The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

I really wanted to write some sort of “blog post” today, but while things were nice for awhile, at the end of my evening, things got real shitty. So here I am, at 3 AM, tired as fuck with no blog post to give to you. At the same time, if I don’t post something, I shall feel like a failure. This is that thing I will post.

So, yeah. Here’s an LP recommendation from me. I’ve been watching this playthrough of Demon’s Souls. You’ll recall the game is not for me. However, it’s still super interesting, and I’m enjoying watching someone who really knows what they’re doing run through it.

If you don’t read Deptford’s comic, you’re missing out on some real gems. Real non-inked gems. Yep.

I’m also probably way behind the curve on this, but I just started reading the Comics Curmudgeon earlier, and laughed my ass off. Clean off. Seriously. Had to reattach it.

Anyway, fuck work-related bullshit. I’m going to try to sleep. Tomorrow you’ll probably either have a blog post about a Magic Card Draft, or a Porn Game. Feel free to start casting your votes now. Sleep a lot.

I’m deeming Operation: Get More Sleep a failure.
It isn’t a failure because I wasn’t getting more sleep. I was. It’s a failure because it’s dramatically cut down on my work efficiency.

I find that, more and more, I only get work done in the mornings. Once the afternoon hours hit, I am either busy being social, or busy hiding, eating, and trying to eek out a little relaxation before a busy evening. I can’t make myself focus on work then. I’ve tried, with limited success, but it just doesn’t work for me.

Yesterday, I woke up early. Really early. And I graded a huge stack of papers, wrote a speech to give later that evening, set up an appointment with a name change lawyer, and had my appointment in St. Louis. Many of these were things I had been trying to get done all weekend, but felt stuck, depression-wise. But I knocked it all out this morning, and had time to talk with Cara about things, too.

Yes, I’m going to have to spend more mornings getting up early and knocking shit out if I’m going to succeed, get this thesis done, and so on.

Therefore, I declare Operation Get More Sleep a failure. Long Live Operation Neversleep!

And with that, ironically, I’m going to bed.

I’ve been playing a lot of Through the Ages. Not in like, physical form. Have you seen the prices for that thing? Also, there are so many pointless counter bits to keep track of, that I assume that actually playing the game would be an accounting nightmare. I still don’t understand all the systems that are running behind the scenes, and I’ve played several games now. Still, once you get the hang of it, it’s a rather fun game with a lot of strategy involved, and I rather enjoy it.

I’ve been playing it on this not very legit-looking website. The interface on the site is kind of awful, but it basically lets you play by e-mail rounds of this game with your friends, and once you figure out how to actually control the game, it works fairly well, when the site hasn’t crashed.

(Seriously, with all the questionable things in the way of me learning this game, I’m amazed I stuck with it and like it as much as I do.)

There are two great things about this game. The first is the wide variety of strategies. You can work on your tech, and out think your opponents. You can work on your military, and conquer your opponents. You can simply build up your culture, and out art your opponents. The best part is, though, that you can’t completely min/max. If you neglect your military, you will be stomped on. If you neglect your tech, you won’t be able to keep up with advances in the arts and military. If you neglect your arts, your people will be bored and displeased, and often revolt, riot, and things of that nature.

The second is the way that you draw cards. Every turn, based on things like what government you’re running, you have a certain number of moves. In front of all players is a bunch of cards dealt out. Each one is in either a one-point slot, a two-point slot, or a three-point slot. Taking a card costs as many moves as the point value. However, after each player’s turn, all cards move upward towards being cheaper, and you deal replacements on the bottom. This makes for amazing strategy. Do you take the card you want now, while it costs you multiple actions, or do you wait to get it for cheaper and hope your opponent doesn’t snag it? You can really plan ahead, and fuck up other players plans, with this setup, and I really like it.

Yeah, I’ve been having a really good time, and I certainly thank Stiv for forcing me into playing. It’s been great fun! In reality, though, I bet it’s less fun, because holy shit. There is so much bookkeeping in this game. But as an online play-by-electronic-mails thing, it’s pretty solid. I do recommend giving it a spin, if you can. Just be prepared for a huge learning curve.

Already took a day off for Depression (which Jonathan things is a game, because I capitalized it!) so fuck, taking a break here too. Here’s some links.

Best Let’s Play.

Shakespeare has some important advice, apparently. That’s nice of him.

Did you know that you can lose the tutorial battle of Final Fantasy Tactics? I sure as fuck didn’t, until I watched this video.

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHmuchmuchAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

ANALYSIS CUBE! ANALYSIS CUBE! ANALYSIS CUBE! ANALYSIS CUBE! ANALYSIS CUBE!

I’ll force myself out of my horrible state tomorrow. Have a good day, everybody.

I guess here is where I write about Dragon Age: Origins: Awakening: The Expansion to Dragon Age: Origins: Additional Colon.

I was shocked at how much I liked the original Dragon Age: Origins. I assumed it would be very standard fantasy fare, but Bioware brought some real characters to it, and I was pretty connected and involved in the story.

On top of previously mentioned stupid design decisions, Awakening totally failed to do any of that.

I mean, there was nothing offensive about Awakening or anything, but I was basically given a bunch of characters I didn’t know (I never really used Oghren in the main game) and not given time to get to know them. Unlike the characters in Origins, which were given time to break out of their cliche status, all my party members in Awakening stayed right in there. Flirty mage? Sure. Elf who hates humans? Why not. You just didn’t get any time to know these people. They were much more “roles to fill your party with” than characters.
The only one who stood out, simply because he was from the main game, was Oghren. Although, yes, he didn’t have much dialog in this either, you could see his depth even in what they had there. I had to admit, he was pretty awesome. Obviously comic relief, but pretty funny comic relief at times, and he has some depth to him. But again, he’s comic relief. There was nobody like Alistair, Leliana, or Morrigan to be both really seriously deep and really awesome.

The missions and combat were basically the same as before? Thankfully they didn’t do anything to really piss me off for “variety” like the fade puzzle bullshit from the main game. They added some more skills and stuff, including some options that made my Bow user less shitty, which I appreciated, but it didn’t really change my main strategy any. The boss at the end looked suitably bad-ass and boobful, of course, but fighting her wasn’t really a big deal. It was just a thing. (Granted, I was playing on easy… or so I assumed. I imported my save and it never asked, but that save was on easy, so…)
The most interesting parts of the whole thing just didn’t have enough time to work properly. Stealing the upgrade mechanic from Mass Effect 2 for Vigil’s Keep was a great idea, but I didn’t play the game long enough to think of it as “home,” so I didn’t give much of a shit if it got destroyed or not. Similarly, the plot points about stealing Grey Warden blood to give the Darkspawn free will could have been cool, but it just kind of gets thrown in there without much setup or payoff. It’s just a thing.

I don’t know. I’m pretty glad I didn’t buy this expansion. Playing through it wasn’t a bad experience, as I said, but it’s nothing at all like the awesome of the main game. I also don’t think there’s anything in this that anyone worried about not having the whole story for Dragon Age 2 will need to play, though I guess we’ll find out. Maybe the free Darkspawn thing will pay off in that game somehow? I have no idea. We’ll see what Shepar…. Hawk has to deal with when I get around to the game. The final word on Awakening, though? I’m unimpressed.

I buy many trivia games. Scene It!, Buzz!, I even bought that Trivial Pursuit game. I love playing trivia with my family and friends, and I have been trying to fill a trivia-shaped hole in my heart for awhile. This is because Jellyvision hasn’t been making You Don’t Know Jack games for awhile.

But now they made another one, and it reminded me why Jack is, hands down, one of the best gaming experiences you can have with your friends.

It is seriously like they haven’t been gone for all these years. The game immediately opens, just like the old games, and the game flows almost exactly the same as well. The best part is: all of it totally still works. All of the banter, all the jokes, all the fake commercials. They are all still completely hilarious, even today. Every episode is a finely crafted experience, and you get 73 of them at the budget price of 30 dollars, or 20 on the PC because there’s no online play.

How have you not bought this yet?

There are a few small changes, but I really think they are for the better. The new Jack adopts the now more-popular style of “everyone answers, and the faster you answer, the more the question is worth” format of most recent trivia games. This is great because it, of course, keeps people like Essner from completely dominating the game and lets everyone participate more. With no keyboard, the game also loses the Gibberish Questions, but lets face it: that wasn’t really the most fun category anyway. Dis or Dats and the Jack Attack are still in play, though.

On top of that, there are tons of new features. All the new question categories, like Cookie’s Fortune Cookie Fortunes with Cookie “Fortune Cookie” Masterson and It’s The Put The Choices Into Order Then Buzz In And See If You Are Right Question, are both hilarious and interesting in their execution.
By far the best addition, though, is the Wrong Answer Of The Game. Every game is “sponsored” by a fake sponsor, who has chosen one wrong answer to associate with a “fabulous” prize and $8000 dollars. These answers will be thematically related to the sponsor. It’s devious, really: a trivia game trains you to lock in your answer as fast as possible, but $8000 is a huge amount of money in this version of Jack, and can easily swing the game in your favor. You’re then forced into the tough choice of trying to pay more attention to the answers, and link them with the theme, or assume your opponents won’t find the Wrong Answer of the Game and just play normally. It’s shockingly strategic, actually, and by far the best “Holy shit!” memorable moments I’ve had while playing have been based around someone finding the Wrong Answer when everyone else missed it and the reaction that ensued.

This is as near a perfect trivia package as you could want. The game even supports the Scene It! buzzers, making it very parental-friendly as well! If you like trivia at all, and I do mean even the least little bit, you owe it to yourself to drop the 30 bucks on this game and pick it up. You will not be disappointed.

You Don’t Know Jack is so, so fucking amazing. Play it. Own it. Enjoy it. Do it now.

Lately, my life has been lead by terror.

It’s weird, though. I have so much like… actual stuff I could be scared about. I have actual shit going on in my life. Transitioning, graduating… all this shit is terrifying, potentially.

But I’m getting panic attacks about not formatting informal notes correctly, not being early enough to have enough time to sit around and be early, or a non-important radio message not going through on the radio that never works anyway.

It is beyond stupid and I hate myself for it. But these are like… well, okay, I’ve had worst “attacks” in the past, but I seriously have to stop and just breathe for a bit to calm down, and I’m left with this sense of dread over the stupidest things until they’re done. I had to ask how to STUFF ENVELOPES like three times today because I had to head off the feeling of slightly stuffing an envelope with a flyer wrong before it made me even more useless than I already am.

Best guess is that I’m projecting issues related to passing onto all manner of other things in my life. I certainly know that I was projecting my anxiety about my shopping trip today onto Cara, when it was just a thing we were going to do, as far as she was concerned. I’m sure this stuff is fairly similar. I’m worried about some bullshit like “letting people down” with what I’m doing, and that translates into panicking about letting them down in dumb ways which would never happen. That makes a level of sense.

But dammit. It is frustrating. Makes me want to just sleep for a few days, or stay inside. Bleh.

On the night of Valentine’s, I got a call from Essner asking me if I wanted to go to this release night Marvel Vs Capcom 3 tournament thing. I said yes, because, I dunno, it’s the sort of thing I said yes to, and my copy didn’t show up early. We went, then, to the Wal-Mart to play in this thing.

Of course, it looked, for a long time, that we were the only two people who were going to play. A Wal-Mart employee, and myself. Eventually they got the system set up, though, and Essner and I just started dicking around with the game. It was a ton of fun! Soon, another employee who got off of work who was a comic fan jumped in, so we had a three person “tournament” on our hands.

I started out really strong. There was awhile there when I was playing as Chris and was kind of unstoppable with him. I was also getting some pretty good hits in with Felicia as well, which surprised me. As the night went on and we stopped dicking around and started the “tournament” proper, though, I had lost my advantage. I didn’t know the moves, and when I am clueless on moves, but almost know them, and face people who are doing more button mashing? I lose every time, because I focus on trying to execute moves I don’t know. Of course, it also hurt that Essner knows just enough to supplement his button mashing with well-timed specials, making him hard to read.

Essner ended up using a lot of Dante and Iron Man, which served him well. Although I didn’t play as either, Dante seems both really good and really fun! He’s got a nice variety of very flashy attacks, and a bunch of different types of projectiles so that you never know exactly what he’s going to throw at you. Iron Man is Iron Man. Since none of us figured out how to super-jump, Unibeam was pretty godly. I couldn’t, say, cancel it with Chris’s gunfire. I knew I needed to super jump over it, but I couldn’t pull it off.

Other guy (I think I might have heard his name, but I don’t remember it) was a big Captain America fan, and actually got to be pretty damn solid with Cap by the end of the night. His play with the other characters (Deadpool and Spidey, mostly) couldn’t really cut it, though, especially not in the face of Essner’s well-timed beams and button mashes.

Anyway, it was decided that we’d all have two “lives” and the last one with a life left would win a free copy of the game. Once we started this tournament part, Essner didn’t lose once. I had a very close loss against him, if I recall, but basically he just steamrolled us all, and scored himself a free copy of the game. A game he wasn’t planning on buying, since all the play of it he’s going to do is probably going to happen at my house, and I already have the limited edition coming in the mail, but hey. That’s pretty cool, and it had a special cover art, so that’s nice.

After the tournament, the manager, who is not a gamer but recognized Ryu and Chun-Li and probably played Street Fighter back in the day, picked up the controller to play one match, and completely creamed Mr. Other Guy, laughing his ass off. Basically, the manager kept summoning in support characters, which we hadn’t really been doing the whole time we were playing, and the Other Guy had no idea what was happening and wasn’t blocking.

Anyway, it was a very interesting experience, and I got to dick around and see how badly they nerfed Tron early. (Seriously, the new command for her dash is going to take a LOT of getting used to, as it’s the key to Tron being any good and it’s much harder to pull off.) I also got this poster I hung up in my office. All in all, a fun time, and soon I’ll get to start working with MvC3 for reals, so that’ll be fantastic as well!

Essner decided we should go to Lambert’s for no reason, and I decided eh, why not? That meant we had a very long wait ahead of us, so I busted out an app I had grabbed for free awhile back: Movie Cat.

Basically, Movie Cat is a movie trivia game. You get 9 “lives,” which represent how many incorrect answers you can get. The different difficulties make you lose different amounts for a wrong answer. On medium, for example, you get one “grace” wrong answer before losing a life, though it does cost you points. The idea is to play all five rounds without losing all your lives, and score as high as possible. Fairly straightforward.

They’ve got a pretty solid mix of categories here. There are several standard trivia categories, like “Award-Winners” and “Chick Flicks,” but there are also categories like “Cat Chat,” which shows you a section of a script from a film, “Dressing Room,” which shows you cat-ized versions of costumes from a movie, and the one I thought was the most clever, “DVD Chapters,” where you have to guess what the movie is by the titles of the chapters on the DVD release. You have to complete 5 random questions to move on to the next round, but you have three “shuffles” per game, where you can draw different categories for that round, if you don’t like what’s up there.

Essner, the movie buff, seemed to think the questions were fairly easy. For me, though, who doesn’t have a mind like IMDB, I thought the questions were of a fairly good difficulty level, having both fairly easy questions and fairly hard ones. I have had trouble getting through all five rounds sometimes. Essner, of course, could breeze through them, no problem.

The only flaw I can find with this app is that it’s single player trivia. I find trivia to be a multiplayer event. That’s why I liked QRank so much: it made it multiplayer by having all your friend compete on the same set of questions. Even if you wanted to compare Movie Cat scores (you can upload your results to Facebook, if you’re that kind of person) you can’t compare them in a meaningful way, because the questions are always randomized. Still, if you like movie trivia on the go, this is by far the slickest and most complete product I’ve enjoyed on iOS. Of course, my only comparison has been the Cash Cab game, which is alright, I guess, but the interface is kind of shitty and it isn’t great. Movie Cat oozes polish. It has that going for it.

Would I pay $2 for it? I’m not sure. I don’t think I would play it a lot alone, which makes that 2 dollars something probably better spent on another iOS game or two. That’s completely personal, though. If you want a trivia experience on your iPhone, especially movie trivia, this is one of the best I’ve seen by far. It’s a quality product that I have certainly had some fun with.

It’s the day of St. Valin the Tined, so named because he had spikes all over him. Maybe.

Basically, Valentine’s isn’t a big deal for me this year. I mean, I would never put it up there as a “top” thing, but this year, especially not. Not only am I going to be busy the whole damn day, but the biggest thing I did to celebrate was to have a game bought for me, and buy a game in retaliation. That’ll show him to buy me a thoughtful gift!

But seriously, I may have a ton of shit on my plate. I may be stressed and worried as fuck, certainly. There is a lot of shit going on in my life!

But I still have love.

Brer, fuck, I love you so much. Shit sucks, but we are working it out. I know you’re working hard. I’m working hard. We’ll get in the same physical location, dammit.

Cris, goodness, I do love you, you know. Our relationship is something I know you tell me I worry about too much, which is completely fair. But it’s still awesome, right? Yeah. Still pretty awesome.

Kale, I love you. You’re very silly, but so very nice. I can’t talk to you without feeling the emotion there, you know? Don’t go anywhere.

Ecks, though we don’t get to see each other nearly enough, I love you, you know? You’re so wonderful. Our schedules will sync up again soon, I hope.

And man, those are only the people I have at least partially romantic feelings for. Awesome family. Awesome friends. So much love.

Enjoy your day of love, hm?