The Race Driver: GRID demo just went up for us Silver users.

It's pretty incredible, all-told. I don't think I've been this excited for a racing game since PGR3. There's just something about GRID that lends itself to a very white-knuckle, fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants experience. Driving your car feels like a very physical experience; fantastic sound design and great camera work make you feel every little bump in the road, and if you hit a wall, it's a very crisp, satisfying, and hard-hitting SMASH! Even watching replays is exciting, with camera work that almost feels like it's out of a street racing movie like The Fast in the Furious, with lots of quick cuts and shaking cameras. But the game doesn't really feel arcade-like; I suppose it kind of is a little bit, but it also doesn't feel like a simulation. The game has style but without being stylish. It's hard to describe, but it's right up my alley as far as racing games go. I am not a gear head and I seem to be doing pretty good in the GRID demo on all the default settings.

Been working for four or five days on a Machinima I made in Garry's Mod. Honestly, I did not intend for it to be anything super-involved (I figured one day, tops, to record and splice it all togther), but the more I worked on it the less patient I became with poor footage. I'm still not 100% satisfied with the footage I captured, but due to the nature of Gmod and my experience with it, it's about as good as I can do right now. I don't know if machinima from me will become a regular thing from me (probably not), so we'll see what happens when I'm done. With any luck it should be done by... tomorrow?

Then I can get back to GTA4. Unlocked the Third Island before I got inspired on the machinima. It's a good game. What else can you say? A lot of people are sick of hearing about GTA by now, I'm sure.

That's about it. There's a DBZ: Burst Limit demo on XBL right now, but since I am a lowly Silver, it will be next week before I can play it. Most pointless restriction ever.

So Gametrailers TV had a ton of footage on Ghostbusters: The Video Game tonight. They showcased a lot of new stuff, from battles with the Staypuft Marshmallow Man to the Devil Dogs to the always charming Slimer.

Now, I've written on the subject before. For those of you with short attention spans, I'll summarize: Terminal Reality is not a very good developer. I'm sure a lot of great people are employed there that love the Ghostbusters franchise, but somewhere in that company is more than one weak link. Their most memorable titles are games like BloodRayne and Spy Hunter: Nowhere to Run, which did not exactly garner glowing reviews and have only gotten worse with age. My opinion back then was summed up with "Signing a C-List Developer to work with A-list talent". For those not in the know, that's sort of like getting a car mechanic from some backwater town to come in and "tune up" an F1 Race Car for the Indy 500.

And watching the newest gameplay footage has done nothing to extinguish my anxiety. My main problem seems to be with the animations and the overall visual design. The animations feel stiff and understated; as the proton beam flies around on screen with a trapped ghost, the Ghostbuster in question is just sort of standing there not really doing much of anything. There's no tactile response that you're fighting for control of an unruly ghost. And there's just something about the way your character moves that just rubs me the wrong way; like there's not enough weight or something - again, it's an animation issue. It just feels... stiff. Sterile, perhaps. There's no character or personality in most of what I saw on Gametrailers TV.

This extends to the art direction. You see fantastic concept art and when they reveal what it looks like in game it's just generic, lifeless CG. At this point I'm almost more interested to see what the Wii version of Ghostbusters will be like, given it's aiming for a more animated visual style (vaguely reminiscent of Team Fortress 2, actually). It could help give the game a much more unique, defining personality rather than the "stiff animation and generic CG" PS3/360 game. I get that they want the next-gen games to look realistic and all, and that's perfectly fine, I suppose... but it doesn't change the fact that the game as it stands looks rather dull and underwhelming. Perhaps the gameplay will change my mind - here's hoping we get a playable demo to download some time in the future.

And I know it sounds like I'm whining. To some of you out there in internet land, the Ghostbusters don't mean anything to you. I suspect that's why Terminal Reality, of all developers, were given this game; the Ghostbusters as a franchise aren't what they used to be. The third movie has been floundering around for probably over ten years now, The X-Treme Ghostbusters TV series flopped pretty hard (though I maintain that not enough people gave it a chance - despite it's cliche and stereotypical exterior, it was actually pretty good) and other attempts to recapture the "Ghostbusters Magic" have also flopped (Evolution, anyone? Does anybody even remember that they tried to launch a cartoon series and an action figure line with this movie?).

But... c'mon. Supposedly the Ghostbusters Logo is still one of the most recognizable logo icons in the world and the best they can dig up is Terminal Reality? They sign on legends like Dan Aykroyd and Bill Murray to work with the guys who made a game about a leather-clad, big-breasted vampire named Rayne who ran around eviscerating nazis? Ghostbusters was one of those late-80's/early-90's mega-franchises and the first movie ranks up there with some of the greatest films ever made. And I'm sure the game will be passable, I guess, but there's this voice in my head constantly repeating "This could be so much cooler if a better developer was working on it!" every time I watch any video footage from it.

We'll see. But I am not holding my breath for a good game.

So. GTA4. It's a game.

It's a game where you drive around and stuff. I don't want to turn this in to a review, but so far, I'm really enjoying it a lot. Niko has a lot of personality and charm, with a great sense of humor. Cars feel much more weighty and realistic - a friend of mine described it like "old GTA games were like, steering an RC car or something, and this is like steering a real car." That sounds about right - cars in GTA4 lean a lot more in to turns and it's taken a lot of getting used to. But, you eventually do get used to it; it's sort of like re-learning how to walk again. Motorcycles remain a tough point still, though (which is sad, because that's all I ever drove in GTASA for their speed and manuverability).

The world is smaller (but much, much more detailed). The cars are slower as a result, and the day/night cycle is also slower. Rather than it take 10 or so minutes for a full day to pass, it now takes closer to 30-45 minutes. The new targeting system works really well. The graphics are good, though there's some pop-in and framerate hiccups here and there - but if you've been playing GTA for any length of time, you're more than used to that.

If I had to lodge one complaint against the game, it's that it's not quite as funny as past GTAs. This is most immediately noticeable on the radio stations (as well as on the TV and Internet, new features to GTA4); which feature a lot of swearing. Now, of course, I'm not a prude - I wouldn't be playing GTA if I was - but past GTA games never really featured a lot of swearing on the radio, just clever innuendo. Here, the gloves come off, with f-bombs flying left and right. It's much more raw and in-your-face rather than being sly with that wink of "Eh, eh? Get what I'm saying?". It breaks the illusion of this being a radio station and doesn't feel quite as witty. This extends to the rest of the game as it's more of a somber tale of a man who seems to have grown a taste for violence after serving in the war, and even though he seems to regret what he did, he continues to be violent.

That's all for now. Might dive in to multiplayer later today; we'll see. The game came with a month free of XBL Gold, but I have more than enough 24hr trials stored up to where I'll save the month trial for a more important date.

Getting a tooth or two pulled definitely ranks up there pretty high on the "weirdest sensations ever to happen to my body" list. The order of events basically went like this:

DENTIST: "OKAY WE'RE GOING TO NUMB YOU UP GOOD."
Me: "OKAY, SURE."
(Injection, people leave for 20 minutes)
DENTIST: "HERE, HAVE SOME MORE NOVOCAIN."
Me: (sweating profusely) "OKAY, SURE."
ASSITANT: "You'll be fine."
(three more injections, another 20 minutes)
DENTIST: "CAN YOU FEEL THIS?" (poke)
Me: "AUHW, YETH."
DENTIST: "HERE, HAVE SOME MORE NOVOCAIN."
Me: "OTAY, THURE."
(three more injections, another 20 minutes)
DENTIST: "CAN YOU FEEL THIS?"
Me: "FEEUH WHA?"
DENTIST: "LET'S BEGIN!"
(lots of pressure, a dull ache, followed by a sickening crunch, all in a couple of minutes)
DENTIST: "ALL DONE! Eat soft foods, no smoking or drinking alcohol, no soda, and no straws for a couple days."

I basically cranked up 1up Yours, closed my eyes, and held on to the chair really, really tight.

In other news, GTA4 is... different. Everything feels so... heavy. Niko feels heavy, cars ESPECIALLY feel heavy... it's going to take a lot of getting used to.

Sorry I haven't blogged in a while. Stuff's been happening, I guess.

When I entered the Moddb contest, I messed up my hand I worked on it so hard (carpal tunnel syndrome or something). It eventually came to a head and I couldn't use the PC at all it hurt so bad; so I basically took a short break from the PC, having minimal interaction with it for nearly a week. Hand's better, but I can still feel it tightening up every now and then.

Then, just a few days ago, I got a really nasty toothache. Went in to the dentist yesterday; they put me on vicodin and antibiotics with the eventual plan of pulling the tooth (and it's next door neighbor) on Tuesday. I'm very nervous. This is the first time I've been to the dentist in 10 years (long, kind of personal story). I'm trying to build a mix CD to listen to when they open me up (assuming they just inject me with numb juice and don't gas me). Podcasts and whatever, but my MP3 CD player vomits at most podcasts - perhaps the files are too big for its memory, I dunno.

So that's been the last two weeks of my life. Sometimes it feels like my body is falling apart.

Hopefully I'll be getting GTA4 at launch. I may have trouble scrounging up about $10 more to buy it, but maybe not. We'll see. I've got money coming down the pipeline but I also need to get my Mom a belated birthday present.

Finally forced myself to go back to Twilight Princess (rather than putzing around in Sonic CD, San Andreas, and Trackmania). On what I think is the final dungeon (Dungeon 8?). I'm surprised! Dungeon 8 has finally cranked the difficulty up and I find I actually need to use fairies to not die. Already tossing around words in my head with the plan that this will be my next review on TSSZ.

Sega Superstars Tennis Demo on Live. It's... okay, I guess? My main problem is how automatic it feels. It more or less boils down to "press a button when the ball gets to your side of the court and be vaguely within range of the ball and your character will do the rest". But the collision detection is weird; often times the ball will pass right through my character (I was standing too close to the ball) or the character will spend too much time doing an elaborate dive animation and I'll miss the ball. Those sorts of circumstances never feel like my fault and I attribute that to the #1 reason I have not won a single game in the demo. I once missed three opening shots in a row because either my character wouldn't even try to hit it, the ball would phase through their body, or they did an animation that took too long to play.

Currently fascinated with a project to remake Sonic the Hedgehog 2 in HD.




I really, really, really, really want this to get finished, but community projects have a tendency to fall apart before they see release and there's always the looming danger of the dreaded Cease & Desist. It's still in the earliest stages, though, so we'll see where it goes. They're still trying to decide on an engine and stuff.

That's it, really.

So like, a bunch of people totally voted for me and I took runner-up prize in the GameFunk mascot contest. I now have $50 to spend as I please. Thinking of Oblivion or waiting to see how long it takes GTA4 to drop in price (GameFunk primarily specializes in used games).