The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

It was a Sunday in which I got little done. I mean, I had fun at a draft with everyone, even though there was a lot of confusion about the timing of it, but after that, it all went downhill. I had to work, but it was a short shift, so I didn’t get paid much. By the time I got home, my earlier fun basically felt really far away and just kind of felt like shit. I tried some gaming, but nothing appealed. I hadn’t seen Brer all day, because he’s been so sick he couldn’t even get out of bed. It’s good he was resting, but I was missing him. Conversations were going on in IRC, which I was trying to follow, but felt left out of for no actually sane reason. I knew then and now I was separated from the conversation simply because I was not joining in. It was getting later and later, and I felt like crap, emotionally more than anything.. I tweeted about it, got some nice support, but I was still alone and fucked up mood-wise.

Then out of nowhere, Ecks came online.

It was seriously like magic. Heh, apparently he had followed my twitter and I didn’t realize it was him. But seriously, just out of nowhere, he swept in, showed up, and distributed hugs liberally. I don’t get to talk to him near often enough, so I was glad to see him, and glad just to have someone there. We talked for awhile. It… it meant a lot.

I say this all the time, but fuck, I mean, what am I supposed to do, lie? I have some of the greatest people ever in my life.

Sure, by the time Ecks had calmed me down, it was like 3 AM, and then Molly decided I needed to get up at 8:30, so I’m kind of exhausted right now, but… well, it turned out pretty good. Pretty good indeed.

While working a floor shift at the Kohl’s, I stumbled upon a MYSTERY.

I was fixing all the bedding sets thrown around, when I saw a Big One bedding set with a playing card stuck to it. Upon closer inspection, it was actually inside the packaging. I opened the package and pulled out the Seven of Clubs. Looking on the back, I found a number scrawled in marker. Here is some evidence.

My initial reaction was that I had accidentally fallen into an adventure game. I talked to Kevin about the card, and he suggested I keep it on the down low, and that I’d probably have to solve the puzzle in order to leave after my shift. Twitter even chimed in with some good advice, but I couldn’t make anything useful.

I searched high and low for more cards all night, but I found nothing, unfortunately. They let me leave without having to solve the puzzle, so I survived in that respect.

Still, I wondered how that card got there. It would have taken effort to open the bedding set and stick that in there as it was. Who would have done it? Why? I then started wondering if I was the only person who would have put such significance on this silly card. Certainly someone else would have found it, shrugged, and thrown it away, but I was sure there was some reason for it. There had to be, right? I mean, 7 of Clubs? 19? Or maybe 61? Why would those just be there?

I tried to envision what would happen if I scattered such cards around local stores. Probably nothing. I doubt it would fill anyone else with a sense of wonder that would distract them for an entire shift. Then again, maybe it would. Maybe it would entertain many retail workers who would try to figure out the mystery. Maybe it would brighten their day a little. Or maybe the puzzle piece I hid would just be trash.

I guess, in the end, it doesn’t matter. I still have the card, and like so many random puzzle pieces I have found in the world, it’s placed in safety in my room, waiting for when I’ll need it to solve the puzzle. I pick up so many things like this, and I doubt I will stop. I’ll always be on the lookout for little objects that connect the world together in interesting ways. Always.

It seems difficult to top this review of Infinity Blade. In fact, I’d recommend you read it first. While not very “pro” on the game, it encapsulates the experience very nicely. So do check that out. Still, I’m going to give some of my own thoughts on it.

I think Infinity Blade is quite a fantastic little game. There are better games on iOS, but few have this level of polish and visual impressiveness, and it’s a fun little diversion besides.

The basic idea is that your father died at the hands of the God-King, and you have to go to his castle and avenge his death. By the end of your journey through the castle, SOMETHING has happened to you to end your journey, and years later, your son comes to the castle, ready to avenge the death of his father, only for some reason he has all the experience and gear his father had. Hm. In any case, as you saw in that review, the game is almost a time loop, of things happening over and over. That means there is little surprise to be had, perse, after the first few runthroughs of the game, but that doesn’t bother me too much. The main point of the game is mastering the mechanics.

The obvious goal of Infinity Blade was the developers trying to make Punch Out!! into an RPG. I think they did a pretty solid job of it. You have to watch your opponent to dodge and parry his attacks, and once you find an opening, you just start wailing on him, just like in Punch Out!!. You have a shield you can use to block attacks, but you only have so much “block energy,” and eventually you will run out if you don’t use dodges. It’s a nice little save for people not good at games, but since you can’t rely on it, I never leveled blocking up, and just focused on learning to dodge effectively. If you put a lot of points in it, though, and kept the “shield” spell around to refill your block energy, perhaps you could rely on it exclusively. I never did.
To mix things up, you have a magical ring, which you can use to cast gesture-based spells, and a “super stun” that will create an opening for you. Both of these recharge over time. Magic tends to recharge much faster, because you can put points into your Magic stat to make it regenerate moreso. They do a good job of making the more important spells have simple gestures, and the more risk/reward spells have more complicated ones. The powerful Light spell requires you to draw a star on the screen, while a simple fire spell just has you draw a circle. I never really felt like the game wasn’t recognizing my spell gestures (except, perhaps, once or twice with Shock, which required me to draw a lightning bolt) and the fact that they take time requires you to really think about whether or not you have enough time in your enemy’s pattern to get the spell off. It works really well.

Outside of battle, nothing much happens besides pretty cutscenes. You can look around the environment in the cutscenes to spot randomly scattered bags of money and health potions, which you can tap to grab, but that’s really about it. It looks impressive the first time you see it, and then you just kind of don’t pay much attention, looking for more money for gear.

What really keeps you going in the game is the leveling system. You have gear: a helmet, armor, sword, shield, and magic ring. Each of these gains EXP, just as you do. When you fill up the bar for these items, they are “mastered,” and you get a free skill point that you can put into HP, Strength, Blocking, or Magic. Leveling up gets you 2 points, so it’s to your benefit to be constantly cycling through equipment, mastering each one, in order to really get a lot of skill points and make yourself more powerful. If you’re a completionist, this game will drive you mad with trying to master each piece of gear, and they’ve been adding more gear through occasional updates.

In the end, the game isn’t the deepest thing in the world. Once you mastered the various types of enemies and their patterns (There are about 5 enemy “templates,” which lots of varying looks for them. One template may be a troll one time, and a clockwork golem the next, but the attack patterns are the same.) the game becomes a grind for stats, and once you’ve had your fill of that, you’re done with the game. Still, that gave me way more replay value than, say, the new Punch Out!! on Wii, and was just about as fun. I don’t know if it was worth the premium it debuted at, but at the 3 bucks I paid for it, I was very happy with my purchase. They even added a multiplayer mode I haven’t tried, and can’t imagine would be all that great, but at least they’re trying to make the game better. If you like Punch Out!! and swords at all, this really is a game you should try. It’s not the greatest thing I’ve ever played, and I would suggest many other iOS games before I would suggest Infinity Blade, but I had a lot of fun with it.

Dead Space 2 is a fantastic game that you should play.

I dragged my feet playing the original until 2 came out, when I started hearing so much about how great it was. The original demo for Dead Space had not really been my thing, but my experiences with RE5 got me to give it a shot. Once I got into it, and started enjoying the customization mechanics and so on, I really, really loved it. Of course I wanted to play the sequel, and I will admit, the sequel was better in pretty well every way. I would still play the original. It’s fun. But Dead Space 2 really refines things into a fantastic game that should not be missed.

The same focus on skill shots is there. They’ve even introduced a new enemy who really makes you focus on that even more: these goo-spitting dudes. When they hit you with their goo, you can’t run. You move super-slowly, so hitting limbs from a distance before you get surrounded becomes even more important, because you’re unable to get away if you miss. They really up the intensity, and the game uses them liberally, which I approve of.

There are new weapons, sure, but the Plasma Cutter remains the best pistol in gaming, or at least close to it. You really don’t need another weapon, and using the Plasma Cutter feels fantastic! They did nerf my go-to weapon of choice from the last game, the Ripper, by making it’s melee range significantly shorter, but it’s a better weapon for it. It makes the alt fire actually have some use, and makes the decision to use it a tough one: you can destroy enemies with it easily, but you have to get in close. It’s much more risk-reward, and is more fun for it. They also tried to make Kinesis more fun by letting you impale people with blade-limbs from monsters and poles strewn about the environment. I have never found throwing stuff in the environment around as a weapon fun, even in something like Half-Life 2, where it was novel, but I know some people do, so I’m sure they can have fun with that. Finally, they changed Stasis to something that recharges over time. It’s really slow in the beginning, but you can upgrade it, of course, and having it recharge makes it much more a part of combat. It also makes those stasis recharge items even more of a waste of space in your inventory, but what are you going to do.

What really struck me about this game is how it wants me to care about it’s characters. It wants me to suddenly care about the protagonist, Issac Clarke, who was just a silent nobody who was good at shooting things in the first game. It wants me to care about the people on the Titan station, and the fate of the world where some weird cult is making a ton of monsters. It really wants me to take this seriously, and I honestly find it laughable. I think my friends on the On the Stick podcast said it best when they said that Dead Space is a “video-game-ass video game.” There is no way this could be more of a video game than it is. The store system, the upgrades, all of these are clearly game systems, and make little actual sense if you tried to put it in a real-world context. Even less sense are the monsters. There’s no way any sort of twisted world would make something die faster by cutting limbs off than by shooting center mass. It is a very game-y premise. There’s nothing wrong with it being so game-y. It’s what makes it fun as fuck to play. But when you have all these things in the game, and then you’re also expecting me to take your characters seriously and be scared by the silly-looking monsters that I have butchered a million times before, well, that’s just silly. I know you have to have some sort of plot, but I don’t think Dead Space 2 went in the right direction with it. I mean, they’re obviously trying to be a “trans-media property” with their movies and comic books and shit, which is why their story came to the forefront. But it’s really silly.

Still, the story makes the environments in this game much more varied, and to great effect. Titan is a city, and as such has a bunch of really neat places to cut the limbs off of monsters in, and I approve of that. They even do some really good stuff near the end of the game that are callbacks to the first. Spoilers, you eventually end up on the Ishamura again, and the only real scares I had in the game was when Issac’s hallucinations made me, for a moment, relive some of the most tense moments from the first game. Good job, Visceral. That worked for you.

I didn’t play the multiplayer, because I have no idea why this game has multiplayer. But there is a ton of replay value in this game. Crazy difficulty modes, new game +, lots of unlockables… if you like replaying games, Dead Space 2 is for you. I don’t replay games, but I appreciate them putting that effort into putting those into the package. It’s neat. Game designers don’t do that shit anymore.

Yeah, Dead Space 2: Fantastic. Probably won’t be my game of the year, but it will probably be in my top 10, certainly. It’s a game purely based around fantastic, addictive mechanics, and does a much better job of keeping the flow going from scene to scene than the first game. This is something anyone who likes to shoot things should play.

Gamefly sent me a double-whammy: Two dead games! Dead Rising 2, and Dead Space 2. Dead Space 2 I’ll talk about later (Spoilers, it’s fucking fantastic) but today I’m going to talk about Dead Rising 2.

I played it for like… 2 hours, and I was done.

Now, first, I suppose I should talk about Dead Rising 2: Case Zero. I played through all that, and got every single achievement. I loved every minute of it. It was a small, constrained experience that let the game emphasize what’s fun about Dead Rising. It was pretty well the exact right length, and I’d urge pretty well anyone who wants to try Dead Rising just to pony up the five bucks for that instead.

I got into Dead Rising 2, and it was constantly talking at me about plot. Not that there wasn’t plot in Case Zero, but it was pretty minimal. Build a bike, get out of the town. It was straightforward. You could skip all the cutscenes and not be lost. Dead Rising 2 started with a weird sequence of you driving a bike around and killing zombies in a competition (I guess this is from the multiplayer competitive mode that is included for no reason) and then you have to run away from an arena, and find Zombrex, and do all kinds of bullshit before you can actually play. It’s frustrating, because all you want to do when you put the game in is go dick around in the new environment. On top of that, the story in Case Zero was simple. A man cares about his daughter, would like her not to die. You liked Chuck Greene in that scenario. This ridiculous “being set up by the media” crazy bullshit really doesn’t make you care about Chuck at all, and the fact that I murdered many, many non-zombies who were looting Fortune City, just like I was, really makes me feel like Chuck is a much less likable dude this time around. Basically, what I’m saying is, I don’t give a shit about the story.

However, the game is mostly story. There is plenty of dicking around to be done in Fortune City, but the game doesn’t really reward you for it. Things like not being able to collect all the silly outfit parts to play dress-up, or being able to store stuff you find for later, really stops any urges a player might have to explore and just see what’s out there. Even the Combo Cards, the things the game wants you to collect and use, are just impossible to actually make use of in a way that’s any fun. It was more forgivable in Case Zero. It was a smaller game, and you had smaller combo options. There are just a ton of them in the full game, though, but you always just use nails + bat over and over, because that’s what’s easily available every time you exit the safe room. The crazy stuff would be fun, but you can’t depend on it in any way.

All that said, for the bit of running around, dressing Chuck up in silly clothes, and fighting zombies, I enjoyed myself. However, after visiting a sex shop, I walked into a building and met a guy with a tiger. I just wanted to see what was in the building. Apparently, what was in there was instant death via a boss battle I didn’t want to be in. I had even managed to make a light saber, but that broke immediately, and then the tiger pounced on me and I was dead. I then thought about having to start over, and looked to the other envelope on my desk with Dead Space 2 in it, and my mind was made up for me. I sent it back.

I don’t know. There is a core to Dead Rising that is fantastic, but it’s just not coming together into a game I want to play. I don’t in any way want to do the cases or see the story, and it doesn’t really want me to mess around. It’s just not a fun thing. More power to people who managed to push through it, but I couldn’t do it. I had more fun games to work on.

Sometimes people go “Let’s go see a movie!” and then I go see a movie because being active socially is top of cool. Sometimes, though, the movie I go to see in these sorts of scenarios is not really the sort of film that I would see otherwise. Priest was that sort of film. When I told Essner that I went to see this movie, his first question was, “Well, it was at least better than Legion, right?” To which I responded, “Yeah, yeah, it was better than Legion.”

Let me just set the tone for this film. The movie starts, and you see a bunch of monk-looking dudes in a cave. One of them says: “This place feels like our grave.” That’s the first line. That’s what they open with. I knew immediately that I was not in for a great movie-viewing experience at that point.

The film is based on some sort of Manga, and the movie tries really hard to stay true to this manga nobody has ever heard of. (Well, okay, I never heard of it, and didn’t know anyone who had before the film came out.) Like, there’s constant back story, and constant desperate attempts to fill in who these characters are, instead of showing us who they are. In general, it’s not super important, because everyone is a pretty straightforward archetype with no real depth, but they really want you to know that this is, like, a world, you know? So they go for it anyway.

Basically, there are vampires, but these vampires are just like Hunters from Left 4 Dead only with no eyes and no hoodies. So they screech and leap about, and sunlight lights them on fire, I suppose. They’re also kind of sticky. There’s a main character, who is a Priest. Priest is future-world for Vampire Hunter. He’s bound by the church to not hunt vampires, but since he’s a vampire hunter, he’s going to anyway, and UH OH the church doesn’t like that! Also, someone has been turned into a Human Vampire. So that’s… a… thing…?

There’s a love side plot, and everyone is related for no reason, and there are action scenes. I will give the movie this: the action scenes were not bad. Some of them were super ridiculous (I must throw my throwing stars into the air and then kick them at the vampires, instead of just throwing them! This makes sense!) and the end battle against the villain was extremely unrewarding (they just kind of decided that, oh, shit, we’re out of ideas, everything explodes), but it was indeed and action movie with action scenes, which makes it way better than Legion, like I mentioned.

The main “theme” of the movie, which they repeat constantly, over and over, is that the power of the Priests don’t come from the church, but they come from God. Which is nice, I guess. It’s nice to have a “corrupt church” plot where the characters still keep their faith. The institution can be corrupt, but the deity can still exist and be nice. It’s a change of pace, at least. But seriously, it is crammed down your throat, and makes little sense since, honestly, the church plays such a little role in the film you could have cut it out completely and still had the whole movie make sense. It wasn’t really an important conflict.

Finally, I saw it in 3D. That was a waste. Movies, stop being in 3D. Stop it.

Anyway, there are some thoughts. I can’t really recommend the film, but the people I went to see it with really seemed to enjoy it, so I guess it’s doing something right. I just like my action to not take itself seriously, a la Shoot ‘Em Up, or have some genuine, actual impact and relevance to a plot. This really did neither, being ridiculous and taking itself way, way, way, way, way too seriously. So, yeah. Wouldn’t recommend it.

Some jackass writing something on the Fox News website really pissed me off today. A few people on twitter were talking about an article, so I click on it, as I often do on twitter, and I start skimming this thing. It’s about Chaz Bono. It’s really hateful, designed to insult and inflict pain. It is by a “doctor.” I guess I shall link it for posterity, though I don’t suggest actually reading it. I just pulled up the article to make sure the link was right and I immediately got frustrated again.

There’s nothing I can do about it, though. He’s a stupid, hate-filled fuck, but he has every right to write about this shit on the internet as I have to write this blog. Frankly, me being pissed at him is exactly what that guy wants. I am supposed to yell, and scream, and he will bathe in my anger and become stronger. That’s the entire point of the article, and the only reason it was written. There will always be idiots who write shit like this, and there will always be idiots who believe it. Trying to deal with those people is a losing battle, and not one I really want to get involved in. It’s not worth it. However, there is another danger to stuff like this, which is maybe more subtle.

Press like this makes it seem like this is the way the world actually is.

When I get mad at the article, I’m not really mad at this “doctor.” I mean, I am. Fuck that guy. But if it was just one guy being a dick, it wouldn’t bother me. What gets me is that I look at this article, and I see how many editors must have looked at this before it got put on a big professional website, and how many people are going to link to this article as a source for something else. I think of how many people will read that article and not be filled with rage or write it off as completely stupid. I think of all this, and I get angry at the world. I get angry at a world where there is so much hate for absolutely no reason. A world where we can’t move past stupid, inconsequential shit like this that keeps us apart and keeps us all from being happy.

I know the world is not like this. Every day I interact with fantastic people who would never be consumed with such hate for no reason. I’m in class with these people. I work with these people. I game with these people. I’ve never actually seen that kind of hate in real life. Maybe I’m just crazy lucky. In fact, I’m sure I am. But still, the majority of people are about love, not hate. They’re nice. They care. They don’t hurt people for stupid reasons like this. They’d rather not hurt people at all.

But every time I see an article like this, that knowledge that while there is certainly shit out there in the world, the majority of it is made of good… that knowledge is shaken a little bit every time something like this comes up. It always comes back. I haven’t lost faith in the world yet, and I really don’t think I ever will, as long as the people in my life keep being the awesome people in my life. But the fact that, even for a moment, it can be shaken is scary. I’m sure others aren’t as firm in this. Others could fall apart reading shit like this. It’s an attack on the idea of being happy in this world, and that is such bullshit.

There’s always a new thing to be mad at. I can’t spend my life being mad. That’s why I don’t seek this stuff out. A life of anger isn’t fun. I don’t want that. I don’t want to be a horrible douchebag like the author of that article. I believe in love, and I want to live with love, and make love to love, and all kinds of shit like that. I refuse to let any number of terrible articles or news reports stand in the way of that.

Let’s talk about a more “normal” app from me, I guess. You know, a game?

There’s been this game on all the top bought app lists called Burn the Rope (not to be confused with You Have To Burn The Rope, which is totally different) that is all the rage. As such, like just about anything, similar games start appearing. At least, I assume so. Because I’ve been playing Burn It All: Journey to the Sun, which has a lot of rope-burning, and I have to assume it’s similar. Is it a rip-off? I really have no idea. I want to say not, as this game seems to have been made by the same people who made the very nice Pix’n Love Rush, but it certainly seems similar just by looking at it. However, this one had the main difference of having a recommendation from a Talking Tyrant, so of course, I bought it! I’m glad I did, too. It’s pretty entertaining.

The main idea is that all flames are actually the children of the sun, obviously, because the sun is the biggest flame of all! So you are trying to guide the little flames upwards so they can go meet the sun. You do this by burning everything. The flame starts on a little volcano, and you drag the flame to what you want to burn. It then hops back to the volcano and recharges after setting the fire, which will slowly consume whatever you lit up. You attempt to set fires to do this as fast as possible, while dodging things like non-burnable stone, and water droplets which will make you have to recharge early. There’s a timer, and if you don’t burn it all in that time, you fail and have to restart. Do it really fast, and you get between one to three gems for that level, a sort of standard rating system for games on iOS these days (I think Angry Birds started that trend, but man, I don’t like Angry Birds, so I don’t even remember. It’s not a bad thing, though. I rarely care about high scores, so I rarely try, but I respect people who want to “ace” each level, and that’s a good way to entertain those people).

The game does a really good job of mixing it up as you go along. You start by controlling a standard “red” flame, but eventually you have levels with a “blue” flame who can light ropes on fire in the middle, instead of just at the end of them, and a “green” flame, who can pass through burnable objects and light multiple things on fire, but who recharges super slowly. These mechanics changes really seriously come at exactly the right time. I was getting bored of the simplistic red flame levels when they came along, and they do offer a lot of different scenarios while having the same basic pieces in play. Apparently, the game mixes it up even more in levels I haven’t gotten to yet, adding even more mechanics. It’s great the developers aren’t just grinding out levels, which you could probably do for this game with little issue, but instead is focused on making sure to maximize player fun.

The game also looks very pretty, too. The little flames are nicely animated and have character, and the fire effects look neat when they really didn’t have to. It’s also a universal app, but doesn’t look like they just stretched all the assets or whatever when playing on the iPad. I haven’t tried it on my Touch, but it seems much better suited to the iPad, too, because you have more precise control of where to drag the flame on the screen with more screen real estate, and some of the later levels can require really pinpoint movements to be really effective.

Really, the only problem I have with the game is something the developers can’t help all that much. All the time I’d quickly be moving my finger about to solve a level, and find out that my flame got caught on a rock early on in my crazy movements, and thus didn’t move how I wanted. This was really frustrating, especially since movement isn’t really confined to when your finger is on the flame. You can set the finger down wherever and drag it to move the flame about (I assume this is for the iPhone version). Thus, you miss one turn, but your flame doesn’t stop, but instead goes careening into something you didn’t want it to hit. There’s no good way to fix this without tactile feedback, which the game can’t give me, but that was really my main source of frustration with the game. It’s not a game-breaker, but it provided moments of less fun in the middle of my fun.

It’s a buck, and currently has like 100 levels or something like that. (I’m only through about 50, or so.) Of course, it also has the other iOS “More to come!” world icon after the ones that are there, but even if they don’t, this is plenty of fun game for a dollar. Well, at least to the level I value my dollars. If a fast-paced little maze game sounds like fun to you, do check it out.

Well, I kind of have to get all my papers graded and final grades turned in today, so, uh, no serious blog post. That’s the excuse I’m using. But don’t worry, I’ve got some links sitting around here somewhere.

I’m sure you’ve already seen it by this point, but you should really watch this Lonely Island video anyway. Still making me laugh.

This video, though less hilarious, still makes me grin. Sometimes this show is pretty great.

So there was this combo video that got me thinking about Bayonetta again. Then I learned that the director had done a let’s play of sorts that was being translated on Platinum Games’ website. It’s really interesting.

Contrary to popular belief, PSN is not down, and I have proof.

Art, made by nanomachines, surely.

This comic is completely factual, and surely will get you pumped for Mass Effect 3’s delay! Or something like that.

If you ever wondered how comics are made, this pulls back the veil.

Anyway, have a good day. More ridiculous blog bullshit tomorrow, surely.