The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

Well, it’s that time of year again. It’s the time to dust off our copies of the Mother series and dance in joy as we revel in the genius of Shigesato Itoi and his team of talented game makers…

Oh, wait, let me try that again…

Well, it is the day of mothers, a time to celebrate those of the female persuasion who raised us.
My mother and I don’t always get along. Not only for the obvious reasons of the not agreeing with the whole transsexual thing I have going on, but just in general. She respects my advice in dealing with her own life, but wouldn’t dream of the idea that I might have some idea of what I’m doing with my own. She commands me to be happy, she refuses to meet me in the middle on issues and get things done in a way we can both agree with, she drags me into her silly schemes to do labor for her enjoyment and hers alone…
But everyone has things they can’t stand about their mothers, I’m sure. It’s clear that my mother cares quite a bit about me, and I care quite a bit about her. Perhaps sometimes to my detriment, I care what she thinks. I do my best to be good in her eyes. She’s helped to give me a college education, a very comfortable life where I don’t have to worry about the little things…

I do love her. I love her quite a bit. And though we don’t always see eye to eye, I hope she knows that.
I hope living my life my own way won’t completely destroy our relationship.

But… yeah. Mother’s day. Go hug a mother. And have a good day in general.

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.

So, Wednesday, we did another Hamster run. This time, everyone was there and everything! Though Ryme didn’t know we were doing it, so he was in, but didn’t have long. So we rushed in, determined to Hodgekill!

I made my first mistake in one of these runs, accidentally hitting the shortcut key on a choice adventure to enter the Marketplace, pointlessly wasting a turn. That really frustrated me. I would have been more frustrated if that would have kept us from getting a Hamster! That was the biggest worry when I learned that we didn’t get it. We didn’t go fast enough for a Hamster. But we were over by at least 4 turns, so I was kind of off the hook.
Apparently, in our efforts to go fast and get poor Ryme to bed, we were wasting a lot of turns opening the Tent that we didn’t need to use. I didn’t really notice, but apparently that was so. If we had gone incredibly slowly, we could have gotten it with time to spare… but, alas…

Still, the Hamster run can be a very tedious thing, so I actually didn’t mind the rushing. It made it better. Though it was a shame we didn’t get the prize we wanted, we still got the consolation prize, Hodgman’s disgusting technicolor overcoat. A solid item in its own right! It would have really helped me out during my basement run.

Then, the unthinkable happened. We rolled for the coat, and I won it.

I hate rolling for anything. I don’t feel like I should be greedy, and it feels greedy, even though I did as much work as anyone else. (Well, okay, Val did much more work because she’s funding everything and farmed all the meat. But everyone else rolling for it? Same amount of work.) At the same time, I do enjoy a bit of phat lewt. And I do deserve nice things. So though I held out, I threw my hat in the ring for the roll at the last second, and somehow came out with the coat. Winning immediately embarrassed me. But I attempted to hold all that back and accept the coat with pride. Yay coat!
I also managed to, kind of at random, get the last piece of the Hyperborean Hobo Habiliments, Frosty’s Old Silk Hat, via a giveaway at the start. So that’s nice too! Yay gear!

Still, once I start ascending again, I won’t be able to equip any of it! But still, it’s nice to have. It’s nice to have in-game goals. Yes indeed.

I can’t do a raid next week due to working, but hopefully they can find someone to fill in for me and whatnot. Still, I’m in this until everyone is done. And then I’m totally going to ascend and try out my huge stockpile of goodies I’ve accumulated.

So my job is honestly kind of boring. It takes very, very little brain power to do my job, at least for me. I’ve been doing it on autopilot for so long, it just occurs without me thinking about it.
With this in mind, you’d think it would be CRAZY EASY to get a lot of thinking done during work! I could do all kinds of brainstorming and all kinds of deep thought-ing, right?

I wish.

I don’t know, but doing those sorts of things just sort of turns my brain off. It’s not a bad thing, perse. It makes it feel like it’s going faster, same as being entertained would, I guess. I’m mostly just going over and over what needs to be done. I’m reading off in my head a map of where everyone is so I can pre-figure out where to send everyone and estimate when people are going to be done. I’m reminding myself over and over that I need to go pick up this, or I need to do that, or I’m almost done.

That’s the majority of it. That’s all my brain does. But of course, sometimes I think of other things. Silly things. Amazing silly things. Example: Tonight, all I could think of is how badly I wanted to hug the Lucario in the video in this post. (You can see the guy in the Lucario suit really early, you don’t have to watch the whole thing or anything.) I watched the first little bit of this video very early in the day before work, but out of nowhere, it kept coming back to me AT work. That’s just such a really great suit. I know there are furry people who are all down on how overdone Lucario is, but dammit, I still like. Very much so. And that Lucario needs a hug!

I am so great. Still, I suppose it’s better than the nights when I get something incredibly depressing or stressful stuck in my head… which does happen. Because I am so great. So great. Read my blog, I’m great.

…okay, sorry. I’ll shut up now.

In the Browser RPG front, I’ve been playing new stuff! (Well, besides Legends of Zork, which I still keep playing constantly. It’s so flawed, but I love how quick and easy it is to play. Shame on me.) And that new stuff is Alpha Bounce, the Breakout RPG. It’s proven to be a fairly completely compelling experience, and it has the benefit of not taking much of your day, either. I see that as a benefit, anyway.

Yeah, so, there’s some plot about how you’re a prisoner and you can gain your freedom by doing a dangerous job: mining in a “Mining Envelope.” This envelope happens to look like a Breakout paddle. So you go around the big map, buying upgrades for your ship so you can move farther, and just generally breaking blocks, getting money, etc.

There’s a fairly large world map. Every area you’ve cleared before it slightly highlighted, and every one you haven’t is darker. So you slowly work your way out, trying to clear the whole map. Meanwhile, you get missions. “Clear all these areas for a cash reward” seems to be the most common, but there are also ones like “check this space for salvage” or “answer a distress call from here” or whatnot. They basically end up being the same thing: Playing a game of Breakout. But at least you always have something to work towards, which is something I insist upon.

The Breakout-play itself is pretty solid. There are many different types of blocks, some of which require different strategies or upgrades to your Mining Envelope to take down. These blocks drop a staggering array of different power-ups. There are the standard ones, like Multi-ball and Extension, of course. Some power-ups, though, are completely game-breaking, like Spawner, which lets you spawn a new ball whenever you click the mouse, or Laser, which lets you fire lasers that destroy blocks for the rest of the level. Still, I don’t think that’s a problem. It feels GREAT when you get one of these uber-powerups and the stage you’re on goes from difficult to done in like 5 seconds. There are also plenty of other power ups with weird abilities that you have to quickly compensate for. I got one that turned my ball into a beam of light, and when it hit my paddle, it just teleported to the top of the screen and came back down again, instead of bouncing off of it. It really changed what I was doing. It was neat.
The controls itself are sometimes iffy, though. You move the paddle with your mouse. (You can move it with the keyboard, but I found it moved too slow to be effective.) This causes problems because, if you get too excited and zip the mouse to one side, it’ll move outside of the play area and fuck up your control. That’s the main unfortunate part of the controls. Otherwise, left click launches the ball and uses any power-up abilities you may have. Escape or P pauses. Space fires a missile from your missile stock, once you get that upgrade. And that’s it. I mean, it’s breakout. It’s not THAT complicated.

The main problem I have with Alpha Bounce (and it’s not really a problem, more a concern for a, I assume, small company that made a game I’m enjoying) is its business model. Like most Browser RPGs, you get a limited amount of plays per day. Each day, you’re supplied with three “Liquid Hydrogen Capsules” which let you make three trips, and play three levels. Liquid Capsules apparently only last for one day, so you can’t stock them up. However, you can buy “Solid Hydrogen Capsules” in game, which persist until you use them. You can also slide the company a little money to get a huge cache of Solid Capsules, so you could play all day. The first transaction scores you a permanent extra life, too, to make the game a little easier.
The main problem with that is I will never pay for extra turns. The reason I love this games is because I love how they don’t demand much of my time. I am COMPLETELY fine with only playing three levels a day. Overjoyed in fact. And since they don’t have any other ways in place to get any money from me, I probably won’t be throwing any cash their way. Which is a shame. I enjoy supporting these games, especially when I get perks for it. But I dunno, if it’s not something that will make the game more fun, it’s a harder sell.

But yeah, overall, I’m having a lot of fun with Alpha Bounce. I recall hearing that at some point, the game takes away all of your free lives, which will… probably kill the game for me. I often need all three lives to clear a stage. But yeah, if you need a breakout fix, Alpha Bounce is a great way to get it. Yep!

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.

So, my little brother moved out.
Good for him, you know?

He’s got a small, one bedroom apartment at the top of an apartment building in town. He’s also got way, way more furniture that he can ever use for said apartment, as all my mother has been doing is making and buying him furniture for the past… month or so. Still, I hope he gets what he wants out of having his own place. I may still be in school limbo, but hopefully he can really get himself settled to get on with his life. In some way, anyway.

But yeah, my mother… I’m sure at least part of the reason why Jonathan wanted to get out of the house was to get away from the controlling nature of my mother. She’s a planner, and she is a manager, but she is very, very rarely a doer. So, for our entire lives, it’s mostly been Mom coming up with some complicated project and then us having to actually do it while she stands there and commands us to be happy and not be annoyed by having to do useless things in her exact, precise way, especially when we know a better way. Yeah.
Of course, the closer and closer it got to the day my brother moved out, the more and more clear it became that this was becoming a Mom project instead of Jonathan’s show, like it should have been. Jonathan asked me to help, said I could sleep in, no worries. I agreed, of course. He’s my brother. I’d love to help.

Mom woke me up yesterday earlier than I sometimes get up for class. No sleep for me! Then, the entire time, she was angry at me for not being awake and happy. Man, I wonder why that was! I seem to have threw my back out during the moving as well, as it’s kinda in serious pain right now. Still, I blame Mom for that too. Blame: It’s the cure, cure anything. I mean, she seemed pretty angry at me for getting hurt! Yay!

Bleh, I’m just kind of unhappy at the moment. I don’t mean to be quite so down on my mother. She has tried to be better about it, in general, and I have tried to be nicer towards her, and it has mostly worked. It’s just… bleh. Day like today. When I should be happy for my brother for getting his own place and being all supportive and such and she just kinda ruins it.

Bleh, no. No more negative emotions. And negative things.
Ha, we’ll see how long I follow that command.

So, on Wednesday, it was finally time once again for a Hamster run. Hodgeman awaited! We were ready to murder in a very tedious and calculated way!

But, you know. Best-laid plans. Etc. Etc. Our Sauceror didn’t show up. You can’t get to Hodgeman without a Sauceror! What madness to think you could!
We started without him, hoping he could get into a position where he could show up late and just jump in. We raided, we killed, we pushed forward. Nothing. 2 hours later, he still wasn’t around. There were attempts to find a replacement, but they didn’t really go all that well. Someone offered, but was painfully slow and it was already almost 2 AM at this point. Eventually, we just decided to scrap it. So it goes, you know? Later reports show that he was without any sort of internet due to horrible annoyances from his internet company. So it wasn’t really anyone’s fault. Just a really horrible group of circumstances.

Val took it pretty hard. Seemed kinda down for wasting everyone’s time. But hell, nobody really thought that. We were all there as a team to help each other out. Just because she was the boss, and was ordering us around like a boss, well, that doesn’t mean it’s her fault. Shit happens.
The only reason I particularly care about our failure is because we need to finish these runs up! The school year is almost done and I would like to start ascending again. Still, I don’t particularly care one way or another. It’s all in good fun. I refuse to worry or anything.

We’ll get it. Yes. Yes, we will get it.

When you’re feeling overwhelmed, the thing you have to do is break the task into chunks that are not overwhelming.

This is just generally useful advice. Seriously, put that shit to work. Do it.

Still, sometimes when you’re most overwhelmed, you have problems thinking of things in those terms. You’re freaking out and you can’t parse everything the way you need to.

I suppose that was me on Friday of last week and whatnot. I had an entire mental breakdown attempting to finally once again face transitioning head on. In my head, things totally got overwhelming. I couldn’t handle it. My mood crashed hard. Very hard. I was pretty well out of commission there for awhile. I wrote a little blog about it. It was bad times.

However, a completely random bit of rambling in a depressive conversation with Brer helped turn me around. We talked about Health insurance, and how I could get it, and what I could do, and how it would help. Suddenly, a very vague and frustrating situation had a physical, present problem for me to deal with. I started to work on that, and my mood lifted… well, it felt pretty quickly to me. Maybe other people would think otherwise.

I really appreciate Brer helping me to break this into a smaller chunk I could deal with. I don’t know why I found it so hard. Much like I was talking about in the other blog post, I am better at this than I used to be. I used to have these panic attacks just with schoolwork, but I figured out how to break them into tiny chunks of things to get done, and not worry about the outcome, and it worked. But I’m so close to this shit. I couldn’t deal with it straight on, even with this, I guess. I’m not a strong as I thought.

But progress is being made. That’s the important part. It’s not, you know, fast progress. But I’ve got a plan I’m executing. That’s all anyone can ask for.