The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

APPARENTLY IT’S THE LAST DAY OF NOVEMBER AND I HAVEN’T REVIEWED ANYTHING AND I WAS SO DEAD SET ON THAT AWFUL JOKE YESTERDAY I COULDN’T DO IT THEN AHH.

But that’s okay, I don’t know how much I have to say about either. Mostly because I, uh, don’t have much experience with either.

For example, the KoL IoTM is the first one in a long, long time I haven’t picked up. It’s the Movable Feast. It’s… kind of mind-boggling. Sure, it’s an all-around familiar equipment. Sure, it lets you buff up your familiars, I guess, and it adds some damage and familiar experience. But man, I just don’t know. It only seems worthwhile if you’re switching familiars a lot. At the same time, if you’re playing softcore, you’re PROBABLY playing casually and don’t switch familiars all that often, and this doesn’t do much to entice you if you aren’t trying to train up multiple familiars concurrently. It’s just kind of uninteresting to a casual player, which is who I always think about these softcore-only items being aimed at. It’s especially less useful when I have a Mayflower Bouquet, which, while more random, I feel is better in pretty much every way for my purposes. And while I passed the little box of fireworks up for a similar reason that I passed this one up, it’s still extremely close to the cost of 1 Mr. A in the mall and still seems way, way better than the Movable Feast in every way.
So yeah, I just don’t get who this is aimed towards. So I didn’t pick it up.

In Twilight Heroes, we have the Atmos Spear, which works both shortened and extended!
Twilight Heroes kind of likes these changeable morphable items like that. As is, in the current gamestate, it seems like the extra chips from the shortened version seems like your best bet, as it’s clearly the best weapon in the game at the moment with that kind of enchantment. And the flying on both versions can be useful to free up vehicle or other slots, not to mention the lighting strikes.
I just, I don’t know. I’m kind of burned out on the grind of Twilight Heroes. If there were some way to redo the quests, I’d probably check in more often… it’s a great game, that’s why I’ve supported it for so long. Just… yeah. I can only grind for so long! Especially when I have so many other distractions.
Still, you should at least read the utterly ridiculous story that Cris wrote about the thing. Because it’s pretty awesome. The idea that something I can go buy in a store is so important is kind of silly. And awesome.

Anyway, there are some thoughts. DECEMBER, HO!

Mega Man ZX Advent is a game for the Nintendo DS Portable Entertainment System. It is a sequel to Mega Man ZX, which I got for 9 dollars at Toys R Us once. I enjoyed it, as one might expect that a combination of Mega Man and Metroidvania might be enjoyable, but it made some really, really dumb decisions. The biggest one was that it didn’t have a map, so much as a very vague screen that it called a map. This map showed “areas” and where these areas could connect to, but gave you no information about the areas themselves. So while I knew that, say, Area A connects to Area B, it gave me no information about how to get to the exit in Area A that lead to Area B. It was really stupidly hard to navigate without having GameFAQs open with an actual map.

I assumed that, seeing as this was a huge problem, that they would fix it in the sequel. But when I got it in from Gamefly and booted it up, I found out that that is not the case. The map is slightly more useful, splitting the areas up into multiple, smaller areas, but it still doesn’t give you an actual map. You still have no idea where the hell you’re going half the time. To make matters worse, they added some awful, awful voice acting. Now I can hear some really bad voice actors saying some of the really awful dialog that I wasn’t playing the game for anyway. Whee.

The game did some cool things, like letting you turn into bosses instead of just taking their powers, which was a pretty neat idea. But the first time I got lost because the map was so useless, I couldn’t help but say “fuck it,” and I sent it back immediately. Come on, Capcom. You can do better than that. I’ve played games where you’ve done better than that. So, so much potential wasted. Ugh.

There have been a lot of posts since I first mentioned being ill?
I’ve been sick the whole time.

At some point I managed to get all those other posts cued up. I can’t even remember when! But yeah, I’ve basically been in bed the whole time since. Though I took a break to pretend I was well on Tuesday, and did a lot of work, and then, you know, only made myself worse and much, much more sick.

So yeah, I missed Thanksgiving, so I finally said I’d had enough, and I went and I went, with my mother as backup, to the doctor on Black Friday morning. Apparently I did not have pig flu! But I did have bronchitis. What followed was a whole, whole lot of prescriptions being written, and me trying to deal with some comically huge pills. Also, I think my health insurance didn’t work for no reason? I dunno, future battle.

The point is, it’s been a few hours since I took those pills, used this inhaler, etc? I already feel tons, tons better.

I always hesitate to get doctors involved and stuff. I don’t really know why. I can’t say I have a good reason. But man, if these drugs keep working like this? Maybe I should give up on my pride and just go the moment I get sick, you know?
Then again, nobody can remember a time when I have been more sick than this, so…

Anyway, hopefully I’ll be back on my feet soon. Yep.

As is my stupid whatever the fuck, it’s time for my holiday shopping list post! Yay yay! Let’s see how I’m doing on this, the first major shopping day of the Chrissymas season.

Mom: No Check
Dad: No Check
Jonathan: No Check
Grandma: No Check
Grandpa: Check
Talking Time Festivus Victim: Check
Brer: Check (and delivered!)
Kale: No Check
Friends Gift Exchange Or Just Friends???: Reply Hazy, Ask Again Later.
Cris: I’d like to, but I’m unsure how we stand on such things.

Yeah, I don’t know what we’re doing with the normal gift exchange thing I normally do with my friends… there’s been no talk of it. If we don’t do it, I’m still probably going to buy gifts for people, but I’d like to know what’s going on with that so I can make some decisions. I should probably get that discussion going soon!
But yeah, I made some decisions ahead of time, and got some things bought. I was especially proud that I came up with something creative with my hard-to-buy-for Festivus victim. I need to send that out at some point, probably with a card and a poem, but I’m otherwise covered. It also was a no-brainer to go ahead and get Brer Dragon Age so he didn’t miss out on that on release. He seemed to like playing through it, so I guess I succeeded there? And I bought my Grandpa something on a whim awhile back, which I hope he enjoys.

The rest… well, I’ll have to think about them! I’ll have to go shopping soon! Or… maybe after the semester is over. I dunno. Sometime.
I’m so stupid busy.
Anyway, CHRISSYMAS IS HERE. Enjoy this horrible song they started playing in Kohl’s. It may be the worst Christmas song I have ever heard.

It’s Turkey Day! Thankful Day.
Yeah.

I’m thankful for all the standard things: My awesome friends, my nice family, all the neato things I have, THE INTERNET, life, etc. And I really am thankful. If I take them for granted… well, I shouldn’t. I try not to, but I probably do.

But today is the day where I don’t. So…

If you’re reading this, know that. Know that you’re important to me (because let’s face it, if you’re actually reading this blog, I know you personally, right?) and know that I care and know that… well… I probably owe you a hug! Or a hearty handshake of thankfulness. Or a turkey.
Though probably not a whole turkey. Maybe some deli-sliced turkey. I couldn’t afford whole ones. But the good type of sliced turkey! Honey-glazed. Something like that.

Okay, anyway, have a happy Turkey Day. I’ll be off doing… things. Probably schoolwork. Something boring like that.

While I was sick, I moved the PS3 into my room in order to actually have something to do. I played inFamous for awhile (which I’ll talk about later, I’m sure) but then wanted something a bit more hands-off to do. That’s when I remembered that CJ, who sold me the PS3, had left a copy of The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters on the machine for some reason. I had always meant to watch it, and this seemed like a great excuse, so I started it up.

This is a pretty amazing documentary, and deserves all the praise it got. There are a lot of weird people in the documentary, sure, and there are definitely some things that you will probably laugh, or at least grin at for being so absurd. At the same time, it tells a really great story. It’s all about Steve Wiebe attempting to attain the international top score in, what else, Donkey Kong. There’s this almost hilarious sequence when people are talking about how Donkey Kong is “the hardest game ever” which just seemed so surreal, even if I didn’t doubt that, in the context of these kind of competitions, it very well might be. Wiebe’s quest is fraught with problems, though, as it paints the man who held the top score since the 80’s, and who is famous for being the first person to “beat” Pac-Man, Billy Mitchell, as being a huge douche and a complete villain. I know it’s possible that he wasn’t QUITE as much of an ass as the movie paints him. Editing can do some amazing things. But man, it makes for a compelling story, seeing him snub, refuse to face, and embarrass Wiebe from a distance the entire time. It is one of the best put-together documentaries I’ve ever seen. It does a really good job of establishing what’s important, and why it’s important. It also does a great job of drawing these weird-ass “professional old-school gamer politics” lines, where some people are Billy’s henchmen, almost, and some just want to take him down. Lines are drawn. It’s just… really way more dramatic than a movie about playing Donkey Kong has any right to be, and does it without being forced the majority of the time.

The only downside to the movie is that the ending is a bit anti-climatic. I mean, I’m sure they couldn’t do anything about it. It seemed like the circumstances of the ending came about after they had basically finished, and they felt it important to tack on this extra bit of information, but it’s certainly less powerful than the rest of the film, and leaves you with a weird feeling.
Still, the overall experience is excellent. I feel like I’ve done an awful job of explaining it, though. But oh well. You should watch it anyway. It would be a great rental, and a great time. Go for it.
And thanks, CJ, for putting that somewhere where I could enjoy it.

While I was sick up in bed, I decided, hey, I should beat things. So I did. I beat Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box.

Honestly, I don’t know what there is to say about the game, though. If you liked the first one, or you like the idea of a whole bunch of brainteasers and puzzles being tied together by a very nicely animated plot, then this game is probably for you, and you should buy it so they bring over The Last Time Travel and The Specter’s Flute in a much more timely fashion than the last two games. Buy buy buy, by my whims to get the games I want to come out. Go.

But yeah, the plot seemed more intense and involved this time. They really tried to give a much more interesting plot to the thing. I don’t know if it worked as well. To avoid spoilers, I won’t say much, but I will say I rather found the conceit that caused there to be a whole town full of puzzle-lovers in the first game much easier to buy than the reason in the second game, much less the fact that Layton travels to multiple places, all with puzzle-fanatics. But eh, it’s a world concept, and I’m generally fine with that. At the same time, the games go out of their way to try to explain it, so I feel like they should have to explain it in a satisfactory way. If they’d never explain it, it wouldn’t be a problem.

The game does tie more puzzles directly into the action. Sometimes they aren’t a direct one-to-one puzzle connection, but often you have to solve a puzzle to do something that Layton needs to do. To navigate a dark forest, you have to complete a puzzle about placing lights in a dark forest. To prove a murder wasn’t suicide, you have to look at a room and find out what’s wrong in it in order to prove there was a murderer who escaped from it. These really do tie you into the story very well. There’s even a puzzle that involves a physical object in your instruction booklet, which is pretty bold of them.

But yes, the game is really more of the same, but that is not at all a bad thing. If you like puzzles, and I do, it’ll keep you entertained for quite awhile. I’m kind of glad my sickness gave me a reason to get back to it and finish it up. Now I can wait for The Last Time Travel (which is actually teased at the end of the game, so it better be coming!) eagerly, without a guilty conscience.

Modern Warfare 2 was kind of a disappointment.

Well, let me be more specific. The single player in Modern Warfare 2 was kind of a disappointment.

As an overall package, MW2 is completely worth it. If you’re going to put any time into multiplayer, go buy it now. It’s so much more chaotic, and you have so many more options, plus new cool things you can use like the Riot Shield. It’s great.

But the single player…? I dunno.

The first Modern Warfare has pretty amazing. Not only did the game feature some of the best shooting mechanics ever, as well as that excellent quasi-RPG multiplayer, but the single player game was fantastic. Here was a game, that from the surface seemed like it would just be a kind of “fuck yeah” shooter, but did genius things with perspective during the plot to tell a fun story in a way that really made you think about things. The points most people would refer to is the sequence in the AC-10 gunship, and the HUGE PLOT TWIST when the bomb goes off. These sequences really do affect you. They were novel, new, and made a strong point to them. They were, dare I say it, innovative in some ways.

So I was expecting the same level of innovation from the Modern Warfare 2 single player. But they took the general “bigger, more badass” approach to the game. They looked at what was effective in the first one, and just did that like… every 2 levels. Which makes it devoid of almost any point, when it’s brought up again and again. Not to mention that it was no longer novel, since the first game did it. There wasn’t really any innovation there at all.
Still, I could have forgiven it had the plot not been extremely nonsensical. You feel like you know what you’re doing and why you’re doing it in the first game, and you feel like what’s going on is not completely outside of the realm of possibility. MW2 is a game of supervillians, huge conspiracies, and so many things that they require you to buy as conceits that it just makes absolutely no sense. What’s worse, characters that died in the first game come back for no real reason, and it sets this precedent that none of the characters are actually vunerable, which removes all of the potential drama when you see one of them go down. You know, now, that Infinity Ward will have no problem with bringing them back in the next game anyway, so what’s the point?

I realize I haven’t mentioned “No Russian,” which was their “controversy” level. It hasn’t stuck with me at all. Maybe it’s because I’ve heard it analyzed to death on podcasts. Maybe it’s because, once I thought about the plot, your particular character being there and acting that way makes very little sense. Maybe it’s because there’s no repercussions for NOT being involved in it, so you can just follow along and keep your hands clean, making it devoid of the point they were trying to make. In any case, I really don’t think that level is effective in the way they wanted it to be.

That said, there are some really cool sequences in the single player. The level where you’re having to bunker down and defend a TGI Friday’s and a Burger King is almost surreal in its location, and pulls off that sort of “thinking about things” more that anything that was probably supposed to, for example. There are also some fucking awful sequences, like a point where you have to advance on the Whiskey Hotel, and there are so many people firing at you that it almost seemed like stupid luck that I made it through on the 40th try, since there was very little I could do to cut down on how much I was being shot.

As an overall package, the game is still amazing and a great value. I guess I’m just a bit let down by the single player. I had such high hopes. This was the first sort of “standard” shooter series that really, really got me involved, and it was because of that single player. After the passable but lackluster effort of Treyarch in World at War, I was ready for something amazing. I got that in the multiplayer and Spec Ops, but not so much in the single player, and that’s sad.

So every time I start a blog post, I want to start it with the word “So.”
Normally I will edit it out and rewrite it so it doesn’t start so stupid. I obviously didn’t this time for effect. But it kind of bothers me that I do that literally every single time I attempt to write something. It’s always “So I was playing” this or “So I went” that. Surely I’m a better writer than that?

Then again, I guess I am, because most of the time I change it. I keep on doing it, just to get me writing, but I make sure the end result is just a little bit better than that, I guess. That indicates something about me as a writer, right? Maybe?

I guess it’s almost the stupid way I kick-start myself into writing something. It isn’t always easy banging these things out, although like most things, once I get rolling, then I go and go and it’s no issue whatsoever. It’s a habit, and gods, do I fucking love habits. I guess it isn’t a surprise I do things in a habitual way.

Still, if you ever see a whole lot of posts on here that start with the word “So,” slap me.

Out of nowhere, I am insanely ill. Like, seriously, one minute I was fine, and then five minutes later my throat was in pain and I couldn’t stand up.

So I’m out of it.

This is bad.

I’m probably pushing myself too hard…

Anyway, more actually significant bloegs when I can write them.