Game Play: GTA IV, At Story's End

We're not technically at the end, end, but rather still trying to make our way through the very last mission (or, by it's length and difficulty - what we assume is the very last mission).

The story of GTA IV marks high water point for at least the franchise, if not the genre and even the industry in general. That's not to say that this is wonderful Pulitzer material or anything, and the game could learn a few lessons from previous story heavyweights like Knights Of The Old Republic. Name the decisions Nikko makes don't feel like they hold a profound effect on the narrative as a whole.

This might be a premature assumption as we still haven't played terribly much the branches, I admit, but to bring it back to KOTOR terms I get the impression that Nikko's choice is, in reality, between the Dark Side and the Dark Side (this analogy, by the way, fits even better when you get to some of the end dialogue with Roman).

That said, Nikko's story of hate, anger and revenge has some serious depth. It's brought out not merely in the overall story but in Nikko's bellowing cries at his victims. Rockstar embraced the fact that Nikko excels at walking into a crowded room and walking back the only one alive. Nikko isn't some faceless action hero - he is punishment in motion.

This, however, swings wonderfully into emotional breadth when Nikko is occasionally quieted. Or at times when he's trying to come to terms with himself while talking to Kate. I won't spoil it here (although I feel like we're the last people to finish the game) - but one of the best moments in the game doesn't arrive with an assassination ... but after.

In other news, the HDTV purchase has been ordered, which might be an excuse to play the game all over again.

Chicago's 3rd of July

Chicago regularly holds their Independence Day fireworks on the third, although this year is a weird one because Navy Pier will also be holding theirs tonight.

It's hard to describe the urban density of the event, especially from Grant Park. There was a over a million people packed into a few city blocks to the east of Michigan. As you push and angle your way through it's obvious that humankind just wasn't designed for this kind of navigation. Nobody quite knows how or where to move.

Thankfully some friends of a friend had scoped out a place early. And by early, I mean they got there at two o' clock for a show that starts at half past nine. A show, I might add, which lasts about half an hour.

It is, however, quite a show. And the spot was so sweet that you could occasionally feel the aftershock of the explosion in your chest.

And in some ways the show doesn't end after the fireworks stop blasting. There's nothing quite like walking down the middle of Michigan Avenue with a few thousand of your fellow Chicagoans.

Yet with all this mass crowding came a grim reality. We actually heard about the shooting first by overhearing some high school kids talking about running from gunfire. Apparently if you put that many people from Greater Chicagoland into the same zone, someone is going to have a problem with someone else.

Definitely not your suburb's celebration.

Game Play: Bad Company Multiplayer

Breaking radio silence. As aside, I haven't done that kind of concentrated coding in some time. It felt kinda good in that tiring don't want to do it again for some time kinda way.

I've managed to spend a little more time with the full version of Bad Company's online mode. I stated earlier that the single player stacks up well, not exactly a AAA shooter but certainly worth some attention. The online mode, however, feels like the kind of evolution I would have wanted from the Battlefield series when I first tried it and put it down so many years ago. This iteration feels less spawn point obsessed, less vehicle obsessed and far more balanced.

Bad Company's multiplayer is a slight twist on domination point style play where attackers are trying to destroy a pair of crates (full of tasty gold bars) in succession until they clear the map. The defenders are trying to stop them. It's simple enough for people to learn the basics in a few rounds and the sandbox mechanics from the single player allow for plenty of variation.

This is a solid recipe for online games these days. While I appreciate more complicated dynamics - they require more time for players to master and increase the amount of frustrated noobs crashing tanks into walls. While everyone would like to see tighter squad mechanics - it's often hard enough to get two people to work together than four.

Instead, Bad Company keeps players working in tandem by allowing spawns to occur wherever your squad happens to be. Provided that the whole squad doesn't get wiped out right away, this means that you press the line consistently without a lot of guesswork. In addition to this, as you spot enemy soldiers and vehicles - they'll show up on your mates' HUDs as well.

Add in the tight weapon mechanics, unlockable ranks and weapons, and some great vehicle physics and you have a game which is fun even when you're team is falling behind. Unlike previous incarnations of the subgenre, there's little risk of a handful of players camping vehicle spawns and dominating the game (or simply crashing repeatedly).

It's not all wonderful, though. The invite method (at least for the PlayStation 3) leaves much to be desired. There doesn't seem to be a very friendly way to leave the game in between rounds. The PlayStation 3's support for VOIP seems to result in a series of ghostly burbles coming through your speakers.

And while the current squad mechanics work fairly well, there's still a feeling that it could be more. Whether it lacks a commander role that could paint onto the squad's HUD or bark commands, I'm not sure - but I'm willing to wait for the next version to see how it evolves.

Easily recommend.

Going Dark

Brief communications breakdown will occur through this holiday week. Nothing crisis like - but a phone call at work has kinda put us in heads down mode and while I'd love to have some time chat about My Boys, Doctor Who or Diablo III ... it'll be a little time before that happens.

Netflix Backs Down, Keeps Profiles

Just arrived in the inbox:

You spoke, and we listened. We are keeping Profiles. Thank you for all the calls and emails telling us how important Profiles are.

We are sorry for any inconvenience we may have caused. We hope the next time you hear from us we will delight, and not disappoint, you.

-Your friends at Netflix


Netflix

Perhaps we aren't the only ones twisting this feature into a handy organization tool.

My Biggest iPhone Annoyance

How the hell did Apple, whose love for all things design is near holy, allow what might be the worst possible interface for download MMS messages?

The Girl sends me one. I get a text saying that I've gotten an multimedia message, a link to viewmymessage.com and randomly generated id and password. The link works on the phone - but of course doesn't link to anything *useful* since it can't send the id & password. The iPhone also lacks any cut and paste, mind you, so you end up staring at your iPhone with one hand and entering the codes with another.

And then, because AT&T's website is just so fine, sometimes you still just get a big blank white screen.

Sadly, I have no hopes that the 2.0 OS will fix it.

Hot Coffee Ends With A Dull Thud

In what might the best example of moral panic in history, the Hot Coffee fiasco culminated into a class action lawsuit which has now fizzled into a whopping 2,676 respondents. This is a number so small that if we crammed them all into two square miles, you could barely call that block urban. It will cost Take Two about the same as it would to buy a small luxury car to pay off the claims.

Or in other words ... wait ... one, two, three, four...

OK. Sales of Grand Theft Auto IV just paid off the claims while you were reading this post. That's how insignificant this response measures compared to the hype and craze the media, the lawyers, the politicians and let's face it - even the game industry - made out of the deal.

This speaks volumes to the fact that games, by the way, are not the domain of children alone. The most outstanding reason why this was never a big deal is that the vast majority of GTA owners are thirtysomethings who could care less about a crappy sex rhythm game when, let's face it, they have the Internet to download porn in massive volumes for free. And most of the other demographics were too busy downloading porn to care.

In the spirit of not simply dismissing things as "just a game" we can at the very least agree that San Andreas was a pretty poor method of getting your jollies.

I still say the biggest impact that Hot Coffee had was unfortunate and unintentional. The game industry, in all it's own moral outrage, left modding out to dry a bit. If Take Two does skip on a PC version of GTA IV - there will be another punctuation mark in the obit which has been the recent history of user mods.

Update This will not stop, of course, some politicians from acting like complete and utter idiots about the subject.

TV Watch: 30 Days, Same Sex Parenting

There are those, I assume, who would watch this episode and perhaps walk away thinking they just watched a woman who held true to her beliefs in the face of adversity.

If I'm to believe polls that say that a majority of people in this country still oppose equal rights for gay people, then apparently it would be a lot of people. As Kati, a Christian mom (and also an adopted child herself) goes off to live with two gay men and their four adopted kids - we get to see that adversity over and over again.

The problem that turns the episode into such a clunker is that it becomes pretty clear early on that Kati's goal for the exercise isn't to learn anything in particular but to hold firm to conviction that homosexuality is just wrong, wrong, wrong and that kids shouldn't be allowed around them.

Does the fact that the four kids raised by the two gay men seem healthy and well behaved dent her conviction? Not at all. Does the fact that one of the kids didn't even speak before living with the two gay men sway her belief? Not an iota. Does visiting the broken down foster homes where these kids could have ended up if her fight to make same sex parenting illegal move her? Well, briefly to tears it does ... but then she is quick to remind us that being gay is just wrong, wrong, wrong.

When confronted by nearly the whole set of one of the adopted kid's biological family, several of whom admitted they were worried about the Gay Agenda (TM) when they found out where the kid was going - and they confessed that the child had a much better life with the two gay men ... she screams that she is being prosecuted and storms off to the house.

At one point during the show, Kati says that she just wanted to see some facts. And yet, when presented with anything factual - she simply falls on her bible. We continually hear the same cognitive dissonance that this circle of intolerance spouts. About how they are the victims here, because clearly two gay men raising four healthy young kids half way across the country is "stepping on her toes" (her exact words). About she doesn't disrespect these people - she just believes that the happiest things in their life should be illegal, banned and swept under the bed.

Spurlock does try to flesh out some of the other side's viewpoint, including a brief (but potentially not brief enough) interview with a woman who feels she was wronged by her gay adoptive father for his sexual ways. And it sounds like she was wronged by her gay adoptive father for his sexual ways - but not because he was gay but because he was a creepy jerk.

Which is, in the end, where Kati's supposed search for facts falls finally with a resounding thud. At one point she is being forced (and complains about doing so) to hand out posters for a local gay rights group and in the process is asked why she would ban good gay parents and keep bad straight parents legal?

Religion isn't supposed to drive our legal system and there are few good reason why. For one thing, anytime a religion requires a law in order to justify itself - it ceases being a religion and becomes instead a system of governance. Secondly, religion often makes for poor logical arguments even when it makes for decent exercises in faith.

And finally, it ignores completely the basic concept of liberty to which we should hold dear. As much as Kati might feel like a victim, nobody in Michigan is trying to tell her what to do in her own home, place of work, or church. On the flipside - she is trying to remove these two men's entire life at home.

My Grandmother was one of the great God fearing women of her time. And she would tell you that simply isn't terribly Christian.

What's interesting about 30 Days I think is that often the story is as much a reflection of the specific people involved as opposed to mixing experiences. Take "30 Days In A Wheelchair", which shows as much revelation about being disabled and the hardships and struggles involved as it shows that Ray Crockett is really one hell of a guy.

While I'm sure there are some that watched "Same Sex Parenting" and walked with the thinking that Kati simply held to her beliefs - I got a lot more joy out of watching Ray empathize with his fellow people.

Game Play: Bad Company Single Player

I'm actually not entirely sure the demo did the single player of Battlefied: Bad Company justice. It takes place towards the middle of the first block of scenarios and places the player into moderately difficult place without much introduction.

In the full version, the player is quickly but thoughtfully brought into the action with occasional tutorial style moments, many of which are still clever and fun (in fact the first is brilliant, but I won't spoil it here).

I've spent scant little time in the Battlefield series, so I can't compare it directly with any real accuracy - but compared to modern shooters like Half-Life 2 or Doom 3, it stacks up quite well. The game manages a realistic feel, a great "inner loop" - the feedback between the player and his immediate functionality (shooting, running, etc), and yet manages to throw in the occasional unrealistic game mechanic (like a timed health boost instead of limited quantities) which just makes sense in context of play.

The framing of military orders fits into this well - it keeps a quasi-sandbox feel to the game while laying out well designed objectives.

My biggest complaint might be partly to blame on my SDTV, but I kinda doubt even a fancy new HD set would make those enemies pop out in any greater detail. There's a little bit of fun in trying to watch for movement and react quickly - but there's less fun in getting pelted by someone with little to go on but gunfire flare to determine the position. There are times when playing the game when it feels less strategic and more like running for cover while spraying areas with fire.

A couple graphical glitches hit as well, like disappearing vehicles and the occasional shearing (which, again, might have something to do with mashing the screen down to SDTV). In general, though, the game looks simply wonderful.

I've generally been bored with military based shooters since abandoning Counter-Strike so many years ago - but Bad Company's single player might be one I actually mean to finish.

Game Play: Send Mario Kart Wii Friend Requests

We finally got a chance to play The Brother and wife online for a little Kart action. It was completely wonderful but most people really don't need a blog post about that.

What you might need a blog post about is the fact that you can send a friend invite to play Kart online to anyone in your address book without pulling a pen and paper out and copying some annoying unique ID.

It's true. This oddly hidden feature is on the Friends screen where you can normally register them, but you have to wait for the little scrolling bar at the bottom to say something like "Send Invite To A Friend". Only then will clicking on it allow you to pull up your address book and send someone a nice little wiimail that they can easily use to accept said invitation.

Why this feature is so obscurely hidden when it is just sooooo damn handy I have no idea. Even after Big Bro had sent it once, it took him a while to find the way to do it again.

Horrible interface design, Nintendo, just simply dreadful.

But now you know, and knowing is half the battle.

TV Watch: Battlestar Galactica, Revelations

Finally getting this up, I know.

Spoilerifics to follow. Read at your own risk if you haven't made it to Season 4's mid-finale.

I'm not exactly sure what I was expecting from this episode, especially with all the buzz that was surrounding it. This probably wasn't it. Somehow I had assumed that the precipice that the Cylon rebels and the Colonials had created was going to follow with some kind of epic level tragedy. It made me wonder things like, would the creators destroy the show's namesake and that kind of thing.

This is what I love about shows with finite endings. The show can take any angle it needs and it doesn't have to worry about keeping the handsome hero around for ratings.

What we got was much better, I think. My only real complaint is that it feels a little bit like we got shortchanged with the impact of the four being revealed, although seeing Adama go to pieces was a pretty choice scene and Lee's standoff with D'Anna was well worth it as well.

I'm guessing that we'll have more of to follow. Instead, the writers wanted to get us to their end scene of choice - the broken, apocalyptic, devastated remains of Earth.

Not that the sight was a huge shock. Firstly this is a show which has never allowed characters to get off easy. Second, if we follow that the show has more than a little religious undertones, then we won't get grace just by parking ships in orbit.

It does raise some interesting questions though - who exactly did all the bomb dropping and when. If the Cylons were, in general, unaware of Earth, then why exactly were there five hidden models that knew the way? How much of this ties into the "This has all happened before" mantra from a season or so ago.

Especially since, in reality, the four didn't know the way to Earth. They were just there to help open the envelope. Starbuck was the messenger - or rather Starbuck's ship was the messenger.

And to paraphrase Starbuck, it all makes it seem like there's someone pulling the strings. If you look at the whole show as an organized plan to rediscover Earth ... which seems the only explanation since Earth would still be missing without some pretty divine intervention, the real remaining questions would be - who is the puppetmaster?

Or rather, without putting to deep a point on it, the show is asking: Who is God?

And should we read too much into the fact that the final model is as of yet unrevealed. Would they be one and the same? Was D'Anna being specific with the whole "there are four" statement in the sense that the fifth isn't part of the fleet or that the fifth was already on the Baseship?

My money is still on Roslin, Baltar or some yet unseen character. Definitely looking forward to the show's conclusion.

Game Play: PAIN

I feel like I should say something like "if you can get past the whole human torture thing" to describe PAIN - but I feel like that's doing the game an injustice. The whole fact that you're slinging a human into a physics playground full of monkeys, mimes and explosive crates is just part of the hilarity.

The premise is simple - through either chain reactions or the use of "Ooch", which allows you to push your slung avatar post launch, do as much damage to the character and existing world as possible. Despite this take, the game isn't even an ounce gory, but rather sticks to cartoonish designs befitting the much maligned objects in the game.

PAIN is far more rounded than one might expect for a budget download. Single and multiplayer games give the game more than a few options, the graphics are good (even on our still hanging in there SDTV) and there are few games which allow you to say "sorry, The Girl is throwing mimes through plate glass ... call back?"

For the price, PAIN is an easy recommendation for PSN users.

Netflix Drops Profiles ... A Resounding WTF Follows

Netflix sent an email out to users yesterday declaring that soon enough they would be dropping the profile feature from accounts. This is a feature which allows accounts to divide their DVD queue into multiple profiles.

While it might sound trivial, The Girl and I have made it into an essential part of using the service. We're 5 DVD people and we divide the profiles not up for each other, but rather by category. I'm actually rather amazed Netflix doesn't let you do this in a more structured way - it's more insanely handy than I can describe. If we send a popcorn blockbuster movie back, we get one of those next. If we send a TV show back, we get the next disc in the TV show back. It saves us all the needless time of organizing a single list in a chronological order we can't really determine.

Why Netflix, which has had a decent track history of evolving their user interface, would so willing put a baseball bat to our knees is quite beyond me.

I'm hoping they have a really good trick up their sleeves as this puts the service, which is facing stiff enough competition as it is, into a much less desirable mode for us.

Game Play: Spore Creature Creator

I got a quick sneak peak at the Spore Creature Creator last night, which is apparently now available in trial format for the public. You can see that I made myself busy by creating a disturbing little thing with teeth that I then promptly sent to myself.

It's an interesting little insight into the much hyped game and I will admit it's slightly addictive at first playing with spines and legs as though they were putty. For the most part the generation works without a hitch, although if you try something truly funky in terms of shapes or sizes you'll notice the occasional shearing of the model during animations. Once you've created your beast, your choices are pretty much sharing it with the rest of the world or taking it for a small test run where you can play various animations with it.

When Spore hits, these creatures are to be fully compatible with the game.

My only real caveat is that while this is a fun little toy when it's free, I'm not entirely sure it's worth ten bucks to own. The difference between the trial and retail version is about 75% more creature parts, I guess, but considering that there's not a lot to do with the creatures until Spore hits - I'm just not sure I'd see the point. Maybe if I could send creatures over to a co-workers computer for a good fistfight or something...

The trial is available for PC and Mac, so at the very least it's a decent look into the much anticipated title.

TV Watch: Battlestar Galactica, Sine Qua Non And The Hub

Yeah, I know I'm behind on Galactica. And still am, I haven't caught Revelations from Friday yet. I actually still have about half of my truckload of entertainment that I armed myself with to survive the flight home. I've got Doctor Who, 30 Days, there's even a couple meerkats in there...

Spoilers be here for the two episodes listed above.

That said, the two that I did catch up on were quite awesome. The show is walking this fine line between bizarre hocum pocum and really tight character conflict. Just how well the hocum pocum will work is to be determined, but there's at least a lot of interesting takes on religion. The end of The Hub, where Roslin feels gipped for having saved Balthazar but not gotten her golden ticket home was a wonderful depiction of all the characters involved.

Apparently the scene with Tigh and Adama where Adama mentions how many times he has to repair his model ship might be an in-show reference to breaking the ship during an ad lib take on the set.

I'll wait on any more final five speculation until I can catch up. Don't want to ramble on and on about a guess when for all I know D'Anna has been singing like a bird last week.