The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

So, Franz Ferdinand’s new album, Tonight:Franz Ferdinand, finally hit. They’re one of bands I actually follow and actively search for, so I was happy to snap that shit up using the amazing powers of Amazon Prime I now possess.
I’m really not that impressed.
I mean, it’s all solid. The vast majority is very listenable, and I’ve been enjoying listening to it on shuffle the past few days. But I have yet to find one song that’s especially memorable in any way. Their initial self-titled album had many, such as Take Me Out, Dark of the Matinee, Michael… the majority kicked major ass. The second album, You Could Have It So Much Better, was less filled with hits, but still had some great, clearly standout hits, such as the title song, and The Fallen…
I have yet to find a song on Tonight that makes me want to put it on constant repeat, and honestly, that’s kind of my criteria for a good song. I listen to songs I love constantly, over and over, endlessly. Nothing has really made me want to do that. I mean, their single for this album, Ulysses, is pretty good, but not like… amazing? I don’t know.

A lot of talk was made about how they were going to mix things up a bit with this album, and use more electronic influences and whatnot. You can certainly hear it, and several songs just have these long, pointless, electronica finishes to them? I like that kind of music, but I’m not especially a fan of it mixed with my Franz. Still, it’s not BAD? It’s just not stand out and doesn’t excite me.
The songs are also, on a whole, much slower than previous albums. The first had like… no slow songs. The second had like two. This one feels like it has a whole lot, but the problem might be that shuffle is hitting them a lot? I don’t know. There’s certainly not any especially fast songs. I like my fast songs.

So I guess I’m underwhelmed. Not as underwhelmed as I was by, say, The Else, which was just… completely forgettable, unfortunately. But underwhelmed. Still, if you’re a Franz fan, this is still an album worth owning. If you haven’t really listening to the band, you should probably just pick up their first album, though. Cause that one is just golden, and awesome, and why I love the band so.

They say the highway’s just one big road, and it goes from here to there…

There being Table Mountain, of course.

So, I kept checking back in and reading Netbrian’s Nethack Let’s Play and it was making me all hungry for some hot Rougelike action, especially since I didn’t have anything else on my gaming plate at the moment. It really made me want to play Nethack. But Nethack is complicated and ugly and… I tried it once. It went badly. It was then I realized I had one of the best Rougelikes ever made on DS, Shiren the Wanderer. I might as well whip that out and play a couple more rounds of that instead of intalling Nethack and hating it.
So I did.
And I immediately got farther than I ever had back when I first bought the game. Such as, you know, to Table Mountain, which is the goal of the game. Heh.

It’s kind of cool how the game slowly starts to change over time, something that I never really survived long enough or smart enough to see. It slowly becomes less and less about combat and more and more about identifying items, using every bit of your inventory effectively, and evading enemies. I’m about as far from a rougelike master as you can get. Pokemon Mystery Dungeon is really more my style. (SMILES GO FOR MOTHERFUCKING MILES) But it’s amazing how much I’ve improved. Since I bought Shiren, I’ve played so many rougelikes with varying degrees of success at them, but I’ve obviously learned something, because I’ve started to become vaguely effective.
For one, I was using items. There were so many situations where I know, back in the day, I wouldn’t have wasted, say, an item that could hit multiple enemies when I wanted to affect one enemy. I wouldn’t have used a staff to give me a minor boost and more safety when there was a vague, shady chance that it would be more useful later. I never did those things, but anything that keeps you alive keeps you going in a rougelike, you gotta. And thus, I’ve gotten farther.
I also had to deal with jars, which is something I’ve never really had to do before this. Chiropractic Jars are pretty amazing, and I ended up with many Jars of Change, which I used to decent effect to swap items for hopefully more useful ones. I also got the joy and pleasure to meet my first item-rusting monster, which kinda killed all my equipment, which may have been a reason I died soon after that. Heh. But it was all neat!

The thing that really hit me about this, though, was how new it all felt. Like the title up there, it felt like I’d not put time into this game before. Higher level play gets different like that, I guess. It was the fun times.
I dunno, going back to the game certainly scratched that itch, which is good. Also, it’s a damn shame that Shiren is on so many clearance racks and stuff. It’s pretty well $15 dollars everywhere, if not cheaper. If you have a DS and care about rougelikes in the least, it’s a game that should be in your collection.

So, as I sometimes do, I find myself unfocused, without a game I really feel drawn to playing. I’ve been trying about everything. While iced in, I gave many demos a try. Puzzle Quest Galactrix was better than the flash demo indicated. It’s certainly on my radar now, especially since it has a “space trader” buy high sell low mechanic built into it which sounds like a lot more fun than some of the side quests in Challenge of the Warlords. Defense Grid: The Awakening was a really great tower defense variant, but at 20 dollars, I really can’t justify the purchase. I even tried playing some more Peggle to think about whether or not I wanted to pick up Peggle nights, but dammit, the final boards in that game are kinda hard. I don’t know how you’re supposed to do them without getting lucky.

I feel like the main problem is that everything is coming out in the last two weeks of February. If just one thing would come out this week, I’d be satisfied, but no, it’s all then. Just look at this list: Dragon Quest V, Retro Game Challenge, Street Fighter IV, the aforementioned Puzzle Quest Galactrix… That is a lot of game power. Granted, Retro Game Challenge comes out one week earlier than the rest, but still. And the hits don’t stop in March either. I’m probably picking up The Dark Spire, Steal Princess, and Class of Heroes, and that’s just Atlus titles.
All these great games coming out at once just makes me grumpy. I wish what I wanted was spread out over the year a little better than it tends to be. I mean, Street Fighter and Dragon Quest on the same day is actually fine. I need something to play in between online matches while I’m chatting with people, and something simple like Dragon Quest fits the bill perfectly, but otherwise…
I’m especially disappointed in Atlus. They almost have games of theirs competing with other games of theirs. I mean, isn’t like… that Ys collection and My World My Way coming out on the same day now? And I think Steal Princess and Class of Heroes are on the sameish week as well… Mm, nope, I’m wrong on that one. Steal Princess comes out on my brithday and Class of Heroes is in April… but damn, still.
(I still love you, Atlus. You keep putting out everything you can, and I will buy the vast majority of it.)

But yeah, this is just mostly a post saying “Conform to my schedule, game publishers!” Which is stupid of me. I mean, if I didn’t buy so many games the day they were released, I probably wouldn’t have this problem. Oh well. I know my medium. I know my fun. I’ll chase it however I want, dammit.

So I played The Maw after hearing Tycho’s recommendation and trying the demo. It looked to be a sort of short and sweet puzzle platformer, and I mean, it’s cute as all get out. That’s a recipe for success, isn’t it?

Well, yes and no.

I enjoyed the game pretty much. It was cute, it controlled fairly solid (except for the Bee-tull power, which was shockingly frustrating to use) and, you know, it was pretty fun if you like platformers. Think about to the Nintendo 64, and then think if someone had made one of those platformers, only it was short and had better and cuter graphics. That’s what the game is.
I was really expecting the game to get… puzzle-y at some point, though. The way it started out, I thought what would happen would be that I would find all these different things for Maw to eat to get different powers, and I would have to juggle these powers to get out of levels. It doesn’t really work like that, in the end. Basically, you work to get Maw big enough to get to the power, figure out how to get it, then use it to get out of the level. Still pretty good, but less enjoyable than I was expecting.
Perhaps they were worried about losing audience with the game. It’s extremely casual. You can’t die (something I appreciate. More games should be like that) and it’s pretty nice about giving you hints if you get stuck. Perhaps they felt all the puzzling would confuse some of their audience. However, I mean, it’s an XBLA game, you know? You more than likely already have a level of “hardcoreness” to even access it. I think they could have pushed it a bit more.
Losing the puzzle element also makes the game pretty darn short. If you aren’t trying to get some of the achievements and just blaze through it, you could easily feel you didn’t get your 10 dollars worth. I was alright with the length, though. I would have loved more, but I enjoy supporting good indie developers, you know? These guys obviously know how to make a game. If they made a more puzzle-based sequel, I would be grabbing it in a heartbeat. So I don’t lament the purchase. However, if you’re someone that must make every dollar equal X gameplay hours, you might want to be wary.

So yeah, I guess I give the game a sort of… bittersweet recommendation. I bet younger gamers would eat it up, and people like me, who just kinda like cuteness and solid short experiences, had a good time. I do wish it would have unlocked a gamer picture of just the cute alien. It might have gotten me to change away from my Puyo Puyo Fever girl. Heh.

Late Minute Addition: After writing the bulk of this review, I read this, which said they had three DLC levels coming for $1.25 a pop. This really kinda rubs me the wrong way. The game already feels like it’s pushing it costing 10 bucks, and now to say “oh, we have these three levels we cut that we’re selling to you” just seems… really horrible to me. I guess maybe it was a file size thing? Or maybe it’s just a money grab thing? Either way, I don’t like it very much at all. I certainly won’t be buying them.

So I finished a novel. Holy shit, me? Reading? Holy crap, right?
Well, you know, I’m in this 21st Century Fiction class, so you’re going to be seeing a lot of talk of me finishing novels this semester, and, hopefully, talking about how much I enjoyed them. If they keep being as good as the first book we had to read, I’m going to be very happy with my decision to take the class.

The book I read was Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem. It’s a story about a sorta detective sort of mobster with Tourette’s trying to figure out what happened to his mentor and father figure. And damn, it was really good, you know?
The book did many things correctly, and the main thing it did correctly, which is why I enjoyed it so much, was the main character and narrator. Lionel is such a likable person. He’s very intelligent and well-spoken in his internal narration, and the way he tries to view so much of the world through his, you know, condition is endearing and interesting. Seeing him work mentally, and then seeing how people see him while having to, you know, deal with his outbursts and tics just really make you side with the guy more. It also, for whatever reason, gives you an oddly quick but in-depth view of every other character. The way they react to Lionel really says a lot about who they are, so I think you get a really good view of those characters, too.
The plot itself is fairly solid too, a decent detective story with, you know, the things a detective story has. It kind of peters out in the end, but I think for a really good reason. That’s how these sorts of tales actually end, you know? When you’re dealing with organized crime and whatnot, things rarely work out perfectly. In the end, Lionel still hasn’t, you know, completely found his place in the world. He’s done what he’s set out to do, but it’s clear that things in his life aren’t fixed. It wasn’t an ending that left me with a smile, and it wasn’t an ending that was particularly strong, but I really have no ideas about how it could be better, so I can’t really complain about it.

As a quick aside, one thing this book did to me is make me feel very Ticcish. Lionel points out the tics of everyone he comes across because, you know, they kind of run his life, so he looks for them everywhere. Him doing them, and pointing them out… well, I do have little tics. The clearest one is that “ball of energy” finger thing I do when I get really excited, but damn, if I didn’t feel almost obsessive/compulsive observing my own behavior while I was reading the novel. I mean, I’m clearly not, but it was an odd feeling, I suppose, that the book instilled.

This isn’t a book I would have searched out myself. I have little interest in the subject matter and, frankly, I’m just not a reader. The more and more time passes, and I get older, the more and more I find that if it isn’t a podcast or a vidjeo (I don’t know why I’m working that spelling into my vocabulary, but I am) game, I just don’t have time for it. Still, if you are someone that reads a lot of novels, and you like detectiveish tales, this is probably a great book to pick up next time you’re bored. I wouldn’t say you should drop everything to read it? But it certainly gets my recommendation.

OMG THERE’S ICE OUT THERE!

Yeah, so, the weather is pretty bad. Luckily, we’ve had no power or internet outages, or else I would be insane and wrecking the place by now. My Grandma wasn’t so lucky, and is probably going to be here until her power gets back on at her house, which could be, I dunno, a week or so. I’m glad she’s here safe, but the incredible temperatures she demands (correction, understandably demands. She is nothing but bones, it isn’t surprising she gets so cold so easy) means I’m going to be staying well away from downstairs for awhile. All that heat makes me feel sick.

None of this really changed my plans any. Sure, I went to a few less classes and I didn’t go to work tonight, but my life is so… up here on the computer-based that I really didn’t do much different. Just gamed away and interneting it up.

Still, those people without power… harsh stuff, and I hope the best for them… though it just makes it so clear why I’m not living out in the middle of nowhere, if I can swing it. Need constant power and internet connectivity, dammit. CONSTANT.

Anyway, I guess, tomorrow, I get to get out and about again, on the slippery streets. To watch Casablanca. Or… not, because they just closed the school for another day… And I might go to work, maybe. I’m not clear on that. Nobody has been at Kohl’s all day so I couldn’t figure that one out. We’ll see.

Welcome!

I am too easily entertained by completely ridiculous shit.

What other kinds of shit am I entertained by?
Maybe this.
Or this.

I dunno.

This too, maybe…

I’m so lame.

Still, finally… last but not least… this may be the greatest accomplishment of mankind. I can’t wait to own it.

So I had to write this letter to my classmates about me as a writer, to introduce myself to my writing group. I thought the idea really kinda cool. So I’m going to share now.

—

To Whom it May Concern:

Some say I was born with pencil in hand. They really don’t understand how, you know, gestation and birth and whatnot works.
But yeah, I’ve been writing in some capacity for as long as I can remember. I recall an amazing tale about three cops written, with illustrations, in the first grade. I recall attempting to write a poem about the very poetic topic of me throwing up in the car back in second grade. These masterpieces were, however, only the beginning.
Throughout all of grade school I was writing. I must have like… 10 notebooks mostly full of half-novels I wrote in pencil during campouts and whatnot. They were painfully Mary Sue. What else could they be? But they were always there, and I was always working with the adventures of my latest female protagonist in my head, for better or worse. Hell, I still do to this day, though I tend not to write them down anymore.
In high school, I picked up the poetry bug. It crawled all around, and was kind of disturbing to look at, so I decided to write poems instead of notes during class instead of collecting insects. They were very strong on the rhyme and very cute, for the most part. Greeting card-style, you could say. I still write those FOR Greeting cards, but I didn’t really think of them like that back then. I even think I read a few of them at a Journey reading during my first semester here, The thought very much embarrasses me.
There was an attempt at my high school to create a literary magazine called Harvest. It wasn’t very impressive, but I submitted, with a packet entitled “A Hostile Takeover of Harvest.” It did not get the reception that I was looking for, and I was told very clearly that I would not be taking over the entire magazine.
During my final years of high school, I acquired an old laptop, and with it, I started to write a real novel. It was still a bit Mary Sue-ish, but much more subtle about it. I wrote, hell, at least half of it. I had about 120 pages written, I believed, before I stopped, It was one of the biggest writing projects I ever undertook.
I also started “blogging” during this time period, though it wasn’t called that. I was writing on a fairly regular basis on OpenDiary.com, which then eventually all transferred over to my actual blog, GetMeOutOfThis.Net. I still write daily on it, talking about my responses to games and movies and whatnot in a vaguely review-like fashion, but ultimately just giving myself a dumping ground for the thoughts I have, and not really expecting anyone to read it.
College became a magical time where I discovered two of my great literary loves: The Parenthesis and the Personal Essay. The Parenthesis came to me during my first lit class, when I dived into the work of e.e. cummings for the first time. It hit me how limited I was taking my poetry, and I started making it look more like how my mind works. I did this by liberal use of the parenthesis, having layers and layers of them throughout, and abandoning non-internal rhyme most of the time. I think my poetry has improved quite a bit because of it, though I sometimes make things really hard to read. I also took a class called “The Art of the Essay” which taught me how completely awesome Personal Essays can be. They can be serious creative works, and not just assignments, and I started treating them as such, constructing them.
And that brings us to today. I’m busy with schoolwork and normal, money-getting work and vidjeo gamez, but I do attempt to take the time to write creatively every once and while. I especially enjoy classes that force me to do so, though I think I’ve taken just about every single one of them available to me, so I guess I’m out of look. Good thing I’m about to graduate, I suppose.

So, while I work at the work where I work, I’m in charge late at night. One thing I have to do while in charge is answer the phone, because sometimes Corporate forgets to tell the security system people that my crew is going to be in there, so they call to check and make sure I have the proper clearance, and I have to feed them a code and shit.

So the phone rings, I walk over and answer, all ready to give that code out. But it turns out it’s this guy. Apparently him and his girlfriend were in the store before they went to a late night movie, and now the girlfriend has lost her phone. Could I go check and see if it was there?
Sure. I’m a helpful person, I can check to make sure it’s safe. So I go and check the lost and found, and sure enough, there’s the phone he described. I tell him the good news.
Then he asks me to bring it outside to him.
Now this, I can’t do. I don’t actually have a key, for one thing, so it’s a one way trip outside the door. For another, I can’t just open the door for a stranger. I’m in charge. I have to set alarms. I didn’t doubt that this guy was sincere, but there’s always that vague risk that he’s trying to get me to open the door so he can point a gun at me, barge in, and rob the place, right? It’s just not something I’m allowed to do. I also can’t take the phone out of the building. No matter how innocent it is, I’m being recorded, and honestly, that could very easily look like me stealing. Me getting the phone to him is just not going to happen.
So I tell him as such, and that the phone will be right here, ready to be picked up in the morning, or whenever he wants to stop by and pick it up during business hours.
He keeps begging, saying he lives far away, and I can hear his girlfriend in the background feeding him things to say. Why not take another associate out with you? Why not take it out when you leave the store? I stand my ground, he eventually hangs up.

I head back to work.

Ten minutes or so later, the phone rings again. I figure it’s the guy calling me back, but I can’t not answer the phone, because, you know, it could always be the security company. So I pick up the phone.

It’s not the guy. It’s the guy’s girlfriend’s mom. She wants to know who is going to be the manager on duty tomorrow morning, and that that manager best be ready with a $60 check to cover the gas of her having to drive out there and pick up her daughter’s phone. She’s very angry.
I very much wanted to snap at her, but, you know, I’m the boss now. I was polite and professional, and explained to her why I couldn’t just hand her daughter the phone.
She tells me that not only have I caused her to have to waste her time tomorrow where she has to leave church to drive here and then drive back for a funeral, and I’ve also put her daughter in incredible danger, driving home and to work tomorrow without her phone, and that the manager best have that check ready.
I explain, as nicely as I can, that that is almost certainly not going to happen, but she can pick up the phone any time she wants. It’ll be safe until she gets there. She doesn’t have to come right when the store opens, or even tomorrow.
She tells me I best leave a note telling the manager to have her check ready or she is going to call corporate.
I desperately, desperately wanted to tell her to please, call corporate and complain that I am doing my job correctly and protecting their store and their investment. Surely they would be on her side. Of course.
I told her I would write a note, and she hung up.

I went back to the office and wrote a note of warning, explaining all this and that she’s coming and that it is probably going to be a “hairy situation.” And then I signed it “Good Luck.”

And that’s my most recent work story that’s of any interest.

So a little while back, I finally got into the remake of Chrono Trigger on the DS that I got for Christmas. Good news, everyone: The game is as wonderful as you remember. Or at least as I remember. If you’ve never played Chrono Trigger, grabbing the remake is a great idea. The new DS touchscreen controls should work great for anyone who’s never played it before and loved, say, the controls for Pokemon. (I loved using those controls in Pokemon, but I just can’t play this game like that. I’ve tried. It feels wrong. Still, I like that the option is there.) They also managed to get all of the PS1 anime cutscenes into the game, so you can now watch those without playing a version of the game that loads every few seconds! Huzzah! I haven’t gotten to the new optional dungeon, I admit, and all reports say it completely sucks, but still, overall, this is probably the definitive version of the game now.

However, the thing that really gets me about the game as I replay it is how little I remember about it. I always felt like I remembered quite a bit about the game, and I mean, I do. But my memories of the game are all slices. Little bits. I sort of remember the plot, I remember some key scenes, I remember what the sidequests are, but in general, I’m having to find out this stuff all over again and being pleasantly surprised by how awesome the plot is playing out.
For example, I seriously could not remember why you go back to 65,000,000 BC for a second time. I know you did, because as I got through the area the first time I didn’t have Ayla and there was still plot there I remembered. But I couildn’t, for the life of me, remember how the party got back there. When it happened, I was pleasantly suprised.
I was also greatly pleased with Crono’s trial. I remembered there WAS a trial, but I didn’t remember how interactive it was, and how much what you did at the fair affected it. Man, this game was just crazy well put together, you know?

For this run, though, I’ve decided to try to do things differently. I’ve been using Ayla. Out of all the characters in the game, she’s the one I’ve never really given a fair chance. So far, she seems as least as awesome as everyone else, which is great news. She just does massive, massive amounts of physical damage, and that’s effective against most enemies and bosses. If I do end up beating the game, I’ll probably keep using her all the way through.
I also plan to kill Magus this run, if I get that far. I’ve never done that either, so I figure that would be a bit of a different thing to try for once, eh? We’ll see how that goes.

But yeah, anyway… Chrono Trigger! Whoo!