The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

I have played some Split-Screen 360 Borderlands!
It leaves something to be desired.

For one, you can’t do system link split-screen or online split-screen, so my dreams of buying a second copy and setting two people up in Spants’ room and two up in Jonathan’s were dashed. Still, I’m glad I found that out before I wasted the money on it.

Secondly, the split-screen is really oddly implemented. Basically, it doesn’t resize the menus for you having half the screen. They’re the same size, and you basically have to move the camera around to look at the whole menu with the right stick. It’s kind of the experience of using Mobile Safari while you’re really zoomed in. It’s incredibly sub-par. I mean, it works, but it feels so very, very pasted on. You often can’t see what item your cursor is on or near because you had to move your camera down to where the item information box is. It’s really weird.

Still, it luckily doesn’t hinder one of the very best games of last year enough for anyone to care. It’s still a ton of fun in Co-op. I’ve only really played a Soldier, so I rolled a Hunter this time, since I sniped so damn much as a Soldier anyway, while my brother rolled a Siren. We both ended up really liking what we were doing. Jonathan enjoyed the Shadowwalking or whatever the Siren ability is called… internet search says it’s “Phasewalk.” Okay then. Phasewalk. Jonathan was really digging that, and he was murdering everything with shotguns.

Me? Well, I had heard a lot of questionable things about Bloodwing, the birdie that the hunter throws out as his ability. So, of course, I was dedicated to using the “Rogue” tree, since Pandora apparently exists in an alternate world where “Rogue” means “Bird-trainer.” Luckily, though, I ended up really liking the skill. Swipe is really quite awesome, I’m going to love when he steals health starting next level, and I enjoy the fact that it recharges amazingly fast. At least compared to the Soldier skill, anyway, which took a very, very long time to get up and running. With the Hunter, I can start any combat by critting someone with my sniper rifle, and then throwing out Bloodwing to take out a guy running for me while I snipe the other one. Plus, constantly using abilities is just a nice change of pace, since I’ve obviously shot all the guns in the game a ton when I was beating the game on PC.

But yeah, Borderlands: Still fucking awesome. I’m so fucking busy, I don’t know when I’ll get in another session with Jonathan, but I do hope we make it happen. It’s good times.

Take a moment, and listen to some of the music of Halo 3: ODST right now. Listen to this, and this, and this.

You’ve basically experienced the best part of the game, in my opinion.

Seriously, that soundtrack is amazing. It takes a game series where my brother and I, when playing through it, would yell “GUNS! WE MUST SHOOT OUR GUNS AT THINGS THAT ARE BAD” during cutscenes and dialog because that was all that was going on. It takes a game that is basically that, and makes it intensely atmospheric.
Then, of course, you get into the flashbacks and you have more normal fare. Alright, but not mind-blowing.

Other than the music, though? I dunno.

Playing so much Halo 3 with the Talking Tyrants was a shit-ton of fun, but it made me intimately familiar with the workings of all the weapons in Halo 3. This caused me to hate them so much. Maybe you can only pick Halo or Call of Duty, but if that’s the case, I’ll pick CoD every time, because your weapons feel powerful. Sure, it’s a LITTLE arcade-y. People still take more damage than they actually do. But if you snipe them, it’s one shot. You can kill a person with less than one clip of ammo with all but the weakest pistols against the heaviest-armored opponents, and even then you can negate that bonus by getting headshots. Compare that to the Halo Assault Rifle, where it takes at least 2 clips to kill another player. It’s just so frustrating and stupid to attack people in Halo. It makes me mad that I can get the jump on somebody and lose, because it takes so many shots.

And so, through all the matches, I began to loathe all Halo weapons. Odious Tea did nothing to negate that.

The game really makes me wish that Bungie had gotten to create something else. The game does a shockingly-good job of being atmospheric in the Rookie segments. It feels like a game I want to play. But then I come upon some Covenant and it becomes a game I’ve played to death and is really annoying to me. I really couldn’t get over it as I played. It was so frustrating. A non-Halo game like this I would probably fall in love with.

Still, I was going to hold out up until I learned that Bungie hates people playing their game the way they want to. I have never played a Halo game by myself, and yet I was going to play Odious Tea in that way. I die constantly on Normal in Co-op, so, of course, to play alone I set it to easy, to which I was greeted with a description that “the game basically plays itself.” Thanks, Bungie. Needed that insult. But I continue on anyway, until I realize that I am not getting a lot of achievements. I check them. Apparently you can get the achievements on anything BUT easy. Any other difficulty, but they don’t allow easy for absolutely no damn reason for achievements that are just “Beat Level 1,” “Beat Level 2,” etc. I’m not a complete achievement whore, but I do very much like achievements. I like earning them. They do give me incentive to keep going. I was very pissed Bungie so desperately wanted me not to play their game the way I wanted that they removed that incentive from me.
So after that big fuck you from Bungie, I didn’t feel like pressing through the mechanics I didn’t like any more. I sent it back.

If you can still stomach Halo combat, I bet ODST would be a really, really damn good experience. It’s certainly paying much better attention to story. But it’s pretty obvious it’s not for me.

Before my session today, I had homework to do. I had to write a script about how I was going to talk to my parents about the whole gender identity thing. This seemed like a great idea. I mean, I’m a writer. I write from time to time. Some people might even say I write every day on some sort of “bloeg.” Surely I could come up with something effective, especially since I was prepped on a good method of doing such a speech, and it seemed completely logical and effective to me.

I then went about putting off writing this script for the entire week, and wrote it at something approximating the last minute. I just finished it a second ago.

And now I kind of feel like I’m falling apart.

In some ways, I almost wish I didn’t have a good relationship with my parents. I almost wish I didn’t give a shit about what they think. But I do. I really do. And I feel like they’re the biggest obstacle I have. Just attempting to write something that explained my situation to them, and how I love them, this isn’t a personal attack, and I can’t help it, and I have to do something about it. Dammit, just doing that put me on the verge of tears.

How the hell am I going to talk to them?

I know I’ll do it. I know I’ll move on afterwards. I know my parents are completely awesome, and they will, eventually come around once they understand. It just… the idea of fighting with them over this again makes me want to hide under the covers all day.

I mean, nobody, least of all me, said this would be easy.

At times, one Matthew Essner can get crushing really hard on fairly cool actors, and follow them into movies that he knows are going to be god awful, just because he’s there. This happened with Paul Bettany, and thus I found myself going to see the movie Legion, which, by all likelihood, was going to be a horrible piece of garbage. Still, I go for the company, and I hoped that it would at least be a silly, over-the-top piece of garbage that I could laugh at and still have a good time.
Legion completed failed at that. Completely.

In fact, it failed at whatever it was trying to do so badly, that I don’t really know what it was trying to do. I’m interested to know what the people who made this movie thought it was. Was it an action movie? Was it supposed to be horror? I’m really not sure. It doesn’t do either very well.

It’s not a very good horror movie because the “monsters” were completely lame. The transformation sequence of them shaking their heads with a stupid little effect was not going to strike terror into anyone. It is a stupid and cheap effect. The possessed people themselves have also just put in dark contacts and are wearing fake teeth. It looks like an effect I could create for a movie we were shooting for fun. It would be impressive in our movie. It just adds to the “budget” feel of the film here, especially since we’re talking about a film with one location for the entire thing.
The movie also attempts some elements of psychological horror. People die, and the movie attempts to make you connect with them in some way before that happens. However, it is done via what might be some of the worst dialog I have seen in a movie in a long time. Every single character has a speech that follows this pattern: “When I was young, every night, as I was tucked into bed, my mother would tell me that I need to be good, because if I’m not, God will be very displeased with me.” Something like that. They all are a parent pulling them aside every night, and almost every single statement is one that, if you told a kid that every night of their life, it would really fuck them up. Seriously, telling a kid every night that he needs to think about what he does because it may be his last day on earth? That could warp somebody. There were other examples too. The writing is so bad, and yet taken so seriously. Put in a different light, it would be funny. As it was, it was just painful. So, no, you don’t connect with any of the characters, and there is no mental horror aspect to the film as well.

That’s fine, of course. It doesn’t have to be a horror movie. Maybe it could be an action film. And, frankly, during the few times the movie is showing fight scenes, it is at its best. The fight scenes are no better than the dialog. They often don’t make any sense, and people use the very worst tactics. However, they do tend to be over the top and fun. Paul Bettany lighting the stream from a gas pump on fire by firing a pistol in order to set a van on fire so that he could pull someone out of the van? That shit is crazy, and is fun to watch.
However, the problem is that there is so very little of that. There’s only one other sequence of fighting along those lines, and that’s the finale. All the rest of the movie is people, in this diner, talking to each other very seriously about God, and things their parents said to them. If they had embraced the “badass angel fucking shit up” angle that the movie seemed like it would go for, it would have been a fairly entertaining movie, though pretty stupid. Like, let’s say, how G.I. Joe was. G.I. Joe was successful, and was a much better movie than Legion, because it didn’t take itself seriously and let itself be fun and stupid. Legion is so, so serious, and you will be left scratching your head as to why it is.

Add into all this sort of thing some fairly large plot holes and an awful, awful case of “we desperately need to set up a sequel even though the concept of this movie getting a sequel is fairly laughable” and you pretty well wrap up how much of a trainwreck this movie was. I had a fun time because I was sitting there making fun of it with Essner and Mason the whole time. If I hadn’t been, I would have been in constant pain. I don’t know what they were trying to do with this movie, but it’s pretty clear they failed.

I have played John Woo Presents: Stranglehold. I have shot tons of dudes with guns. I did not beat the game. After two levels, I was kind of fed up with it. And what do we do with games we are fed up with? If you said “Send it back to Gamefly” you win!

I remember really liking the demo to this game when I played it a long time ago. That’s why I wanted to play it again. I wanted to rent it and play it. It seemed like a simple fun action shooting extravasperiance. If nothing else, shooting people in the cock with “Precision Aim” was really satisfying.

However, it turns out that the game is really only interesting for that sort of demo period. You get more skills, but honestly, none of them are more useful than healing yourself and the precision shot. You go to new locales, but all that does it create an opening for the game to create awful objectives that are no fun to go after.
Example: in the second level, you are tasked with doing things like placing C4 and destroying a certain number of little drug labs. Now, you’d think that wouldn’t be too bad. But the game is really hard to navigate. There’s nothing like a map of any sort to help you, and the camera works so it’s really close behind Tequila so that you get a better view of hiim leaping about. It’s not built for exploration. Add that to the fact that the destructable enviroments, while cool little extras while you’re in combat, become a “puzzle” that is really hard to find, comprehend, and execute, and you have a recipe for annoyance. Twice during the second level I missed one objective and had to wander about for 15 minutes trying to find it. There were no enemies. I had already killed them all. I just had to wander around the enviroments and do nothing until I stumbled onto it.

The idea of doing that for the remaining levels ruined any fun the combat might have been. The combat shows off well in short spurts. It’s fun to jump about to and shoot the crap out of everyone in a world where everything reacts to your guns. After that initial high, though, you realize how simple and uninteresting it all gets, and the game only throws annoyance at you to try to fix that.

Yeah, didn’t really like this one. Sent it back. Can’t recommend it. Still, it was fun to rent. I like renting. Let’s me play stuff like this and realize how much I hate it!

Shockingly, I ended up watching the last episode of The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien. How did this happen? Well, you know, friends pull me places and I watch things. I wouldn’t have watched it by myself, but I was pretty glad I got to. I dunno, Conan is a damn funny guy, and he was definitely getting jerked around by higher-ups in a company that obviously does not really know what it is doing. He does not come off completely like roses, but I think he definitely won this fight, completely, in the eyes of everyone. My parents are glad to have Leno back, but I think they have to admit that Conan was getting screwed over, to some extent. He won.

Still, it’s interesting that, like anything, the whole situation is starting to draw some backlash. The argument tends to go “look at all the energy people are putting into such a stupid thing. Why does Conan need all that support? Why can’t they use their energy for something that’s actually good? Like, I dunno, I heard there was something in Haiti.” The argument rather frustrates me, though if you’d like to read a intelligently-created version of it, instead of my mocking synopsis, Michael Ian Black wrote something pretty good over here.
I can’t disagree that, to an extent, these people saying this have a point. There are way, way more important things to rally behind. Say, getting equal rights for gays and getting gay marriage accepted, if you want to pick something that I care about. But hell, pick whatever you want. There has to be something you support that could use your help more than Conan, who is a fairly rich and successful guy, and can handle himself. He’ll survive, and whatever he does in the future will probably be awesome. No doubt about it. He’s fine.

Still, though. Don’t complain about people following their passions. Whether they are genuinely upset and want change, or they just think having a pro-Conan party would be a lot of fun, which it probably would, they aren’t doing the wrong thing. They were putting out energy for something they were passionate about, and if they had fun at it, then hell, they made the right choice. If it banded some people together for a bit, that’s the right choice. The fact that it was so successful does not mean that the effort was wasted.
It’s not like it would be a one-for-one thing anyway. If you could scientifically spend the same amount of effort planning some sort of “Conan Rally,” or this wonderful day I heard of where everyone rides mass transit without pants on, and then spend an equal amount of time working to, I dunno, get people to overturn a law or give more blood, which do you think would be more successful? I put forward it would be the “fun” option, every time.
Rallying for Conan creates a party. Riding in a subway without pants creates an awesome story for you to tell. These activities put a smile on your face, and while they can be hard to organize, like anything can be hard to organize, they’re successful because they are fun. Blood drives, charity donations, and writing your congressperson just don’t do this. They are serious, and because they are not fun, they feel like work. At the same time, neither group of activities has a good chance of creating a change that you can actually experience. If I call up the office of one of my government representatives and voice a complaint, it’s not completely impossible that it might do something, but it’s unlikely. If nothing else, whatever I want happening happening will not feel like something I had a hand in. At the same time, a pro-Conan rally had little chance of affecting the outcome of what was happening, but in that situation I don’t need that to make it feel like a worthwhile experience, because it was fun to begin with. Doing it was already a reward.

There’s nothing wrong with having fun. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with doing something productive or useful, either. In fact, if those people involved in the sort of things I am talking about here were not doing anything useful, then yes, perhaps they deserve to be berated. But I would bet that’s not the case for a huge majority of them. They have jobs. They do the useful things they do, and then they want to have fun afterward. Let them have fun.
Let’s all have fun.

I don’t claim to have always been a rock, someone who has no issues and who doesn’t break. Far from it. But after the past few years, I’ve gotten my confidence back, and I got to a point where I felt like I wasn’t going to fall apart every day, and where I wasn’t going to have panic attacks time and again. I got to a point where I was working and I was accomplishing things.
Now I’ve moved to accomplish so much more. And it’s brought it all back up.

Starting to deal with my gender issues is bringing so much depressive ammo to the forefront of my mind, and my mind, being the dick it is, is restarting with making me feel nervous and bad about it. Things I haven’t worried about for years and years are coming back.
It’s frustrating, but I know it’s a good thing.
This is all stuff that I’ve repressed for so long just to survive, and get by. It’s not like they were gone, and they magically reappeared, although it feels somewhat like that. It’s just that all the little demons in my head that were always constantly draining me quietly from the background, that I had bottled up, are out in full force. They have to be, or I won’t be able to fight them.
It’s the first step in stopping all this shit and being genuinely happy once and for all.

It’s just so scary, though. I have complete confidence in myself. But the voice in my head sure doesn’t. I know I’m strong enough for this. I’ve been waiting for it for years. I know I can pull this off. But it’s not going to be the easiest thing. I know that. And my head knows that. And is really trying to use it against me.

But I’ve got forward momentum now. That’s something I’ve wanted for such a long time. I have forward momentum, and no amount of “sick to my stomach” nervousness is going to deter me. Because I am fucking going to take control of my life, be who I am, and love myself for the first time. I am going to make things happen.

I can make things happen.
I can.

I read that let’s play on Red Rescue Team, and then I got all lame and bought Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Sky, because I was really in the mood for it and you can play as a Vulpix in that one. All that is kind of lame, but I did it anyway, and you couldn’t stop me, so ha. I’m going to play it anyway, bitches. And Smiles Go For Miles.

Anyway, I was going over the new features and amazing benefits I have received by buying the “Pokemon Yellow” of the second group of Pokemon Mystery Dungeons. These features include faux items that are out to trick you into using bad items on yourself (Wait, this isn’t a Reviver Seed! This is a Reviser Seed! Oh game, you almost caught me there!), special campaigns outside of the main campaign that you can access from the main menu, and Spinda Cafe, a place to sink items in a way that gets you rare items or stat boosts. Plus, you get to watch the adorable little mixing animation of the Spinda when he makes you a drink that I wish I had an animated gif of. (I don’t suggest watching that whole video, though. I dunno, that guy’s voice creeps me out.)

All these features make the game more hardcore.

Now, the mainline Pokemon games are for kids, and they are simple in that way. With perseverance, you can beat anyone in the main storyline with just about any shitty party you’d like. Sure, there is a second level of strategy that I have never not used that is involved with building a well-rounded party, picking the most effective moves, and constantly preying on type weaknesses. This, however, is only one chart worth of complicated, and kids can easily pick that up, too. Or at least notice the game spits out “Super Effective!” whenever they attack a bird with their beloved Pikachu. Of course, there’s a third level of strategy that only insane people engage in that involves hidden stats and other such bullshit, but we will ignore that, as everyone should. Anyway, the point is that most of the more complex systems in Pokemon can be used or not used, depending on your level of competency and how much time you want to put in the game. It’s a sliding scale, but at the bottom of this scale is an RPG that anyone can play and be successful at.

Pokemon Mystery Dungeon just simply does not work like this, as much as the developers would like to.

Pokemon Mystery Dungeon is the babiest of all roguelikes I’ve played, this is true. There are no unknown items, and you can outlevel your foes if you’d like. You can always bring items into dungeons, except late game challenge ones, and you constantly have a collection of power moves to take out foes, instead of having to rely on a questionable basic attack. All these are features, not flaws: they’re trying to appeal to the same crowd who plays Pokemon. The same sort of crowd that is all over that sliding scale.
However, I doubt they’re getting anyone but the more hardcore, higher up people in that group. Even toned-down Mystery Dungeon rules are still a very large ruleset. Moving, searching, dealing with hunger effectively, and controlling your party are not simple button presses. Many common actions require you to hold combination of buttons down, but only if you set the moves up beforehand. If you didn’t do that, they’re buried under several levels of menus. The moves and creatures are fairly obviously familiar, but moves do different things. Important status effects like “slow” and “haste” just don’t actually exist in Mainline Pokemon, and leveling up the new stat of IQ through Gummis is, while not that hard, still a completely new concept. Basically, someone who likes Pokemon cannot just jump into these games and be successful. It will take a bunch of failure, and some practice. Granted, the game has a decent tutorial, but still: I could see how it would frustrate a very casual player.
Add to that fact that the features added in this expansionish game. You’ve got inscrutable systems of getting new items and boosts from the Spinda cafe to spade out. You’ve got the Faux items, which are attempting to replicate the “need to be tested and identified” items from normal roguelikes without actually adding that feature. It’s all additional added complexity and challenge. This game is simply less accessible than Explorers of Time and Explorers of Darkness. While most “third” entries in the mainline Pokemon games often do add more hardcore options (a Battle Tower, or some extreme challenge after the credits roll) these are, once again, optional. Nothing of the new stuff added in this game is that way. You’re getting faux items, no matter what. Gathering your party is moved to this Spinda Cafe, and you get a tour through the course of the story, so you can’t think it isn’t there to be used.

I guess what all this is working towards is that this game is really aimed towards me, but it’s still fairly childish in presentation and story. Which, of course, ALSO aims it towards me. But I’m weird, and it’s hitting a really weird niche of people who like cute, but hardcore, but not TOO hardcore or else it would be frustrating, games. Is there really a market out there? Does the game sell exclusively to furries and pokemorphs? Or is it something that everyone who grew up with Pokemon has graduated to, because they wanted a change in the formula of the original, seeing as they’ve just reproduced it like 5 times?
I really don’t know. You tell me.

Gamefly is currently sending me John Woo Presents: Stranglehold.
I’m excited.

I mean, I don’t have any good reason to be. The game was, at best, a competent but not all that wonderful shooter. I’m sure there will be bad guys, and I’m sure I will use a variety of guns and bullet-time (excuse me, Tequila-time) effects to kill them again and again. And you know what? That’s great.

Buying these sorts of shooters always seems like a bad value proposition. To make them last long, you have to play them at a high difficulty, which I’m just not willing to do anymore. Frustration will make me drop a game. If you play them on the easier settings, they don’t take very long. Often, there just isn’t much gameplay there. If there IS a long campaign, it probably gets boring near the end, and was probably padded. Thus, I never really buy many, if any, of the zillions of shooters that come out on the 360 every year. Sure, there might be a few gems, and they might be fun, but it just feels so wrong to buy them.

Gamefly has opened all of those games up to me. Suddenly, they’re a joy. I can blaze through them in a weekend on “Easy” or “Casual,” get some nerdpoints to increase my electronic penis, and feel no remorse. Sure, often they’re nothing special, but I get a feeling of accomplishment for actually beating a game, and it’s a good use of my time, and my rental. Plus, sometimes I find a shockingly good game, like Bound in Blood, and then I get to be pleased.

I guess what I am saying, in one line, is that renting games makes mediocre games worth it, and mediocre games on the 360 are, for the most part, shooters. I like playing through a lot of games. I like being knowledgable. I like beating things. I like this setup I’ve got going.
So bring on the Strangleholds and the Army of Twos and the Wets. I’ll play them until I get bored or beat them, and then send them back. It will be delicious.

Also, as a completely unrelated side note, Happy Birthday, Jonathan. Cause, you know, that’s today and all.

Okay, so at this point, school has started back up again, but dammit, I read like a million let’s plays over break, and they’re all fun, so I wanted to share them all. So here’s two more to read if you’re bored.

This is the sort of Let’s Play I’d love to write. I love the Pokemon Mystery Dungeon series, probably more than I should, because I love the silly little stories and the roguelike gameplay. This is exactly the sort of Let’s Play I would have loved to do of the first game. It takes the rather childish subject matter seriously. It has some amazing fanart. It’s just… I found it really fun to read. Maybe it isn’t your thing? But man, it was my thing.

Now this, this can be everyone’s thing. The Dark Id, who did many wonderful Let’s Plays of the Resident Evil series which I also really enjoyed, did this Let’s Play of the amazingly nonsensical Clock Tower 3 for the Playedstation 2 Console. It, much like his previous outings, is a great read, and a great trip that makes every single ridiculous plot hole extremely clear. I like it. Give it a go. And while you’re at it, why not try his Dead Aim Let’s Play! Now there’s a game that’s just mind-blowingly awful.

Okay, that’s the last of them, I swear. Not going to have any time to actually read anything for months, so you don’t have to worry about more of these posts! Really. Promise.