The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

So the other night, I played a board game of a much different sort than I normally play. Jonathan convinced me to try some Harry Potter Clue, which his ladyfriend had gotten a copy of and wanted to play. Clue is always a decent sort of time, so I decided to not hide and be sociable and play, even though it seemed like the game wouldn’t last long. I mean, whoever was playing as Harry Potter would obviously win, because he can accuse anyone of any stupid thing and always be right, because he’s the main character. Still, gave it a try I did.

It’s not a very well-designed game.

The changes to the game are pretty clear. For one, all the player characters are not also suspects, even though no matter what happens, it’s probably Harry Potter’s fault anyway. That change is less of a big deal, though it does steal the “teleport someone away to accuse them” aspect of the normal game that you could use to dick people over. For two, all but one of the “murder” weapons can’t actually kill someone. No, these are all like… evil inconvenience weapons. There are no murderers at Hogwarts. Probably. Just people who like to be really annoying to people.
But those are mostly cosmetic changes. There are real ones. The board, for example, has these little wheels built into it that, as you rotate them, open and close doors and secret passages all over the board. This is probably the most welcome change to the game, as there’s nothing wrong with that at all and it does give it a big of “magical” feel, though it does make it so you rarely have to walk out into the hallways once you get in a room with a secret passage since, by the time your turn comes around again, the secret passage in your room now probably goes somewhere new on the board. Also, the players no longer hold all the cards that aren’t the solution. You apparently give everyone 3 and put the rest in Dumbledore’s office. If you walk in there, you can look at all of them. I don’t know what I think about that change. It doesn’t completely remove most of the strategies with suggestions, but it certainly hurts them. I guess, perhaps, they wanted to give people a good reason to get out of the secret passages and walk around? I dunno.
The real big change, though, is this deck of evil things, called Dark Mark deck or something. Each player starts with 80 House Points (Or HP! Get it! Ha! Hilarious…ish.) and when you roll the dice to move, you also roll a dice that either tells you to move one of the secret passage things or draw a Dark Mark or Help card. The Help cards just sit around and negate some of the Dark Mark cards. The Dark Mark cards randomly take HP from random people. Some are extremely specific (Only female characters in one specific room) and some just dick over everyone. The point is, this makes it possible to die and fall out of the game. If you lose all your HP, you’ve lost the game. However, the game then makes you just sit there to reveal your cards for the rest of the game. Sure, you can do this by making a horrible accusation too quickly in the original Clue, but at least then it’s your own damn fault. It’s horrible game design to make a game where, through no action of their own, a person can just fall out of the game completely and no longer get to play. Hell, even Arkham Horror lets you restart with a new investigator or just go to the Hospital when you die. This mechanic is completely bullshit, and I’m not just saying that because I got knocked out on the third turn and just had to sit there (I still had fun. I played TapDefense on my iPod) though that does make the feeling a bit stronger, I suppose? But it doesn’t seem like I just got incredibly unlucky. It seems like this would happen regularly enough to quickly sour the game and make you turn back to regular Clue.

I mean, I dunno, I guess I’m turning into kind of a board game connoisseur or something. I do take my board games seriously. But I mean, I have nothing against the classics like Clue or Monopoly. That doesn’t mean they can’t have issues, and Harry Potter Clue… well, you have issues. Sorry. Just the truth.

So, we played another (short) session of Jonathan’s DnD campaign in the magical wonderland of Crystaengland on Sunday. It was exciting times, I suppose! There was only one serious combat, and that was against a big rock that Essner dealt like a million damage to in one turn. He was all gloating about it, and I’m like “Dude, you’re the damage dealer. You don’t see me gloating when I throw down some heals. Whoop dee doo, you did your job.” Yeah. That put him in his place. Yeah. Heh.

Anyway, it was fun as always. Jonathan gave us an NPC teammate for the next part of the quest, which… I dunno. We’re all being dicks. Having an NPC to be dicks to constantly… is that a good or a bad thing? WHO KNOWS. But he’s good at carrying gear, and he has a beautiful pompadour.

It’s amazing how dickish I can get, though. I’m always such a good guy when I play any kind of game like this, and yet, somehow, in this particular group of people, I’m the one suggesting we beat up old men to take their stuff and encouraging all kinds of stupid evil. It’s not a bad thing, but it’s certainly a change for me. I’m having a lot of fun with it, though… though I don’t think I could do it in different company. I can be a total ass around Essner, Spants, and my brother because they know me. Being that way around people I’m less familiar with? Probably won’t work.

In any case, we apparently are going to get in one more session before school starts up again (Fucking school… so close already! Bah.) so we’ll see how things go at the windy temple of windy wind or whatever it’s called. Maybe I can get a commemorative jerkin there, too.

So, after finally beating my two RPGs from 2008 that I wanted to tackle, I finally got to turn my attention to the unfortunately overlooked last episode of Strong Bad’s Cool Game For Attractive People, 8-bit is Enough.
It was a fitting end to the series. I suppose Telltale thought that putting Trogdor in the last episode would be enough fan service to really excite people and make for a strong end. I can certainly see why they’d think that, and it’s certainly fun, but this was far from the best of the 5 episodes. Dangeresque 3 had fan service coming out of its ass and was a stronger episode overall. If they wanted to end on their best note that, to me, would have seemed like a better way to do it. But eh, like I said, it worked and it was fun.

The ending especially, with the revival of Strong Bad’s original concept art, was a genius move to those who follow every bit of Homestar Runner stuff like myself. That was probably the part of this episode that I enjoyed the most. Other than that, though, I can’t really think of any points that particularly stood out as funny or outstanding. It was all competent and all entertaining, but it just was, you know? In comparison, I can think of many points in Dangeresque 3 that really rocked my face, like the car chase, and Strong Bad covering for various bloopers in the set…

Still, there is absolutely no reason you shouldn’t get and play ALL of the episodes if you’re a fan of Strong Bad. They’re just great, funny stuff. Hell, if you’re a fan of Sam and Max, you could probably enjoy these too. I probably said all that already. But yeah, Telltale continues to do episodic gaming right, and they will continue to get my money. Here’s hoping that Wallace & Gromit’s Grand Adventures comes out soon and is completely awesome, eh? It’s certainly the first IP Telltale has put with these episodic games that I had no real active knowledge of since the press release that they were making the game. Since then, of course, I went and watched Curse of the Wererabbit and it was pretty good, not to mention seemingly well-suited to Telltale’s gameplay style. So I can’t wait. Heh. Keep making awesome, Telltale!

So, I beat Fallout 3! Yay for me, I suppose! First, some general comments, then, I suppose, some ending spoilarz. Which I’ll have a line designating before them, so, you know, read on.

This was a damn good game. Brer can bitch about it all he wants (No RPG can ever make him happy, I’ve come to realize) but man, this was definitely one of the best if not the best RPG of 2008 (I hesitate because I love Persona 4 SO MUCH. But I think I’ve made that clear.) hands down, and the improvements over Oblivion were astronomical. For example, this game actually had characters with personalities that I found interesting, and I wanted to hear their stories. That’s a TON, TON better than the cookie-cutter fantasy world from Oblivion, where I was just in it for the dungeon crawling, and couldn’t care less about what people were telling me. On this, they did quite well, in my opinion.
Though not perfect, I also have to give props to their VATS system for keeping, sort of, the feel of the original Fallouts. Seeing the hit indicators all over just really makes me remember those old games, you know, and it’s a nice compromise between shooter and RPG. Although, if someone decided not to use VATS as much as I did, man, I don’t think they’d have nearly as good of a time. Fallout 3 without VATS has really shitty combat! I guess if they used Melee, they’d be okay? I dunno.

Still, though, it wasn’t perfect. I got lost. Nothing frustrates me in a game more than getting lost. The moment you have two different objectives on the HUD, you can no longer use your HUD to navigate, because both points look exactly the same on the little compass. It’s maddening. Also, having people move about and eat breakfast and go to bed and stuff is great for having a living world, but fucking frustrating when you’re trying to find someone to turn in a quest. Still, fast travel is a fucking godsend, and I’m so glad that’s there. I wouldn’t have gotten anywhere in the game without it, though I wish I could do it in locations, too. Having to walk to my house over and over again was kind of retarded. I should be able to teleport right in there.
Also, the game crashed several times. A rarity on a console. I didn’t enjoy that much either, though it never set me back very much at all.
Still, my problems were nothing that stopped me from loving the game, even though I do feel I was about done with it, even with leaving so many side quests undone. Good thing I finished up then, eh?

I’m going to talk about plot now, so…
HERE BE SPOILARZ! PROCEED BECAUSE YOU LOVE SPOILARZ.

Everyone hates the ending to this game, and now I see why. The decision you have to make makes NO SENSE if you have basically any of the people you can get in your party with you. And that’s complete and utter bullshit, I admit.
Brer explained it to me through cut and pasted stuff from Bethseda where they basically said “Party members were added AFTER the plot was done, and we could either fix the plot and cut party members or have cool party members, so we decided to have cool party members.” I mean, I can get behind that, but it’s just really frustrating when I kept coming up with like… seemingly simple solutions to their problem that would seem to take very little time to implement. Still, it only frustrated me for moments, and didn’t ruin the experience for me too much.
The other major plot thing that got to me is how much it depended on me giving a shit about my father. The game gives you SO many reasons to hate your dad, yet expects you to follow him desperately and do everything he says without question. I helped him out because, you know, quests, and also because I’m a nice guy and I do see the good about what he’s doing, but I wished very often for a “you are a complete dick, and I’m only helping you out because I want to help the people of the Wastelands” option.

Still, though. Still. Rough around the edges at parts, but still a damn, damn good game. I’m glad I played it. It was a lot of fun.

The question is, now what do I play? Hm.

So, Essner wanted to watch Hamlet 2. Now, I didn’t think the movie was going to be good. I mean, it never really seemed promising. It didn’t have anyone in it I really think could do the solid idea justice. But surely it would provide a few laughs, and maybe I’d be surprised and it would be good, right?

Oh.
My.
Fucking.
God.

I can’t remember the last time I watched a movie this horrible. The entire movie focused completely on B plots that went nowhere, had nothing to do with the premise, and weren’t the least bit interesting. Do I care that the main character is sterile? FUCK NO. Do I care that he has relationship problems? FUCK NO. The entire time you’re watching the movie, you are asking yourself, “Why the fuck is this scene here?” There is no answer to this.
All these pointless subplots could be saved if the movie would actually employ humor. There were two funny lines in the entire movie. TWO. The rest seemed to assume that naked men and the word “fuck” are funny. I mean, set up appropriately, both CAN be funny. But there was no setup. That’s all they did. Oh look, this character said the word “fuck” really loud. Hilarious.
So little of the film was about the play “Hamlet 2” which, I may remind you, is the funny idea the movie was supposedly based on. And when it does finally get to the point where we see the play, it’s nothing but a series of bad musical numbers. And not bad in a “oh god, that’s so bad! It’s hilarious!” but just… overwhelmingly mediocre. It sounds like a bunch of high school students with a big budget doing these scenes. It’s not funny, it’s high school theater with fucks.

What the fuck happened with this film? How could it go so completely wrong? How could nobody see how horrible an idea it was NOT to focus on the funny idea that the movie was about? How could nobody see that it was stupid NOT to add humor? Even bad humor would have been appreciated.
Essner described the movie as “a Disney Channel Made For TV Movie that has fucks for some reason.” That perfectly describes this film.

Ugh. I still can’t get the taste out of my mouth, even now…

So we finally got to give a go to Scene It! Box Office Smash. Just like the other game, it was a lot of fun. There’s nothing special about the movie trivia game, but hell, a good trivia game is always a good time, even if there’s absolutely no way Essner won’t win, because he’s the movie guy. I still always have fun.

The game has made a ton of improvements. The animations are significantly toned down and probably only hide loads now, which is a godsend. The announcer is slightly less annoying, but can be turned off in the options, which is also a godsend. The worst categories in the original have been reworked so they’re more playable. For example, Distortions in the original game were basically un-getable because they were cutting the picture into these little squares, and you just couldn’t guess early enough to get any points, even if you knew it. In this game, they’ve replaced it with a water ripple kind of effect, which still makes it difficult but also makes you able to guess it much earlier if you know the answer. The very worst category from the first game, however, was Sequentials, where you had to put movies in the order they were released. These questions are hard for even movie trivia fanatics. Thankfully, they’ve changed it to the point where it’s actually fun, by letting you take multiple guesses (You could only guess once in the original) and by slowly revealing some of the dates to help in guessing. It perhaps lowers the stakes a little bit, but it makes the category much more hectic (as, even if you don’t know it, you’re frantically trying to get in more guesses) and in general more fun. So yeah, all those improvements are welcome.

The game also uses the Xbox Avatars, a feature that… well, it’s a feature aimed at my mother, really, and since my mother is someone who will play this game and will be totally thrilled by seeing them in it, it’s a great move. They don’t really harm the game in any way. Your icon is just your Miivatar and when you’re getting your points in between rounds they make little happy faces or sad faces or whatever. It’s a positive addition, overall.

The one change we all agree was kind of negative about this game is the removal of point penalties. In the previous game, after round one, wrong answers lost you points. Since the amount of points the questions are worth tick down over time, it made guessing later on a very risky proposition. You had judge how confident you were in an answer before you buzzed in, because you could lose as many points as you could gain. That’s totally lost on this version, and I think that’s a shame. It’s a solid mechanic that keeps people from just jamming on buttons and gets them to try a little harder.

Still, there are so many improvements that I would have trouble recommending the original over this one. This is the one to get, if you want such trivia action, unless you, I dunno, desperately want more questions. Then go pick up the old one too. Or get both, whatever. It’s all fun.

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”

As of today, in Twilight Heroes, I am ranked 9th overall in PvP.

What the fuck.

You might recall there was a time where I was really into the PvP in Twilight Heroes. I still think it’s pretty awesome. But I haven’t really been worrying about it for a long while. I’ve just been doing a fight every now and then to keep me as a viable target. Somehow, this rocketed me up the ranks. Perhaps I was one of the few higher-ranked people who kept themselves targetable, and thus those who were trying to grind rank specifically for the board kept attacking me, and losing, and up my rank went? That’s just a theory, though. This came out of nowhere, and I might not have even noticed if Cris hadn’t pointed it out to me. Why did it happen? Must have been Hitsuzen, I suppose…

But seriously, wow. Just wow.

I’m not going to worry about staying on the board. I’m just going to keep doing what I do. If I stick around on there, awesome. But fun is my first priority. Constantly worrying about a leaderboard seems to be the exactly opposite of that. But man, there’s my name. And it’s not even about snowflakes or anything!

Wow.