Tanatoes (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} tanatoes) wrote,@ 2008-05-01 09:06:00 |
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So wht's up with me?
Okay. The other excuse I've had for not posting, besides my lack of computerage, has been the monotonous sameness of my life. I'm not sure if this is simply a perceptual thing, but it often seems to me that little in my life is worth broadcasting. I work. I hang out with wife and cats. I watch TV. I play videogames. I sleep a little. Maybe see a friend on rare occasions. And repeat. When there is an event of note (like our adventures last week taking cats to the vet for tooth cleaning) Amanda is sure to post about it, so I know friends and family are sure to hear about it.
Still: now posting is as easy as it is likely to be without the advent of cranial ports, so those minutia of TV and videogames can be posted about. So here I go:
TV: There are a couple shows Amanda and I make time in the week to see and actually try hard not to miss. Not many. And only one that is right now absolutely must-see: the new Battlestar Galactica. I missed last week's episode because I was working until 11 PM last Friday, and it's been nagging at me ever since. I had permission to watch it on Amanda's computer, but I've always feel awkward using her mac (not ever having ever owned a Mac of my own until last night) and I've been dedicating every spare second to videogaming lately and haven't had a chance to catch up. Now that I have a computer of my own I can watch the streaming episode and be all caught up by this Friday and ready for more doom-filled drama.
Gaming: I've been splitting my time this week between two games. When Amanda is home I'm playing lots of Mario Kart Wii. I've always enjoyed the Mario Kart series, even when I couldn't master the dreaded 'snaking' technique so essential to mastering the DS and Gamecube incarnations, and this new one is in many ways a return to the more pure play of the SNES and N64 versions with a ton of fantastic online features. My favorite feature by far is the ease of sharing ghosts. Need help finding all the shortcuts in a level? Download the ghost of the fastest run in the world and watch it a couple times. Want a slightly less impossible challenge to beat? Download the ghosts of your friends and try to beat them. I've been spending more time racing ghosts than doing actual rcing against opponents. It's got less of the cheating of the huge nasty item attacks and the rubber-band speed of the computer opponents.
I'm also enjoying the Wii Wheel that comes with the game. I realize that it's probably less accurate that using, say, the wavebird controller and I should probably change over if I hope to truely master some of the trickier bits of the game, but it's so much fun and so intuitive. I thought that a wheel with nothing attached to it would be awkward, but in fact it works surprisingly well. I've been able to do mad wild steering and fine detailed finessing with very little effort. My only complaint is that the 'shake to do tricks' feature seems to sometime not register my shakes, so I find myself really aggressively shaking my arms to get it to work, and that get exhausting after a couple hours.
Then when Amanda is not home I've been playing Grand Theft Auto IV. I'm of two minds on this game. It's clearly a huge game, with deep storytelling, a vast and intricately designed world and plenty of play options.. but the series has toted itself as the ultimate sandbox experience where you can go anywhere and do anything, and this is clearly a falsehood. You can go just about anywhere and do most anything you want.. as long as it is immoral, criminal and vaguely evil. Oh, sure you can choose not to do the quests involving shootouts, drug deals and insanely irresponsible driving, but you wouldn't really be playing the game. You can, for example, take a girl out bowling. Or you could play pool or arcade games. But these little side games are fluff: little extra details and not part of the actual game. I've got better bowling, pool and arcade games on my Wii, and I'd boot those up if that's what I wanted to play. No, the heart of GTA is it's crime-laden main plot, and there's no escaping the fact that no matter how you play it, you are an evil person. I have started seeing some yes/no choices in my quests that will, I assume, at some point shape what kind of criminal I'm becoming in the game. Am I a ruthless mob boss and killer.. or will I become a kinder, gentler.. um.. mob boss and killer? But in an insideous way the game gets iside your head and makes you act in an immoral way. I'm not just talking about the plot here. Yes, the game is about drugs, murder and crime, so naturally the quests involve those things. But on a more base level the game encourages you to behave in a criminal manner even when you're not involved in one of the quests.
The biggest criminal influence in the game is simply getting around the town. The designers gave you plenty of options for getting from point a to point b. You could walk, or find a subway station (which are not marked on the in-game map, so you'd have to haul out the huge paper map that comes with the game I guess) or hail a cab... but all of those ways are time consuming or take money.. or both. The only real way to get around is to drive. And if you're not at that moment right near Roman's garage that means stealing a car. Okay.. the game is called Grand Theft Auto, so perhaps it should come as no surprise that you spend virtually the whole game driving around in one after another stolen car. If you should go off on a quest and get out of your car it will sometimes disappear, and I haven't figured out how to park in the right place for my stolen car to still be there when I go back to my safehouse to nap and save the game, so every few minutes I have to steal a new one. It's blindingly easy. Apparently nobody in Liberty City has Lojak or uses the Club. And every car is super easy to hotwire. There doesn't seem to be any difference between stealing a pretty souped up sportscar from uptown or a clunky jalopy from the projects aside from the handling of the car. And if you can't find a convenient car parked anywhere nearby just walk ver to the nearest red light and with the press of a button carjack a new ride. Oh, sure, the police may at some point get off their asses and give chase, but at the level I am at in the game they give up pretty easily and I get my consequence-free stolen ride to get around the city.
Then there's the driving mechanic. The camera is a little floaty and the way ahead of you is often obscured by your car so you can't see what's in front of you. Also, every car in the game turns like a boat. Huge, wide turns even when you use the breaks and try to drive responsibly, or alternatively crazy over-turning if you choose to use the handbreak. Maybe I'm just bad at it, true, but I can't seem to drive with any accuracy. The result? Another insidious criminal-making influence of the game: accidental crimes. I've run over pedestrians. I've knocked down lightpoles and knocked out fire-hydrants. I've been involved in countless collisions, fender-benders and sideswipes. I even once accidentally carjacked a cab because instead of holding the Y button to get into the cab I tapped it and threw the cabby on the ground, driving off with his liveliehood and ruining his day by accident! And in the consequence-free world of the game these constant, innumerable crimes are nothing at all. They're just part of getting around the city, a little slice of life in this virtual world. I tried when I first got the game to obey traffic laws. I'm not sure why. I stopped at red lights and drove mostly (when I could manage it due to the difficulty with steering) on the road. But now, after only a couple hours of lay time, I drive like a mad man. If there's traffic I drive around it, in the opposing lane or on the sidewalk. Over lawns and through parks. I've smashed through toll plazas and had police chasing me not because I had to for a quest in the game but because I couldn't stand to wait in traffic.
The odd thing is that I can't really figure out why all this criminal behavior bugs me so much. I've played and enjoyed such crazy driving games as Need for Speed: Most Wanted, where you spend most of the game being chased by increasingly frustrated and aggressive police. I've driven like a complete lunatic and caused 1000 car pile-ups in Burnout: Paradise. So why is the same behavior so reprehensible in GTA? I suppose because of all the effort they've put into making the world as realistic as possible. The characters in the main plot are well crafted and interesting (if ugly, hate filled and vulger much of the time.) And the many citizens of Liberty City have realistic reactions to your criminal behavior, shouting and carrying on. So it just feels more 'real' and less gamelike. It makes me feel dirty to play it.
And yet I don't want to stop. I want to see what happens next and I want to build up my vast criminal empire. I'm tired of doing odd jobs as a small-time thug and want to see what's going to transpire. And the game is beautiful, vast and engrossing. I'm a fan of exploration and collecting and well-plotted character development. I just wish it didn't make me feel like such an asshole so much of the time.
Wow. That was long. And I've got more I want to post besides. I guess that even in my monotonous life there's stuff worth posting about. Y'all can prolly expect to see many more rants from me now that I am re-computered.
Ta.
Okay. The other excuse I've had for not posting, besides my lack of computerage, has been the monotonous sameness of my life. I'm not sure if this is simply a perceptual thing, but it often seems to me that little in my life is worth broadcasting. I work. I hang out with wife and cats. I watch TV. I play videogames. I sleep a little. Maybe see a friend on rare occasions. And repeat. When there is an event of note (like our adventures last week taking cats to the vet for tooth cleaning) Amanda is sure to post about it, so I know friends and family are sure to hear about it.
Still: now posting is as easy as it is likely to be without the advent of cranial ports, so those minutia of TV and videogames can be posted about. So here I go:
I'm also enjoying the Wii Wheel that comes with the game. I realize that it's probably less accurate that using, say, the wavebird controller and I should probably change over if I hope to truely master some of the trickier bits of the game, but it's so much fun and so intuitive. I thought that a wheel with nothing attached to it would be awkward, but in fact it works surprisingly well. I've been able to do mad wild steering and fine detailed finessing with very little effort. My only complaint is that the 'shake to do tricks' feature seems to sometime not register my shakes, so I find myself really aggressively shaking my arms to get it to work, and that get exhausting after a couple hours.
Then when Amanda is not home I've been playing Grand Theft Auto IV. I'm of two minds on this game. It's clearly a huge game, with deep storytelling, a vast and intricately designed world and plenty of play options.. but the series has toted itself as the ultimate sandbox experience where you can go anywhere and do anything, and this is clearly a falsehood. You can go just about anywhere and do most anything you want.. as long as it is immoral, criminal and vaguely evil. Oh, sure you can choose not to do the quests involving shootouts, drug deals and insanely irresponsible driving, but you wouldn't really be playing the game. You can, for example, take a girl out bowling. Or you could play pool or arcade games. But these little side games are fluff: little extra details and not part of the actual game. I've got better bowling, pool and arcade games on my Wii, and I'd boot those up if that's what I wanted to play. No, the heart of GTA is it's crime-laden main plot, and there's no escaping the fact that no matter how you play it, you are an evil person. I have started seeing some yes/no choices in my quests that will, I assume, at some point shape what kind of criminal I'm becoming in the game. Am I a ruthless mob boss and killer.. or will I become a kinder, gentler.. um.. mob boss and killer? But in an insideous way the game gets iside your head and makes you act in an immoral way. I'm not just talking about the plot here. Yes, the game is about drugs, murder and crime, so naturally the quests involve those things. But on a more base level the game encourages you to behave in a criminal manner even when you're not involved in one of the quests.
The biggest criminal influence in the game is simply getting around the town. The designers gave you plenty of options for getting from point a to point b. You could walk, or find a subway station (which are not marked on the in-game map, so you'd have to haul out the huge paper map that comes with the game I guess) or hail a cab... but all of those ways are time consuming or take money.. or both. The only real way to get around is to drive. And if you're not at that moment right near Roman's garage that means stealing a car. Okay.. the game is called Grand Theft Auto, so perhaps it should come as no surprise that you spend virtually the whole game driving around in one after another stolen car. If you should go off on a quest and get out of your car it will sometimes disappear, and I haven't figured out how to park in the right place for my stolen car to still be there when I go back to my safehouse to nap and save the game, so every few minutes I have to steal a new one. It's blindingly easy. Apparently nobody in Liberty City has Lojak or uses the Club. And every car is super easy to hotwire. There doesn't seem to be any difference between stealing a pretty souped up sportscar from uptown or a clunky jalopy from the projects aside from the handling of the car. And if you can't find a convenient car parked anywhere nearby just walk ver to the nearest red light and with the press of a button carjack a new ride. Oh, sure, the police may at some point get off their asses and give chase, but at the level I am at in the game they give up pretty easily and I get my consequence-free stolen ride to get around the city.
Then there's the driving mechanic. The camera is a little floaty and the way ahead of you is often obscured by your car so you can't see what's in front of you. Also, every car in the game turns like a boat. Huge, wide turns even when you use the breaks and try to drive responsibly, or alternatively crazy over-turning if you choose to use the handbreak. Maybe I'm just bad at it, true, but I can't seem to drive with any accuracy. The result? Another insidious criminal-making influence of the game: accidental crimes. I've run over pedestrians. I've knocked down lightpoles and knocked out fire-hydrants. I've been involved in countless collisions, fender-benders and sideswipes. I even once accidentally carjacked a cab because instead of holding the Y button to get into the cab I tapped it and threw the cabby on the ground, driving off with his liveliehood and ruining his day by accident! And in the consequence-free world of the game these constant, innumerable crimes are nothing at all. They're just part of getting around the city, a little slice of life in this virtual world. I tried when I first got the game to obey traffic laws. I'm not sure why. I stopped at red lights and drove mostly (when I could manage it due to the difficulty with steering) on the road. But now, after only a couple hours of lay time, I drive like a mad man. If there's traffic I drive around it, in the opposing lane or on the sidewalk. Over lawns and through parks. I've smashed through toll plazas and had police chasing me not because I had to for a quest in the game but because I couldn't stand to wait in traffic.
The odd thing is that I can't really figure out why all this criminal behavior bugs me so much. I've played and enjoyed such crazy driving games as Need for Speed: Most Wanted, where you spend most of the game being chased by increasingly frustrated and aggressive police. I've driven like a complete lunatic and caused 1000 car pile-ups in Burnout: Paradise. So why is the same behavior so reprehensible in GTA? I suppose because of all the effort they've put into making the world as realistic as possible. The characters in the main plot are well crafted and interesting (if ugly, hate filled and vulger much of the time.) And the many citizens of Liberty City have realistic reactions to your criminal behavior, shouting and carrying on. So it just feels more 'real' and less gamelike. It makes me feel dirty to play it.
And yet I don't want to stop. I want to see what happens next and I want to build up my vast criminal empire. I'm tired of doing odd jobs as a small-time thug and want to see what's going to transpire. And the game is beautiful, vast and engrossing. I'm a fan of exploration and collecting and well-plotted character development. I just wish it didn't make me feel like such an asshole so much of the time.
Wow. That was long. And I've got more I want to post besides. I guess that even in my monotonous life there's stuff worth posting about. Y'all can prolly expect to see many more rants from me now that I am re-computered.
Ta.
