The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

Awhile back, I had tooth problems, as you could recall. Recently, I’ve started noticing an effect these problems had on me.

I stopped biting my nails.

For the first time in my life, I have fingernails. Well, on some fingers. Some not so much, since they were seriously bitten down that seriously. But I have some fingernails!

It’s really kind of fucking me up.

One would think that it would mostly be benefit. “Hey, I can pick up coins from the ground now!” and so on. But I’m not really finding it to be the case. I have years, literally a lifetime’s worth of muscle memory of how to do things without fingernails. Now I can’t do those things. Even typing this blog, from time to time I find my fingers hitting the keys in an odd way, because there’s a nail on them, and I’m not used to accounting for it. I feel like I can’t do the simplest tasks. It’s really stupid.

I mean, I’m going to try to keep them. But I’m not going to lie: I’ve been tempted to gnaw them off, not because of the bad habit, but just to let me work without having to adjust. It’s weird. Fingernails are weird. Someday I might master them. Until then, I’ll bumble about when, say, attempting to pull a paper off of a stack of papers.

It seems really stupid, honestly, but I’ve been using Epic Win for a week or so, and it’s pretty amazing.

I’m really good at keeping things in my head. I always have been. I’ve never really had to keep much of a schedule or anything like that. As I got more and more into all this teaching and schooling stuff, though, I started to have to give myself loose guidelines. I used my phone’s calendar to point out when I had to be places. But I still never really connected up and attempted to keep a list of tasks. I still kept those in my head.

However, it was starting to become taxing, because to remember them, I’d have to go over them often. It sort of started to feel overwhelming in a way. I had heard of Epic Win, and I decided to splurge and try it. I liked the cut of its jib, so to speak, and I figured it might be useful.

I don’t know if it’s REALLY proved useful, but I’ll tell you one thing it has done. It’s made me feel like I’m getting shit done.

I often feel like I’m not accomplishing anything. Nothing is moving forward. I’m not doing anything. It can get downright frustrating, and contribute to generally horrible moods I find myself in. In reality, though, I do actually get a lot of shit done, and just listing it, and then completing those quests… it really makes me feel more productive. It’s a nice feeling. It’s something I rarely feel. Hell, take this blog post. I have a daily quest set to write a blog. Just checking it off on there when I finish writing this helps me to realize how much work I actually put into this silly thing. It’s a lot. It is significant, and it’s something to be proud of, even if it isn’t the most amazing blog in the world. It’s awesome to get to see that.

It’s also making me more productive as well. Or if not more productive, at least a bit less of a procrastinator, as I tend to set quest deadlines in empty spaces, spreading my various tasks out a bit more, instead of doing them all on one day. That’s another benefit.

Yeah, I really like Epic Win. I wish it had a bit more functionality. For example, I’d love to be able to link to my character, show off my stats and loot, and such. It also seems a little expensive, especially since they’re selling additional character classes as DLC. But hey, I’m getting things done and enjoying myself. I mean, I have a quest log now. That’s way more badass than a list of chores. I can get behind that.

After watching an amazing video LP, I put the strange reboot Dead to Rights: Retribution in my Gamefly list. Then, it showed up at my house and I played it.

I was glad to see what Jack Slate, and his faithful murderdog Shadow, were just as ridiculous as they were in the original game. Jack Slate is ridiculously violent for no good reason, and he and Shadow kill thousands upon thousands of people, while NPCs tell Jack Slate he is a good job, and that he has to “do what he’s good at,” which apparently involves strapping grenades to people’s backs and then throwing them into the air so they explode and shower blood on top of his grimacing, muscly body in order to intimidate other attackers. There are many pre-canned murder animations in the game you can get by punching dudes, and while they do repeat fairly often, they are all so ridiculous and stupid that it doesn’t really get too boring, especially since Jack Slate seems to jump into an alternate murder dimension where time and other enemies don’t exist to pull them off. The camera even gets a filter on it. It’s so stupid, and so badass.

The gameplay itself is kind of weird. It’s trying to be faithful to the original games, while updating them. However, the original games were of an era long past, where games tried to do absolutely everything. It has to be a brawler AND a shooter, and it feels super odd to see those two mechanics in the same game. It doesn’t completely fail, but it seems odd, too, especially when you get to the point where you have a supersoldier army coming after you, and they all want to run up and punch you instead of shoot you with their laser rifles. It just doesn’t make sense to be in so many fistfights at that point. Both the brawling and the shooting are a bit half-assed as well. Brawling uses very simple, repetitive combos, and while they’ve put a cover system in the game, because every third-person shooter is mandated by law to have one now, it doesn’t work well. You can shoot dudes, but it always feels a bit awkward.
They do make the shooting feel unique, though, by making Jack Slate unable to carry much ammo. You maybe have one spare clip of ammo for a gun at any time, max. This creates a fairly unique feel, as you’re constantly having to scrounge for ammo, or attempt to use Shadow and brawling to conserve what you have. It doesn’t completely work, but I appreciated the attempt to create something unique out of this mish-mash.

Honestly, my favorite parts of the game were the Shadow sections. Shadow is apparently the fucking Batman from Arkham Asylum, as he has to stealthy sneak around, dog-style, and take out enemies. He can even “listen to heartbeats,” which basically gives him Batman’s detective mode to see guys through walls. I enjoyed those stealth sections a lot in Arkham Asylum, and here, it’s no different, especially since they’re fairly short so as not to overstay their welcome. Plus, Shadow has his own ridiculous and stupid set of kill animations, though he doesn’t get to teleport to another dimension like Jack Slate does.

The game is so weird, but it does manage to be fun. I wouldn’t recommend anything more than a rental, or very budget purchase, but it’s a fairly good, if ridiculous and stupid crazy time. It even has Avatar awards, which shocked me since I though the game came out before that. But hey, my Avatar is now wearing a Grant City PD shirt. I’m sure nobody will even know what game that’s from, and that’s how I like it. But yeah, I enjoyed myself. It was certainly a good pallet-cleanser in between Dragon Age sessions. Expect a crazy, weird mish-mash, and you’ll have a decent time.

I believe I mentioned that I never actually dress up for Halloween. I always get some ideas or something, and then never follow through because of busyness or laziness.

However, I had a Halloween party to go to, at my brother’s house. I was thinking it might be nice to dress up.
Then I had a dumb idea.
Because of this recent comic by one Phillip Armstrong, Phanto was in my head. I got to thinking, “You know, with a little effort, I could create some sort of shitty Phanto mask to chase me around.” I threw the idea at Brer, and he got a chuckle. “Okay then,” I said, “Fuck it, I’m doing it.”

I doodled Phanto heads on some paper, and taped them to bits of an Amazon box that was sitting in the room. Then, with a gigantic roll of duct tape, I attached the head to one end of a hangar, and the other to a belt, and used massive amounts of duct tape, and additional cardboard, to create a shitty harness system so that Phanto would float behind me. It didn’t work perfectly, and of course, when wearing the thing, I couldn’t, say, sit down. But it was something. I took the big key by our door, to give Phanto a reason to chase me, and went to the party.

Of course, when I got to the party, nobody knew what Phanto was. Well, a few did, but were still confused. I guess it was more of a strange concept, seeing as I wasn’t dressed as any of the cast of Mario 2. But hey, I made more of a Halloween effort than I have in years, so I’m calling it a win. Something like a win. Yeah.

“How did Gamma World go?”
I’m glad you asked, voice in quotes.

I believe it was a success.

Originally, we were supposed to have like 6 or 7 people make an appearance. It was going to be a big crowd, and an intense game because of it. Eventually, people had to bail and it ended up being a more intimate, but no less intense, affair with me rockin’ the Dungeon Mastering, and Kevin, Jonathan, and Spants playing characters.

The cast of characters included Hiro G, a Gravity Controlling Japaneseman from Japanesetown, who was in gay love with his former master of manhole-cover-throwing, who was a plant, and had a love child Bonsai plant named Phyllis. Next was Ox Bellows, a Speedster Thespian who annunciated everything, was wearing a Sharks costume from a production of West Side Story, and could do a badass electric boogaloo. Finally, we come to Containment Zone, or Contain, for short. He may be glowing softly from radioactivity, but that didn’t stop him from being a master of stealth, and also a collector of metal fragments and purifier of water, since he had one of those.

The trio soon began to be huge dicks to all the NPCs, which is pretty par for the course. However, and this is why I think Gamma World fits our group a bit better than straight DnD, this made sense in the more post-apocalyptic setting they were in. They had to fend for themselves, and there was always somewhere else to go, whereas in DnD a lot of the time settings are created that has the players involved in some sort of group or something, and pissing people off at random would create consequences. In here, though, sure. They started by seeing a robit explode, and then pissing everyone off and heading out with their like, four horses, which caused them to rename themselves The Horse Lords. For they are clearly the lords of horses.

Most of the night was roleplaying them pissing off everyone in the town and proceeding towards ADVENTURE! but they did eventually get into a combat. I was impressed with how they attempted to think outside the box, be stealthy, and use the environment to their advantage. Of course, their attempt to flip over a huge boulder on a dude completely backfired, causing them to lose their surprise round, but they made it through the combat okay. They had all drawn Alpha Mutations that drained life, and, calling upon listening to many a Penny Arcade DnD podcast, I decided to try using enemy banter to make combat more enjoyable. I started having all the monsters shouting about how it always seems to be life-stealers, and kill the fucking vampires, and please don’t drink my blood, it’s not tasty anyway!
Those powers really swung the battle in their favor, but still, one could tell it was a high death setting, as I got Ox Bellows down to like 2 HP at one point, and he would have died if Hiro hadn’t used a power that gave him temporary HP earlier in the fight. This caused Contain and Hiro to argue about who got control of Ox’s horse, Contain claiming he should get it, as Hiro had two, and he only had one. Hiro responded, “To be fair, you also have that dead horse,” a horse carcass they had picked up on the way to the place where combat was occurring.

It’s that stuff that’s awesome, and really made the game a lot of fun. This setting is way, way more suited to the way my friends play, much like Paranoia, and it is a ton of fun. Granted, whenever we play, we have the most fun just free-form roleplaying, and it just makes me wish I had an easier time convincing people to play something like, say, Primetime Adventures. Still, it was great, great times. Over too soon, but great times. Hopefully we can find a time to play some more soon.

Every October, I tend to try to think of some things I could dress up as, and every October, I end up not dressing up as anything at all because I got too busy or was too lazy to attempt to figure costuming out.

Oh well.

Halloween has always been an exciting time, mostly because I am around so many people who feel that it’s an exciting time. There’s nobody more into Halloween than Essner, for example, which is why we always attempted to put together those elaborate Halloween games for awhile. As such, it has always been something that has had parties around it, and has been fun.

It’s also meant me eating way, way too many Smarties.

Fuck, why am I so obsessed with Smarties? (For our Canadian readers, I mean Smarties, not Smarties.) Maybe I’ve written about this before, but shit, you put a bag of Smarties next to me, and they’ll be gone. Like, immediately. I’ll feel slightly sick, but I won’t be able to stop eating them. I will continue to pop them in my mouth, again and again. I’ll have a huge pile of wrappers on my desk.

And that’s the true meaning of Halloween. Maybe. Candy is the true meaning of Halloween, right? Smarties in particular? Also, I guess, women dressing up in “Sexy” outfits and pretending they’re a costume. That’s a thing Halloween is too. Mostly the Smarties, though.

Hope you have a decent Halloween, in any case. I’m going to go Pahtay, certainly. Maybe grade some papers. I dunno. Probably stay away from Smarties so I don’t kill myself with sugar sweetness. Probably.

I find that, when I describe many things I like to Cara and Cole, who have known me for less time and just “get” my sense of taste less, I describe them as being “wonderfully terrible.” This can mean a variety of things, of course. The “wonderfully terrible” of Deadly Premonition, for example, is completely different than, say, the “wonderfully terrible” of Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt, the anime I am currently following.

Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt is kind of a Japanese love letter to the more “adult” shows on Cartoon Network. Its art style is reminiscent of things like Samurai Jack and Powerpuff Girls, while the humor is rude, crude, and attempting to push the envelope of taste. Watching it is an experience not unlike watching the original programming on Adult Swim for the first time back in the day. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing, and it was awesome, but sometimes it just doesn’t know where to stop, and follows through with some terrible ideas.

Some examples, I suppose, would be useful. Episode where Panty and Stocking are fighting a sentient shit blob that’s eating people through toilets? Kind of eh, but fine. Episode where Panty and Stocking are fighting a ghost car while constantly making very blatant jokes about premature ejaculation? Yeah, it fits, it’s fun, and it makes you smile the whole time. Episode where they’re fighting the ghosts of dead sperm, which is between very, very long and intensely drawn “storm the beach” scenes starring sperm, with a lovingly drawn vagina on screen… pretty stupid, not funny, and annoying. It’s this kind of random swings in quality that remind me of Adult Swim, actually. Most of their shows, besides pure gold like Venture Brothers, are like this. Some episodes are hilarious, and push the envelope in novel ways, while others have stepped completely across the line and refuse to realize it, creating something intensely stupid and insulting to view. Panty and Stocking is exactly this way.

However, like most shows on Adult Swim, I keep watching because, when the show is on, it is ON. It’s very funny and entertaining when it’s doing things right. I mean, just take a look at this classy scene. It made me laugh my ass off the first time I saw it. It’s a great parody of many a magical girl transformation sequence and, what’s more, it completely fits the characters. There are tons of moments like this. It works. This is why I’m going to continue to watch the show.

There’s still plenty of season left, of course, but I’m going to see this series out until the end. I mean, it’s no lesbian mah jong, but it’s pretty solid, and completely worth your time. (Hey, there’s another show that’s “wonderfully terrible.” See? I like that stuff.)

Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2 for the 360 is fantastic, but man, Microsoft is screwing people over by forcing Valve to charge for all that DLC. I say this because I’ve recently played through The Passing and The Sacrifice with my brother and Brer, and while they are really fun little campaigns, I can’t help but feel like I would have felt gypped if I had paid 7 dollars for them.

If for no other reason, the Passing is probably the better DLC because it has so much fantastic dialog. Valve knows what it’s doing when it’s trying to create characters who are only built through realistic dialog. They’re fantastic at it, and throwing both groups of survivors together to talk was a great way to let the writers of the game have fun. There is some hilarious stuff there, and while I’ve only played through it one and a half times (the half was due to technical difficulties) I already heard a ton of different dialog. There’s some of that in The Sacrifice, too, but since there’s less people to play off of, it’s, perhaps, less obvious. They do give Louis some great dialog in safe rooms, though.

Lengthwise, neither is really long, though you can tell they put The Sacrifice together with the idea that it would be a shorter campaign for Versus. Nothing wrong with that, of course, especially since it’s free on the PC. Again, having to pay 7 bucks for it would be a little harder to swallow, but it’s still just fine. At the same time, there’s nothing particularly different about the levels: they’re just a different place to play Left 4 Dead on. They try to mix it up with a door you have to open that has a tank behind it, the “Sacrifice” mechanic, and the original Left 4 Deaders providing covering fire for you in the end of the Passing, but it doesn’t really change it much. You don’t have anything as sweepingly big, change-wise, as Hard Rain, or the first time you do the conclusion to Dead Center. It’s not a new game, so that’s probably too much to ask for, since, as I said, they did try to mix it up within the confines of the game, but I’m just saying, if you’re wanting something fundamentally different, these won’t do it.

But still! They’re fun! Plus, with Left 4 Dead currently being on sale on the PC for the same price as the 360 DLC will cost, well, you should probably pick it up. It was nice to get back to the game. I’m not going to be the sort who plays the mutations every week, but the game still holds up, and is a fantastic time with friends.

I am sitting in a Borders, writing this on my tiny little netbook. It’s been awhile, netbook! I forgot how terrible your keyboard is. It’s pretty bad. But oh well, you’re my little computer. Mokona-chan, I have named you. (All my computers are named after xXxholic characters. Shut up.)

Awhile back, I decided my tiny little computer hadn’t gotten enough love. I hadn’t used it in awhile! I had also heard about the Flow Chromium builds that are out there. I love the crap out of Chrome as a browser. I’ve basically stopped using Firefox completely, even though the name is much more appealing. As such, bringing the smaller, more streamlined experience to a whole OS sounded like a great idea. It would do the few little things I needed to do quickly and well. It would rock, and I’d get more use out of my little lappy. I did an OS install.

I hated it.

I didn’t realize how much I depended on the little things in an OS in order to function. Without a task bar and set programs, I found it very hard to operate. Sure, I could use online word processors or something, but it wouldn’t be organized in a way I could deal with. I mean, I couldn’t even figure out how to shut the computer down. It was just so completely different, I couldn’t understand it.

In addition, I expected Chromium to be extremely compact and speedy, but I didn’t find that. My little lappy here was chugging on it, which was unappealing. If it’s going to chug anyway, I might as well have a more complete experience!

So I went and installed the latest EasyPeasy build.

I had an older build on here before my Chromium excursion. It was functional, but kind of janky at times. Certainly better than the bullshit linux this thing shipped with, but not great. I was pleased to find that this new build fixes most of that. It seems a lot quicker, and has streamlined the menus in such a way that I still have access to everything, but can get to my most-used programs in a much clearer way. I appreciate that quite a bit.

It also adds this new thing called Empathy. I don’t know if this is a general Ubuntu thing, which EasyPeasy is a fork of, or what, but it’s pretty great. Basically, it builds basic chat and social networking functionality right into the OS, and it works. My Twitter and AIM are right there, built in, in one spot. Since I’m not running three different programs, it doesn’t eat up as much processing power either, which is always a benefit on a little thing like this. It’s pretty nice stuff! A great feature.

Anyway, that’s sort of what’s going on on the netbook front with me. If you have an older netbook, or just don’t want Windows, EasyPeasy is a great alternative, while Chromium still has a ways to go. I’m very happy with the latest EasyPeasy.

And hey, I’ve mostly gotten reacquainted with the shitty keyboard on this thing. I can almost type full speed again. Crazy. Too bad I’m done typing on it for now! Oh well.

Costume Quest is fantastic.

I guess I should be more specific about that, though. Costume Quest is a great idea with mostly solid execution. It’s entertaining and endearing. It’s cute as fuck. It’s simple. It’s fun. I completely got 15 bucks worth of entertainment out of it. If you have any nostalgia for Halloween, it’s probably worth your time to play.

It’s fantastic.

It’s Halloween, and monsters are attempting to steal all the candy in order to appease a gigantic demon. In doing this, they accidentally capture your sibling, who was wearing a Candy Corn costume. Thankfully, due to being “really serious about Halloween,” you, and the friends you get along the way, can transform, using costumes, into awesome heroes, monsters, robots, and so on to battle the evil on the streets!

I personally love the fact that the only explanation given as to why your characters can transform is that they really like Halloween. It fits the setting perfectly. Of course, I’m not surprised that Double Fine had the chops to be subtle in their writing. Comedy writing is one thing they know how to do, and they continue to know how to do it well. Costume Quest has some great dialog. It’s not stand-up-comedy hour, but it is entertaining, appropriate, and will elicit a few laughs over the course of the game. The art and such sets the mood, and sets it perfectly, but it’s the writing that really cements this game and sells it. Basically, if you like the writing in the demo, the game is probably worth your time.

However, like other Double Fine games, it’s not completely there in other areas. The biggest, stupidest thing the game does is not let you save. The game uses an autosave system, but it doesn’t save after every battle. It only saves when you make progress on a quest, or travel between the different areas in the game. You can fight many, many battles in between finding quest items, and find many hidden things around the world besides. If you were to, say, open a chest with a costume part, then quit, you wouldn’t have that costume part when you booted the game up again. It flat-out sucks not being able to stop when you want to because you’d have to redo several fights, and it is a ridiculous oversight not to give the player the option of manual saving, or at least automatically saving after every combat.
Similarly, the combat is a little flawed. Well, okay, it’s not flawed, it’s just extremely simplistic. Each costume can attack, and has a special move that takes three turns to charge. Basically, you just stall with basic attacks until you use your special, and then the battle is over. There are other things you can do, of course. Battle stamps can give you other abilities and change how your basic attack works, for instance. However, those abilities are almost overpowered: the 2-ply TP power is just ridiculous, and basically lets you completely lock down all enemies so they can’t even attack. Most enemies were stun-locked the entire game thanks to my liberal use of this power.
Still, the combat looks cool enough and the game is short enough that it didn’t really bother me. In addition, the game really makes use of what it has for the boss battles: several boss battles required me to change my loadout and pick different costumes. For example, I couldn’t defeat the last boss until I realized I should use the Vampire costume, since its life-drain really helped with my need for healing in that fight. Of course, there’s only about five bosses in the game, but when they come up, it can get a bit tough.

Still, I totally feel like the setting and writing make up for the few mechanical issues in the game. I had a damn good time, and I have no problem recommending this game for $15 dollars. At $10, I would be demanding you pick it up. It is just so much fun, and it’s great to see Halloween getting its due this year. It certainly put me in much more of a Halloween mood, and I’m proud to have made this the second game where I got all the achievement points.