The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

Dear Mom,

I really do love you.

I know we’ve been clashing more than ever nowadays. I know I’m making life choices you don’t really agree with or understand, and I know that’s hard for you to deal with. I know it’s making us butt heads more than I want, and I believe more than you want.

It really frustrates me.

What you think of me, and that you’re there for me… that means the world to me, Mom. I get very upset worrying that this is going to drive a rift between us that I’m not going to be able to fix. I need you there, and more important, I want you there. I’m trying to explain it in a way you can understand. I’m trying to do things the right way. I’m trying to be the least amount of problem that I can be, but I know sometimes that isn’t enough.

Let me just say this again: I want you in my life. It’s not some arbitrary relationship I feel I have to keep because I’m your child. You’ve done so much for me, and though you can be frustrating at times, you are such an awesome person, Mom. I want you around. I want to share my life with you. I want you there to celebrate with me when things go right, and I want to be there for you when things go badly. I want to fix your computer, troubleshoot your technical issues, interpret documents, I want to do all these things because they’re such a small way I can show you how much I appreciate all you’ve done for me. Sure, sometimes they’re at a bad time, and I don’t seem happy about it. A lot of the times it’s me being pissed at the technology, I promise. If I really didn’t want to do it, I’d never come downstairs. I’d never come help. I want to help. I want to be there for you. I love you.

It’s your day today, and I hope I make it decent. I hope we can keep having moments of togetherness without silly things getting in the way. I hope we’ll always be in each other’s lives in some capacity. I hope we can both understand each other.

I hope you have a wonderful Mother’s Day.

If you didn’t see, and didn’t know, well… Let’s Play Pandemic, shall we?

Updates should be bi-weekly to weekly, depending on how stressful things get with things.

I’m excited. I am going to make this board game awesome.

Maybe.

Hey, I follow LPs, right? Here’s a video one I’ve been watching. It’s about a group of people who, due to their own insanity, are playing through the complete pile of glitchy, badly designed garbage that is Sonic the Hedgehog 2006.

Seriously, it’s honestly just amazing that the game is that bad. Sonic is a big name, and it’s like literally no effort went into this game. Sonic Adventure and such was weird, and not good in some ways, but you can tell a lot of care and time when into it, and it was, for the most part, playable. It’s amazing that this game was played all the way through, and I’ve only watched the first 6 videos or so at this point. It is a miracle of a trainwreck, and it needs to be experienced.

The LPers are pretty decent, too. They’re recording this like it’s a big party, and you get that vibe. It’s maybe not the wittiest commentary, but you really feel like you’re with a group of dudes who are utterly flabbergasted that this game exists, much less that they’re making themselves play through it. It’s fun.

I think it’s worth watching. Enjoy it if you do. I’m going to keep going. Sorry about the lazy post, but I’m trying to finish things up homework, grading, and LP-wise. Soon things will get back to normal. Ish. I guess they haven’t really gotten TOO not normal. Maybe I’m more awesome than I thought.

Anyway, LPs! Yay!

This is a review of Battlefield: The Worst Companionship.

Since I bought the PC version of 2 on a whim, I thought I would give the single player a go in the first edition before I went on. You know, for plot relevance, and so on. It arrived from Gamefly, and I played through it. Then I returned it.

First off, it’s clear that DICE needed to get some mistakes out of their system. The controls in Battlefield: Bad Company leave something to be desired. It should really be using the d-pad to select secondary weapons, but instead, it uses some weird-ass ineffective system with the bumpers. I know they fixed this in the second one, because they had it fixed in the demo, which is good. There’s no excuse for that being that way.
The campaign, too, has some missteps. First off, it gives you no achievements for playing on easy, which I hate. Secondly, the checkpoints just aren’t intelligent when you’re looking at a huge area of combat like this game does. You’ll checkpoint somewhere, drive far away, die, and then respawn at the checkpoint, where you already took the vehicle, so you have to walk all the way back to where you died, only to, perhaps, die again, and have to walk all the way back there again. Seriously, it was this sort of stuff that was the majority of the game time, and it really frustrated. They could have at least spawned a little four-wheeler or something for me when I die like that.

The one mechanic I really liked was the syringe. Most games either have health packs, or belong to the “heavy breathing” school of shooter design, where if you are out of fire long enough, you heal. Bad Company splits the difference with this magical recharging syringe. Using it heals you to full, and it recharges to use again very quickly and has no ammo. At the same time, you have to pay attention and switch to it to heal yourself, and do so in enough time for the animation to go off, if you’re in the middle of a firefight. I felt like this was a great compromise between health packs and regenning health. It’s friendly, and low stress, but you still have to think about healing and heal management. “I have time to heal now, so I could heal now, but I’m not hurt much, and if that tank hits me while I’m running across the field I’ll need to heal then, and it won’t have recharged yet. It’s one of the best parts of the game.

Additionally, I saw what the Giant Bomb guys saw in the game. The characters are excellent, and very entertaining to listen to. One wishes they would have even more banter than they do during combat, instead of keeping it mostly between fights. I mean, sure, they’re in serious combat scenarios, they don’t need to be funny then, but more excuses for them to play off each other would have been welcome. I think they nailed the tone and characterization perfectly. I heard it changed a bit in the second game, and that does worry me, but we’ll see when I get to playing the single player of that one.

The multiplayer is similar to the single player. You see where they came from, but after having played the multiplayer in the second game, it’s just ridiculous how much better that is. You have no reason to play original Bad Company multiplayer, except maybe for the achievements. I played a round just for that, and then put it down.

Still, if you’re more hardcore than me and won’t die so much, Bad Company single player is worth a play through. It’s often funny, and has some interesting combat scenarios. It’s all you can really ask for.

On Monday, I had my last meeting with Missy about the semester before I left for the summer. There is a chance (it’s not for sure, but I’m certainly trying) that by the time I get back from summer break to teach again, things are going to be different. Transitions will be in full swing. Etc. I decided that you don’t tell people this sort of thing over e-mail, and thus I need to talk to her in person before all that got started. This was likely going to be my only chance until I set up another meeting. I was going to tell her.

Now, Missy is awesome, and it really was no big deal when it happened. She understood. She said she may have to ask some “stupid questions” to really get it, but that’s a perfectly fine response. Still, I got so worked up over it, it was making me sick. I felt worked up and anxious all day afterwards, too. It was a somewhat big step to tell my boss that, right? Something like that?

I am just so wrapped up in anxiety. I cannot remember a time, besides those initial fights with Natalie way back when, and maybe when I broke up with her, where I have felt so nonstop awful for such a long period of time. These last few weeks have been deadly with nervousness, and honestly, I’m really, really sick of it. I’d like to move on. I keep telling myself that once I finish all my homework the feeling will go away, but I’ve been knocking more and more of it out, and things haven’t improved, really.

It’s frustrating as fuck.

Basically, I’m really tired of being nervous and anxious, and if I’ve been an ass to you, I’m sorry. That’s my bad. I shouldn’t be like this. I really shouldn’t. I’ll handle it.

I’ll handle it.

WarioWare D.I.Y. was a kind of random purchase. I was all sick and out of it and I just kind of randomly picked it up. However, I have been, overall, very impressed with it. It’s a game that basically requires a community around it to be interesting, and Nintendo makes that has hard as possible to do. But if you do pull it off, it’s quite a lot of fun making things and seeing what other people are up to.

Basically, the game is full of the tools you need to make your own microgames. If you’re an artist (which I am not) you can sink a lot of time into making really great looking assets for the simple, silly little games. Although the DS is not the best art platform, you still have tools basically equal to Mario Paint, with some even more robust, like actual copy and paste functionality. You can make some really cool shit. However, I feel like Nintendo wins in that WarioWare already had a very strange art aesthetic that makes it feel okay to draw shitty art. Even my horrible scribbles fit in, to an extent. I’m not hindered from creating by my artistic talent, which is wonderful.

It’s also wonderful because you can bang out a working little game in a very short amount of time. Maybe 45 minutes or so? Longer if you do a lot of art and the game is complicated. There’s nothing that feels better than having a result from hard work. Creating something feels good. Shipping a game in WarioWare D.I.Y. feels awesome. “I did this! I made this thing!” and then you can play it, mix it up with professional games, and tell yourself “fuck yeah!”

Oh, I suppose you can also create music and comics too. The music creator is, again, Mario Paint Plus, and it works really well. I just rarely want to take the time to just compose music. I’m sure many can have fun with it. The comic creator is… a real missed opportunity. Being able to draw and share these 4koma is a cool idea, but for something like this, you really need a way to export them to the net, way more than with the games or music. If there was a comic viewer where I could link my friends to uploaded comics online, I would actually try to draw more of these. Still, they are kind of fun to do.

There’s some unfortunate restrictions, of course. I mentioned the online, and that is a huge issue. You can only store 2 games, 2 songs, and 2 comics at a time in your “crate” and you have to do stupid friend code exchanges to get anyone else to see your stuff. They have a thing called the “NinSoft” store, where you can connect to the server and download games from the community and “Big Name Games,” which are microgames made by famous and semi-famous game makers. This is an awesome feature, to be sure, and keeps you in quality stuff to fiddle with, but in the end, without having access to a full community, you’re only, at best, going to pick up the game once a week to try those new uploaded games before putting it back down, instead of it being something you can go back to whenever you want and see something new.

Still, if you can actually get a bunch of friend codes exchanged, it’s great to send out a game and then have people try it. It feels awesome. And that’s why WarioWare D.I.Y. is a success. It makes you feel like a programmer without being super complicated. Anyone can do it, and it feels good to. It’s fun stuff. It’s certainly worth a shot, if you were thinking about picking it up.

I’ve been having some really bad mood day lately.

Uselessly, I’ve been trying to pin down why. I mean, I know that I have had a lot of shit on my plate recently. Lots of things are going on here at the end of the semester. But it seems like that’s just making it worse. It isn’t the cause. It feels like there’s something deeper behind it, that I can’t get to, and I can’t figure out. I try and I try to connect the dots and figure it out, but I fail. It’s so damn frustrating.

It’s like there’s a hollow place in my stomach, and then a pressure on my chest. It makes it hard to breathe, and sometimes I have to just stop, and focus on breathing for awhile. It’s really kind of annoying. Brer says it sounds like anxiety, so I’ve been using that word, but hell if I know.

Basically, yeah, if you’ve seen me looking like shit recently, it’s probably that which was going on. People have been asking me if I’m alright, so I feel like it’s been pretty bad this last week and whatnot. Which is annoying. I don’t want to bring people down with my stupidity. But what are you going to do, I guess. I’m doing what I can to combat it. I’m getting my work done, I’m seeing a doctor, and so on. Not like I can do much more than keep working on it.

Work work work, etc etc etc.

Pirate Radio was such a disappointment.

There was so much potential there. You had this boat full of this amazing cast of characters doing amazing, awesome stuff. They were making history, breaking the rules, and doing all sorts of crazy things on that boat. Any number of plots could have been drawn from that. Any number of interesting events could have happened. Or, alternatively, they could have done a documentary with some re-enacted portions, and really given me information about this cool set of events in the history of the UK.

Instead, they made Pirate Radio, which was boring and stupid.

Basically, this movie was a series of completely disconnected scenes. People entered those scenes with no background or character development, simply because they were there in history, I guess. The movie made no attempt to explain who they were, or why they were there. There were so many characters, you never give a crap about any of them, because none of them are given enough time, even if you pretend this is a movie about an ensemble cast. Things happen to these characters, and you shrug, because it amounts to nothing. I guess he found his father. I guess he got the girl. You’re given no reason to care, although the movie certainly seems to expect you to.

Similarly, the movie is constantly cutting to legislators who are trying to shut down pirate radio. However, nothing in those scenes have any effect on what’s going on in the boat until the very last event. Huge portions of the movie are dedicated to showing what’s going on in the government, and none of it matters until they pass the law at the end. It’s a complete waste of time.

Other than that, you have lots and lots of screen time dedicated to showing random people listening to the radio and dancing. Sometimes they are on the toilet for no reason. This is apparently of the utmost importance, because they show this constantly, as if the viewer didn’t understand 5 minutes in that lots of people listened to this station. It’s ridiculous.

There were so many potential plot threads that, if focused on, would have meant something. But they didn’t, and the end result is the feeling that the entire film was pointless. Nothing happened. There was no plot. There was an outcome, but it seemed disconnected to 95% of the action in the film, so it didn’t actually resolve anything in a way that feels good as a viewer.

Basically, Pirate Radio is exactly how not to do a dramatic re-enactment of historical events. I really disliked it, and I bet, if you sat through it, you would too.

(And for those wondering about the title, well, that’s a quote from the funniest part of the film: the commentary we were throwing at it as we made fun of how badly put together it was.)

This means it’s time to repost one of my favorite JoCo songs. I mean, it’s traditional. Or something. So listen

The first of May means other things too, of course. Like the end of the semester looming above my head. As you’re reading this, I am probably screaming in frustration as I try to finish up all of my end of the semester projects. This is a weekend from hell, to be sure. All works and no play. But soon it’ll be done, and then summer will be here.

Summer. I can’t wait. So much shit to catch up on, and so much relaxing to do. It’ll be wondrous.

Until then, though, I’m still working crazy hard. I’m going to survive. I’m going to make it. But crazy work. I’m not out of the woods yet. I can’t go do fun things in the woods yet, even if the song suggests it is now time for them.

But soon. Oh yes. Soon. I can taste it.

Remember, this is the day where I take the Spoiler Gloves off. If you care about Heavy Rain Spoilers, come back tomorrow. I’m sure I’ll have some non-spoilery crap for you to read instead. If you read on, you’ve been warning.

SPOILARZ START NAO

If you don’t care about spoilers, or if you’ve played Heavy Rain, I’m just going to start by saying you should play Press X to Jason. It’s a completely awesome and accurate depiction of the start of the game. You can refresh yourself before I go on rambling!

I was not expecting Heavy Rain to be so Saw.
I mean, I guess I should have. It made sense the moment I got into the game. But Saw annoys me, and I didn’t really want to play Saw: the Game. That just didn’t seem like fun.

However, going through the trials as Ethan presented some very interesting decisions on the part of me the player. Basically, I had to decide: was I going to make these decisions as me, or as the character, and if I was going to make them as the character, who was the character?
The part that exemplified this for me, and I assume most players, was the fourth trial, where he was told he had to kill someone. As me, I don’t want to kill anyone. I’m in it to save people. Be a good guy. However, was Ethan? This was a dude who just chopped off his finger a few scenes ago, at least in my game. He barely hesitated. In fact, in the trial at the electric transformer, he briefly considered quitting, but then decided he was all in. At least in my mind. I decided that he, the character, would not hesitate to murder someone to save his son. He was to the breaking point, and he was going to do literally anything. So I shot the guy without hesitation.
If I had made different choices for him up until that point, I know I would have played it differently. I wouldn’t have had that look back, and decided I was too far down the rabbit hole to give up. THAT is where the power of a game like this lies. In changing those perceptions and having the player actual create who the character is.

Another great example: in the opening sequence, I accidentally failed to help my wife carry in the groceries, accidentally did something else before helping set the table, and then failed to kiss her when I was getting romantic. None of these were set, but they happened. Then, later, when I learned they got divorced, or were at least separated, that was some amazing foreshadowing that I did myself. “Woah,” I said, “I really set that up right. There were so many subtle clues.”
Alternatively, Scott being the Origami Killer was not set up at all. I played him as such a nice guy that I was shocked he was the bad guy. My decisions, where he helped each person he came across to the best of his ability, made the twist all the more shocking, though it made complete sense. I set up that surprise, but I could have, instead, set up the foreshadowing that he was evil, if I had played those sequences another way. Either way, I would have had a strong impact on the story, which is completely awesome.

The narrative did have its faults, though. The pacing was horrible. Very often, you jump between characters for no apparent reason. There’s little connection, until near the end, of what each character is doing in the scene before to what a new character is doing the scene after, not even thematically. This makes a really jarring, start stop feel to the narrative, and I’m sure David Cage could do better. Then again, he ended Fahrenheit with a battle against a living embodiment of the internet, so what do I know?
I also didn’t really find any of the characters particularly likable. The only character I really ended up liking was Scott. Here was this nice guy, going around helping people, fighting off dudes and putting his life on the line when he’s chubby and overweight? I thought he was awesome. Then he was the killer. Seems like maybe something should have been put in motion to make me give a shit about the other characters, since they were the real heroes. I dunno.
Finally, there was a complete misuse of fucking in the game. It was completely out of nowhere! I had a chance to choose no, I admit, but I was asked about a kiss. I feel like they would have stopped before they got to fucking, especially since it took them so damn long to get their clothes off. And then, in a game where we had seen both of them naked in the shower, they decide to put their underwear back on after they fuck to snuggle in bed? I honestly don’t buy it. Why would you push the boundaries enough to show man ass during a shower scene just for the hell of it, and then not show anything during the sex scene? It’s kind of stupid.

One Final Annoyance: The ARI glasses. Jayden has to wear a glove to manipulate it, but you see him manipulating things with his non-gloved hand all the damn time during the game. What sense does that make? Why was it so hard to follow your own set of rules? Grr.
Sorry, that really annoyed me.

Anyway, Heavy Rain is not revolutionizing anything. It was an enjoyable experience, and, despite its clunkiness and often horrible voice acting, does manage to have some truly emotional moments. I suggest everyone give it a rent as I did. Still, I doubt anyone besides Mr. Cage is going to make a game like this anytime soon. If they do, though, I hope they work some of the kinks out of the recipe.