The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

This one is a simple one, but I like it a lot.
The GigaGuy Cannon is this month’s offering in Twilight Heroes, and beyond it being a blatant MegaMan reference (which I missed for far, far too long. Take away my Talking Time license or something) it’s also a pretty solid ranged weapon. Well, certainly better than the King’s Boomerang, in any case. (Though that comparison really isn’t fair, I suppose, since the cannon cost about 3x as many stars at the boomerang.)
It does decent attack damage, even after equipping my new Grimm’s Bulwark, but again, that might be just because I’ve been used to seeing the shitty damage from the Longbow of the Law and the Shortbow of the Stick for months. And it comes with several MegaMan 2 style abilities or whatnot, which are always appreciated. I actually found that some of the weaknesses carry over, too, which surprised me. The “GigaGuy Rapid Boomerang” does extra damage to metal enemies. I added that to the wiki. Heh. Do the others deal extra damage to those who are weak against them? I dunno. It’ll take more testing. But I think that’s a pretty cool little thing to add.
The real benefit of this gun, though, is that it makes enemies drop restoratives. After battle, you have a strong chance of either getting a GigaGuy Pellet or a GigaGuy Capsule. These only heal a tiny bit, but they drop after almost every battle and they’re greatly appreciated. They’re probably going to be the real reason someone equips the cannon. Well, that, and I suppose if someone isn’t an Elementalist like me and needs a source of solid elemental damage.
In any case, the point is, I quite like this month’s offering.

However, I believe it’s important to make an addendum to a previous review. After I wrote that, Ryme modified the Recylonizer so that it causes enemies to sometimes drop hunks of scrap metal. This is an item which is only used to recyclonize. It doesn’t do anything else. This really increases the usefulness of the Recyclonizer. Before, it was normally more useful just to autosell stuff and buy restoratives and caffeine and whatnot instead of recylonizing. Which this, you get a few free shots every day, enough to, say, get you two Oil Can Coffees for your caffeine or just get some of the buffs with no downside. It makes the Recylonizer much, much more useful. I understand Ryme was worried about giving people what amounts to free chips every day, and I agree that that is still a concern with this solution, but it really helped to make this one useful, at least for me. So I appreciate the change.

Another board game we tried out on New Years was Fury of Dracula, from the company that brought us Arkham Horror. I thought the all vs one mechanic combined with what looked to be a hopefully shorter game would make this one a winner, so I went about making sure I got it for Chrissymas.
Before I talk about my impressions, though, I have to put a huge disclaimer on here. There are a ton of rules to this game, and learning any game like this makes the first time you play draaaaaaaaaag and go sloooooooow and generally be much less fun than it should be because you don’t know what you’re doing. I especially, as Dracula, had a ton of rules to juggle and figure out. I remember Arkham Horror sucking the first time we played it too. It’s not surprising I didn’t have a great time this first go.

However, I feel like the game may have some problems. For the first… I dunno… hour of us playing the game, nothing really happened. Essner and Spaeth were annoyed because they were just wandering about with no guidance, and I was just playing cards without knowing exactly what I was doing because I wasn’t getting any feedback on them. This wild goose chase gameplay could be fun for Dracula, after I figure out exactly what I should be doing, but it’s certainly not too fun for the Vampire Hunters. It seems like there has to be a way to fix that, but I don’t know what it is quite yet.
The part that was the most fun was when the hunters had my location narrowed down to like… four locations, and had to strategize about where to wait for me. Then you were having those “detective deduction” moments constantly, and I was trying to throw them off the trail using my powers. However, to get to that point, basically my whole trail had to be revealed, which basically removed all traps I could spring on them to give me many options. All the locations of my catacombs were revealed, so I couldn’t spring any big traps on them. It was… less than optimal. It might just have been that I didn’t set things up the way I should because I was kind of clueless. Which I was. I don’t know. In the end, Spaeth had to leave, so I started making some suicidal moves to finish things up, and lost. (Note that I probably would have lost either way at that point, I was just speeding up the process.)

One interesting thing about Fury of Dracula is that it is a game that I don’t think gets better with more people. Three MAY be the optimal number. The hunters have another player to bounce ideas off of, but play moves quicker because you don’t have to wait for too many people to take their turns. Since every hunter is on the board no matter how many players are playing, it certainly doesn’t seem to give an advantage to having more people, even though you can play with five. Who knows, though.

Anyway, this is a game that needs at least a few more playthroughs before I can make a real judgment of value. It’s interesting, and all of the things that I expected to be in the game and that drew me to it are there… I just don’t know if it works well as a package overall. We’ll see, I’m sure.

So, this last night, we got to finally play some of this Dungeons and Dragons campaign my brother has been working on. It went well!
Rachel Sparklewhisper made a slightly re-specced appearance as team Warlord/Healer. I took roleplaying her much less serious this time, though. Cause, you know, it seemed appropriate. So I ate muffins and I went into battle wearing souvenir T-shirts from the temple we were trying to purge evil from… our team leader was Essner’s wolf companion (which, of course, only he could understand) so that was nice. We kept giving the wolf all our gold for safe-keeping. (Though I demanded compensation for muffins purchased, because they were a business expense.) It was fun times.

The combat, as much as I hate to say it, seemed to work a bit well overall than mine did. His “more hitpoints, less damage, very accurate” setup of the monsters kept the tension higher and generally more exciting than my builds, which were based off the numbers in the books and seem more geared for a “high miss rate, high damage” kind of experience. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But I dunno, we’ve all grown up with games like FFT where missing is a catastrophic failure, so missing as often as you hit just doesn’t feel like you’re a badass hero, you know? In any case, his combat was pretty good stuff.
It was, however, based around “battlefield gimmicks.” This is not something I have a problem with! But I’m pretty sure it’s also something that isn’t going to seem special, because I’m pretty sure he’s built every fight around a different gimmick. I would more build those as special encounters as opposed to something that’s normal and expected, and let the combat and monster mix stand on their own to make things interesting. Still, maybe that’s an error on my part. I know Essner especially loved the gimmick twists on each of the battles we did tonight, so… yeah.

I feel like I’m comparing myself to Jonathan as a DM. I don’t know why I’m doing that. I guess because I always just kind of assumed that I would be better at such things, you know? It’s not that I don’t want him to do well, because hell, if he keeps doing great, that means I get to play more DnD from the character side, which I am all for. Still, I dunno. I feel something there. I need to get the fuck over myself. Heh.

Anyway, it was, overall, a damn good time, and certainly a nice change of pace from the hard workings I’ve had to do recently. Plus, as my commemorative jerkin states, “I Rocked the Temple – Crystaengland Earth Temple”

Last night, I was pulled away from a rousing game of Fallout 3 to play Left 4 Dead with Talking Time people. As per usual, it was a damn, damn good time. That game was great! But after we finished a Versus mode on Blood Harvest, we started talking about what to do, and it was decided that we would open the game publicly, get in an Xbox Live party, and grief.
It was a damn good time.
Not that I have any innate skill at such things. I’m not really adept at being annoying or whatever in various ways. My mind does not instantly figure out how to annoy people within the confines of a a game, especially a game I’m enjoying playing as advertised. But goodness, just being a part of it made me laugh so damn hard. We had so much fun doing shit like getting all the infected into the safe room and locking them in, and using Infected escorts, and accidental party-killing molotovs… It was an hilarious time, and once again proved that, without voice chat, these sorts of games aren’t NEARLY as fun. If we were making jokes and laughing the whole time, it wouldn’t have been nearly as fun.

Still, a part of me wonders if I should feel bad being such an ass to these random Xbox Live people. I mean, they could have been nice guys who just wanted to play some Left 4 Dead. Then again, we are talking about people on Xbox Live. The majority of them are dicks. The odds are extremely good that they deserve a little griefing. Still, I suppose that’s kind of a bad thing to say…
Aww, what the hell. I had a damn good time. They could have and probably should have left the game the moment we did something retarded. I refuse to feel bad about the fun times. The party times. Yeah yeah yeah.

So, to ring in the new year, we tried a lot of my new board games on New Years Eve, so I suppose I should write some impressions of them, hm?

Apparently, there are only 7 hotel chains, ever. Did you know this? It’s true. And Business Magnates? Well, they are all up ons these hotel chains.
That’s what Acquire told me.
The game itself is pretty awesome, honestly. It’s really simple. You don’t do a whole lot over the course of the game. You just lay a tile, buy up to three stocks, and draw a new tile every turn. But it’s very much a mind game. You have to think about what all the other players are trying to do so you can maximize your investment. Do you want to invest in Festival because it’s growing to be the biggest chain, and thus your shares will be worth more in the end? Or do you want to buy much stock in a cheaper chain like Worldwide, hoping that the much bigger Imperial acquires them in a merger, letting you trade in your stock for the more valuable Imperial stock? And is any of the other player’s plans going to screw this over? Is player two going to screw you out of the bonus you get for being the Majority stockholder?
But seriously, the game always seems like there should be more to it, and it’s odd that you can only cash out stocks during mergers (though that seems to be a balance thing to help encourage people TO create mergers, which is where most of the action is) but in general, from one playthough, this is a game with a shite-ton of strategy in it’s simplicity. That’s an awesome thing.

I honestly can’t wait to play it again, now that I understand how things work a little better. I’m probably going to try investing mostly in one company next time. This time I really spread out my investments and got second place, but Jonathan won by investing heavily in Festival early, and then working to make sure Festival was the biggest chain out there, whereas I focused on buying little stocks and getting them bought so I could spend my Majority Stockholder bonus on more stocks. I mean, I suppose either could be a viable option? We’ll see, though.

So one of the things I got for Christmas was this Anotherholic book. It’s actually kind of shockingly lame, since it amounts to xXxholic licensed fiction, and we all know how amazing licensed fiction is. (Not that there’s anything wrong with it, though, if it’s a series you like. Knock yourself out! And I mean, there is good stuff out there that’s licensed. But in general? Plenty of crap.)
Still, it’s fun stuff to me, who is such a rabid fan of the series. It makes some weird decisions, though, like strongly pretending it’s three anime episodes and having, like, an opening credits sequence in each one just printed in the book? It’s also extremely wordy. I mean, I guess xXxholic can get wordy, but I don’t know. It just feels dense, where most of the time the manga doesn’t, besides a few of Yuuko’s speeches and whatnot. Then again, I suppose Yuuko has more speeches in this book, too… heh… anyway, I am totally enjoying it.

However, like actually xXxholic, it’s just making me very introspective and forcing me to think about myself. Last night, in what I was reading, Yuuko said something along the lines of “There is nothing more self-centered than thinking everything is your fault.” That sort of hit me right to the core, I suppose.
I don’t think about myself as a self-centered person. I mean, I guess I think of myself as a “small world” person, where I have this sphere of influence and everything in it is extremely important and everything outside of it can fuck off because I just don’t care. Then again, I suppose in the middle of that world is me, you know? Maybe it is self-centered… maybe I am self-centered, because that certainly is something I have a huge problem with. I always feel like everything is my fault, that I fucked up, and that it’s all on my shoulders. I’ve been trying to break that habit, but it still happens often.
I mean, hell, I write a blog where I talk about me, me, me, constantly, all the time, and I have been for years. Maybe I am self-centered…

I guess the question then becomes whether or not that’s a bad thing… I was always told by nice people that you need to take care of yourself before you can take care of anyone else. Goodness knows I still have problems with myself that need to be addressed, so maybe it’s alright. And hell, isn’t everyone self-centered to some extent?

But dammit, I don’t want to make excuses…

I want, most of all, to be a positive force on people around me… I don’t think being self-centered is the way to be that positive force… you know? It’s all something, a bad habit, I should probably break, I guess…
It’s weird, though, because one of the things I’ve been working on so hard in myself recently is just to be honest with shit. I want x, or y, and I should just say it and be done with it. I shouldn’t beat around the bush, or hope quietly and stew on it and generally be unhappy. I should just say it, admit it, and go for it. I’ve been working so hard to make that happen in my life, and now just to look at it and notice how selfish and self-centered that is… I don’t know.

I don’t know.

So Essner got me this Carcassone variant, New World. It’s… well, I don’t know if it’s better than original Carcassonne? But it certainly does add interesting elements.
For one, having to build off of one edge does add some interesting elements to the strategy. In normal Carcassonne, you can go just about anywhere to, you know, ignore what other players are doing, if you’d like. You can do no such things in this one. Everything is built off of this starting “coast” area, which makes all the play be bunched up a bit, which is interesting, though not completely game-changing.
The main thing the game adds, though, are these “Surveyors.” These little pieces move “westward” each time something is completed. If your little settler piece is in the row of a surveyor when you complete anything, you get an extra 4 points for each Surveyor in that row. That can get a pretty huge boost in points. On top of that, if you have any settlers on pieces that are uncompleted when Surveyors move past that row, you have to pick them up. (This doesn’t count “trappers” which are the farmers in this game. Those stay until the end of the game, like always.) You get no points. This is the mechanic that I think could really mess with the game right here, and although I haven’t played enough to completely gauge it, it seems to strongly punish people who try to make large towns and it makes “farms” (which are the monasteries in this game, named farms for MAXIMUM CONFUSION) much, much less lucrative than in the main game. In normal Carcassonne, there is almost NEVER a reason not to put a guy on a Monastery. In New World, I can totally see putting a settler on a farm often being a bad and kind of pointless choice, as it’s often hard to complete monasteries quickly. This game also makes mini-cities potentially maximum spiteful, too, which is always good. Spite is always good.
Anyway, I’m sure I’ll give it a more thorough playthrough soon, but that’s just kind of my first impressions. I think the main thing I’m going to get out of this game, though, is that I’ve added so many tiles through expansions to original Carcassonne that it is no longer the quick and fun game it originally was, and is now much more involved. Since this game is back to that original, smaller number of tiles, it would be great for those times when you have the tile-game itch, but want it to run quicker. If it manages to fill that niche, I’m all for it.

I BEAT PERSONA 4!

I didn’t get the true ending, though I have a save so I can, if I wanted. But I don’t want. But dammit, I BEAT PERSONA 4!

It’s so rare for me to actually beat a jRPG. I normally start so, so many of these, so many games in general, and never beat them. To overcome having new, shiny Christmas games and still beat it? It feels good. Real good.

The game itself is really great, too. I mean, some of the characters are kind of horrible. I hate Yosuke, and I hate Rise, but they’re both a believable kind of person I hate, as opposed to one who is unrealistic. The game is just so… realistic in its characters. It’s almost boring sometimes because of it, but they really spoke to me.
Picking Beginner was completely the right choice for me, though. I never had to restart or anything, which is probably what helped get me all the way through it. Never did I have to redo a battle or anything. The boss A.I. kind of would act stupid in my favor, and the 10 respawns, which I thought would be a very minor benefit, were actually a huge help in reducing the frustration of hard boss battles. I very much recommend anyone coming to this game because they heard about the cool characters and shit to pick Beginner. Also, to have a guide. It will up your enjoyment of the story, I promise.

The rest is probably all spoilers, so…
SPOILARZ

When Nanako “died” it seriously hit me with an emotional reaction. All of the Nanako stuff did. It played me the whole game, making me expect her always around. It worked PERFECTLY. I really appreciate games that can do that to me. Still, when she turned out to NOT be dead, I threw up my paws in anger. I complained. How dare the game make me feel so bad for nothing? It didn’t make me hate it by any means, but man, it affected me. I’m not all that cool with the game undercutting the emotional reaction like that.
Still, the path for the bad ending that I didn’t go on was… awesome. The whole idea that my party was emotionally charged and about to commit murder? It was so perfect, because I was affected emotionally at this point too. I’m completely unsure how you’d NOT get the bad ending, though. I used the guide to pick what I was supposed to say, and without it, I probably would have never picked some of those things. Then again, I have no idea how anyone would get the True Ending without a guide either, so…
Still, man, my main character was like… the calmest person in the history of ever. The entire time, everyone would be SO ANGRY GRRR GONNA KILL and my responses would always be “Hey, let’s calm down.” Again and again. And finally, in that scene, I got to go “CALM THE HELL DOWN” which felt good. Real good.

But yeah, the game was 70 hours of goodness. It came out EXACTLY when I needed a long awesome game. Everything was right for Persona 4 to succeed. And it totally, totally did.
Totally.

So, the other night, after showing Jessie Left 4 Dead and having a good time at that (though she obviously isn’t a shooter player. It shocks me that she beats games like Silent Hill that frustrate me. She must either be better at them than me or have extreme patience) we went looking for something to watch, and, after looking through what I had, we ended up trying some Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei. I’m happy to report that it hasn’t lost any of its humor from the last time I watched it. It’s still got such intense randomness combined with horrible stereotypes. Heh. It was, you know, good times.
About halfway through, though, I remembered a series that relied on random humor that I hadn’t seen in an eternity and got out the DVDs. That series is Excel Saga. Going back and watching it, I barely remembered much about it. I feel like it doesn’t hold up quite as well as back then. It’s still totally random, of course, and the humor comes from that randomness (Space Butler!) but it’s significantly less character driven. There’s all kinds of random shit happening, but Excel is just this crazy person who does crazy things as opposed to a character, really, and stuff just… well… happens. Like I said. Yeah.
Basically, mulling these things over, I think I’ve kind of figured out what makes randomness work so well, and that is an adherence to a strong internal logic, even if the events don’t make any sense. Granted, Excel Saga is purposefully lacking an internal logic because they change everything around every episode to spoof various styles and whatnot, but that’s also hindering it. No matter what fucked up things happen in Mr. Despair and his class, they are still internally consistent, even if their characters are kind of expanded stereotypes. Each member of the class is going to react in a logical way, given what you know about them. It gives the wackiness some grounding, a baseline to compare the craziness to, and that just makes it more funny. Right?
That’s the theory, anyway.

So, after reading this post over on Gamespite, I bought Dokapon Kingdom for the Wii on the cheap to give it a try. Me and my friends have been known to play some Mario Party, and I would be all for a better Mario Party, you know? Anyway, Essner and I finally managed to sit down and give it a little trial, and I am going to share some of my wisdom that I have gleaned from that experience.

First off, this is a fun party game. I mean, like, seriously fun. The 1up Review was all down on how little interaction there is between the players? This is also true, but there’s more to it than that. This is a game of huge wins and huge losses. When you win, you win easily, and when you lose, you lose incredibly badly. If you’re in a group of people who enjoy trash talking and making fun of each other, the game is utterly full of fuel for that, and that, honestly, is where most of the fun is. Although, I would say that most of the fun of ANY competitive game with a small group of friends is this kind of talk, so…
Secondly, don’t play this game with computer players. The computer is like… good. Really good. And you have to watch every single one of its turns. Even on super-fast, it got kind of old pretty quickly, not to mention how much the computer just trounced us. Four Human players seems the only real way to enjoy this game.
Thirdly, man, I fucking suck at this game. I was in dead last the entire time I was playing, and my warrior kept constantly dying. I have no idea what I was doing wrong, but I was doing it VERY wrong. Still, I was having fun. It wasn’t frustrating. But goodness, it was horrible. But hey, at least I got “Anime Heroine With Punk Rock Dye” hair near the end of our session. I was losing, but at least I was looking good.

I still don’t quite get all the mechanics in the game. For example, what bonuses to Magic-users get? Warriors get random strength boosts, and thieves steal things, but we never figured out what the magicians get. What exactly does the SP stat do? I know it’s speed, but does it just affect dodge rating? Does it change both dodge and hit chance? I couldn’t find these answers in the manual easily. I don’t know if I was just missing them, or it wasn’t there, but it was odd.

I’ll be sure to report more next time we dive into the Kingdom of Dokapon, but, you know, at the very least I’ve learned that it’s worth trying to get us all together to dive into said Kingdom again, eh?