The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

While browsing internet, I came across a link to this website in the discussion of some comics. I rather liked the guy and his little impressionistic reviews. I spent an entire evening reading up on them. While I was reading through them, I stumbled upon this review of a comic called Miss Don’t Touch Me. I clicked on the link to Amazon, assuming it would be some expensive hardcover thing. But it wasn’t. I snapped it up for 10 dollars and gave it a read.

Basically, the story does some very interesting things, as alluded to in the review, if you read it. It starts out as a story about Blanche ending up going undercover, almost by accident, to attempt to solve the mystery of her sister’s murder. However, as the story progresses, it’s obvious that Blanche is not up to the job. She’s become high-profile in a bad way, and is too impulsive and emotional to deal with this problem. However, Miss Jo, a prostitute of questionable gender (Jo certainly seem much happier in the female role, as she never leaves it, but she could just be a crossdresser. It’s never completely explained, though everyone treats her like a woman, for the most part.) soon figures out what Blanche is up to and has the disconnect from the subject matter and the connections to make the investigation come together. It’s this switch of protagonists that’s so shocking. The story is, almost completely, from Blanche’s perspective, but suddenly, Jo steals the show, and becomes the focus of what’s going on while we wonder what might have happened to Blanche. It is in some ways a break of the general trust of the reader/author relationship, but at the same time, it makes perfect sense. Following Blanche would no longer have given us anything useful. Someone else had to step up before she made a horrible mistake, and so someone does.

The characters in the story are fairly well fleshed-out. Most of Blanche’s nature is completely believable, being so uncomfortable in her new role as well as completely excellent at it. She’s funneling a hatred towards men and her sister’s murder into her dominatrixing, and it makes perfect sense and works out well. Similarly, Annette’s submissive, loving attitude and Jo’s sisterly devotion and willingness to use her importance to get things done is completely believable as well. They all feel like real people, and that is certainly nice.

At the same time, I can’t call the book a must read. It’s… missing something. I don’t know what it is. It leaves you with a feeling of melancholy, like something just didn’t click quite right. It could be the situation of the main characters at the end of the story, but I don’t really think that’s the case. There’s always a little something off in the tale, and I could never pin down exactly what it is. Still, it’s a good enough time, and solid storytelling. I don’t regret my purchase one bit. But I’d say, borrow it from me if you can, instead of buying a copy of your own? It may not be the sort of story worth owning, but it’s worth reading.

Starcraft II is definitely a video game where you game up all the videos, and then some things explode, and you mine a mineral.

I don’t really know what there is to say about it.

They’ve done a great job retooling the single player campaign to make it interesting, and every level has enough different in it to make it super exciting and fun. The multiplayer is just as fun as it ever was, even though they totally fucked everyone over with their horrible Custom Maps system.

Basically, it’s Starcraft II.

I mean, that’s cool. I’m enjoying playing it with people. But frankly, the single player can’t hold my interest, and I’m not all that good in Multiplayer. I keep teaming with Essner against online people, and he does everything and I, maybe, take out one thing with a Thor or something. Thing as in turmulent, not as in base.

I just can’t get into RTSes anymore. I used to play them all the damn time, and I had so much fun. In the end, though, I think it was almost purely the social aspect. RTSes were one of the few games, back in the day, that I could play with a group. I played Warcraft II and the original Starcraft with Essner all the damn time on dial-up back in the day. I stopped playing them, though. Getting better at them isn’t interesting to me, and it only takes so long to try out the units, do some cool things, and be done with it. I just can’t get excited about build orders.

Starcraft II is excellent. I’m not sad I bought it. I will continue to enjoy playing the occasional multiplayer match, and maybe I will polish off the single player at some point. However, it’s just not really my thing anymore. I’m not an RTS player. I kind of knew that going in, though. I knew this would happen. I just didn’t want to admit it out of nostalgia.

Scottingham Pilgrim has not the only movie I saw recently. If I had to pick another film I saw recently, it would probably be The Other Guys, because I saw that one in the theater a week or so ago.

It, too, was really damn good.

In a completely different way from Scott Pilgrim, though. I would describe Scott Pilgrim as “Awesome” while The Other Guys was “Hilarious.” Granted, there were moments of awesome and hilarious in both. That’s just the general feeling of the two.

I knew practically nothing going into this film, but apparently it’s one of the first films that really brought back together all the people who made Anchorman great, and it shows. The writing in this movie is excellent. There is a really smart comedic mind at work here, using things like refbacks and running gags in a completely effective and not annoying way. For example, the joke in the title is funny on it’s own (well, in context anyway, maybe not as a title) and only gets referenced one more time, to great effect. The movie doesn’t need to use the same jokes over and over again, because they’ve got plenty of them. They’re only bringing them out when they’re most effective.

It’s not all perfect, of course. The plot of this film is nearly non-existent. Anchorman had a plot, although a stupid one. In this movie, they’re trying to stop some sort of scheme, but they don’t know what, and you the audience don’t know what, and it’s incredibly vague. Doesn’t stop it from being entertaining, of course, but at the end of the film you may be scratching your head, wondering what exactly happened, now that you think about it. On top of that, the credits sequence is completely weirdly serious in giving you stats about actual white collar crimes, which is just strange and completely out of place. Did the makers of this movie really think they were being political in some way? I have no idea.

If you’re going to see one film in the theater, see Scott Pilgrim. It’s full of visual pizazz and pop that just looks great on the big screen. However, you really should see The Other Guys. It contains humor all the way through that won’t imbalance your humors. I was laughing pretty well constantly through the entire movie. It had been awhile. It felt great. It was a great film.

There was some point where Matthew Essner said that he was glad Scott Pilgrim was almost out, because it had seemed like the entire summer was building to it, and it was about damn time.

Well, now I’ve seen it. It’s been a summer of anticipation, and the film had a lot to live up to.

I think it completely lived up to it.

The movie changes many things about the plot of the comics, but almost all for the better. It streamlines the events to happen in a length of time that make sense with the whole movie covering the entire plot, as well as changing many of the battles in ways that just make more sense and tie all the events together. For example, many more of the fights are tied into the Battle of the Bands that Sex Bomb-omb is a part of.

The result of this is what people I’ve seen initially talking about the film call “removing the emotional core.” I kind of agree and kind of don’t. It’s true most of the relationships in the film are much, much shallower, and people only exist for their completely awesome jokes. For example, fan-favorite Kim Pine really doesn’t have a very big role in the movie besides throwing out some awesome lines. Scott and Ramona don’t so much have a romance as a meeting one night followed by some fights with some exes. The emotional content was one of the key parts of what made the comics something I stood up and took notice of, so it is kind of sad.
At the same time, Edgar Wright made exactly the right choice here. There was no way he could give these people enough backstory to make them deep characters in one film, and still put in all the key points of the story that people would come to see on the big screen, namely the fights. He decided to play up the comedy and action of the series, bring that completely to the front, and let it run wild, and it completely works. We root for Scott on a different level, one where he’s funny, and sometimes badass, and less because he’s the lovable loser of the comics.
Still, I don’t think it’s completely devoid of the emotion people claim it’s missing. Movie Scott is different from Comic Scott. The big lesson he learns at the end is to respect himself, and be motivated by himself. He’s fighting, in the end, because he wants Ramona, not because of “destiny” or “true love.” It’s selfish, sort of, but also completely realistic. It’s also not romanticized. When he leaves with Ramona at the end, it’s not for them to live happily every after, it’s because Scott wants to be with Ramona, so he’s going to try again. There’s no promise it’s going to work out. I’d actually probably bet it wouldn’t. But he wants to try again, and he does, because if he doesn’t he won’t forgive himself. That’s a realistic motivation. That’s a real character, to some extent.

Anyway, the movie is fantastic, end of story. You should see it. I’m probably going to see it again today, after I finish writing this bloeg. It is great, great stuff, and I can’t wait to buy it on Blu-Ray and play the vidjeo game and all that stuff. Scott Pilgrim, man. Scott Pilgrim.

There was a time where Alan Wake was a huge thing. People were super excited about it.
Then like… five years passed.
Then it came out, and I didn’t really hear a lot of excitement or buzz about it. “This is exactly the kind of game I should Gamefly!” I told myself. So I did.
Now I have beaten it.

Alan Wake is a really mediocre game.

Seriously, I go back and forth on being very, very down on it to being kind of eh on it to being all “Yeah, that was pretty good.” It’s such a swing-y game in many ways. When it’s working, it’s very fun, but when it breaks, it’s really quite frustrating. I don’t know.

This is most clear in the gameplay. The combat is decent enough. You shine flashlights on enemies until they pop in light, and then you can shoot a few rounds into them and kill them. You have to dodge enemy attacks as well to survive. When it’s working, it’s a fun variation of normal shooter stuff, and a good time. However, as the game progresses, they start spawning more and more enemies in places where you can’t see them. They sneak up on you and hit you twice, and then you’re almost dead, and one stray smack will finish you off. The result of this is that eventually you get into death loops where you have to go “Okay, this guy will spawn here, have to take him out first, then this guy, then run over here and another guy will spawn, but I have to take out the guy behind me first…” This kind of gameplay is obscenely meta and, frankly, unfun. The game forces it on you, even on the easiest setting, “Normal.” Add to that inconsistent checkpoints that sometimes leave you with having to complete multiple combats before you get another one, and you can see where the combat can sometimes really frustrate.
On top of all this, the game loves to make you repeat the same hour or so of powering up, instead of giving you new toys to play with. Alan is apparently incapable of, say, putting a gun in the pocket of his coat, because he is constantly losing his guns and flashlight. Constantly. Which causes you to basically replay the same sequence where you’re like “Oh, here’s a flashlight, run run, oh, here’s a revolver, fight a little, oh, here’s a shotgun, now I can really fight” every hour. It was a neat trick once, but the game constantly relies on it, and it kind of falls flat. I’ve been told that Remedy’s previous games, the Max Payne games, were the same way. I never played those, though. Maybe someone who had would have been expecting this. I just found it a little annoying and pointless.

The story also has it’s ups and downs. The characters themselves are pretty well fleshed-out and acted. Alan is a fine enough character, and his agent Barry is a perfect example of a comic relief character who is also a genuine character you kind of like. There are also some really cool moments in the game, including an incredibly dramatic “hold this position” battle on a certain farm which I won’t spoil. However, the plot itself just isn’t that engaging. Alan’s trying to get his wife back, and is playing through a story he wrote, sure. But the story is constantly reiterating things you know already, like they were some big revelation, when you figured them out hours ago, and the entire plot is completely predictable. Using the manuscript pages to add background depth and foreshadowing is a decent idea, but it’s also difficult to do well. Some pages work perfectly, while others just tell you things you already know, or ruin intense moments in a way that much, much less effective than just watching them play out. It just doesn’t work perfectly well.

The best part of the game, I think though, were the Night Springs TV shorts. You stumble across Televisions that show this old Twilight Zoneish show called Night Springs. They were live acted, incredibly cheesy, and a lot of fun. I was looking forward to those a whole lot more than the actual plot itself.

So… yeah. I’m pretty negative in this review… it’s a pretty middle of the road game. It’s a rental game. Rent it and enjoy it, but it’s really not worth buying. If I had bought it, I would have gotten “The Signal” DLC story for free, but eh, I didn’t really feel like I missed anything. Besides some Gamerscore, I suppose. Alan Wake. Mediocre. Yeah.

I’m on the verge.

It’s all coming to a head.

More overused metaphors.

I’m seriously so close. So very close.

Fuck.

The moment before is always the worst, you know? Once you get on stage, then it’s easy. Once things are out in the open, there’s no longer any problem. But until then, until you make that step… it’s painful. It’s crazy. It’s tough.

It’s very tough.

I’m going to make it through this, and I am going to be the better for it. Sometimes, I just need to tell myself that. Sometimes I need to keep myself going. Keep myself from running away. Locking myself in here, with this computer, and never coming out. But no, I don’t need to do that. I’m going to make it through this.

Fuck.

A few days ago, I finally played through all of Alien Swarm, the free co-op game that Valve put out that involved shooting a bunch of aliens.

BUT WAS IT WORTH THE COST?

Oh yes. Completely.
I would have easily paid 10 bucks for this game, although in that case, perhaps a few more missions would have been nice. But seriously, Alien Swarm is very polished and a lot of fun. If you haven’t gotten some people together to play it, you really should.

The game is a top-down shooter in the twin-stick style. Of course, you don’t control it with a gamepad, even though I’d like to. You use the cursor you move around the outside of your dude and walk around with the WASD. That’s completely functional and works perfectly fine, of course. It’s just something I don’t prefer. Doesn’t affect the game in a negative way, though, even for me. You run around and shoot these people. There are a variety of different weapons and a variety of different classes you can be, each of which has slightly different loadouts and skills. The most important of these classes are the tech, which can hack open doors, and the Medic, which, oddly enough, has access to healing equipment. The other two classes, Officer and Special Weapons, don’t really seem all that different, from what I’ve seen. They just shoot some stuff, with Officer being a bit more well-rounded stat-wise and Special Weapons having access to a few bigger guns.

The way this game switches it up from other games of its type, I feel, is that you really have to manage your ammo and fire. Most shooters from a top-down perspective like this are “fire like crazy and kill everything.” In this, you have fairly limited ammo for most guns, so you have to make sure every shot counts. You also have friendly fire on, so much like Left 4 Dead, you have to actually pay attention and make sure not to catch a friend in the sweep of your flamethrower, for instance. This gives it a more different feel, and makes it feel much more like a squad-based FPS. That’s fun times. Of course, the new perspective makes me even worse at the game. At least in a FPS I feel like I know when I’m going to friendly fire. I feel like I have much more control over it. In this game, I either get so ancy about friendly fire that I barely shoot at all, or I force myself to shoot, and have many friendly fire incidents. I’m sure if I practiced a bit more, that would go away. But it is just the sort of game where I’m not used to be cautious and calculating, and it does affect my play. Doesn’t make it any less fun, though.

Seriously, the game is pretty amazing. It has Steam Achievements and persistent leveling to unlock new guns, which is nice enough that you can unlock everything in a few run-throughs of the game: hitting max level isn’t impossible. It uses the same PC lobby system that Left 4 Dead uses, so you get to bypass a lot of PC bullshit to get into co-op games, which I always appreciate. It’s just a really, really polished product, and totally worth your time. They could have easily charged some money for this, but instead they gave it away for free, with the complete source code out there on the web for full mod-ability. It’s great. Glad I’ve played it and enjoyed it.

We drafted Magic 2011, the 12th edition that comes out in 2010 today. In a surprising upset, Jonathan was the complete loser, and everyone else tied for first. (This is the problem with a four-person Round Robin tournament, though it’s not like we particularly care.) Everyone actually had a really well-done deck this time, even if we teased Spants on kind of falling into his. (He opened like 3 huge White bombs.) Once again, this is kind of strange, as normally one person has one deck that is just far and away the best. Everyone was rocking different strategies, but everyone had a pretty functional deck that held it’s own.

The draft itself was fun, but it really made me think more about how much I like what they’ve done to the core set. I have made many a joke about the horrible naming of the new core sets, but I think they’ve done a fantastic job. No longer is the core set just the place where you get the expensive dual lands you need. They’ve stepped up the kind of cards they put in there, and started creating new ones for it. They’re still less complicated than the other sets, but they are much, much more dynamic than playing with the old core sets.

In fact, what you end up with is a strangely “pure” Magic experience. When playing in block, the game is normally about trying to exploit the various specific mechanics that only exist in that block to your advantage. When you do that, you lose a little something. You lose a bit of what made Magic cool in the first place. These new core sets feel more like playing Magic back when I started. The game becomes less about getting the most of certain toolsets and keyworded cards, and more about monsters banging into each other, and making sure you have everything in the proper ratios to make that work. There’s enough variation and strategy to keep it interesting, but it’s much more “Magic how you remember it” and less “Super-boring simple Magic.”

In a world when I don’t play Magic much, and don’t have a lot of time to devote to deck building, I find that really cool. There’s still plenty of other cool Magic things out there, of course. But that’s pretty neat.

Even if I poke fun, I approve.

When I dream, which doesn’t happen often, it’s normally narrative.

What I mean by that is, oftentimes when I dream I understand that I am the narrator of a story, and I keep the story going in a way that makes sense for the characters, whether it be people I know, or some random shit my brain puked out. I often don’t remember all of the actual dream, or even much of it. What will happen, though, is that I will wake up, slightly, and continue the story as I have been. Without even thinking about it, my mind keeps going and narrating. Until I get fully awake, it can be hard to stop this. I get some kind of drowsy need to reach a stopping point in the story.

That’s all well and good when they’re good dreams. I could keep telling those for awhile, no problem. Lately, they haven’t been, though.

I’ve been having near-constant dreams about bad things happening to me in some regard. I lose someone. I scream at someone and get really mad. I lose something and go berserk. The other night, the dream was that I got my car stolen, right before some sort of fancy concert that Jonathan and Shauna were going to that I really wanted to attend. I was dealing with something with my parents up until the very last moment before I had to leave, and then I noticed my car wasn’t there. I had to work on getting it back, and I never got to go to the show. I was so angry.

And I woke up so angry.

Dreams are just too real sometimes… I don’t know, my mood is fragile enough these days. It annoys me that my subconscious is making me wake up feeling like shit again and again. It just makes me feel stupid and weak to be so upset by such things. Then again, I guess in a lot of ways I am. I crumble and crack and fall apart again and again. It’s silly.

I mean, I’ll survive. I have so far, somehow. I’ll make it. I guess I just wish it would be easier. And that something as simple as my dreams would co-operate with my plans.

Harmony of Despair, or High of Definition if you’re so inclined, is a lot of fun. This is despite how poorly put together it is.

Basically, you gather five other people, who pick a Castlevania protagonist, and then run through stages together in a sort of boss rush. The whole thing is timed, so using teamwork to get all the chests and use all the machinery you need to defeat the boss really helps you get done quickly, as well as take the boss down without casualties. Then you go ahead to the next level and do it again. As you play through, you pick up food that gives you permanent increases to that character’s stats, as well as level up their abilities and skills in a way appropriate to the games they were in. For example, Soma must still kill enemies to collect souls to use, while Jonathan has to, once again, use his subweapons over and over in order to upgrade his proficiency in them.

This is all well and good, but it’s unbalanced as fuck.

The five playable characters just aren’t equal. It is such a pain in the ass to collect and level up Charlotte’s spells that you can’t do them during a normal run, for example. You have to level them up to have her be a useful character, but you can’t take the time to level up her spells with other people around, because they’ll either kill the enemies or you’ll just be bringing down the whole team. This means you have to grind in single player, which is much less fun, in order to be effective. At the same time, Shanoa is just obscenely the best character, due to her Magnes glyph. She can use this to go into areas that no other character can reach. She’s the only one with a movement power like this, and oftentimes having a Shanoa or five on your team can make a run go a whole lot better. The other characters fall somewhere in the middle of this scale.

In addition, as I mentioned, the game really isn’t fun by yourself. Sure, there is a single player mode, and you probably could beat all the chapters, if you had the skills, but it’s obvious the game was designed with multiple players in mind. Enemy HP and stuff scales for more or less players, but not enough to make it really viable as a single player exercise. No, Single Player is just there to let you grind skills, as, unfortunately, you just don’t get powerful enough fast enough. Important spells and items have very, very low drop rates, and you’ll have to run through again and again just to pick up the stuff you need in Chapter 2 to make Chapter 3 easily doable. Eventually, you even have to kick up the difficulty to get good drops anymore, which is understandable, but annoying for someone who isn’t hardcore like myself.

All these complaints are completely legit, but I find myself constantly going back to it. The basic Castlevania combat and increasing your skill set is just lots of fun, to the point where something phoned in like this still is enjoyable to some extent. And, as per usual, adding more people makes a mediocre game great, and if you can get a game going with 3 or 4 friends, it is a complete blast. I just wish more balancing thought had been put into the characters and such. It’s so close to being great. As it is, it’s just good, but if you have the money and love Castlevania-style action, I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.