The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

The tabs in Chrome are getting so small that I can’t even make out the little icons of the pages. That’s kind of crazy. Maybe I should leave some links for you here, so I can close some of these windows.

Do you like bananas? Do you like sculpture? Maybe these creepy sculptures would be up your alley, then.

If you answered yes to the second question, and not the first, than this might be more your style. The detail in this thing is kind of stupid.

If you’d like to attempt to explain why this picture of Applebloom cosplaying as JoJo exists, I would really like to hear it.

There’s no need, however, to explain the joy someone can receive by looking at Hulk Hogan’s face.

these are insane computer time’s we live in
wow.

I’m unsure why this wasn’t thought of sooner, really.

Computers in pop culture are amazing to compare.

Prepare for raddness.

Finally, Deptford continues to be hilarious with his comic. Do take a look.

Whew! I can see my tabs again! Thanks linkdump post! You saved the day again.

A long time ago, I fell in love with a little game called Digital: A Love Story. Sure, it was a little cheesy, but it was creative, and it had its heart in the exact right place. Catching up on Rock, Paper, Shotgun, I found out the person who made it had created another little art game, called don’t take it personally, babe, it just ain’t your story, and Brer’s like “Oh yeah, should I have told you about that?” and I gave him a dirty look over the internet. Of course he should have. I immediately downloaded it and played it.

It’s solid, but didn’t blow me away (IGN.com) like Digital did.

One of the things that Digital really got me with was how everything about the game drew you into the setting. It really felt like I was actually at a computer in the old days, dialing into BBSes and such. It was really cool in that regard.
don’t take it personally, however, is trying to be a Japanese visual novel, and pulling that off. There’s already a level of removal there, since your character is not you, like it is in Digital. This means that the storytelling leans much more heavily on the writing. Now, I’m not going to say the writing is bad, because it isn’t. It’s pretty good. But there are moments where a character could have been more complete, or where a couple more editing passes could have made a sequence more eventful, and you’re more aware of it than you are in Digital because all you have is the text before you. This is especially apparent in the conclusion, which comes off seeming a bit heavy-handed. It’s a shame.

Still, the game does some really interesting things. The main conceit is that you are a teacher who, essentially, has access to all of the Facebook conversations, public and private, of all your students. As you’re having conversations and talking, little alerts will pop up in the corner, telling you new posts have been made. Looking at these will let you in on the secrets of these students’ lives, as well as what they’re thinking, as they’re updating while you talk to other people in the room. It’s an interesting way to keep one perspective, but also give us insight into the brains of the other characters. It’s also a really huge conceit: I didn’t believe for a second these students would use a service with a security hole like that. This is addressed to some extent in the final scene, but again, it’s a bit heavy-handed and I didn’t really like it.

As Rock, Paper, Shotgun pointed out, though, the game does an amazing job of simulating what it’s like to interact with people today. You’re constantly jumping from the conversation in game to the messages on the Facebook clone and back to the conversation and, on top of that, jumping to talking with people online as well while you play, if you’re like me. In that regard, the game is a bit engaging in that you really do simulate what you’re actually doing as you do it. Of course, the problem is that Mr. Rook, the character you play as, is a character very much out of your control, so that fact tends to tug you out just as these mechanics are tugging you in.

The game asks you to make some tough decisions, such as having a relationship with a student and how to give relationship advice to the many couples asking for help. The whole point is that you know more than you can say, because you can see their private chats, and it becomes up to you whether you use that knowledge or not. It’s an interesting idea, and the game has several branching paths, depending on what you chose. However, I just wasn’t interested enough to go back and replay to see them. What I chose felt right, as opposed to being decisions I should have made otherwise. Maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe all the decisions feel that way. I’m not sure. Still, it’s nice there are some branching paths.

Before I wrap up, I do have to mention the art. The art is… really weird. There are static images of the characters when they’re talking, but there are also occasionally a drawn scene thrown in to highlight action. These drawn scenes feel like they’re in the uncanny valley. They’re so close to the art style of the characters, but also just enough off that they seem incredibly creepy. I’m not sure if it was on purpose or what, but it was sort of unsettling.

If you hate the idea of a visual novel, this game will do absolutely nothing to make you like the genre. Still, if you liked Digital, you’ll probably enjoy it. It’s solidly built and I had a good time playing through it. It isn’t the next big art game, but it is totally worth your time. Give it a chance.

After loving Bayonetta so much, I had to play more of what Platinum had to offer. They made me fall in love with a genre I didn’t give much of a shit about. What could they do with a genre I generally enjoy, that of the third person shooter?

Well, it wasn’t the revelation that Bayonetta was, but Vanquish is a really solid game, and certainly something anyone who enjoys gunshoots should look into.

You are Sam, a dude who works for DARPA. You have a badass robosuit. Russia has space lasered San Francisco, so you and a team of marines are sent in to stop the next Russian attack.
Blah blah, the story doesn’t matter. It’s not making you exclaim “what the fuck?” every two minutes like Bayonetta. It’s a pretty standard shooter plot.

In fact, the whole game looks pretty standard until you start to feel Platinum’s little touches. You don’t pick up guns, but instead have a crazy morphing gun that scans weapons to turn into them and looks obscenely badass doing it. Your melee attacks put full robosuit force to work, and you punch through enemies in a very satisfying way. Some cutscenes feature combat that reminds you that this game came from the same people as Bayonetta, with Sam spinning until he drills through the top of a tank, for instance.

The best part, though, is the rocket legs. By holding down the left bumper, Sam turns on thrusters in his legs, sending him sliding forward on his knees at a rapid pace. This lets you zip between cover points quickly, as well as cover ground to enemies to melee with no problem at all. The best part is that it looks obscenely badass. I would rocket around just to do it, and even at the end of the game, it made me feel extremely cool. This is exactly the sort of thing a mechanic should do.

The game had one interesting weapon, too. The lock-on laser was kind of neat. It was kind of a handheld mortar strike. You would paint enemies and it would fire rockets into the air, home in, and hit them. Most of the rest of the weapons were pretty standard though. I used an assault rifle the whole game, basically. There is a system to level weapons up, too, but since it just kind of happens automatically, it doesn’t feel all that cool, though appreciate it being there.

But all in all Vanquish was a lot of fun. It’s the perfect rental or bargain bin grab, and if you like challenge, it seems to have you covered with higher difficulties I am not into. I had a lot of fun, I’m very glad I played. If this is a “mediocre” Platinum game, well, it still came out better than most shitty third person shooters that hit the Xbox.

It’s a movie three-pack! A three pack of movies. Yeah. More movie blogs than you can shake a movie at! Or something!
Anyway.
After a fantastic dinner made by my sister-in-law, we all sat down to watch Percy Jackson and The Olympians: The Lightning Thief. Or Lighting Thief, if you trust what I originally typed, which really seems like it would be a less exciting movie.

There was a time where I was a young-type person and this movie would have been really fantastic. As someone who is, in theory, an adult, it just doesn’t have that cross-age appeal that something like, say, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic does. Yeah, I just went there, but I will qualify it. Friendship is Magic really goes out of its way to make sure everything lines up, makes sense, and that there are no big, gaping holes in what’s going on, even as it manages to have multiple side-by-side plots. Percy Jackson really broke down in spots, plot-wise. It may have been the translation from book to film, but those problems were there.

Example: Early on in the film, Percy is given a quest. He decides to say “fuck this quest and it’s time limit” and instead goes on a completely different quest to save his mom. Later on in the film, though, there is reference to being almost out of time. The time limit really had nothing to do with saving Percy’s mom, which is all that was being attempted at that point. In fact, the whole plot, which is supposedly the main one, of the Lightning Thief was all but abandoned at this point. However, they kind of forgot that they had abandoned it. It’s that kind of stuff that keeps this from being a really great adventure movie for kids.

Still, there was plenty of really cool action. They were well-CGed and generally a lot of fun, though they had occasional moments of “Why is the enemy falling for this?” For example, in the final, climactic battle of the film, there’s this moment where the bad guy spends a lot of time not shooting and instead going “Oh no, you’re doing something!” If he had just continued to fire, even if he had been distracted, it would have went fine for him. But oh well, it’s hard to choreograph a fight scene like that and have people understand what’s going on.

I really liked the fact that Percy Jackson was a hero, but he was put forward as being a hero because he was completely shitty at doing “normal people” things. He can’t read English, because his brain tries to translate any text as if it was ancient Greek (which is kind of a hilarious superpower) and he is constantly twitching about looking for foes to slay, so he can’t actually succeed at school. The very things that make him a great Greek hero make him useless in the modern world. It’s an interesting sort of character building concept. I mean, Harry Potter can still function in Muggle society, you know? I kind of doubt the books and any future movies, if they make them, will go anywhere with that idea, but I liked it.

Anyway, it seems like it would be a movie that you’d enjoy if you enjoyed the books. I was pretty okay with it, though I certainly wouldn’t watch it again and probably wouldn’t go out of my way to see a sequel. Still, it was nice hanging out with people times, anyway.

Somewhere, someone had an idea. “Let’s make a fantasy movie, but make it able to be as crude and crass as a standard comedy in order to make it really super funny.” This was a fantastic idea, with a lot of legs, and a lot of potential.

Then they made Your Highness, which wasn’t very good. It’s probably going to make it hard for someone to make something actually good off of this fine premise. It sucks, but what are you going to do?

The movie had two main problems. One, probably the smaller of the two, was that it couldn’t decide if it was a parody or not. Sometimes the dialog is playing the world very straight. It’s a fantasy world, but people have a more normal sense of what’s vulgar and how to talk. Other times, it’s trying to be a fantasy parody, trying to mimic generic fantasy speech. Although I sure as hell don’t want to watch a parody, if they had stuck with that dialog, it would have made sense. However, it constantly jumps about. One scene will be in a fairly common type of speech, and then it’ll jump to the next, where language will be heightened for no reason in a kind of parody format. It’s unfortunate.

The second, and really the main issue, was that it suffered from a problem I call the South Park Problem. There are scenes, lines, and moments in this movie that are hilarious. Many of them are in the trailer. However, when those hilarious moments are not going on, the movie is really, really painful, insulting, and stupid. South Park is like this. Good episodes of South Park are amazing. Bad episodes of South Park injure you when trying to view them. The good thing about South Park, though, is that normally it is an all or nothing affair. Either the episode is terrible, or it is amazing. This movie, however, goes back and forth constantly, and unfortunately, there’s more bad than good. The funny parts were not really worth the cost.

Seriously, there is some groundwork for a great film here. There’s actually some real world-building going on, and some interesting stuff that they did to make their fantasy world seem unique, as Essner rightly pointed out as we drove home from the film. Everything else about it just isn’t worth it. Go watch a more different film! I bet there’s one out there that’s funnier. Or hell, just rewatch Anchorman. That’s this style of comedy at its finest.

I suppose since, in a few hours, I am going to watch a movie, I should probably get around to writing down my thoughts of the last movie I saw. That movie was Source Code.

Mr. Gyllenhaal is an army man but also a history teacher and he is on a magic computer train that explodes over and over. You get to watch him fail over and over in a series of wacky exploits. Okay, well, not really wacky. But exploits, certainly.
See, by recreating the last 8 minutes of time before a bomb on a train blew up from the memories of people who have exploded (work with me here) a secret government project can perfectly replay what happened, and even have it magically change completely and still function in a way they consider “true” to reality. Jake Gyllenhaal becomes the man on the train he has the best sync with, and relives these minutes over and over to attempt to gain information about the guy who blew the train up.
That’s the premise.

It’s one of those kind of movies that kind of falls apart if you try to actually think about the science handwaving the movie is doing. However, the characterization in the film is pretty nice. Gyllenhaal was reacting in very realistic ways to the really weird situation he was put in, and was certainly being a hero. The movie handwaves SUPER EXTRA HARD at the end to give him a happy ending, and though it breaks down the moment you leave the theater and think about how it ended, it feels like his character has earned it, so it doesn’t really bother during viewing.
Other than the ending, the only thing I really felt was a promise was the romance between Gyllenhaal’s character and his love interest. For one, love interest is reset every time the timeline restarts, so there’s already a bit of a problem there with building them up. However, a lot of the feelings for this woman seem to be built during a part of the movie where there’s a serious montage that indicated that a lot of shit is going down. This time frame is a very unspecified length of time, and I can totally see it being long enough for feelings to form. However, as an audience member, I don’t really get to see that. I’m kind of told that those feelings are appearing, not shown. It’s unfortunate, as what is there between the two of them is fairly solid.

Those are really the only potential problems. I talk about them because the rest is solid, though not in your face. Nothing jumps out as “OMG THE BEST PART” but all of it was fun. The movie starts strong, and runs right on through in a very enjoyable manner. Unless you are super annoyed by the magic in a setting not being explained sensibly, it’s a fine time at the theater. It just runs on by, and you sit there, mesmerized and enjoying it. This is by the guy who did Moon, which is apparently the Cat’s Pajamas, though I have not seen it, but he certainly seems like a solid piece of work to have made this. Source Code isn’t the perfect movie, but it is a really fun movie, and it is worth seeing.

Running games like Canabalt just work good on iOS. The interaction can be simple, because the character will move with no input, and it’s great for little pick up and play sessions. However, unless you have a Hook Champ, they tend to be just that. Just a little something you do for a little while, and then put down.

Mirror’s Edge manages to keep from being that, and be a pretty solid game, one I probably had more fun with than with the full-blown console version.

Faith is a lady who has to run about. You do this with a set of fairly logical and completely functional gestures on the touch screen. Swipe left or right to change direction, swipe up to jump, swipe down to slide. Simple. You can do a few more “complex” moves, but it’s mostly just about doing that at the right time. Not having buttons on the screen works really well, and I never had trouble getting it to recognize a swipe when I did it. The only problem I had was being very confused about how to pause at first. (It’s swiping two fingers up.) Other than that, it’s a really solid control scheme.
Obstacles are colored red with “Runner’s Vision” like in the console game, but unlike in the console game, because this game is 2D, Runner’s Vision is actually useful. It lets them make the backgrounds a bit more interesting than they would be able to otherwise, because you can always tell what’s something you will have to deal with as you approach it. Sure, following that path will keep you from getting all the collectible bags on each level, but at least you always know how to get to the finish line. I appreciate always knowing how to proceed.

Levels slowly ramp up in difficulty, but don’t vary too too much. Eventually they will start throwing gunners and other obstacles that could kill Faith, but the basic gameplay doesn’t really change up. It played almost like a very relaxing Super Quick Hook. Though you’re encouraged to go fast, rarely do you feel rushed and against the clock. Succeeding requires a level of precision, but nothing near the level of skill required to successfully grapplehook. It hits a nice point, and I really enjoyed it. It’s a game worth playing.
Of course, the game ends weakly with a stupid “boss battle.” There’s another dude running around the screen, and you have to trip him three times. However, he’s just as fast as Faith and annoying as fuck to actually catch. That sequence was no fun, and then it just kind of unceremoniously said “you win” and dumped me back to the menu. It was kind of a letdown, but so it goes. Didn’t make the rest of the game less fun.

I do feel like I have to mention the price, though. I bought this on a sale for a buck, but it’s normally ten dollars. This really isn’t a ten dollar game by any stretch. It’s a bargain at a dollar, and is worth more, but if you compare it to an XBLA game or indie game on Steam, which is what it’s competing with, you are not getting enough game for that. I can’t really suggest it at full price, but it’s the app store. It’ll go on sale again. When it does, do consider it. It is one of the flashier action games I’ve played on iOS, and is a solid amount of fun while it lasts.

I. Love. Space Channel 5. If you have any doubt, I offer this image of furry me cosplaying as Ulala as proof. So yeah, love the game.

Sega has recently put out an incredibly shitty Dreamcast collection. Seriously, of the four Dreamcast games they could have picked, they picked Sonic Adventure, Crazy Taxi, Space Channel 5 Part 2, and Sega Motherfucking Bass Fishing. What the hell? So, so many great Dreamcast games, and that’s what they chose. That’s not what I’m complaining about, though.

I rented this collection because it gave me an excuse to play Space Channel 5 Part 2 again. I own it on PS2, but I recently tried to play it, and the spiffy HDTV made the timing go a bit off, which I hoped this collection would fix. I had also heard there were Xbox avatar awards in the game. Now, I’m not going to spend money on avatar stuff, but I do think they make amazing awards. As someone who has played this game a million times, I figured I’d be able to pass whatever challenge they were tied to, and get some cool something or other. I mean, one of them might be an Ulala outfit, which would be fantastic.

Well, I played through the first run-through of the game the moment I got it. It took me about an hour and a half. I haven’t played the second “Extra” playthrough yet, but it’ll probably take me about as long. I played a little Ulala’s dance mode. Then I went to check how to unlock the avatar awards.

Unlocking the Ulala costume requires you to play this game for 10 hours. That’s it. No skill, no nothing, just 10 hours of play. These aren’t hours in the menu. These are hours when the game is actually running. A game that takes less than 2 hours to beat. A game that won’t run unless you are hitting the buttons and not failing.

What the fuck.

Now, I’ve logged TONS of hours into Space Channel 5 and it’s sequel. Seriously, I can’t count the number of times I’ve beaten the first game. I probably put at least 30 hours into that silly game, and it has a length similar to Part 2. I beat Part 2 tons of times as well. Even I think this requirement is insane.

Space Channel 5 is a success because of its incredible passion. It loves it’s stupid world, and shows it. You can tell every inch of the game was crafted with vision. The result isn’t great, perse. There are much better music games out there. But Space Channel 5 just does what it does with so much style, you can’t help but smile at it. But it was never about having a lot of gameplay. Certainly not 10 hours worth.

All the games on the collection apparently have similar rewards. These times maybe make more sense with Sonic Adventure and, I guess, the Bass Fishing, if you are one to actually play a fishing game. They make no sense for Crazy Taxi either. It’s obvious that these requirements were just thrown together by some intern because people were too lazy to make actual requirements. If they were going to just turn in something, I wish they would have made it attainable.

I am gaming the system to get my Ulala costume. Stage 2 will run for 15 minutes without you having to hit a button, and I’m letting Ulala fail that report over and over to run up my time. I’m not proud, but I am doing it. That doesn’t make this little achievement okay. It’s not. It’s kind of bullshit. It’s bad game design. It’s punishing fans who likely have played the game to death before this collection and are most likely to want this little reward.

Or at least it’s annoying me. And let’s face it, it’s my blog, that’s all you have to do to get me to complain about it.

My mood has really been up and down recently. I’ll have a fantastic week, then a week when I’ll feel like garbage, then a week where I’m kind of just tired, and then one where I go back and forth constantly… I do my best to keep my shit together.

Still, I have some feel good stories to share about how awesome people in my life are, so I think I will.

Story one is a theoretical. Let’s say I still worked at… you know what? Fuck that bullshit. I do work at Kohl’s. At this point, they aren’t going to cut me loose and try to replace me on my class with 6 weeks left. Yes, I still work at Kohl’s. Anyway, the other day, I found out that I have become the Superstar for the month of March. (Superstar is like Employee of the Month, only there’s two of them a month, because why not.) This is voted on by everyone at the store. However, my ad set team has created a voting block, because why not? They tend to pick someone they feel deserves it every month and get them one of the Superstar slots. I normally don’t involve myself with it because, I dunno. I’m just enough management to feel like I’d be manipulating their votes, and they tend to discuss it while I’m working on other things anyway. The point is, I had no idea this was happening beforehand, and I knew the voting block of my team had decided to give it to me.
So, of course, I thank everybody for voting me Superstar during our break. Everyone is all awesome and supportive. Jane especially speaks up, and she says, “We did that back on that night when you were really down. Well, I mean, that’s not the only reason, you deserve it, but we wanted you to know we appreciate you.”
It kind of knocked me over.
Normally, when I get to work and feel a little shitty, the routine of work tends to draw me out of it, or at least let me ignore it for awhile. There was a night in early March, though, where I was just feeling completely defeated and terrible, and basically apologized for being low energy. I could tell everyone was worried about me, but that they’d go out of their way this much… that meant something. It’s great to know I have such great friends at work.

Of course, I have them at home, too. Story two. I was at work, and worrying like crazy about talking to my parents more about transitioning. I’m about to start the name change process with a court hearing next week. It’ll be a little before it officially takes effect, but it’ll be rolling. Things will be happening. I’m really worried about telling them that it’s hitting, since so much other stuff has been going on. I was driving myself crazy, and Brer was being Brer (meaning supportive, but his viewpoint is extremely biased at this point so when I’m really out of it, I have trouble taking what he says on this kind of thing seriously). I randomly texted my brother about this stuff.
His immediate response was if him and Shauna could be there for me at the court thing to support me. I didn’t even explain it well, likely, so he didn’t know all the details, but he wanted to be there for me. Shauna did too. I texted her a thank you, since Jonathan was speaking for both of them and I appreciated her support too, and she made it clear, like Jonathan, that they are fully behind me. Heh, I got so focused on the family members who might be an issue that I forgot about everyone who’s right there with me already. I tend to do that. It’s nice to be smacked around and reminded.

I know some pretty great people. I really shouldn’t let my stupidity make me forget that.

I love Telltale. This is not hidden knowledge. Way back in the day, when they announced Nelson Tethers, Puzzle Agent, I was super excited. I love me some Layton, and nobody had really tried to do Layton. It seemed like a great idea. A long time later, after buying a copy on the iPhone and the PC, I finally played through it on my iPad. I love giving Telltale money, but I have to say that I’m glad I only paid like 2 or 3 bucks total on this game.

Tethers is a likable character, to be sure. He’s just as much of a loser as an FBI agent who focuses in puzzle solving should be. The world of Scoggins, while small, is also weird and interesting. There’s some intrigue, and some silliness. The plot is, certainly, something like what I expected, and has the charm I expect from a Telltale game. Sure, it ends randomly on a cliffhanger, but it did it in a way I bought. Tethers is a guy who solves puzzles. He doesn’t get to be the hero. I am fine with that.

The puzzles, however, are another story.

Telltale has never had the strongest puzzles, but in most of their adventure games, I am okay with that. They have the funny dialog and situations to carry the action forward, and there’s only so much puzzling you can do without breaking believability, even in a wacky cartoon kind of scenario like a Sam and Max episode. However, Layton solved this problem by having the puzzles almost completely separate from the story, and therefore able go be whatever brain teasers they could come up with. Puzzle Agent could have done this as well, but completely fails at it. The vast majority of the puzzles are actual jigsaw puzzles or grids of tiles you have to spin into a particular organization. These are extremely trial and error. The jigsaw puzzles will stick permanently together when you make a correct match, rewarding you for sliding pieces about at random until they click together by luck. The rotating piece puzzles use art that only matches up if it’s rotated correctly. Incorrect paths never seem remotely right. You just rotate until the art looks okay.
On top of all this, what good puzzles they have they reuse with small tweaks. This works in Layton, where you have close to 200 puzzles in the game, and thus a series of three puzzles of increasing difficulty doesn’t bother one much, but Puzzle Agent only has maybe, what 25? 30? It’s not enough to handle that repetition.

I was a bit disappointed, yes. Hopefully the announced sequel will be better. It’s still a fantastic idea and Telltale is still a great company. It just wasn’t yet ready for prime time.