and I rather liked that. Now that feels thrown down the drain.

Mood Lighting On The Normandy: Can’t the Alliance Military afford to actually light their goddamn ship? This “everything is dark and soft-glow like a romantic restaurant” look is obscenely stupid.

Security Station To Hide A Load On The Way To The Galaxy Map/Elevator On The Second Floor: Why the hell is Shepard getting scanned for weapons every time she goes to talk to Joker on her own fucking ship? Is this really where we need a security station? Seriously? And not, like, I dunno, near life support, or something where a saboteur could do a lot more damage? Or in, say, the docking bay, where people are boarding the ship? It’s clearly hiding loading, and I get that, but gods, it’s just dumb being there. There wasn’t a stupid security point there in 2.

Calibrations Joke: Yeah, I get it, Bioware, you read fan comics about ME2 as well. But by recognizing it, you’re kind of ruining it.

Anyway, I’ll get back to playing more tonight. It’s fun! But yeah, could be better, thus far.

I watched an anime and it was called Princess Jellyfish, and it was certainly a thing.

I have a lot of mixed feelings about the show, but most of it basically comes from me being me, which I’ll talk about in a little bit. In general, though, the story of this cross-dressing, fashion-minded dude breaking into the lives of a bunch of overwhelmingly geeky girls was pretty fun!
It felt, in many ways, a bit rushed, which I assume was because of limited episode time. After all, they really set up this “problem” for everyone to solve and then it just kind of disappears in the last episode with very little to no actual actions of the characters causing it. That’s not really good storytelling, but it’s the kind of thing you do when you try to create a short show from a series that’s still ongoing, which was probably the case when this was made.
I don’t think that took away much from its charm, though. While many of the cast of geeks were a bit… one note and jokey, as to be expected from background characters, they did a great job of making fairly realistic geeky people for the ones that were focused on. The main character, Tsukimi, is fairly well rounded, to be fair. She has her passions and her problems, and for the most part, the show sells them, which really helps. You really kind of understand where her phobias come from, whereas with the background jokey people, it’s just kind of part of the joke “ubergeek” persona. She’s likable, and you want her to get into a happy relationship and become successful instead of being stuck in this apartment. Similarly, I feel like, by the end of it, the landlady’s daughter, Chieko, is really fairly well fleshed out. You really get to see into her motivations, of trying to put together a family in this place and keep everyone together, as well as just looking out for the general well-being of everyone. For a support character, I really buy her.
Similarly, I really kind of buy Mr. Hipster Main Male Lead, Kuranosuke. I feel like they explain why he enjoys crossdressing in a way that doesn’t necessarily make him a stereotype: just part of who he is. I completely buy why he ends up connecting with Tsukimi and everyone and wanting to hang around them, as he’s mostly lead a life of appearances and not being genuine up until that point. He’s kind of unlikable in a lot of ways, but he’s also very understandable. You don’t root for him, perse, but you know he’s going to end up with Tsukimi and that will be fantastic for her and nice for him and everything will work out well.

Basically, it’s got all the elements of a good comedy romance, and it does it all pretty well. If that sounds fun, this is probably worth giving a view to. It’s not my favorite thing ever, but I really enjoyed myself.

However, the show also really upset me for silly reasons that probably wouldn’t bother anyone else.

Crossdressers are really nothing new in anime. They’re all over the place. But never have I really watched a show where you saw so much of the crossdresser getting ready. I mean, it works for the show. It keeps you reminded that this character is a dude, and though he enjoys himself, he still identifies as male, which is useful and does define his character. But it is a process for him. A realistic process, because he wants to pass, not just be a drag queen or whatnot.
I found myself watching this, and just being overwhelmed with both a mix of jealousy (“This fictional guy passes so easily and everyone thinks he’s such a sexy girl and here I am, a real woman, being all stupid.”) and shaken confidence in how I’m perceived (“He’s doing a lot of what I do every morning to get ready, people must think I’m like him, fuck, nobody believes I’m me, I am fucked.”). I know these thoughts are BEYOND STUPID, because they’re pretty stupid, but I found myself unable to lose them while watching the show. It really kind of hindered my enjoyment of it, because while it was fun, and I could see it was fun, I was also in a kind of funk from this sort of stupid shit. Which sucked.

However, if you’re not me, you probably won’t have that problem, and it’ll be a fine thing to view. So.

Remember how this is a thing I’m doing? I think this is a thing I’m doing here.

Tetris Attack is basically a perfect game.

There have been a million versions of what they now call Puzzle League, and they are for the most part fine. I loved Pokemon Puzzle League, for example, and the 3D mode was interesting, if not really very long-term engaging. The DS version of Puzzle League was fine, though the stylus controls really kind of changed the game a bit and made it a lot easier. I’m pretty sure there were some versions of this game in Japan before Nintendo brought it out here all Yoshi’s Island’d up. I’m sure those are also fine. But Tetris Attack is the one that I feel is perfect.

Do I even need to talk about how fucking amazing Tetris Attack’s gameplay is? Because it is goddamn amazing. It is, hands down, the best puzzle game, save maybe Tetris. Bust-A-Move, Puyo-Puyo, Puzzle Fighter, they can all get the fuck out of the way. Tetris Attack is where it is at. The way you can only flip tiles to the side is, honestly, genius. It makes the game work with basically one button, and it makes it so that if you make a mistake, you’re pretty stuck with it. The methods to set up combos become pretty easy to see pretty quickly, and you have a huge amount of control over making them happen: rarely does it feel like a random element was involved. The game is also just as fast-paced as you want it. You can fly around that board setting things up, like I do when I’m in practice, or you can take it slower and have a good time anyway.

But you get that in any version of Tetris Attack, and indeed, those are fun. What really sets this one apart is the style. The Yoshi’s Island backgrounds and stuff look great, sure! But goddamn, that music. Let’s listen to some. Here’s the classic Raphael theme. I could listen to that all day, seriously. Some of the best the SNES has to offer in terms of music. And it’s not just that stage. There is so much more.

Tetris Attack: A life-changing game for me. Granted, I mostly played it on the Game Boy, where it was also fantastic. But the SNES version is just where it is at. It’s such a damn good game, and I would not change a damn thing about it. There is a reason why it is a euphemism for sexual intercourse on Talking Time. Heh.

This Means War is a fantastic film.

I went to it knowing basically nothing about it: I just wanted some social time with Mr. JSpants, who invited me to go. He said it was funny? Sure, I’ve got this gift certificate, let’s go. I really had a fantastic time, though. It’s not some art piece that will change your life, but it is a finely crafted and enjoyable piece of cinema. It’s a fun evening. It’s a perfect date movie.

Seriously, it’s pretty well the perfect two quadrant date movie. The romance stuff in it is really touching, and for the most part comes off as pretty damn genuine. I bought both the relationships, which is fairly impressive considering a lot of the time a movie can’t make you buy ONE relationship. The action in the film is well-done and fun. It’s not the most over the top stuff you’ve ever seen or anything? But if you like watching some dudes shoot some other dudes, there are some good scenes of that in there. The comedy, too, for the most part works. I did a solid amount of laughing during the film. The two main guys have some really great banter between them. The “comic relief” female friend was actually both funny and a character whose I can believe is a real person and not a caricature. It all just works! It’s great.

Another thing that impressed me about it was how it somehow completely fooled me. I was that engaged. If I had stepped out of the situation I was seeing, and thought “What would somebody writing a Hollywood movie do?” then the path to creating the cliche happy ending for everyone was extremely clear. If I had pulled my head out of the film, I could have easily guessed what was up. However, I didn’t: I was so engaged that I didn’t look at the overall plot arc to see where it was going. I was actually a bit surprised at the ending, as cliche as it in some ways was. I think that says something awesome about the film.

Anyway, This Means War comes recommended by me. It’s not going to win any awards, but it’s just fun. It’s a shame that so much of romantic comedy is garbage, and not good like this movie, as I’d probably really like the genre if it was more… entertaining.