The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

Prototype opens with an Abilitease. You start out in a big fight, and you try out a lot of different powers.
None of them are cool.

This was the first warning sign.

I only played Prototype for maybe an hour, hour and a half. But it was already repetitive and grating on me. Why? Well, let me share.

First off, the main character is completely unlikable. He has no personality, and has nothing in mind besides revenge. He also kills innocents all the time for health. He’s a bad person, but they don’t even make him a cool bad person. He’s the “antihero,” and it’s painfully cliche. I don’t give a shit about him. I don’t care what he finds out as he unravels his web of intrigue. There’s no reason for me to want to find out. They don’t give me anything.

This wouldn’t be a problem if the gameplay were fun, but it wasn’t fun as well. You try out a wide variety of melee powers there at the beginning of the game, but they’re all essentially exactly the same with different animations. I got to the point where I unlocked the Claw power. It looked stupid, and honestly, it didn’t seem to affect my attack effectiveness much, so I turned it off and just punched people. Having gigantic metal claws should be cool. Prototype doesn’t make it as such.
Movement is equally silly. If you hold down Right Trigger, Mr. Hoodie Man will run over any obstacle. There’s nothing to stop you. You hold down RT and press forward, and can fall asleep. There’s more you can do with movement, but the game never gives you any reason to, outside of bullshit race missions that I didn’t want to do. It just wasn’t fun running around the city. In Crackdown, you have an obscene range of moment, but it requires some skill to really get going. That makes it feel REALLY good. Also, moving well can keep you out of firefights you don’t want to be in. It serves a purpose. I ran through groups of enemies as Hoodie Man and was in no danger. I didn’t have to do better.
Finally, the game just doesn’t know what it does well. The game is clearly a crazy, open world brawler, and yet all of the missions I undertook involved eating people for disguises and being stealthy. What bullshit. You’re supposed to be some crazy-powered guy. Why would you ever be forced to stealth? It would have been a cool option, but I had to do it for every mission. It was pretty stupid.

So, yeah, I returned it pretty much immediately, and I don’t feel bad about it. It basically matched all I had heard about it, and I’m glad I rented it. It’s a shame. There were some decent ideas in there. The Web of Intrigue, especially. But man, it just didn’t catch me at all.

I was playing a game of LoL with Essner. We were actually doing pretty good! I was playing as Sivir and wasn’t having any huge fuck-ups.

Then I guy named Curv told me I fucked up and should get off the game.
Maybe this would be understandable if I had done something, but I hadn’t done anything wrong at that moment. I was double-teamed, and I ran away, because there was nobody close. It was really annoying.

So I enacted a plan.

“Thank you for your valuable advice!” I said.

“Good. Now Uninstal,” he said.

“Oh, but I could never do that. Now that you’ve graced me with your advice, we should be able to win with no problem! If only more people would help useless players like myself with such advice, nobody would ever lose!” I said.
And then, in a stroke of genius, I kept going.
Every moment I didn’t have to click, I was writing more and more singing Curv’s praises. Telling him how much of a genius he was at the game, and how everything that came out of his mouth was the most useful thing I had ever heard. He would tell me to shut up. I would respond, “But then, how could I sing your praises? Everyone needs to know how much you’re helping me.” Then I’d keep right on going.

Eventually, he told me he had fucked my mother last night. I went on to thank him for doing such a wonderful job pleasuring her, and for being such a kind and gentle lover. I went on and on about how wonderful it was watching him make love to my mother, and that through that act, I knew his true feelings for me.

All this was going on while I was fighting beside him, healing him, and supporting him, of course.

As the game ended, I, of course, talked about how I could never have contributed to our win without him, and that I and my mother were looking forward to seeing her in the bedroom very soon.

Then I sent him a friend request.
It was immediately denied.

Never have I had so much fun in a game. I can’t wait to try it again. I really can’t. Bring it on, assholes. I’m ready to idolize you.

Beyond this point be Silent Hill: Shattered Memories spoilers. The plot is, by far, the best part of the game, and though I’m sure there are a variety of changes if you get a different psychological profile than I did, the main plot will probably be the same. You’ll be sad if you spoil it for yourself. Play the game first if you’re interested.

Spoilarz from here on in. Here we go.

I thought about this game’s plot more than I have any game in a long time. Hell, I actually had a nightmare about it, woke up, picked up my phone, and then was nervous because your cell phone played so much into the game. Granted, I’m probably a wuss, but the game does a spectacular job of creating psychological horror. I love it.

One of the ways I think it is most effective in doing this is telling you, straight out, that what you do affects what the game thinks of you. Now, I know that, if I dug right down, I could make a chart or whatever of the factors it looks at to affect your ending. But that’s no fun, and plus, I didn’t look up the chart that someone inevitably made. It really made me think about my decisions. I started by just answering things truthfully, but I soon realized that there are things I would normally do that I wasn’t doing because it was a video game. So I started worrying about and doing those, too, to make sure the game read me right.
The best example I have of this is at the high school. There is a chemical closet there. Opening it reveals nothing of interest inside, but there is a big sticker on the back of the closet saying “CLOSE AFTER USE.” Closing isn’t just hitting a button. You have to use the Wiimote to grab and close the door. It’s kind of tedious. I almost left because, as a gamer, there were no useful items, it was useless. But then I started thinking: what is the game going to think of me if I don’t close the door? I would in real life. I actually turned back around and closed the door.
This is how the game really got me going. It wasn’t the running about bits. Those were just frustrating. It was the idea that the game was watching what I did, and that everything I did was going to have some significance. It’s smoke and mirrors, sure, but it made it a ton more fun.

The other main thing that really got me involved with the game were how well the characters were animated. Granted, they were mostly cutscenes, but they moved in very realistic ways and had very realistic expressions. The Voice of the Agency, aka The Psychologist was especially well-done. I mean, everyone was a little uncanny valley, but Silent Hill has always been using that for effect, and not by accident, so I had no problem with it.

Plot-wise, I felt like it tied itself up very well. The video that’s the menu screen made complete sense by the end of the game, and the part that I assume is affected by your psychological profile, the section after that on the tape, is a really cool way to make your decisions matter without completely destroying the main plot. All the subtle changes, or what I thought were certainly changes based on the extremely sexy way my game was going, were also completely cool. I think they did a good job at making that matter without having to go overboard and make X number of games.

I’ll admit I was surprised that it was Cheryl that was in therapy. Granted, it makes complete sense, and I don’t know why I didn’t catch it before the ending. I knew it didn’t make much sense for Harry to be in therapy, seeing as how things were progressing. It also didn’t really make sense for it to be completely disconnected to the storyline and it actually be the player being analyzed, which is how I treated it the whole time. If it was out of the game, I feel like the Psychologist would have been treating the player a lot less… creepier.
Still, I think it really drove home what was happening having it that way. Learning it was Cheryl, and that the whole game was probably a metaphor for her dealing with the loss of her father, really put much more context onto a lot of the game’s events. For example, when you play paparazzi at the school, and end up taking a picture of Cheryl in the shower really takes on a bit more oomph, outside of just being creepy in general, once you put it in that context. It makes clearer the odd connections Cheryl was making between sex (and not even real sex, but more… porno sex) and affection for her father she was making because of the tape. Without the Cheryl context, it was making Harry seem like a horrible person. After that he seemed… like a misguided person, and certainly not flawless. He was obviously cheating on his wife and was pretty obsessed with fucking. But he was more of… a guy, instead of a monster. After Silent Hill 2, which was my favorite game in the series before this one (and probably still is, though this is a close second. I liked the two with the strongest plots. Are you surprised?), I was expecting a revelation that Harry had done something awful. Harry has nothing on James. He’s just a kind of bad father. James is pretty clearly a murderer. Heh.

Honestly, I liked that. I liked that it wasn’t some gruesome, horrible thing. I liked that the real reason behind the whole game was something so mundane. It actually makes it that much more disturbing, because once you figure out what the game actually is, things are plausible. Granted, there is an element of supernatural there, but the key events? Completely possible. It makes it stay with you longer. You really feel like you understand Cheryl, even though you only see her on screen for like… a minute or two. By playing through the game, you kind of experience what she’s going through via metaphor. It works beautifully.

The plot is a success. A complete success, in my opinion. I hope future Silent Hill games get made, and I hope they play off of this one. I have no idea if the game was a success or not. I kind of bet it wasn’t, especially since it was not on any “current gen” systems where people who care about the Silent Hill name would think about buying it. But it was so good. Much better than what I played of Homecoming. The plot made me forget all the mechanical missteps I talked about in the last post, and they could fix them in a sequel.

I do hope it happens. Tomm, make it happen!

I’m going to write two posts about Silent Hill: Shattered Memories for two reasons. The first is that the story is so important, I want to talk about it at length, but have it separate from the mechanics so there are no spoilarz. The other is just to fill up another blogging day. What? It’s not like I’m that complicated a creature. Can you blame me for wanting to have to write less?

Anyway, mechanics. Of Silent Hill: Shattered Memories.

There were a lot of mechanical missteps in this game. They had the idea that this game should be accessible to anyone, not just gamers, and as such should not have any combat. This is something that I can completely get behind. I’ve liked watching my brother play other Silent Hill games because I liked the sort of things they were doing with the story. I’ve never been good with Survival Horror combat mechanics, though, and never really wanted to play them myself because of that. The moment I learned this wasn’t going to be something to worry about in this game, I really wanted to play it. Removing combat was smart.

However, they replaced the combat with these “nightmare chase” sequences. They’re completely awesome in theory: tense chases where you’re running away from monsters you can’t fight, having to throw them off before they defeat you, and being unable to fight back. In reality, though, they are painfully trial and error. If you pull it off the first or second time, you have fun, but when you’re trying the sixth or seventh, the fun is gone. This happened often near the end of the game. Constantly, really. I often looked up a FAQ to alleviate this. I wanted to use the in-game map to find my way, but since you can’t look at it and run, it is pretty useless for these sequences, and I had to turn to text on the internet to get me through. That probably means it wasn’t doing what it was intended to do. I certainly had less fun doing that.

They also decided that puzzles are a good thing to have. However, they too seem to be a bit off due to attempting to create a more “everyone” friendly environment. Most puzzles are “Oh, there’s a locked door, oh look, there’s an interaction point behind me, oh look, there’s a key.” They’re really simplistic and mostly involve using the Wiimote to open a door, or sift through a pile. It’s just a little too easy for my tastes, although it’s the kind of easy that doesn’t detract from the game at all. I don’t mind it, but surely it could have been better.
The more involved puzzles were placed, for some reason, in the middle of the nightmare sequences. I liked these puzzles. They were fun and usually interesting. However, having to risk dying to go re-check a solution that you may have seen while sprinting but maybe not isn’t really the best way to go.
If I had to pick one puzzle that I felt the game should have done more of, it would have to be the puzzle in the party shop. That used the “echo” mechanic, the Wiimote manipulation, and the environment to create an interesting way to come up with a passcode. You had to use echo information to find sounds, and then connect those sounds with numbers. It wasn’t TOO hard, but you did have to think for a second. It worked. It could have used more of those sorts of puzzles.

The main problem, though, comes from the Wiimote itself. It’s just obvious at this point how badly the Wii should have had the motion plus stuff built into it from the start. Doing the motions for throwing monsters off of you feels REALLY good, much like some of the motions in Mad World… when it works. When it doesn’t register, then it’s really annoying. That’s the Wiimote’s fault, not the games.
Similarly, I hate, hate, and still continue to hate pointing the Wiimote at the screen. It’s just inaccurate and annoying to do. Now, using the Wiimote as a flashlight is a great idea, and it’s fun enough. It doesn’t keep me from being frustrated about having to do it, though. A few times, I wondered if I would have been better off getting one of the ports to play, but I stuck with this one. It’s a minor concern, but if the game hadn’t been otherwise good, mostly in the story, I would have been complaining up a storm.

Still, the “echo” mechanic, and the Wiimote being both flashlight and cell phone worked wonderfully. I would get a message and, even though I didn’t need to to hear it, I’d always hold the Wiimote up to my ear to listen. After I realized I could call any number in the environment and it would actually do something, I gleefully dialed everything I saw, just to see how Harry would react. I’d swing the wiimote around to point the flashlight at things for Harry to comment on them, and be happy about it. It was awesome. I could feel that kind of interaction and involvement in an adventure game story all day.

And I was very involved in the story. But I’ll talk about that next time.

I’ve been playing a bit of Mega Man 10. Is that surprising? Not really, especially considering how many points I still have from that Pepsi promotion. I’ve beaten a few robot masters, and a full write-up will probably come at some point. One thing is for certain, though.

I suck at video games.

I owned Mega Man 2 and 3 as a child. I couldn’t beat them consistently, perse, but I could get really damn close most of the time.
When Mega Man 9 came out, I played it and tried it. It was really hard to me. I eventually beat a majority of robot masters, but never got close to beating it. It was too hard for me.
When they announced that Mega Man 10 would have an easy mode, I was excited. Finally, I could just enjoy the retro goodness!

I still die all the time.

There are two modes of “easy.” One is the actual Easy mode, which adds platforms over many bottomless pits and spikes so you have less random deaths. The other is picking Protoman over Mega Man, who can use the slide, charged mega buster, and has a shield to block projectiles. I’m doing both of them, and I’m still dying to pits, platforming segments, and bosses.

It’s honestly just kind of sad.

I know that, in general, all that matters is if I am having fun. And I’m having a good time, sure. No worries. But goodness, especially compared to the people on Talking Time, which are probably destroying the game with their eyes closed on one life at this point, I feel kind of inadequate. That hasn’t stopped me from switching most games I play to easy nowadays, and it won’t in the future. It’s just… especially obvious on games like these, which are so much like hard games I used to not have a lot of problems with.

Yeah, I suck. I admit it. There you go.

Note that this is my post talking about the end of Forumwarz episode 3, which basically finished up the entire arc of all three episodes. So if you’re still playing, or think you might want to play? Well, don’t read this one! It’ll tell all.

Ready to read? Okay, good.

Forumwarz is so fucking awesome.
I mean, seriously, the game is just so well put together, and the plot completely paid off for me.

Okay, not completely.

Here’s where the spoilarz come in, Shallow was a sentient AI created by Sentrillion. This is not completely unexpected (though honestly, from the end of episode 2 I was more leaning towards the player character being the AI) but it does pay off. The majority of the characters you talk to in the game are apparently Shallow as well, which makes a good deal of sense, seeing how things were proceeding and people always had a mission for you and were always willing to pay you tons of Flezz.

The moment you find this out, you have to go kill Shallow.

Now, the logic behind this decision isn’t too bad? Shallow wants you to kill him because he’s going to die anyway, and he (or she, I suppose) obviously likes you, and you were nice enough to make sure his child went out into the world. You can then kill him in a number of ways. I picked the good way, “fake” killing him by temporarily bringing down the Sentrillion servers. The ending then describes me having a great pal in the first artificial life form, who eventually asks if I would like to merge with his consciousness, which the game describes, appropriately, as erotic.

That all sounded fine. A fitting ending.

But it was also a little unsatisfying.

I wanted to actually see how my relationship with Shallow changed knowing that he was playing so many people to understand various pieces of humanity through how I talked to him. How do I, the character, interact with him from then on? It would be very, very different. Trying to grok that he is all this people, many of whom you have to cyber sex with during the game, is really going to change that working relationship.
What’s more, what in the world is my character going to do now? The ending says I am “successful” but my job, up until that point, was basically being paid by Shallow to be a guinea pig for his experiments. Is that still my job? Or do I go work full-time for Carolyn Fartz at Geronimo? Or what?

I think some people would think I’m foolish for having become so attached to my player character and the characters in the game, but the fact that they were so real while being so ridiculous was one of the reasons I love Forumwarz. Sure, the plot is steeped in internet humor, but the characters themselves tended to be written in an intelligent way, especially your player character. I liked that. I wanted to see where it goes. And I wanted to see how the core relationship of the game evolves after this big revelation.

At the same time, that’s the sensible place to end the game, of course, so I don’t blame them.

There are a few unanswered questions. Will there be more Forumwarz content? (I hope so!) Will the new story use your current character? (I don’t know! I’d be happy either way.) Do you find out who the main villain of episode 3 actually was? Or was he just some guy? (I feel a suggestion that he was Shallow, but I kind of doubt that. Maybe in some of the other endings, he is.) There are ways they can go. If nothing else, I’m going to be right there with some cash no matter what their next thing is.

But goodness, I enjoyed this game. Thanks, Crotch Zombie guys. You did pretty awesome.

My TA friends were nice, and invited me to go work on homework with them this evening.

I turned them down.

The idea of leaving the house filled me with dread. I was supposed to relax this evening, but already I was drawn to a family dinner and seeing my brother’s new house. I already had to commute up to St. Louis. I already had to do a lot of things. None of these things are things that I hate. I wanted to do all of them.

But what I really, really wanted to do was relax.

I wanted to sit down and beat my game. I wanted to snuggle and unwind. I wanted to not be running constantly, and not have to worry about doing anything in particular.

I turned them down, and went back to my game, but I can’t concentrate on it. I feel like I have failed by not going to get my work done. I can’t relax and play any more. I can’t ever relax. I have so, so much to do. I have so many nice people in my life, but they want things from me, and I’m already stretched thin. I have so much I need to handle and take care of.
So much.

Fuck this.

I should not feel like this.

Fuck this.

…guess I best get to bed so I can do it all again tomorrow.

Can you believe it? On Saturday we sat down and watched a movie that we had rented. How crazy is that? What movie did we watch, you ask?

Black Dynamite.

Basically, some wonderful, wonderful people made a new Blaxsploitation film. It was completely glorious. I have not seen a movie that made me laugh so hard in a long, long time. It is highly recommended.

Why is this movie so successful? Mostly because of the key fact that it doesn’t think it is funny. Besides several very joke-y jokes, which manage to work because they are just so ridiculous (Three Word Example: Captain Kangaroo Pimp), the entire film is played completely straight. Everything is the most serious thing that has ever happened. The drugs on the streets is a real threat! Black Dynamite is one bad motherfucker, and he is not going to be stopped. Not to mention, he has no more than 5 different origin stories and 8 different reasons for going after the bad guys, although it continually changes who the bad guys are. But the movie doesn’t realize how little sense it makes. It’s being completely serious all the time. It makes you laugh so hard, time and again.

Looking at the special features really drove home how much the makers of this movie got it. The special features are all exposition that explains the plot and attempts to make the horrible narrative make sense. These scenes aren’t funny. They’re true to the genre, but they’re true to the boring parts of the genre. Much like how Retro Game Challenge takes the good parts you remember from retro games and removes the bad parts, the makers of Black Dynamite decided, rightly, to take all of those boring parts out of there movie. It makes it more surreal, which cranks up the humor, and it makes it so that the laughs don’t stop.

In any case, I really, really enjoyed this film. It was one of the most entertaining comedies I’ve seen in a long fucking while. If you like laughter, you owe it to yourself to give this a view. You won’t be disappointed.

Hello there! I am typing on my brand new Lap-Top Com Pew Tor. It’s got a number pad, which I am less excited about, and all kinds of bloatware, which I am also less excited about. But it’s running along pretty well. The screen looks fantastic, though it is reflective, and this keyboard is feeling good. It has a button that turns off the touch pad, too, so that it doesn’t fuck me up while I’m typing, which is excellent if I really get into my typing, or hook up a mouse. Most important, though, Windows 7 is pretty awesome. At least thus far.

I already love some of the little things about Windows 7. The start menu is kind of the best of both worlds, being a combination of the Launcher on Mac OSX, which is kind of cool, but not for me, and the normal task bar. This works like the normal bar, but you can stick common programs to it, Launcher-style, and I am liking that so far. You can also mouse over to see the little image of the windows and pick the one you want, which is pretty cool.

I’m also really in love with the stupid little details. I love the automagically changing wallpaper. That is just such a neat little thing, and it makes me happy. It’s certainly, at the very least, going to make me search for good computer wallpaper more often. That, combined with the fact that I believe, if this was on my desktop, that I could set individual wallpapers for both my monitors on my main box, is something I can really get behind. Apparently it doesn’t take much to please me.

Anyway, I’m still in that new gadget glow. I’m enjoying it. We’ll see how I feel as I work with it over the next week or two. But yeah, I’m pretty happy with my purchase at the moment. It’s neat. Yay for lappies!

Due to pressure from the fellow TA camp, and wanting to be more connected with them (they are awesome people) I started to attempt to use my dormant Facebook account, which I mostly made just for games with Facebook connect.

It’s just mostly lead to me feeling awkward and old.

I stare at the Facebook interface, and I just don’t get what it’s supposed to be used for. It has a twitter-style news feed, certainly, so I guess I know what to put there, maybe? But there are so many other things and elements that seem to do the same thing. It’s constantly suggesting I add more friends. You have these kind of nestled comments, so you have to pay attention to posts you were probably done with days ago, perhaps. I just don’t get it. It’s not an “up to the minute” thing like Twitter, and it’s not a slightly more calculated affair like my bloeg here, or whatever. I just don’t really get what I’m supposed to use it for.
On top of all that is the IM service they have built in, but that they don’t let you access unless you are sitting on the page. I thought that hooking Facebook to Flock, here, would let me be online and chat much like I do normally with AIM and whatnot, but no. Facebook doesn’t let you in. They had instructions for getting Pidgin to hook into it, but they were wrong. You have to literally be just sitting on the Facebook page to chat, which just strikes me as completely ruining any utility it may have as a chat platform. Yet people apparently use it exclusively. I talk to people on Campus about AIM, and they stare at me like I’m crazy and talking about something from another planet.

I just don’t get the service, but on top of that comes a social awkwardness I haven’t felt online in a long time. There are no screen names. There are only real names. Maybe I am antisocial or something, I don’t know, but seeing someone’s actual name on posts and friend requests is really awkward with me. I can’t ignore or decline people with a real name. I don’t know who they are, but they have a real name. Maybe they are someone I should know, but have completely forgotten the name of. That is completely likely. Maybe it’s someone I talk to every single day. Maybe.
At the same time, could it be? Because like most online accounts, I set this up with Alexis, not what most of the people around campus know me as and call me. This makes it extra weird when people want to friend me. Do they know who I actually am? Why that’s my name? Or do they expect me to be someone completely different, and they’ll be disappointed when they learn who I actually am?

Man, I don’t know. I don’t like you, Facebook. I’m going to keep trying, but… such worry you are instilling in me. Stupid socializing with the non-internet world. Stop being so complicated.