ダニエルの冒険

Just home from work now. It’s 10:35pm. Yesterday it was about 11pm when I got home. I’m contractually tied to 40 hours a week unless I request overtime, which I haven’t done. So what’s keeping me? Grand Theft Auto IV. The big IV came out yesterday so as soon as work was over I went to the nearest Gamestop/EBGames over on Powell St and marched straight up to the counter and asked for it.

“Do you guys have a copy of GTA4?”
“On what platform?”
“Xbox.”
“Sorry, we’re out of copies on Xbox.”
“Do you have it for any other platforms?”
“I think we have a few left for PS3.”
“I’ll take one of those so.”

And back to the office. We have a PS3 stand like you see in game shops that Sony gave to us set up in the corner, basically never being used and with Heavenly Sword in there permanently, as it’s about the only PS3 game we have around that anyone has any interest in. After 19 minutes of firmware updates, installing to the hard drive, and watching loading screens and FMVs, I finally got to play (for about 1 minute before another FMV). I don’t really mean to complain about the FMVs though. Just like all the other games, the dialogue and acting is great and the mo-cap, voice acting and facial expressions are incredible. The camera shots are also movie-style and really draw you in. The amount of storyboarding that must have gone into that game is incredible.

Gameplay’s just what you’d expect from a GTA game. The car handling is usually really satisfying but I’m still not getting the hang of turning corners quickly and I usually end up hand-break-turning onto the footpath, knocking over a whole load of bins and running over some pedestrians.

Possible spoilers in the next paragraph. The one after that is ok. You’re warned.

So far I’ve gone on three dates with my girlfriend Michelle, but took her to an Irish bar for one of them and ended up getting smashed drunk and nearly getting killed trying to find where I parked my motorbike. She’s commented on my “new cars” every time but never copped onto the fact that I had just stolen them from down the road. I killed my cousin’s loan-shark, and got hired by his boss. I just killed his daughter’s scumbag biker boyfriend and his gang this evening. I spent about half an hour watching TV in my apartment yesterday. I saw Ricky Gervais do a good standup act, watched some funny ads for hella blinging ringtones, and saw an episode of Republican Space Rangers. RSR was a bit too obvious and clumsy but the other stuff was great.

Technically, it runs a bit slow and doesn’t look great. I’m assuming the Xbox is more or less the same. Once I got a 3-star rating the whole thing just started dropping frames left right and centre and there’s the odd slowdown or popping of assets (usually physics debris objects like boxes and rubbish bins). Jaggies abound on 720p, which is probably because of the cheap LCD which came with the unit.

Unrelated to the game, I was on the muni on the way home today when I heard a couple of guys talking about technology. One didn’t know much beyond email and the other didn’t know much more but had clearly been reading slashdot or lurking on forums for the last couple of weeks as he was telling his friend aaaall about it. First I noticed some strange terms like “interactive website” (all websites are “interactive” anyway) and “consumer-based electronics” (”consumer electronics” is the usual term). Nothing “wrong” but just sort of jarring the way he used terminology. Then he started telling his friend about why you can’t play games on OS X because it doesn’t have this thing called “DirectX” that Windows has, and proceeded with some almost-right-but-not-quite-there explanation, all very authoritatively.

It’s a silly thing to be annoyed about, but hearing him try so hard to make his friend think he knew all about this stuff when he actually didn’t know anymore except for a list of vocabulary of buzzwords made me put on my iPod and crank up the music to a level at which I couldn’t hear anything but EXILE’s lyrics.

I’ve got a lot of music recently; a lot of it Japanese. I got a great selection of genres at Amoeba last Sunday: everything from speed rock (Sex Machineguns) to movie soundtracks (Hisaishi Meets Miyazaki) to some kinda-urban-hiphop-cheesy-lyrics-J-pop (EXILE). I also got me some L’Arc and downloaded some Malice Mizer (Mana’s such a freak and Gackt’s such a music legend). I also got a HY album. HY is one of Ayumi’s favourite grounds and they’re really great. It’s a light poppy group with some small bits of rap, nice harmonising between the male and female singers, and some great variation between love-songs, rock-songs and even some classic Okinawan sounds. Probably the best band out of all the ones I just mentioned, just because of the variation they provide. Sex Machineguns are great, but all their songs sound too similar. Malice Mizer is also good, but it’s all just baroque baroque baroque until you want to go kill yourself or become a vampire or something. EXILE is ok but if I didn’t understand the lyrics I’d like it more. It’s all just “hey girl you’re so pretty I love you la la la”. HY has a bit of that too but it sounds more genuine and not just like they’re trying to conform to an image that N*sync or the Backstreet Boys set up for them in the 90s.

I shall leave you with a nice HY song:

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 1st, 2008 at 5:46 am and is filed under San Francisco. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.