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About
This is a blog which is almost exclusively used to complain about largely inconsequential things.
GTA4: 90 hours later
May 9, 2008 – 12:04 am
My boner for this game is losing stiffness. It’s still a great game, I’m still playing a ton, but I’m starting to notice the faults more prominently. Some technical stuff: framerate, pop-in, the usual suspects. Compared to the problems the PS2 games had, GTA4 is leaps and bounds better but.. I kind of want to wait for a PC version more than I want to keep playing the 360 version. Also adding to that feeling, xbox live. The lag is worse (and there are less players) than the PC multiplayer hack mods made for previous GTAs. And the people on xbox live are the some of the worst people alive. Also the PC mods had much more inventive game modes. So the mulitplayer is kind of a letdown. There’s some fun to be had with a small group of friends but it just doesn’t compare to my good old days of MTA.
I still enjoy roaming around the city in single player, and the story was pretty strong. There are some weird moments in the story where the free-roaming nature of the game gets in the way of character development and believability. Particularly Niko; unlike the previous games you are not playing a character whose only motivations are money and power. Since he’s not portrayed as a sociopathic mass murderer it feels a bit odd to go on a rampage killing innocent people. On the other hand, killing innocent people is fun. It’s quite the dilemma!
But I’m done with the story now anyway, so the point where that was bothering me has long been passed. Now the problems are more about the sense of speed in cars feeling limited by the framerate, and my inability to find a damn Infernus anywhere. Also I’m at 98.33% completion and I have no fucking idea what thing I am missing to get that last 1.67% (I even read a FAQ which told me I had everything needed. fuck you FAQ you didn’t help me at all!). (hooray I got it) Life is hard you know.
On a broader level, I have some conflicted feelings about the game. It’s so much better than previous GTAs, and those are games that I love. But.. it feels like it should be better. It’s sort of like the uncanny valley, it’s so real that it’s not real at all. They’ve crossed a threshold where a lot of the staples of the series don’t make any sense anymore. They have cut down on a lot of that stuff but there’s also a lot left, but get rid of everything and it’s no longer GTA. I don’t have the answer, but there’s just something about GTA4 that’s not right, even it does take you 90 hours to recognize.
Also I should probably say that some of the points in this post were stolen from inspired by the most recent
GFW Radio podcast, but it’s how I was feeling about the game. And part of the problem is likely the insane amount I’ve played the game in less than two weeks.
Grand Theft Auto IV
May 4, 2008 – 11:26 pm
There’s not much point in talking about this game. It’s great, I love it, I play it several hours a day and don’t plan on stopping any time soon.
I really enjoy the way the cars handle, it’s a great mix of arcadey and realistic feeling (though it is still very much on the arcadey side). And going hand in hand with that is the road layout of the city which makes driving around a lot of fun. There’s this one Lamborghini Murcielago clone car that you don’t get access to until near the end of the game (or at least I never saw it anywhere before then), driving it around Liberty City reminds me of this awesome video:
Anyway, GTA4 is awesome, I’m gonna go play more now.
Redundancy
April 7, 2008 – 11:45 am
When I started this blog, I imagined that I would post more often than I currently am. A lack of topics is part of the problem but mostly it’s wanting to avoid the feeling of repeating myself. Most of the things I am interested in enough that I would write a blog post about them, I have already talked about in other more immediate venues like IRC, instant messages, or forums; and those are the only people that might read my blog anyway. It’s a lot easier to talk about things in those places because they can be very quick one or two sentence thoughts, and other people add their own thoughts
on the subject.. so there’s a lot less thinking for me. And I’ve always been a “take the easy way out” kind of guy so that’s where I go.
I guess I could just ignore that feeling. I mean there are already a few things you have to ignore when you’re writing a blog. The main thing is that nobody cares, or will ever care, what you think about anything. Maybe your friends take some kind of interest but like I was saying you already talk to them through other means. And trying to move that conversation onto your blog would just make you look like an asshole that has to be the center of attention. Not to say that there is no point in blogging; there is something to be said for being able to completely flesh out your thoughts without worrying about how it will start/affect a conversation.
And to redundantly point out the layer of redundancy contained in this very post, I did already talk about this subject on IRC before writing about it here on my blog.
april 1st lolololo1!!!
April 1, 2008 – 8:51 am
whoooa i’m craaaaaaazy i made a joke today because it’s april first i hope i didnt fool you too bad!!!
No but really April Fools sucks. I will admit that a very small percent of the jokes are funny and well done, but most of them (even ironic ones like mine) are awful. And even the good ones it’s like, what, today is the day that your corporate owners decided it’s ok to have a sense of humor? And tomorrow we’ll go back to being the humorless assholes we really are? Fuck that.
XP vs. Vista
March 26, 2008 – 3:50 pm
So now that we’ve established the PC is the best gaming platform available, we’ve got to decide what operating system to put on it. Anything non-Windows is obviously out of the question for gaming, so it’s between XP and Vista. I’ve had extensive experience with both (and spent a good amount of time tweaking them for maximum performance), and when Vista Service Pack 1 came out last week and did not magically make everything run better and faster, I decided to go back to XP. And in fact when I started writing this blog post it was from within XP.
I had decided to go back to XP because I had stripped Vista down to the point where I was using the Windows Classic theme and I figured without Aero what does Vista really offer. Well, after using XP for a couple days I have to say Vista does have more to offer than a new interface. It feels more stable overall, the OS is almost always responsive even when programs are crashing or consuming 100% of the CPU. Programs launch faster, resource management is smarter. A lot of the control panel stuff is better, the search bar in the start menu is handy (although I prefer to use other launching programs because they are slightly faster and/or have more features).
So I decided to give Vista one more chance. I gave it another pass of tweaking, this time using Autoruns to disable a bunch of stuff that was automatically starting with my computer (tip: use the Hide Microsoft Entries to more easily see what you can probably safely disable) and I used Blackviper’s service guide to disable unnecessary services. At first I had Aero completely disabled (including the Themes and DWM services), but I later found that that was not causing any significant slowdowns after all. So now my games (and applications) perform at least as well as they did on XP, but I also have all the benefits of Vista.
Which makes choosing between them rather easy. If you’re willing to work for it, Vista can be better all around.
And if you are willing to do that, check out the Vista Annoyances Resolved article at TweakGuides.com. Aside from his stance on UAC which I disagree with (I still say it’s worth the convenience of disabling it altogether with the small theoretical added security risk), it’s an excellent article explaining why Vista does not suck.