The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

Okay, I finished it. It is complete. I finished Tales of Monkey Island now. ARE YOU HAPPY, BENJAMIN ESSNER? ARE YOU?

But no, it was fun.

Rise of a Pirate God was a decent episode. I dare say it didn’t have nearly enough humor, though. The entire thing was so steeped in “drama” that there was very little laughter to be had. None of it was out of place for the story itself? They were telling a “Tale,” and this was the dramatic conclusion of said tale. Still, I think it was hurt a little bit by more serious subject matter. It really wanted you to be connected to the characters, but at the same time, you knew what kind of world this was taking place in. You know that, when the game was over, everything would be back to normal. And so it was. It certainly makes “sacrifices” much less meaningful when you know they will not amount to anything because Telltale has to leave Monkey Island the way they found it, in case Lucasarts wants to ever do anything with the series again.

The last episode also had some really annoying puzzles in it. The whole “finale” sequence, while obviously extremely reminiscent of the finale of the original game, was also really annoying to play, as you just had to stand there while you tried to figure things out and, even when you did figure them out, had to wait and wait for things to get into their proper place so that you could enact any plans you created. I mean, I do appreciate the reference, but I certainly found it a little less fun.
Certainly, a lot of the episode was, perhaps, a problem with that sort of thing. There were a bunch of fairly annoying, though I admit not unfair, puzzles. The one puzzle that really stood out to me as awesome and good was the variation on insult swordfighting where you had to insult, but also console at the same time. That was just a really clever and fun bit of puzzle and character development. That was good stuff. That stands out.

In any case, as a whole, Tales of Monkey Island is a package completely worth your time. It might even be better, now that it’s all out, since it very much does feel like one complete game, instead of little episodes. Sam and Max and Wallace and Gromit very much felt like disconnected episodes, and frankly, that is just fine. A fine way to do things. But Telltale managed to take one of the most revered series in adventure game history and write a good, long story with it. That was pretty neat of them. I like it.
Now go get the rights to Maniac Mansion, Telltale! I think that would be cool. I’d play a sequel to Day of the Tentacle made by you all.

I hate March, and I hate every game developer releasing a game in March. Seriously, why are you doing this to me? Let’s run down the games that there is no way I’m not buying that come out in March.

1) Pokemon Heart Gold/ Soul Silver. I may have not beat a Pokemon game in a long while, but I still love them to death, and this is a remake of my favorite of the series, and it comes with the fucking re-imagining of the Pokemon Pikachu. I am so in. It’s coming out March 14th.
2) Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey. I’m a MegaTen fangirl now, so I have to get this. Plus, people say it’s one of the best installments of the series in forever. It comes out March 23rd.
3) Dawn of War II: Chaos Rising. I upgraded a computer to play Dawn of War II, and I loved every second of it. You better believe I’m getting the expansion day 1, which would be March 11th.
4) Final Fantasy XIII. Honestly, this is the only one I don’t need day 1, but only because of all this other amazing shit coming out in the same time frame. I will completely play it eventually, though, especially if it goes through with what I hear about “nice and linear, straightforward, with intriguing combat” that people are murmuring. It comes out March 9th.

That is way, way more RPG-esque goodness than I can handle in that kind of time period. Especially considering that I am going to be so, so busy with work, school, teaching, and, hopefully transitioning.

So yeah, fuck you, March. Shame on you for giving me so much awesome shit to look forward to.
Dicks.

“Insert Review of The Trial and Execution of Guybrush Threepwood here.”
Okay, note I left for myself, I suppose I will.

Basically, I can’t help but wonder how this episode would have affected me if I didn’t know about the fifth episode ahead of time. I could totally see there being a weird pang in some of the death-ness that occurs in the episode. I mean, not serious pangs, since it’s obvious that Guybrush and friends live in a world where, obviously, anyone important would come back from the dead. Yeah, I don’t expect serious drama from my comedy vidjeo gamez, but I still think they did a pretty good job hitting the dramatic notes in this episode, and that is something that I very much appreciate. Telltale can tell a tale. Etc etc, humor, whatever.

This episode’s claim to fame, since most episodes have a claim to fame, is that it features everyone’s favorite character, Stan the Supersalesman. No, seriously, how can you not love Stan? He’s just vastly entertaining. So it’s not like it isn’t pleasant to see him back, and it makes sense for him to play the role of lawyer and such in the episode. However, I really feel like he could have been used a bit more. I mean, part of the reason why I love the character is the huge, long sales pitches he gives. He does nothing of that sort in this episode, which is kind of a letdown. That’s a pure “fan want” kind of thing, though, so it’s nothing too serious.

Once again, I appreciated the puzzles as well. There was nothing particularly awful or out of place in the episode: all the puzzles made sense. I wasn’t too excited to go wandering around the Flotsam forest again, as that was the source of most of the ugh-ness from the first episode, but they manage to keep it to one trip and mix it up enough that it isn’t a painful experience with the new crazy folding map and whatnot.
The only seriously dick move is a puzzle with a time limit which requires you to run all the way across the map and then, when you do what you would think is the logical thing, will make you fail until you figure out the second step. This seems like a sort of “time-wasting” move, since it is kind of annoying to have to run all the way there and all the way back while you trying to figure things out. I guess there’s some old school relevance to, say, the melting mug puzzle from the original game, but it was still pretty frustrating when I thought I had it all solved, and then learned there was another step, and I would have to do more backtracking. A minor annoyance, but certainly an annoyance.

Anyway, the game continues on. Soon a pirate god will rise, probably. I hope it’s been okay that I’ve been breaking these reviews up with other posts. I pretend that I have readers that don’t want to read Telltale reviews every single day for a week. Maybe that’s crazy of me. Still, I’d expect the review of the final episode in, oh, two days. (Now if I don’t get it done, I’ll feel silly, won’t I. Oh well.)

Can you tell I’ve been doing nothing but watching and reading Let’s Plays over my break? Because that’s totally what I’ve been doing. And that means I totally have to make sure you’re aware of the more awesome ones, and by far, the most awesome Let’s Play I have encountered in a long while is this Let’s Play of Mercs 2.
It’s basically two people, in co-op, doing some of the most ridiculous shit you can do in the game while playing through all the levels. The conversations are, for the most part, funny, and seeing them break the physics engine again and again is certainly more fun than doing it in game. Seriously, this game made me want to pop Mercs 2 back into my Xbox, and that is saying something, seeing as it’s a passable, but not great game. Still, they make it seems so amazingly fun, you can’t help but want to join in. They even care enough to cut out the boring bits by putting these amazing bits of pixel art depicting what they were doing… it’s just an amazingly well-done let’s play.

I’d love to tell you all about the greatest moments, but this Let’s Play does not deserve the spoilers. It has made me laugh out loud, so loud that I woke people up in the middle of the night. You owe it to yourself to watch it. Now go do that, and enjoy, and I’ll see you later.

Rolling on and rolling on, I finished off Lair of the Leviathan, the third part of the three parts of the quintet of parts that make up Tales of Monkey Island.

There are some odd decisions being made all around this game. The entire setup of LeFlay as a romantic interest of sorts is just really odd for the series. It’s sort of line if Rosalina was someone to be rescued instead of Peach, as opposed to just being a mother figure for stars with a spaceship full of cannons like she was. Anyway, I just feel like it’s a strange decision, since right near the beginning of the first game, which I recently played, even, it was determined that Elaine and Guybrush were plunder bunnies. Then again, since you’ve got this weird situation potentially drawing Elaine away from Guybrush, I suppose some parity between them is to be expected. It’s obvious Guybrush is pretty clearly dedicated, though, so it all seems… pointless? Perhaps something purely one-sided would be more character-relevant, but at several points, Guybrush is obviously not playing it that way. He realizes she’s attractive and uses that to his advantage, etc. If he only saw her as a fellow pirate-y sort with strong skills, it would have been different.
Maybe I’m over-thinking this stuff.

In any case, I felt like the puzzles in this one were a bit of a step back. Mostly because of the “pirate face-off” system which just was not a lot of fun. I mean, it’s not like, mechanically, it was much different from an insult sword-fighting, but at least then, you’re enjoying the retorts and whatnot. This just seemed like a bunch of people were messing with the crazy-ass things the Telltale Tool could do to people’s faces, and decided to justify putting them in the game. None of the faces were laugh-out-loud funny. Maybe a smile. It just seemed to be kind of a waste.
At the same time, though, the entire sequence where you play as the Voodoo Lady? Genius. I loved it. I guess that makes up for it.

But yeah, Tales of Monkey Island really hasn’t disappointed so far. I’ll admit, back when I played the first episode, I had some worries. With the stupid treasure hunting and some really annoying puzzles, I was worried that, by trying to make it for the kind of people who used to play these games a long time ago, they were going to get rid of the casual charm that makes me enjoy playing their games. But they totally haven’t, and that’s totally cool.

Onward to the Trial and Execution of Guybrush Threepwood! Stay tuned, fans of my stupid rambling!

Sometimes, there is a game so passable, so strongly mediocre, that you would never play it.
However, sometimes this game is so full of yuri undertones that you just cannot help but grin and scheme while searching for maximum awkward.
At the same time, do you really want to play that game?

Well, that’s what the brilliance of LPs comes in.
This Hammer can Forge a Woman! is really, really excellent. I read through it over the pass few days, and damn, it’s just a really entertaining read. Plus, and I do consider this a benefit, it’s all about a game I have no interest in ever playing, so there’s no chance of me ever spoiling anything for myself. It’s an all-around win!

Additional let’s plays I have been reading (because apparently that’s what I do when I’m bored) that are worth your time include this one, which is just an amazing, amazing playthrough of the amazing game Nancy Drew and the White Wolf of Icicle Creek. It’s written in a specific sort of internet humor style that, perhaps, will not please you. But it certainly pleased me. There were a lot of laughs to be had.

And, hell, if you’re looking for additional excellent Let’s Plays on the homefront, it would be silly not to read Over A Thousand Nights… Every day!, a playthrough of a game I’ve never heard of, The Magic of Scheherazade, in classic excellent Octopus Prime fashion. Still continuing, still awesome!

Yep, so this was another post of links. DEAL WITH IT! Get reading! There will be a test!
Okay, there won’t be, but someday I may be so excited about something like this to make a test! I swear!

As promised, I actually played another Tales of Monkey Island episode! We can pretend that Ben’s constant asking me about it for months paid off! It’ll make him feel special, maybe.
In any case, moving right along from the first episode, I played the Siege of Spinner Cay, where there was a siege, sort of, but only for about 5 minutes or so.
Still, though, it was pretty great.

The whole episode seemed much shorter than the first one, but I say that was probably because of a distinct lack of bullshit treasure hunting minigames, which is something that was much appreciated. Those weren’t actually very fun in the first game, at least not when you’re doing them like… the fourth time. In any case, I certainly didn’t mind it. It also might have taken longer if I didn’t refer to an FAQs during one or two times where I had an idea for a solution (and it turned out my adventure game intuitions were right, and I was correct each time) but just didn’t want to go searching around for where in the world such an item would be forever. Still, though, I think the fact that I knew the solution most times was a good sign: there were no bullshit cheese wheel puzzles in this episode, which is great.

The humor was also really good during this episode. There were several conversations, mostly with Winslow who makes a great straight man, that really had me laughing. The merpeople of questionable gender also made me grin, not to mention Winslow’s comment of “Don’t go kissing without knowing. I learned that the hard way.” It’s simple, but fun. I mean, if nothing else, there’s a big book of high-larious fish jokes for you to peruse, so, you know, you’ll laugh.

Story-wise, it introduced the Human LeChuck, which is not completely a concept I find entertaining, but at least they did it really well. Guybrush hates him, of course, but they were really nice with making him ambiguous as to whether he’s a bad guy, or a previous bad guy trying to turn things around. It was a nice level of subtlety that I appreciated. The episode, of course, ended with a cliffhanger, but I don’t feel like I can tell you whether or not it was a bullshit cliffhanger, seeing as I can just immediately play the next episode. It was only sort of straight out of Pirates 2. Sort of.

Anyway, the episode was good. But there’s one more thing I need to mention: Goodness, Telltale, can you render a new pirate head? Every single non-essential pirate all has the same head. Even Winslow, a character who one would think would have gotten more attention if he was going to be around for most of the game, is the same pirate head with a different skin tone. I know you all are working on a time limit, but seriously, would it have been that hard to render one more head in between episodes? It just seems cheap.
I also don’t know what I think about this whole “Guybrush with a Hook” thing. I mean, I had learned about it before I played the game, but it still just doesn’t sit right with me. It makes Guybrush look too much like a pirate. “But he is a pirate!” you say, “A mighty pirate!” Well, yes. But he’s a very LAME mighty pirate, and that’s what makes him lovable. He actually isn’t like a pirate at all. Making him seem more like one? That just kind of… annoys me. It seems to be deviating from his character, even if how it happens wasn’t really that out of place. But maybe that’s just me. Maybe nobody else has a problem with it. Who knows.

But it’s fun, either way. Go kiss a merperson, I’ll keep going with Lair of the Leviathan. I’ll tell you how that goes, I’m sure.

A few nights ago, I had an issue. I wanted to play a vidjeo game in bed, but I had no such vidjeo game! Yes, I had nothing new on the DS. I didn’t know what to pop in and fiddle around with. I’ll be honest, I was jonesing to try Might and Magic: Clash of Heroes, but I am being good and strong-willed and am waiting for that one on Gamefly. I was without anything.

I looked around on the desk, and saw my copy of Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor staring at me. Now, I didn’t get very far in this. I could play it. Eventually, I did end up playing it. But it took incredible effort to get myself to take it to my room and pop it in. It was an old game! I didn’t want to play that!

But seriously, it just kind of overwhelmed me how much I was against booting an old game up again and playing it. I don’t do that very often, I admit. If I were to do some sort of Backloggery, I would put so many games on there… I never beat games. I never want to go back and beat them either, apparently so much so that I find it difficult to make myself. It got me thinking about why…

I think it goes back to something Jick said, actually, on the podcast. He says he rarely beats games, he just plays them until he feels he understands them. Then he has no want to keep going. I feel like that describes me pretty well. A huge part of why I play games it to be able to talk about games. At a point, I understand a game’s systems enough to be able to talk about them. Yes, there’s plenty of plot stuff I’m missing. But I can hold my own in a discussion of Devil Survivor without getting lost, and that’s really what’s important to me. That’s a lot of why I play a lot of the games I do. I mean, they’re fun to, but I want to understand them and be able to talk about them.

You know, thinking about it, it’s been shocking that, fairly recently, I did dig back into my backlog and finish games, namely Layton 2 and Bowser’s Inside Story. Of course, that happened mostly because I was sick, on my ass, and had little better to do. But yeah, that’s clearly an exception, and not a rule.

Anyway, I guess the point of this is that… yeah, I have a Backlog, and yeah, I don’t care. It should probably concern me about how much money I’ve spent and haven’t gotten enough value out of, but you know what? That’s why I got Gamefly. To cut down on that shit. And I have. And what I haven’t completed? Well, who the fuck cares, you know? I had fun. I’m having fun.
Etc. Etc. Etc.
If you’ve decided to work on your Backlog this year, more power to you. I’ll just keep letting my grow until it crushes me under the weight of all the unplayed vidjeo gamez.

Hey, I figured, while my vacation was ending, I’d get back to all the Telltale games that had been sitting on my desktop, wondering if I should play them for awhile. I started by polishing off the Wallace and Gromit series by beating The Bogey Man.

The last episode, Muzzled, was interesting because it put Wallace in more of a clearly heroic role, as opposed to someone with a good idea who screwed it up and must fix his mistakes. It had a clear villain, and goals that were more about helping out Gromit, the dogs, and in a round-about way, the town. This episode continues that trend, with Wallace attempting to save a country club as well as the entire town due to the evils of… golf, I guess? Something like that.

If there’s anything to be said about the plot, it’s that they really went out of the way to wrap up every single loose end from the series in this episode. I don’t know if that means that they will never make another Wallace and Gromit game, or what, but it didn’t particularly satisfy. Especially since all the loose ends tied up were about other characters, and not about Wallace or Gromit. Not that they’re amazingly deep characters that desperately need to have dramatic change? Especially if they’re going to continue later comedic exploits, wacky hijinks, and the like. It seems silly, though, to assume that, as a player, I’m going to get more attached to the side characters than to the characters who are the ones I am attached to, controlling, and who bring a majority of the laughs to the whole situation.
But maybe I care too much about that.
In any case, I guess what I’m trying to say is that the plot of this episode was actually quite good, even though it didn’t feel much like a “season finale.” Muzzled actually seems like it would have been a much more dramatic finish to the series in that regard, due to the high-flying heroism and clear-cut villain. Also, the emphasis put on Ms. Flitt’s relationships as, for whatever reason, being the core of the entire series is kind of silly.
That’s why I’m trying to say.

In any case, the puzzles in the episode were of a fairly good quality! Figuring out the sort of blatant puzzles in the Country Club was pretty fun, if sort of blatantly puzzle-y. At the same time, they did a good job setting up why with the “obvious ancestors of Wallace and Gromit” angle. Though they were obviously a bit more skilled than Wallace at making things that actually work. The strange variation on a sliding block puzzle at the end was both funny and neat at the same time. That’s a pretty good overall collection of stuff to do, I think. Adventure-game wise, anyway.

But yeah, the whole Wallace and Gromit series was… pretty good! It’s clear that Telltale knows their stuff at this point. They’re getting really damn good at this whole “making adventure games” thing, which is lovely. I shall continue walking through all the ones I haven’t played yet, let me tell you, so look forward to badly-written whatevers about all the Tales of Monkey Island episodes soon! Or know you probably don’t have to check back in awhile, Either way.

Alternate Title: “Bang Bang Gunshoot game with a ghost sometimes.”

F.E.A.R. 2 is just an incredibly generic game.

I mean, I don’t know. There are some good parts, I suppose. For one, the Soldier AI in the game is just as top-notch as it was in the original. What I played in the original was fun because the enemies were fun to fight against. You felt like you weren’t in a shooting gallery. Granted, you were much more survivable than them, of course, but they at least, for the most part, acted like someone who would like not to be killed. This holds over really well in this game, and the AI for the soldiers is excellent. It makes the combat in the game quite fun.
In addition to that, the guns in this game feel really good. Granted, not like… Modern Warfare levels of good. Infinity Ward has that shit down to an art! But they’re quite close. The enemies take a few more shots than I would like, but every gun feels unique and powerful in its own way. Except maybe the pistol. But it’s the pistol, so… I guess that’s to be expected, even though I love a good, worthwhile pistol. But yeah, if nothing else, even though they toned down the shotguns from the first game, where they made you a god, the shotguns in this game in particular still feel more powerful than anything else in any other game, and it’s really satisfying to use them. Basically, the weapons are pretty nice.

But man, I don’t know. There are issues. For one, there are enemies other than the Soldiers. “Oh, good! Variety is good!” you say. But the AI for these creatures is the exact opposite of the intelligent manner of the soldiers. They just run up to you, and you fire randomly, and they die. No challenge. Nothing interesting. They’re just generic monsters. The worst, however, are the “puppeteers.” At least these create a different combat scenario, where corpses are reanimating, and you have to find the puppeteer and kill him. But it’s frustrating as fuck, because whenever you get the guy in your sights, he uses this light blast to disorient you, so you only get to fire maybe 2 rounds at him, then you have to find him all over again. It’s pretty bullshit.
The controls, too, are kind of pointlessly different than CoD4. Not enough to completely throw you off, but it’s annoying. I mean, I hate to say that all shooter controls need to be the same, but come on. They do. It’s been standardized by now. Valve kind of gets away with it in Left 4 Dead because the game is so fantastic and they’re Valve. If you’re not bringing that kind of pedigree, and this game isn’t, I need to be pressing the same buttons to do similar things. Melee needs to be on clicking the right stick, etc. Seriously.
The “horror” elements aren’t scary either. Just like the first game, it’s very formulaic. If you’re in a “horror” section, you don’t need to shoot, just run forward. You are in no danger. They added ghosts that hurt you, in this one, to try to fix this issue, but all that does is frustrate you when you get lost and can’t find the exit, because you still can’t shoot at them, so you just have to run. There’s no terror and no tension. I just found myself annoyed that the camera effects were being all weird so I couldn’t find the exit.

Mostly, though, the game hinges a lot on its story to set it apart and make it a game worth your time. However, there’s simply nothing there. Well, okay, let me rephrase: There may be something there, but it is all in little intel notes you find spread around. It’s not actually in the gameplay or the game. You move from location to location with little obvious purpose. The way buildings are connected makes little sense. There are some characters, but they’re just kind of there. You’re alone 90% of the time, and you don’t even have a “Cortana” voice in your head. When you do, it’s almost jarring, and they’re saying things unrelated to the action, like just filling in exposition to attempt to explain why you are where you are. The game also ends abruptly, and certainly doesn’t seem to have your character follow any sort of significant arc or anything. You’re just a guy with a gun, shooting unrelated guys with guns.
I’ll admit: I listened to podcasts during the entire playthrough of the game. Nothing I was reading in the subtitles and nothing from watching the game made me wonder what was going on, or made me interested. One could probably say I didn’t give it a chance. Okay, that’s fine. But the game didn’t show me anything that wanted to make me do as such. In comparison, I paused, listened to, and paid attention to every cutscene in Red Faction: Guerrilla. Now, there’s little doubt in my mind that Red Faction had a worse plot than F.E.A.R. 2. But Red Faction was constantly doing things that made me excited. It made me invested in the awesome shit going on. I wanted more, so I paid attention. In F.E.A.R., I was just moving along for achievements and more guys to shoot. It didn’t draw me in, and it is its job to do so. I feel no remorse in saying the story is not interesting due to that.

Anyway, it was a fine enough weekend rental sort of game, though. As I said, the gunplay for most of it is very entertaining. It’s probably a better shooter than, say, Wolfenstein, which I also enjoyed and is also a great weekend shooty game. Feel free to give it a play. It won’t hurt. It’s not really purchase material, though.