The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

Two things happened yesterday. One was that the VERY NATURE OF THE UNIVERSE was changed as whatever governing body that governs things decided we needed a 13th Astrological Symbol due to how the earth rotates. I’m apparently a Pisces now, a sign governed by a picture of two fish doin’ it, apparently. What will become of me? Whatever will happen? And will people ever learn to pronounce Ophiuchus?
I dunno, twitter was going crazy about it.

Anyway, other than that, I drank a lot of water, which is oddly appropriate, seeing as I’m now drinking for two fish instead of one ram, and was really fairly sick, and expect to continue to be, to some extent. The water really helped a lot. I didn’t feel nearly as shitty as I did when I got up that morning thanks to the many glasses of water I downed. My body must have been like, “Oh thank god, proper hydration. I can’t believe I’m receiving a fluid that doesn’t contain caffeine.” Maybe it was so overjoyed it let me ignore my illness for the most part. I don’t know. I’m not a scientist.

And that was my day. The end. Yes, I really have very little to talk about. Besides, I guess, Fable III’s flaws. But I’ll get to that eventually, and overall, I am enjoying it, even though it’s not the masterpiece Fable II was.

Munchkin Quest does a lot of things that I am unsure of. It adds a lot of mechanics to the basic Munchkin play. One would hope this would make the game more strategic or more complete, but I’m really not sure it does. It requires more testing, but… hm…

First off, I’m kind of unsure what they were intending with how you build the board. Having rooms on both sides of the tiles makes it impossible to have a stack to draw from, and makes it really weird to decide which side to pick each time you draw a tile. The “connectors” also seem really odd. Many of them don’t seem to serve a purpose, and once again, they’re printed on both sides, making them more complicated to draw than is really necessary.

The dice rolls, too, really leave me pretty conflicted. Combat in Munchkin the card game goes pretty fast, and it’s normally pretty clear how things can be affected immediately. With these dice rolls, things are much more swingy, and I don’t feel like it’s really for good reason. Instead of other players fucking you over, it’s the dice most of the time. That’s not nearly as fun in something that’s supposed to be a game of backstabbing. It also makes your base level way less important than it is in normal Munchkin, besides as a counter towards victory. You’re more likely to kill your first monster through a lucky roll than actually being equipped for it, and monster boost cards are much less significant due to the dice rolls, even though they persist through multiple turns.

Finally, most of the wheeling and dealing of Munchkin is removed by the room layout. Since you can only support someone one room away, that means you can’t negotiate with everyone at the table for help against tough monsters. There’s normally only one person within range. You look to them, and they shrug, and then you go and die alone. It’s the player interaction that makes Munchkin a game worth playing, and this game removes a lot of that. You have much less incentive to fuck other players over or to work with them. It just doesn’t really click.

All of these are impressions based on our short learning game, of course. Maybe after figuring it out more, it’ll click more. As it is now, though, playing it kind of just made me want to play the card game. It’s more straightforward, and has way more chances for trash-talking. That’s always been the appeal, as far as I’m aware.

King of Fighters XII is pretty terrible.

It was never the sort of game I was going to buy, but I had it in my Gamefly list to give it a try. I enjoy King of Fighters. I was fairly decent at them at one time (Note: fairly decent means able to hold my own against semi-difficult computer opponents). It interested to see how they were attempting to update the franchise after Street Fighter IV was so fantastic.

I could only stomach about an hour of it. It was really bad.

I mean, okay, the graphics were pretty nice. There is that.
Okay, that’s all I got.

First off, how could you not have Mai? I mean, come on. It’s fucking MAI. Everyone’s favorite boob-bouncing hentai-bait. You have to have Mai for the creeps out there. Plus, I mean, I enjoy how Mai plays. That’s why she was one of my mains. I have no idea why she didn’t make the cut for this game’s roster.
Secondly, the menus are pretty godawful. I attempted to get into an online game, just to achievement whore, and the menus are pretty incomprehensible. Like, I joined a lobby, but that was like… the wait to join a lobby lobby? Then I joined one where I could actually play, but it was winner stays in and I couldn’t watch matches in progress. It was kind of a disaster.

The gameplay, too, just made me scratch my head. Granted, it has been awhile since I played a KoF, but oh my goodness, it just felt all wrong. None of the characters I knew felt right, and all the new characters I tried didn’t seem to do anything. I even turned on this “assist” mode that was supposed to make me throw out special moves all the time, but even this “easy” mode was so weird I couldn’t figure out how to use it well.

I guess it just goes to show what a fucking fantastic job they did with Street Fighter IV. That game immediately feels familiar, and yet is an evolution of the fighting game genre. It’s fantastic. It is everything King of Fighters XII is not. I sent that shit back the same day I got it.

“Where have you been?”
“Hiding.”
“Are you alright?”
“I’m fine. No worries.”

I’ve probably been having this conversation too much lately. At the same time, I want to hide and not come out until it’s safe. It probably will never be, but that’s really want I want. I mean, I want a lot of things.

Fuck, I don’t know.

In any case, I’m hiding from this blog today, too, but there’s some stuff to entertain you.
“Boost” Remo twittered this, and I do find it humorous, and maybe you will too.
The guys who brought you that awesome Mercenaries LP are doing one of Lost Planet 2, which is partcially responsible for getting me to play it some more, so give that a view, if you’d like.
Also, there’s this new Retsufrash which is a pretty amazing view, if that’s your sort of thing. I mean, it’s my sort of thing.

If you need me, I’ll be in bed, hiding.

I am very late to the party cause, you know, I just played Fruit Ninja.

I kinda get it, and I kind of don’t.

Half the time when I play these super popular app store games, I just fail to get it. There’s just not enough there for me, since I’m used to more intense gaming experiences. Cut the Rope is really the exception to that, but I was hoping for another one. I had heard people like Jeff Green saying fantastic things about Fruit Ninja, so in a moment of weakness I paid my dollar.

Basically, Fruit Ninja is an arcade score attack sort of game. Fruits and bombs flip up from the bottom of the screen, and you have to slash across them with your finger to cut the fruits. Miss 3 fruits, and you fail. Cut a bomb, and you fail.

And that’s it, really.

Granted, there are plenty of modes in the game, including a bombless timed score attack and an online multiplayer, which is pretty neat. There are lots of silly unlockables you get from cutting many of different types of fruit. But in the end, this is just not a game I could see myself getting addicted to unless I really had friends constantly competing with me for high scores. The game does its best to enable that, using Game Center and OpenFient to put friend leaderboards right into the game, but since I only had one or two people who had played the game, and weeks ago, it wasn’t really much of an appeal to me.

However, you do have to give the game credit. It is only a buck. I don’t feel cheated or anything, though perhaps the amount of variety is a bit low compared to something like, say, Hook Worlds. However, the game controls flawlessly. It is designed, from the ground up, for the touch screen. You feel in control and powerful as you play. The fruits cut apart in realistic ways based on how you slash. It does feel really good. They nailed that part. That’s probably why the game is so popular, and hey, it earned it. This is a game that anyone can get into. It just doesn’t go any deeper, like Cut the Rope does.

But everything can’t be Cut the Rope, I suppose. I’m glad I tried it, but yeah, I don’t know if I’m jumping for joy to suggest it or anything.

Because I enjoyed 999 so much, I was jonesing for more story-based games to play in bed after I utterly devoured it. It was then I remembered that I never did finish Professor Layton and the Unwound Future, so I polished that off.

Now, gameplaywise, there’s not much to say. It’s a Layton game. They did some smart things in this one, like adding “puzzle battles” to integrate puzzles more completely into the plot, which was a nice addition, but in the end, you’re walking around, getting some plot, and solving mostly unrelated brain teasers. That’s fine. It’s still fun.

The plot, though. Man.

Seriously, the robots in the first game were kind of cute, and made a sort of sense. It was neat. I was down with that. Then came the second game, where the explanation for a lot of the game was “EVERYONE IS COMPLETELY HIGH” which is a horrible explanation. Drugs simply do not work that way. Plus, it’s amazing how it doesn’t upset anyone to learn they’ve been high for hours, and hallucinating. No reaction. No “oh shit, what other horrible effects could this gas have?” Nope.

Anyway, I was expecting that kind of bullshit with this game too, and I got it. Really? A gigantic “movie set” the size of a lot of London underneath London? And nobody in it knows? Been there for a few weeks? I mean, seriously, someone must have walked far enough to see the edge of this cavern. Plus, the reason given for building this obscenely expensive place was not one that I bought in any way. The only way you can get scientists to work for you is to make them think they’re in the future? But again, I was prepared for that bullshit ending.

What I was not prepared for was them undoing their own bullshit ending and making its purpose even more stupid. At the end, they tell us that, hey, one of the characters actually HAS traveled in time. Time Travel is possible. All that stupid ridiculousness about building an underground city doesn’t matter that much, because hey, you can travel through time!
What the fuck.
The series is going so, so far out of its way to remove “supernatural” elements from its stories, even to the point of making these ridiculous explanations for what’s going on, and then they decide that, no, there really is time travel after they spent all that time telling us there isn’t for a really dumb reason. I just don’t understand it. The story would have worked if the time travel was real. Like, seriously, you’d need to change almost none of it. It’s all so stupid.

Again, I still love Layton. The games are fun to play. But blergh, that sort of thing really frustrates me. If you want more Layton fun, though, of course get Unwound Future. But man, that plot…

If you want to know what game has been devouring my life recently, the correct answer is 9 Hours, 9 Persons, 9 Doors.

The visual novel is just not a thing that really has caught on in the west. We want to blow things up and whatnot, not read a novel built into a video game. Still, the DS has created miracles, and I certainly enjoyed games like Hotel Dusk. Therefore, I gave this a try, and I’m really glad I did.

The basic concept behind this game is kind of Cube meets Myst meets Anime. You are controlling Junpei, a young man who finds himself trapped on a sinking ship, playing a game of life or death called the Nonary game. This game is based upon numerology and concepts such as number bases and digital roots. Each player has a bracelet with a number on it, and only certain combinations of bracelets can open the various doors on the ship, requiring co-operation in order to survive… but the way out is behind a door with a 9, and mathematically, all 9 players can’t go through that one single door…

Basically, the game is a sort of “choose your own adventure” novel. There are 7 different endings, and as you read the novel, and help Junpei make decisions, you get to see alternate realities of how the game turns out. The information you gain about your fellow players and the game itself can then be used to figure out the path that leads to the “true” ending, where everything is wrapped up. Along the way, you have to “seek a way out” in what the game calls escape sequences. These put you in a room full of static renders, sort of like Myst, and you have to solve puzzles, usually involving various number systems, in order to open the door in the room and move on.

I really loved this game. It’s clunky in a lot of ways, of course. You have to replay the game many times to get the full story, and while the game nicely lets you skip text you’ve seen before by holding down right on the D-pad, it doesn’t let you skip puzzle rooms you’ve solved before, making you resolve the same puzzles over and over, depending on what paths you’re trying. I solved this by having a walkthrough handy at all times, to help me resolve puzzles in a matter of minutes, but it’s sill not optimal if you were, say, trying to enjoy the game on a trip or something. It also often has the sort of issues Phoenix Wright sometimes has where you, the player, know the solution but Junpei does not, and therefore you have to make him figure it out instead of just solving the puzzle.

Still, the story in this game is pretty great. Although Junpei starts as generic Anime clueless protagonist, his character gets really well fleshed out as you play. At the same time, the other characters have personalities that are also revealed or hidden, depending on which path you go down. There are many mysteries in many of the endings on which characters are doing what, and what characters have motives to do certain things that lead you to bad endings. As such, you’re constantly questioning these characters, and trying to figure out how to pick a path where you keep potentially dangerous characters away from things that could compromise the game. Even better, all the red herrings and clues actually come together in a fairly sensible way. The game manages to wrap up just about everything in its ending, and not feel like it didn’t earn it. This is the most fantastic part, as far as I’m concerned. They could have easily just ignored some things in some of the “bad” playthroughs, but no. It’s all canon; even if some events didn’t really happen, the potential for them happening still existed in the world in the good ending, and that is excellent.

Few games leave me laying in bed, thinking about the possibilities of where the plot is going, and doing math to make sure there wasn’t any plot shenanigans going on. The only other game, off the top of my head, that I can think of that made me think so much was Silent Hill: Shattered Memories. As such, 999 was really a treat for me. I am so glad Nadia made a random Talking Time thread to bring it to my attention. I bought the game from Gamefly, because it was printed in very small quantities and it impressed me enough that I wanted it on my shelf. If you have the opportunity to play it, and are okay with a game that’s more reading than playing, do give it a try.

When I’m all depressed, sometimes I make silly little purchases. This is my excuse for buying a cheap copy of Lost Planet 2 for 360 off of Gamefly.

Now, you may be thinking, “Wait, you already played through that.” And you’re right. On PS3. Which means my save didn’t carry over. Which is fantastic.

Yeah, that’s mostly sarcastic. I dunno. But I did it to myself, so…

Still, I was in for a surprise when I booted it up at random today. For whatever reason I really felt like playing it, mostly due to the revelation that I could equip different weapons in the campaign. I beat the whole game without knowing your “multiplayer” weapon loadout affected the campaign. When I learned of this, I felt stupid, and wanted to see if it made the campaign feel more varied. I booted the game up and went to play with random online people.
And I found some.
I figured the only people playing the campaign at this point would be people doing high-level runs for loot because, I dunno, they really liked the game. But surprisingly, I found people to play the first couple missions with. Not a full group, of course, but I found random online dudes to play with. It was pretty fun! Mostly because people on the internet are way better at video games than me, so when I ran with them through the game on normal, they easily picked up my slack. Or maybe I just have a better knowledge of how the weird-ass game plays now that I’ve beat it once. Who knows.

Anyway, I have no idea if I’ll play through it all again, but I had some fun for one day, so that’s certainly something. And hey, if the Talking Time people whose conversation got me to pick it up ever get on, then that’s something else to do with my purchase, certainly.

The last two Transformers movies were completely and utterly terrible. Like, seriously. So bad. I feel like it must be hard for people who care about Transformers right now. They’ve got such shit carrying the name that they love.

At least they have a decent game in the form of War for Cybertron.

Now, I’ll admit I didn’t get very far in this. It makes some strange decisions. For example, I was almost always hurting for ammunition the entire time I played. Enemies don’t drop more ammo or weapons, so you only get them from boxes around the environment. However, the area I was in looked so samey all around, it was easy to miss these boxes, and then I’d have no ammo for the next encounter. It also doesn’t really give you any indication of what your powers and such do. Granted, that is kind of refreshing. It just says “Yo, there’s no tutorial, so read the in-game manual to learn about shit” when you start a new game. But it’s a shooter. Why would I read about how to play a shooter? Still, there was all kinds of “powers” in the different multiplayer classes that the playable characters fell into that I didn’t really get.

Also, I just don’t really give a shit about Transformers.

I mean, I wanted to try the game, just because I’ve heard nothing but positive stuff about this game. I was wondering if that was just being shocked that a Transformers game could be good, or if it genuinely was something worth playing no matter what. I found it was mostly the former. There’s nothing wrong with what I played. It’s a completely competent first person shooter with seemingly everyone voiced by Spike Spiegel. It’s got co-op through the campaign, so that’s always a good way to increase the fun factor. Supposedly the multiplayer isn’t shit either. But yeah, I don’t know. I’ve played so many mediocre 3rd person shooters, and I just wasn’t feeling it. It wasn’t drawing me in with any style, you know?

But man, Transformers fans are probably still playing this and loving it. And good for them!

I now have functional, working teeth.

Well, okay, I mean, they were working okay before. They just were overdue for maintenance. But now I did that, and now I’m cavity-free, and have functional teeth.

Huzzah.

I’m glad my parents helped me out with all this, and I am doing more to take care of my teeth now. Had been for awhile. Still, I had taken so long, and neglected everything about my personal upkeep for such a long time, and they were kind of completely shitty. They’re fixed, though. That’s a thing.

My own weakness and self-issues keep coming back to haunt me like that. Even if I say that I’m doing better, and I’m moving ahead, and things are happening, stuff like that still makes it clear how fucked up I am, to some extent. Hell, I should have been applying to colleges and shit over the past few weeks, but I couldn’t. I just couldn’t add another worry to my pile. There is way, way too much shit going on, at least internally. I needed to clear something off the pile before I try to add that to the list. But that’ll have consequences, you know? Who knows what will happen?

I’ll be fine, and I’ll survive, but, you know… it’s a thing, for better or worse.

I have been having nightmares about things not working out, to top it all off. Dreams of plans falling through. Things failing. Me failing. Again and again. I’ll wake up at 9 and force myself to sleep for a few more hours, but I’ll simply toss and turn and worry. Again and again.

Something has to give. Something has to improve…
Right?