The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

Let’s just look at a little thing today. Unpleasant Horse.

Apparently Popcap made this little spinoff studio called 4th and Battery who exists just to be kind of a “make whatever you like and not be bound by the fact that we’re Popcap” kind of deal. Which sounds like a great idea to me. Popcap is obviously a genius company, but they’re kind of restricted by the fact that most of their hits are so casual. Plants vs Zombies was kind of a shock coming from them, as accessible as it was, as it’s definitely not a game that seems immediately pick-upable at a glance (though honestly, it kind of is). Giving some of those honestly really brilliant designers, artists, and such a bit more of a loose leash makes sense.

Their first release is a free iOS game called Unpleasant Horse, as I already mentioned. I honestly don’t know why it’s free. It doesn’t seem like there’s any way to make money from it built in. There are no ads or anything. I guess it’s just to get the 4th and Battery name out there? I don’t know. I’m not going to complain about a fun, free game, but they could have easily charged a buck for it and I certainly wouldn’t have complained.

Basically, you’re an unpleasant horse living in a world of “pritty ponies” who fly about a beautiful, cloud and bird filled sky. All this is floating over a ground of spinning sawblades, for some reason. Since you’re such a dick, your job is to leap around from cloud to cloud by tapping the screen. Ram into and kill a bird, and you get a feather, which you can use for an additional jump in the air without landing on something. You can stockpile a large number of these, I think up to eight. Jump onto a pony, and you ride the pony as it plummets down to the sawblades below, killing it in a spray of blood and bones. The longer you stand on the back of the pony, the more points you get, but if you don’t jump off fast enough, you’ll get caught in the sawblades too.

What brings it above is really the presentation. It’s sugary sweet, except the intense metal on the title screen, and the rather intense, though cartoony, gore in the game. The ponies neigh in great pain as the saws grind them up. It’s humorous to watch. Well, if you find a little black humor funny. It’s got that design polish that Popcap is all about, but it’s not Popcap-style stuff that’s being presented. Which is cool.

That’s basically it. You try for a high score until you mess up and land in the sawblades, with no feathers to let you jump away from danger. It’s a fine game for little short bursts, and has a nice risk/reward setup to it, where you can try to play it safe with how long you stay on the ponies and how brave the leaps you make are, or you can just try to play it safe and hope you don’t run out of easily accessible targets. It’s not going to last you forever, but I find many games of this sort, like your Tiny Wings and whatnot, to have similar amounts of replay time, and some people really, really, really play those all the time. I’m sure this can be the same way. And hell, this is free, as I said. Download it and give it a go.

Yesterday was a shitty day. There were some non-shitty bits, caused by the awesome people I have in my life, but mostly shitty ones. As I write this, it’s still going similarly. I’m frustrated and tired and unhappy, and I have to write a blog post.

Well then.

For all the crazy-ass stuff I am doing with my life, transitioning at all, I will have to say that I’ve never really felt like a freak. I can pinpoint two moments when I felt this way. The first was when I dressed in front of Natalie for the first time. That went really badly for both of us, and I cried for a long, long while.

Let’s just say the second thing happened today, when I was attempting to do research based on suggestions from my psychologist. I can’t remember a time I have felt more like a fake, a liar, and a failure than when I was looking for fake breasts to wear, and how to determine what kind of buy. The idea that I would be wearing that sort of thing every day, that I’d have to wake up in the morning and deal with that? That crushed me. Seriously crushed me. I’m trying to be myself, not trade one fake persona for another. That’s the whole point I’m spending all this money, and time, and effort. That’s why I am trying so damn hard at this. To be myself. Not some fake person. Me.
I could not imagine something that would make me feel more fake than that.

So I’m mad at the world. I’m mad at my psychologist for making no sense to me and actively putting me down instead of helping me. I’m mad that I’m in this stupid position where I have to prove I can be someone I’m not before they let me be the person I am. I’m mad at waiting. I’m mad at life, and I’m tired to waiting for it to start.

Fuck you, world. Fuck you, life. I’m done with this bullshit. Do you hear me? I am done with this bullshit. I’m me, and you can’t fucking stop me.

Coin Drop! is the other game Lobst suggested people should buy when she tweeted about NBA Jam. Again, dollar, random recommendation, and I immediately purchased it. A review I saw on Slide to Play compares the game to Peggle. I feel like this is unfair to Peggle. As random as Peggle is, it still feels like it uses a lot more skill than a normal board of Coin Drop! uses.
I say that, but Coin Drop! is still a ton of fun and does require some amount of thought to complete the levels with a high score. It’s just even more “press the button and hopefully pretty lights flash” than Peggle is.

Basically, you go through a series of stages. In these stages are various things: moving pegs, breakable blocks, bumpers, and so on. You have 20 coins to drop from the top of the screen. Bouncing off of things scores points, but you have to collect all 4 “bad coins” to complete the level and be able to move onto the next one. The faster you get those four, the more focus you can put on point-getting.

You can drop your coins from anywhere on the top of the screen. Things have to be timed for all the moving parts to bounce your coins around. However, you can drop up to 5 coins at a time, and I find that on many boards, you can simply drop 5 right there at the beginning and the chaos will hit most of what you’re aiming at without trying. Some levels will mix it up enough so that that strategy doesn’t work, and many levels, as you progress through the game, start adding gimmicks that require you to take a little more care in your shots. Eventually, for example, the game starts adding little pink lady coins that you have to break out and rescue for extra points. Saving them and collecting all the “bad” coins takes a lot more skill. Of course, the rescue is optional, and just for more points, but it’s a nice goal to make the game more complex if you want it.

There’s only one thing I don’t like about the game, and that’s the shaking. You can shake the iDevice to perform a “bump” on the virtual cabinet that you’re dropping coins into in order to use some extra skill in maneuvering the coins around. This is great in theory, but any movement just causes a generic “bump” motion to happen. Holding my iPad and shaking it, it feels really weird that the direction I am shaking the device doesn’t affect the way the coin bounces to the point that it really distracts me. Maybe that’s just a minor thing that only bothers me, though.

Still, this game is the perfect phone “waiting in line” game. It’s satisfying, takes mere moments to play a board, and is cheap. It also has a better sense of progression than something like Tiny Wings, because you’re making progress through a bunch of levels. You’re also unlocking a lot of new “skins” for your coins, so if you’d rather drop slices of lime or chocolate coins, you can do that too. There’s also a promise in the game of more free level updates, as so many iPhone games do, so that’s wonderful. If you’re the sort who enjoys a good time-waster, Coin Drop! is a good time-waster, and worth a look.

Let’s bang out some iOS game review thought things I’ve been putting off, hm?
We’ll start with Neuroshima Hex.

If you feel like you would ever play a hotseat multiplayer sort of strategy game, buy Neuroshima Hex.

Neuroshima Hex is a strategy game played on a hexagonal board made of hexes. It looks like a Settlers of Catan board, if you want to picture it. Players pick one of four armies, each with unique abilities and units. Play starts with each player placing their base on the board. This base starts with 20 HP, and by the end of the game (which occurs when only one player is left alive or one player reaches the end of his “deck” of tiles) whoever has the most HP is the winner. Pretty standard in that regard.

Players draw from their “deck” of tiles each turn. They draw until they have a hand of 3 tiles, and then discard down to two. They can then play as many tiles onto the board as they can fit, and use any abilities, such as free moves, that their units might have. When they’re done, they pass the turn to the next player. Tiles can be actions, like a tile that causes Battle to happen, soldiers, who are the ones doing the fighting, or “buff tiles,” which gives bonuses to soldiers touching them on certain sides. You can hold off on playing tiles in a turn, but you always must draw up to three and discard down to two at the beginning of your turn. Finally, if the board is ever completely full of tiles, or every player has taken their last turn, a battle occurs without playing a battle tile.

Units only attack in specific directions from their hexes, which are indicated by various triangles (short triangles for melee attacks, and long triangles for ranged). Each unit also has an initiative value which indicates in what turn they attack during battle. It counts down, so a soldier with a value of “3” attacks before one with a value of “2” and so on. This is super important, because you can use these numbers to take out pesky units before they attack. There are also many other special abilities, like having “armor” on certain sides which blocks ranged fire, or having extra HP. The game using an iconography for all of this that can take a little bit to get used to, but once you learn to translate it, it’s really easy to see what any unit does.

That’s the description. The game itself is a lot of fun. It’s basically constant trying to fuck your friends over by undoing their plans while pushing yours forward. It can be slightly confusing in games more than 2 people with passing the iDevice around to keep track of who did what, for revenge purposes, but other than that, the game works perfectly on the platform. It’s deep, it’s interesting, it’s fun. Plus, they promise online multiplayer down the line. That’s not a reason to buy it now, of course, but if that would push you over the edge, keep an eye on it.

Also of note is a separate game, called Neuroshima Hex Puzzle. This is basically a single player experience set up like a puzzle game. You’re given a pre-set board and have to win in one turn. It’s almost like a tutorial of sorts, and is really useful in learning the game and the strategies each army can employ. It’s unfortunate it isn’t part of the main game itself, but I’ve really enjoyed it, and I bought both of them during a sale where I grabbed them both for less than what Neuroshima Hex normally costs, so I’m not complaining.

Basically, this game passed the “friends” test. I forced my friends to play it, and I’ve had them request playing it again. That means it’s got something there, you know? If you like strategy board games, it is worth your time.

Pre-message: Cara, I am not making fun of you. I’m trying to think about the nature of game design and how I take it for granted. Using two sticks is super hard.

Anyway, the point is, Cara came over this evening and attempted to play Portal 2 while I watched. As a very gamer type watching a non-gamer try to navigate Portal 2, it really makes me wonder about the method that games use to teach and the assumptions games make.

It’s interesting to me that Cara never seemed to really catch on that the game was feeding her how to beat it piece by piece. You learn one skill, then use it in conjunction with another skill in the next test chamber, and so on and so forth. She’d see each new situation and feel completely lost, even though there was only one additional element. Towards the end of the long play session, she was starting to get it a bit more, though. I saw her looking at the rooms and attempting to point out things she thought were features. “Is that one of those walls that pop out?” Things like that.
It kind of made me realize how much I automatically break down a game space like that into its component parts. There’s cover, there’s objective, there’s this, there’s that. I have to make myself step back to look at the game world as a world to explore, otherwise I’m immediately breaking it down into the points of interaction that are important to my goals. It never occurred to me how important that is. Maybe Cara would have done better in the original Portal, where things were much more clear about “these are the parts of the puzzle” than Portal 2, which is constantly showing you really cool environments and broken down locales in the early game. She approaches them like someone would approach an actual room that they walked into, instead of just an obstacle to solve. I wonder if there’s a way to make a game show you that’s the idea, more than Portal. I don’t really know.

Similarly, Cara had absolutely no concept of where her character was in the physical space without being in third person. Granted, Portal 2 is not great at showing you this, as you’re bouncing all around through portals, but even when she wasn’t doing intense shenanigans like that, she was fairly lost and unable to figure out where she had come from and where she was going.
It reminds me of an article I read part of or heard about or something like that? I think it was on Radio Lab. Anyway, there was a tribe of people with perfect navigation. They could navigate anywhere, even if they were taken somewhere blindfolded, with no issues. It turns out they had sort of a special sense where they could see a space they were in from the top down in their head, almost like a mini-map, wherever they were, and that sort of thing could be taught and passed down.
I feel like this is another thing video games have taught me, or at least something similar. I do tend to get lost the first time I go somewhere, but once I’ve been somewhere, I know how to find my way back and to that spot again using the same path. Thinking about it, that really must be an effect of the millions of hours of silly games I’ve played. It’s also a skill that basically every single game uses, and maybe takes for granted in its players.

Of course, there are other issues, like how difficult using a dual joystick controller is. (I’ve mentioned that before, and it does take practice for the uninitiated. I’m doing the best I can to give advice, but man, there’s nothing much one can say about it. It’s just about developing muscle memory.) She also was so focused on the game and trying to not suck at it that she spent all her time apologizing to me (not like I minded! I just wanted her to experience the game, because it’s fantastic, and I know she wants to get better at such controls.) that she sometimes missed all the AMAZING HUMOR in the game, which was a shame. I started kind of telling her to stop when people started talking. She also really liked Wheatly. So he’s universal!

Anyway, this is the results of my “study” which was actually just spending a nice evening with a friend. But, you know, also interesting in a study perspective. Or something.

Science.

Here’s a lesson: if you ever want things to not change, never do mental math.
Basically, a little while ago, I did some mental math at how much I was spending on energy drinks in a month, just because I was wondering. I then went, “Well, shit,” and haven’t bought one since because, dammit, it was a significant amount I was spending on something not that good for me.

Of course, now, I am in the middle of caffeine withdrawal and I am not feeling great! Still, I have extra money to waste on completely different random crap, so that’s nice.

This reminded me of when I quit WoW. All I did was do a mental calculation on how much I had spent on the game and went, “Oh,” and immediately quit. When I got the whole cost laid out before me, it was easy to see that I was keeping myself from enjoying a variety of games at the cost of a game I only played off and on. It wasn’t that I wasn’t enjoying WoW, it was just that the opportunity cost was a bit high when I looked at it overall. Same with these energy drinks, I suppose.

I do wonder why I didn’t try to stop this sooner. It’s really a lot about habit. I got into the habit of buying an energy drink on the way to work every night. Besides feeling a bit sick right now, the worst part of deciding not to get them anymore was having to break my habit. I love habits, and it’s frustrating to break them. Still, it’s probably for the best. It’s just tough, as habits are my little reminders that everything is okay in life, and nothing is going wrong.
I just have to tell myself everything is alright, and nothing is going wrong, instead.

Everyone on Talking Time and such could not shut up about Spiral Knights. Everyone seemed to be getting into this new free-to-play game that they were describing as a mix of an MMO and Zelda. I was really iffy, but after hearing that you plug in a controller to your PC, and it just works like a controller should, I was more willing to give the game a try, and made a free account.

The game is really fun, and a great way to waste half an hour.

The MMO part of the equation is really kind of PSO in style. You run through randomly-generated Zelda-like dungeons, only with more combat and less puzzles. Sometimes you’ll have to find keys, or hidden buttons to press in order to continue on, but it’s mostly combat scenarios and loot. You fight monsters of various attack alignments and difficulties, and then move on to the next random floor via an elevator. Each time you ride the elevator to a new floor of monsters and loot, it costs you 10 energy. Now, you only have 100 “normal” energy. This refills over time when you’re not playing the game, but it can’t stockpile more than 100, kind of like turns in KoL. You can, however, buy a different kind of energy with real money (or people can buy this energy from people wanting to trade it for in-game currency) that has no cap on how much you can hold. You can also use this micro-transaction energy to buy in-game perks, like having more weapon slots. I would be willing to do something like that (I’d love to have four weapon slots) but the problem is that you can only buy the privilege of having that slot for 30 days, not a permanent unlock. Will I be playing this game 30 days from now? Questionable, and the unlock is seriously only about a dollar of this for-pay currency, but I don’t like paying real money for in-game perks that aren’t permanent, so I’ll likely do without.

The game is really casual, but with some depth to it. I don’t know all the depth, really, but since your character does not level, your ability is completely based on your gear. Fighting with gear lets it gain “heat” which is basically gear experience, and you level up your weapons and armor as you go. You also collect various crafting materials, and one of the big parts of the game I haven’t really gotten into yet seems to involve acquiring recipes and materials to create the best weapons and armor in the game. There also seems to be a way you can manipulate what sorts of random dungeon stages come up by feeding elevators different types of crystals, but I don’t really understand it.
Luckily, I don’t have to get into it if I don’t want to. The game is great about partying you with randoms if you want every step of the way, and since the game is completely co-operative with no real way for one person to screw over a party (Loot is automatically rolled for randomly and distributed. Everyone gets any money or heat picked up. There’s no friendly fire, really. The only way someone could be an ass is by not playing, but it’s really easy to kick someone from your party, or just break from who you’re with, “go solo,” and continue.) it’s been a genuinely fun experience with the random people in the game. While there’s some strategy involved, it’s nothing more intense than a normal top-down Zelda game, so you can just hack away and not worry about having perfect timing or whatever. It’s solid, mindless fun, and since you can only play about two delves into the dungeon before you run out of energy for the day, it takes awhile to get old. I’ve been playing for a few days now and I’m not feeling like I’ve seen all the game has to offer yet.

If you like dungeon crawls, and have a gamepad on your PC, you really should give Spiral Knights a try. It’s free, doesn’t hassle you constantly to give them money, and is a really good time. If I was younger, I could see myself getting really, really into this. As is, I’ll probably only play it off and on for a few more weeks, but still, at the cost of free, it’s totally a worthwhile experience.

Before the end of the semester, I have to submit a bunch more stories to magazines and stuff as part of my independent study thing. Now, one might think that I would be pumped or at least not really stressed by the idea of doing this, seeing as I just got a short story accepted somewhere and thus am obviously an author worth publishing, in theory. Really, the exact opposite is true. I am dreading it.

I feel like I’m in the unfortunate place of knowing too much, but not having the experience of knowing how to use it. I’ve been on the receiving end of creative submissions at the press. I’ve seen the mistakes and I’ve seen how I react to what people send in that is just not good or really stupidly formatted. I know how important it is to follow guidelines and do things the right way if I want to be taken seriously as a professional. Let’s face it, if there’s one thing I want to feel like when I send this stuff out there, it’s like a professional writer. That’s all one gets out of it. I don’t want to seem like an amateurish dolt, or someone so full of themselves that they are too annoying to publish. I want to do this shit right, if I’m going to do it.

What should be a fairly simple affair of slapping together a cover letter, changing the formatting on a word document, and sending stuff out becomes a really stressful event for me. I pour over the guidelines and quadruple check everything, and even then worry that I’m misunderstanding them. Is this piece right for here? Am I understanding what they want? I recheck the spelling on my cover letter over and over, wanting to make sure it doesn’t sound stupid. I get obsessed that there must be something I’m missing, something that’s going to reflect really poorly on me, and make me come across as someone who is wasting these fine people’s time. I don’t want to be a waste of time. Even if my stories aren’t the right stories for them, I want the whole transaction to be smooth, and fun. But to do that, everything needs to be right. I worry and worry and when I finally send it out it’s like I’m gasping for breath, recovering from terror.

Then I have to search for another magazine to submit to and start the process all over.

Yeah, not looking forward to getting that done. It’ll be good that I did, but goodness. I hope I can keep my worry under control. When it gets out, it really goes ballistic.

There are few one dollar iOS games I will not buy for a dollar with a recommendation. Lobst tweeted that NBA Jam was on sale over the Easter weekend, and so I immediately bought it. That is all it takes. iOS game makers, take note.

In any case, I’m not a sports fan or sports game fan, if you exclude golf games. I mean, I played NBA Jam back in the day. Didn’t everyone? And it was pretty fun, so I was willing to give the game another try for a dollar.

This new version is still fantastically fun. It’s ridiculous and unrealistic and that is exactly why it is enjoyable to play, even to people who don’t give a shit about sports like me. I mean, I assume a sports fan who likes crazy arcade action would like it. It has specific players, and sports teams, you know? So you can be your favorite. I just pick the team I feel is the silliest, but, you know, you could pick based on team allegiance. If you wanted. Or you can just pick the quick action option and the game will even pick the teams for you!

Even better, it controls extremely well. The virtual gamepad is fine. You can move around with no issue. What really works, though, are the virtual buttons. They smartly decided that the actions normally done with multiple simultaneous button presses would be done with slides. So if you want to turbo dunk, you hold down turbo, the just slide your finger up to the “shoot” button. To take a normal shot, you instead lift your finger and tap. This works flawlessly. It is a very smart adaptation to the interface and it plays very well.

The game doesn’t have all the features the console versions have, I don’t think. You can basically just play matches, and there is a very basic campaign mode where you take a team through beating every single team in the game. Still, for the sort of gaming you’d be having on an iPhone, that’s really all you need, and the base gameplay is intact and fun. It was totally worth a buck, and if you like Jam, this is a great version and worth your time.

Let me just describe a puzzle in Limbo to you right now. There is a rolling ladder, and a platform that is just out of reach of the rolling ladder. The ladder is on a little platform that is curved so when you move the ladder, it rolls back and forth until the momentum runs out. There is a switch you can pull to raise the platform enough to reach the platform you’re trying to go to, but it’s on the other side of the curved platform.
I glanced at this puzzle, and knew immediately how to solve it. Obviously I start the ladder rolling, flip the switch, jump onto the ladder, and let it roll to the other side so I can get to the platform. Simple.
I tried to do this for 10 minutes, failing again and again to get the timing right, before I said, “Fuck you, Limbo, I have better things to do than fight your stupid physics,” and sent it back to Gamefly.

I was really looking forward to the game. It got so much praise last year, and I do like puzzle platformers. There is plenty to potentially like about it. It certainly tries something interesting with its art style, and their completely wordless, just atmosphere storytelling style is done very well in places. However, the visuals get in the way of gameplay. Until I was told there were contrast settings, the art style made it impossible for me to see anything. Turning the brightness all the way up, it got a lot better, but it was still kind of iffy for no real reason. Similarly, the physics have that “indie game” feel where they function, but they obviously haven’t been playtested enough to be completely polished. You can do what you are needed to do with the controls, but not every time. That leads to many, many needless deaths and frustrations, and frankly, there’s nothing that can turn me off of a game more than when I know the solution in a puzzle-platformer, but can’t pull the moves off necessary to solve it.

If you enjoyed the game, awesome. However, it just really wasn’t for me, and I’m glad I rented the Limbo 3-Pack disc to try it instead of plunking down $15 on it. Indie game developers should keep doing their thing. I do what I can to support them when I can. But yeah, this… yeah. It’s just not an experience I really wanted to have.