The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

Yesterday was Starcraft Day! As of this writing, I don’t have Starcraft 2 yet. It’s coming later this afternoon.

But I’m not really excited or anything.

I don’t know. I have wonderful, wonderful memories of the original Starcraft. I remember playing the ever-loving crap out of it back in the day. There is absolutely no doubt that it is a completely fantastic game in every respect. There’s a reason why South Korea loves it so much. Blizzard only makes quality, and there’s nothing to make me think that this new game won’t be completely fantastic in every regard as well. I should be excited about getting to play a good game, right? I mean, I even installed Windows 7 on here in order to get prepared for Starcraft!

But yeah, I’m not particularly thrilled. Maybe it’s just because it’s taken so damn long. I mean, how long as Starcraft 2 been in development? Like 10 years at least? A long time. In that time period RTSes went from something I did nearly every day, certainly once a week, with people like Essner to a genre I no longer have any interest in and don’t really play. I really got into Dawn of War II, of course, but not the actual RTS mode. Just the RPG-like story mode. Granted, I think Starcraft is going to have a little of that, but, well… it’s Starcraft. It has to stay Starcraft, for the most part, or South Korea will declare war. Or something. It’s a game with such a rabid fanbase that they can’t really change it fundamentally. It’s not going to be significantly different. Granted, it’ll be good, but where I sit now, it feels like a known quantity. I may feel different after playing it, of course, but that’s how it comes off.

While internet is at a fever pitch, I’m kind of not. That’s okay, of course, and I’ll play it. Oh, will I play it. I just don’t mind that I have to wait until late afternoon to do so, I suppose.

At some point I took a break from Dragon Quest IX (I’ve put over 30 hours into that game so far. Man, it’s got me hooked!) to play through Splinter Cell: Conviction. I had heard a lot about the game at this point, and most of it was positive, though not like… life-changing. Just a fairly good experience. My experience was both good and bad, but overall positive, certainly.

Brer had some big problems with the game because of the plot. He really liked the character of Sam Fischer and disliked what they did to him. I didn’t have this problem because I didn’t pay attention to the plot at all, but if you like Mr. Fischer then maybe that’s an issue. From what I did catch of it, it was pretty ridiculous.

But no, what I enjoyed was shooting dudes in the head, and this game does lots of dude-head-shooting. The game is basically trying to be a combination of the stealth sections in Arkham Asylum and Gears of War, and honestly it works pretty well. For the most part, you feel like a total badass sneaking around and killing dudes without detection. Even when you are seen, there’s often good options to have some fun. One thing I figured out late in the game is how much fun remote mines are. When scene, there’s a little shadow of you where the enemy thinks you are. Throwing a remote mine there is tons of fun. And when you blow up the first guy who comes to check? You can mine his body, and his buddy will probably come to check on him and you can blow him up too. It never got old for me.

There were some issues, though. I put the game on “Rookie,” because I didn’t want to have to replay sections over and over. Even on Rookie, though, I found the game pretty hard. Granted, I’ve never been very good at stealth stuff. I tend to be too Kamikaze. But if more than one guy saw me, I’d basically die immediately, and have to replay sections. What made it so bad was that the checkpoints in this game are all over the map. Sometimes it’ll have checkpoints exactly where it should, and sometimes you’ll go three encounters without it doing a checkpoint save. It’s frustrating having to re-fight the first two of three combats over again and again just because you have trouble getting to the third. It wasn’t enough to get me to stop me from finishing, as the game is pretty short, but it was the source of much annoyance.

The guns, also, were really weird. You had a huge variety of guns to choose from, but they were all useless. All pistols have unlimited ammo, and are just better for being stealthy, which you have to be or you will die. I ended up carrying a shotgun for most of the game, because when I was seen, running straight backwards and firing shotgun blasts tended to deal with the problem pretty well. Still, the majority of the time I used one silenced pistol. It’s just weird, because there’s this weapon upgrade system, but you only need to upgrade that pistol, so it is a system with seemingly no purpose. Kind of strange.

Conviction really is the picture-perfect example of a great weekend rental. It’s fun, it’s short and doesn’t overstay it’s welcome, but it’s a little too off to really want to add to your collection. I am sad I never got to play the co-op, because I hear that’s pretty fun too, but maybe I will sometime on PC with Brer when it goes on a super-sale. The single player, though, was fairly good times. I enjoyed myself.

Inception was a fantastic film.

When seeing previews of it, I was kind of bleh on it. I mean, it had nice visuals, but it really wasn’t giving me any indication of what it was about. There was a lot of hype around it as well, due to the director apparently being awesome. It was only when Essner went and said that it lived up to the hype that I took notice and knew I had to watch the movie. And when I did? Well, I was highly entertained.

The movie basically has one concept, the idea that you can hook people up to share one dream using this little machine in a briefcase. Doing this, you can trick an unwilling dreamer into sharing all kinds of secrets. However, if you’re bold, or daring, or just a bit insane, you can attempt to plant an idea into someone’s subconscious by going layers deep into someone’s mind.

Basically, the movie takes this idea, sticks with it, and creates a fantastic heist movie around it that’s elevated due to the premise and mind-games built into the premise. It is a ton of fun, and has some great acting within it. It is highly recommended.

But hey, here’s the spoilar line.

SPOILARZ START HERE.

Yeah, I guess what people are talking about is the ending. It almost seems… gimmicky. I mean, it’s not out of place to me. It is a perfectly valid way to end the movie that makes you think. In the same way, it just feels a bit tacked on because you have to have some sort of “twist” or something at the end, right? It really didn’t seem to have the impact that I thought the people making the movie thought it would have.

Then I listened to Overthinking It, and a bit of their discussion made me realize why it works better than maybe it seems initially. The point of the ending is less that “MAYBE IT WAS ALL A DREAM” and more “he no longer cares anymore if it’s a dream or not.” This is an interesting change, since so much of his own personal holdups were based around determining reality and fixing his reality. At the same time, at that point in the movie, he’s dealt with the issues that were keeping him from enjoying the dream world. He’s not going to be haunted any more. He can see his kids’ faces now, at the very least. It isn’t so bad anymore. I don’t know. It’s just an interesting flip-flop. I don’t think it’s completely out of character, but it is interesting.

Hm.

Anyway, go see Inception. Go on.

This is the first month in awhile I think I’m skipping both IoTMs. I mean, in general, the Juju Mojo Mask seems like a fairly useful item, but it just doesn’t seem like an item that’s going to get involved with how I play.

Unsurprisingly, this is an accessory with great stats. Anything that says “+2 Stats” is probably going to be relevant. On top of that, you can further tune it to get more stats in Moxie, Muscle, or Mysticality by setting up the various buffs the Mask can get you. It’s pretty all-around stat-tastic. This is why it’s powerful, if anything. The various Mask buffs also do some very nice side-benefits, but setting them up is kind of why I can’t get too excited about the mask.

Basically, for each one, you have to trigger them by doing a particular thing. For Mysticality, you cast a spell. For Muscle, you do a non-spell special move. For Moxie, you use a combat item. These seem fairly simple. These are the sorts of things that people playing seriously do all the time. These are almost trivial in that regard. However, I don’t play like that. I don’t use spells and moves and items anywhere near as much as I could or should. One might say that this would get me to go ahead and use these things. Yeah, that might be. It would certainly work if I was being rewarded with coolness for doing so. However, this is just awarding me with more base power. Again, useful as fuck, but that’s not why I buy these items. Okay, not why I buy them primarily. I want the coolness factor. I’m not feeling it from this.

I mean, this seems like a solid IoTM. Equipment is always of limited use, because it can’t be used in Hardcore. As such, I dunno, I tend to assume that equipment is going to be super-fantastically fun. This is powerful, but seems less fun than I desire. I’m sure most would probably be fine with owning one of these. Me, I’ll sit this month out.

After reading Scott Pilgrim’s Finest Hour, I found myself constantly thinking up scenarios that would have been more fulfilling and a more fitting end to the series than what I had just read. In the end, though, this kind of thought process is really useless. The series ended the way it did, and it ended… with a disappointment. And now I’m going to ramble about it a bit.

A majority of Scott Pilgrim’s Finest Hour is a fight with Gideon. This is a fight that, for the most part, didn’t need to be in the story. It had basically been written out by the end of book 5. The reason I’ve always loved Scott Pilgrim is that it is, in some ways, a musical. The fights come in places of emotional intensity, and they represent emotion. For the most part, the characters don’t seem to react to the fights as real things. Not only is there very little emotional intensity involved in fighting Gideon, it’s the first fight that really gets treated like an actual fight, which just draws a lot of things into question, like “Has Scott Murdered 7 People?”

In an attempt to make this fight with Gideon relevant, many, many completely stupid things are retconned into the plot, like Gideon somehow having some kind of memory altering ability and having created subspace and all kinds of shit that I don’t really feel make much sense. It just helps to emphasize the fact that, for the most part, the fight served no purpose.

All of the big character moments in this book are Ramona’s. Scott gets nothing out of any of the events in the book, except, I guess, a girlfriend again. He doesn’t really grow as a person. Only Ramona does that. The problem is, she’s such a non-entity in the story for a lot of it, that giving the climax of the story to her just seems… completely stupid. There’s no reason for it, and it just leaves Scott having changed not at all, and us having complete proof of that in the end. I’m not saying Scott has to be fundamentally not Scott in the end. But there’s literally nothing about him that’s changed, besides the fact that he’s employed now, I suppose. It tries to not be a story about him at the very end, where it’s inescapably a story about him.

This book had a lot of awesome to live up to, and while I wasn’t expecting it to be super amazing perfect, I was expecting something better than this. It is a disappointment, to be sure. Thankfully, it hasn’t ruined my enthusiasm for the movie or game, so I’m sure I’ll still get plenty of awesome Pilgrim in the near future. Just wish it would have been good enough. Oh well.

I am so tired.

I don’t mean physically, though I suppose I am pretty tired physically as well. I’m just tired of being depressed, and tired of feeling like my family is against me. I’m tired of not feeling safe, I suppose. I’m tired of having to force myself to buy that I can do this. I’m tired.

I’m tired.

I guess it’s not too surprising. I get this way every once and awhile. I just want to hide in bed and never come out for a few weeks or months, so maybe I could feel better. I can’t, of course. Way, way too much to do. Always too much to do. But it would be nice, wouldn’t it? A bit of vacation. A bit of rest. It would be nice.

In the back of my mind, I know I’m things the right way. I know I’m getting closer. I know I will survive this and be happier for it. I know that many, many things are happening that I never would have imagined happening before, and that I am so damn close I should be able to taste it. It’s just so hard for information like that to make it through all that tired. I’ve been waiting for this stuff for way, way too long.

Sorry… I just needed to complain a little, I guess… things will soon be back in full swing. I’ll be working at school so much I won’t have any free time at all… but I know I’ll make it. I just wish I could convince myself of that sometimes.

I finally caught up with the Doctor and the latest season of Doctor Who.

It was, on the whole, excellent.

First off, there were lots of people, before the season started, who were really worried about Matt Smith. I wasn’t worried, perse. I didn’t know what to think. But man, he just nails it. His Doctor is wearing the Doctor’s issues on his sleeves. He’s willing to tell people to shut up, because adults are talking, and things of that nature, but he’s also still got some of the fun side of the Doctor. He’s really fantastic. I didn’t worry, and I had no reason to.

However, I was kind of worried about Amy Pond. Every picture of her I saw before I actually watched the series was “Look at me, I’m sexy.” I didn’t want a companion who was just there for her looks, especially after they fucked over Donna Noble so much. (Seriously, don’t get me talking about Doctor Who or I will talk about how much I adore Donna Noble. She is a fantastic character who really, really got the shaft. Fuck you, Russel T. Davies.) I was convinced she wasn’t going to be deep and interesting.
I had nothing to worry about on that front, either.
I mean, I wasn’t completely wrong. She is there to add sex appeal, and that works. (Well, judging from Cole’s descriptions of her relative hotness, I suppose.) But she’s also a complete person. The fact that, say, she nearly rapes the Doctor (Okay, it sounds bad when I write it like that, but…) is not only completely accurate to her character but also completely awesome. I mean, look at Martha. Look at Rose. If only they had had the guts to just flat out say that. The Doctor has all kinds of power, and is a great guy. He is attractive. If you’re on this incredible fantasy trip with him, of course, go ahead and fuck him! Why not! There’s a level of consequences you aren’t going to have from this trip, and once the Doctor is gone, he’ll be gone. Best try while you can. So yeah, that moment, in particular, endeared me to her. But she’s also a very independent person and character, willing to do what she feels is right even when the Doctor tells her to do something else, much like how Donna was willing to tell the Doctor when she thinks he’s wrong. That’s nice. I also think her relationship with Rory is very realistic and well-developed. She loves Rory, but with all this fantastic in front of her, isn’t sure whether stable Rory is the sort that she should stick with, even though she wants to. There’s always a struggle between the possible adventure of being unattached and the benefits of being attached, you know? I thought that was handled in a decent way, too.

The plots themselves are some of the best the Doctor has had in awhile. Thank goodness they got rid of Russel T. Davies (Seriously, Mr. Davies, thank you for bringing Doctor Who back and getting me interesting in the show, but you just are not a good writer.) and stuck Steven Moffat at the helm. He knows how to write a good Doctor Who episode. There are a couple weaker episodes, of course. “The Lodger,” or “We spent our budget on other episodes but we need to make one more” isn’t really all that great, though I’ll take it any day over bullshit like “Daleks in Manhattan.” There also isn’t any episode that really stands out in my mind, like “Blink” did, as being mind-blowingly fantastic. Every episode, though, was fun. None of them made me want to punch someone. They were all really solid.

I hope they can keep this up for the next season. I am looking forward to it, completely. Maybe I won’t wait months to watch that season, too. Who knows.

Also, Bowties are cool.

Way, way back, when I bought Super Street Fighter IV, I did it because a certain Morbid Coffee was planning to host an online Tournament with people from Talking Time. I knew I’d have no chance of winning the tournament, but I figured I could maybe win a few matches and it would be fun either way.

Now the tournament has finally started. And Coffee is doing the coolest thing: He’s uploading all the matches people send him to Youtube. I don’t know why, but I seriously think this is amazingly cool. Certainly makes the tournament feel more… important. So I thought I’d share the videos of what’s happened so far with you. It’s my fall from the winner’s bracket in video form!

My first match was with Matchstick. The original name for the tournament was Matchstick’s Pony, supposedly, so he’s partially responsible for going at it. He was bringing a Chun-Li to the mix. I was using my trusty Abel, the guy who I’ve mained since Super Street Fighter IV for no real reason I can tell, but I’m pretty decent with him, and he’s an odd choice, which gives me the element of surprise against a lot of people who are used to Akumas and Kens and don’t know what Abel is capable of.

I won it in two. The first round, and second round. I didn’t have much trouble. Abel has this really great combo that I can actually pull off. If I can abuse that, I tend to win easily. If I can’t, I have more trouble. Matchstick couldn’t seem to figure out how to get Chun-Li to punish that combo, so I did it a bunch, and pulled off the win. Still, it was a fun fight, and we had fun talking during it. Very good times! I moved on from the first round! Whee!

Second round I was matched up with Shivam. This is a guy who went on and on on the Cast at Demonhead about how Street Fighter is the best game ever. (Granted, he has a lot of best game evers, but still!) I thought for sure I had done some practice fights with him before and he had been much better than me, so I figured I was in for a schooling. I was a bit wrong, though. We had some damn good matches, with a super-dramatic finish! I won the first round. He had said he decided Guile was his best, but he spent a lot of time jumping, and my Abel beat him without too much trouble. After you lose, according to the rules, you can switch characters, and he then switched to T. Hawk. Remember the situation I explained earlier? The one where you don’t know how to approach a character because nobody ever plays him against you? This is how I was with T. Hawk. I was pretty clueless in the second round, and Shivam slaughtered me with Mexican Typhoons. Even after I figured out what I should be doing, it was difficult. Abel isn’t the most capable ranged character, and Shivam could pull off those Typhoons with no problem, which made it hard to approach him. After that, I had a choice. Abel is pretty well my most practiced character, but I needed some range in order to take T. Hawk on. Therefore, I decided I needed some fireballs. For the third round, I switched to Sakura. This worked out better. I actually felt like I had answers to a lot of T. Hawk’s moves, and I felt like I held my own a lot more competently. Still, even with a dramatic Ultra at the end, I couldn’t pull off the win. But they were damn, damn good matches. I never mind losing in fights like that. It was fun times.

That’s about where I stand right now. Soon, I’ll start my loser’s bracket matches. My general hope is that I move on in the loser’s bracket once before I hit people I just have no chance against, but eh, we’ll see. Either way, I’ll give it my all, and continue to have a ton of fun. Because it is a ton of fun! I tend to like fun. Yeah.

I don’t think I really get this month’s Twilight Heroes IoTM.

Seppia’s cephalopod skullcap is a bunch of nice enchantments, but at the same time, extremely situational in it’s “cool” factor.
It’s main “cool” benefits are being a SQUID disc player and letting you breath underwater. There just aren’t that many underwater zones for that to be completely useful, though, and since it doesn’t seem to give any bonuses to SQUID discs (Maybe it does, but I’m not seeing anything about it on the wiki and I haven’t heard anything about it) and you don’t run around with a SQUID player equipped anyway, I don’t see that as much of a bonus.

There’s no doubt that the additional ice damage, a bit of -time, and PP regeneration are all great, though. I mean, those are powerful. But… well… it’s boring powerful. Those might be better than other hats. In fact, I would say that, yes, those benefits are better than most other hats in most situations. It’s certainly the best PP regeneration on a helmet, and while not as good as the -time on the xentrium helm, it’s got the other benefits, so it works out.

It’s just that those things aren’t flashy. I’m not an optimal player. I don’t want bleeding edge. I want cool things. There was an attempt to put interesting flavor on this useful bundle of enchantments, certainly, but that flavor just doesn’t come into play enough. I hope there are people who enjoy the benefits of this, certainly, but I just can’t really get excited by it. Oh well. So it goes.

Dustin finally had another Euchre Tournament.

Euchre is a standard, but pretty darn awesome card game. It’s simple, but requires a ton of meta-game strategy in order to play it well. There’s luck involved, sure. Sometimes you’ll go all night without getting dealt a decent hand. But most of the time it’s about knowing how to use the cards you have to the best of their ability and how to read your partner to know how to play the cards you have without outright cheating.

I’m alright at Euchre. I know the rules, I love games, and I get enough of the basic strategy to not make a fool out of myself, even though I maybe don’t win all that often. However, Dustin’s family are a bunch of Euchre experts. He used to get them all together, and us, to play, and it just amazed me how much of a challenge that was. Not that older people can’t play cards or something, but more that they took the game so seriously, and at the same time so lightly. They play cutthroat, serious, cut you no slack Euchre, but they laugh and joke the whole way through. It’s pretty well the best atmosphere for this kind of tournament. It was a really great night.

How did I do? Well, I went 4W-6L. I was hoping to go 5 and 5, just because that seemed like a good goal, but it was not to be. My wins didn’t get me many points either: I only won very close games, for the most part. Still, in that crowd, I was totally fine with it. I only felt like I made one play mistake all night, when I called on a really risky hand and got completely embarrassed and set. That’s good enough for me.

Dustin won it all, and went on like that was a bad thing, and that it looked bad that he won his own tournament. It was really kind of silly. If that man knows anything, he knows German and playing Euchre. He is a Euchre machine. Everyone there was a good friend. It’s not like we thought he was cheating or something. At least, if we said it, it was in a purely joking manner.

But yeah, it was a damn fun night. Always nice to get on a bit of old-school, standard gaming, and have such a good time. I remember when we used to play Euchre all the time. It’s probably my favorite game with a standard deck of cards. (Pinochle is fun, but requires a special deck and more rules. Euchre is much faster, compact, and you can always play it.) Damn good times.

Of course, then at the end, Dustin said he’d try to get another one together over Christmas break. And my mind went to how different I’d be then, and trying to explain that to his whole extended family… but eh, I would. And I’d have fun anyway.