It was a good day.
Sorry I haven't posted in the last day or so, but I've been elbow deep in the city of Los Santos. Remember my whining about not being able to play GTA: San Andreas, because we ordered it online, and they told me I could expect to wait 1-3 weeks? Well, the whining I did here was nothing compared to the whining I did in real life.

So, after giving my wife so much grief about this, imagine how I felt when the game came in just a few days after my order. Whoops. I'm going to be eating crow for a while. I've already told my wife that she gets a pass on any mistakes she makes for a while.

Anyway, I've been playing the game, maybe a bit too much. I don't quite know what to think of it. On the one hand, it's technically better than the original. On the other hand, there's a lot of character missing. Maybe it's because I'm still early in the game, but this one seems to be missing a lot of the heart that the other games had.

You know all the easy innuendoes that they have in Vice City (like "Cherry Popper's Ice Cream", or the strip club "Pole Position")? I haven't seen very much of that here. The Pizza place is called "Well Stacked Pizza", but I'm not sure I even get that joke. I mean, I know they are comparing a woman's breasts to stacks of Pizza, but it's such a bad name for a Pizza place, that it strains credulity. There's also "Clucking Bell" which is pretty well done, given that they're combining Taco Bell with KFC and still using a euphemism for "F***ing Hell". But even then, you just find yourself smiling a little at the joke, instead of laughing out loud. Maybe it's just me. Maybe it gets better.

Remember all the colorful characters in Vice City? The laughably Texan land dealer played by Burt Reynolds, the wildly paranoid lawyer, Gary Busey's unstable redneck impression? These were funny characters, they made the game seem alive. So far, I've only seen a few characters, and all of them are sedate, serious versions of their subject matter. Samuel L. Jackson and Chris Penn play a couple of predictably crooked cops. The player has three homies: a naive, passionate, Dr. Dre-looking brother; A Wayans brother reject who only seems to smoke weed and insult the player; and a fat brother who looks like a cross between Notorious BIG and Garfield the cat.

The only problem with the characters is that none of them are played as off-the-wall as they could be. The only one who gets any real extreme character action is the Wayans reject, and who really needs to see more dopey toker jokes? The rest of the game plays like a cross between "Do the Right Thing" and "New Jack City". Yeah. It may be hardcore, but it's not as much fun.

Oh, yeah. And I've got a girlfriend. So far, our interaction has been a lot like that in Fable (I do things for her, she is utterly pointless to the game). I'm about to look it up on GameFaqs to see whether there's any benefit at all to having a girlfriend, and if not, I may just dump her. Because, really, she's annoying as hell. Given how many complete strangers you kill in this game, you really start looking at the girlfriend through a sniper scope after a while.

Also, remember how funny the radio was in the previous versions? Maybe it's just me, but I'm getting really sick of the radio already. The loop seems a lot shorter (less time before the radio repeats itself), and the talk radio seems to be more of a parody of itself than real comedy. Also, the music in general sucks. I'm sorry, I'm sure there are some people who really get into NWA, Eazy-E, and Chingy, but other than a couple of tracks ("This is for the RAZA", "It was a good day", and "G-Thing") the radio pretty much blows. Right now, my most popular station is "Radio Off".

One more thing: I know it's been said before about previous versions, but the targeting blows. I can get by with it, but for crying out loud. They've only had nearly a DECADE to work on this system! People have been complaining about this system since GTAIII, and I thought they'd straightened it out when I saw the XBox version. But now, it's back to being stupid.

Lemmie give you an example. There are three guys in front of you. One is standing a long way away, and shooting at you with an AK-47. Another one is running toward you from far away, carrying a bat. The third guy is an unarmed pensioner who happened to be walking by the two enemies when the shooting started. Guess which one the targeting system picks? That's right - the pensioner. Why? Who knows! It's not based on distance, threat analysis, or even being the closest to the center of vision. Now, they let you cycle through targets by clicking shoulder buttons, but it's actually faster to just let go of the targeting button, then tap it again to take another chance at the crap shoot. How hard would it be, really, to make the targeting system take into account threat analysis (of the twenty people around me, how many are rivals? Put those at the top. Now, how many are targeting me? Push them to the top. Now, how many are currently firing at me, Put them at the top)

You know, at some point you're going to need to blink.
-Gwen

Now, all that aside, I played the game until my wife told me I had to stop. She started worrying because my eyes were getting dangerously bloodshot. I love the RPG elements of the game (I've already maxed out my stamina and muscle without an inch of fat, because I love RPG games), and I love the idea of taking over turf to make cash. I like being able to enlist my boys to help out, and the map does feel really huge. I may get used to it later, but for now, the map seems almost overwhelming.

Like I said, I haven't played through it yet. I've still got Peter Fonda and James Woods coming up, and according to the cast list, I should be seeing some old friends from Vice City soon. But if you want my initial reaction, here it is. I'm impressed by the gameplay advances, but disappointed by the characters. I'm just not that much into the Thug life.

- posted by BrandG @ 7:29 AM