KILLGORE 2008 Double Feature

I spent a while leafing through old hard drives yesterday trying to find the files for a video project I wanted to pick up.  Never found 'em.  What I did find was all the footage from the UCB Halloween horror show spectacular Killgore. Harrison Brown, Robert Emanuel, and I taped both shows on the night of Halloween, 2008, on three cameras, presumably for UCBComedy.com.

And then we never did anything with the footage.  

So... here it is. Please enjoy Killgore 2008, starring Brett Gelman and Jon Daly, with Neil Campbell, Michael Cassidy, Katie Dippold, Brian Huskey, James Pumphrey, Morgan Walsh, Chad Carter, Will McLaughlin, Angela Trimbur, Josh Fadem, Kulap Vilaysack, and Chris Stangl. Written and Directed by Matt Walsh, with music by someone I don't know who it was, and the assistance of a legion of others, surely. 

I should perhaps add this is NSFW viewing, not least because it's almost 90 minutes long and you should get back to work. Happy Halloween!

Set List: Doug's Bird Skeletons

I'm working on getting Set List sponsored by the new Nintendo Switch, but until we can close that deal, this week Set List at the Pack is brought to you by: Doug's Bird Skeletons!  Doug's Bird Skeletons: specializing in bird skeletons!

They make great pets, you know, and they don't eat too much. 

Escape Room Reviews: Titanic

Special note: we were beta testers for this room, which was not yet open to the public at the time that we played. 

Company: 60
Date Played: 9/22/16
Player Count: 2, which is enough
Success:  Success!
Premise: It’s the Titanic. Pretty much all it does is sink. Get out of there!

Immersion: At the beginning of the game, things felt very urgent indeed, but that feeling fades fairly quickly.  The set is very nice, although a couple of items seemed a little anachronistic (and may have been replaced after the beta test). The background screams of drowning passengers started to sound like people enjoying a roller coaster after a little while. 

Highlights: The fun factor on this room is really high.  As I mention with every review of a 60 Out room, they're tops at magical objects, but the non-magic puzzles are also pretty clever. Although there are a couple of standard locks, a lot of what this room has to offer is much more tactile and involving. 

Lowlights: As with the Ghost Ship, we got really stuck on something fairly early where we had the right idea, but the thing we wanted to do didn't seem possible. We got past it eventually, but not without a) asking for a hint that didn't help because we already worked out what we thought the thing did, and b) applying WAY more force than I would have thought necessary. 

Some of the props were a little subpar or even broken for a room that isn't subject to public consumption yet, but I'm confident that all of those issues will be sorted out by the time the room is open to the world. 

And Finally:   Hey, this was the second time in two days that we found a [XXX] in a [XXX] on a [XXX] in a room by 60 Out!

If I were clicking around on a company's website, trying to pick a room to play, I think it would have been a long time before I settled in on a Titanic-themed room, but the fact is that this is my favorite 60 Out room to date.  In contrast to Ghost Ship, this room has an unusually low amount of things, but they are used in ways that are mostly more concrete and satisfying.

Out of 13 escape rooms played, I'm going to rank this one #4. 

How to book this room yourself: Visit https://www.60out.com/rooms/titanic

Set List: Party Burritos!

This week's Set List was sponsored by 6-Foot Party Burritos! That's right, 6-Foot Party Burritos. They're real big.

Everyone in this week's audience was invited to gnaw on the Party Burrito on their way out, while there was still some Party Burrito left, and you know what? By the end of the night, there wasn't!

Escape Room Reviews: Ghost Ship

Special note: we were beta testers for this room, which was not yet open to the public at the time that we played. 

Company: 60 Out Escape Rooms
Room: Ghost Ship
Date Played: 9/21/16
Player Count: 2, which is not enough
Success:  Success! …eventually!

Premise: You’re in the hold of the ship of… ghost pirates? You need to escape and break that spell!

Immersion: It's very ship-like! Really great looking wooden construction abounds. There were a couple of objects that I don't know what they were supposed to be in-fiction or out, but that's more of fridge-logic than anything to think about in the moment.

Highlights: This room is huge!  It might not by physically larger than The Lab, but I've never seen a room with this much stuff to do. Most rooms I've played have roughly 25 things*, and this is a room with over 40. 

Some very cool magic objects - this is the top company for magic objects. 

Lowlights: Not every magic object was entirely functional on our playthrough - again, it was a beta test, and the purpose of testing is to work out the bugs, so I don't hold this against them or expect that you'll encounter the same. But still - sometimes we had to have GMs come in to fix things.

We got really stuck on a puzzle where we tried the correct solution right away but for some reason it didn't work, so we ruled it out as an option.  Wasting so much time fruitlessly knocking our heads against this particular wall was bad for morale.

And Finally:   This room reminded me in a few ways of the other 60 Out room I've played, Senator Payne. The first half is mostly physical interactions with ordinary objects, which I found more satisfying than the second half.  

Playing this game as a couple (our GM said the recommended group size would be 6-8) and as testers, it took us almost exactly 80 minutes to escape, and I think I was somewhat escape-room-fatigued by the end of it. With a proper group working out the non-linear segments as a team, and the room itself firing on all cylinders, Ghost Ship would be an excellent room for a medium or large-sized team.

Out of an even dozen escape rooms played, I'm ranking this one #5

How to book this room yourself: Visit https://www.60out.com/rooms/ghost-ship

*Things, in this case, are objects you can interact with: clues, keys, locks, points of interest, anything I would mark down on my map**

**Obviously, I go home and draw a complete map of every escape room I play, with annotations for the objects, locations of the collectibles, notes about the flow of play and solutions. Obviously.