Niko Bellic is killing my blog

Hard times in Blogland, my children. Between the continuing scariness that is being a marketing guy in a bad economy, combined with the usual dearth of summer blogging topics, there's also the following little grenade into my working life... the Shooter Wife and Mom combined to get me a PS3 and GTA IV. It took a while to track down a store that had the 80 gig new machine that is also backwards compatible with my old PS2 and PS1 games, but now that it's in the house, it's a silent but deadly destroyer of any free time. I am not as complete in my GTA addiction as I used to be (I've been playing these games since Top-Down World, aka the first GTA for PS1), but it's still a siren call.

How is it? Unspeakably beautiful. The designers have loads more memory and space to play on the expanded PS memory, and they've used it to ratchet up the rendering like nobody's business. They're still in the bad Uncanny Valley of polygonal human faces, though there's a certain simian quality to many of the gangster's faces that suits them as characters. But I'm still kind of amazed that there's sexual content in these games, because it's not like they can render a female form that you'd actually want to be near in real life.

Oh, and as part of the routine drive you crazy portion of the game, they've changed the controls and the combat stuff, which is always the sure-fire way to multiply my frustration with it. So I'm in that magical stage where I'm not sure if my aging reflexes are going to allow me to get anywhere in this thing, and I have to do the same missions over and over again until I can finally get the firing fingers right. Gahhh.

Anyway, we thank you for your indulgence during the lighter posting schedule, and promise to try to pick it up as events warrant. Failing that, or we'll just throw more vidoes up, and do what everyone else in the space does when they're trying to unlock the other islands...