A weekly log of the games I’ve played accompanied by some random thoughts about them

Sunday, September 21, 2008
Grand Theft Auto IV
Betrayed by Dimitri tonight. It wasn’t really surprising, I kind of didn’t see that coming. My time interacting with Dimitri seemed a little short to build up a real feeling of trust to actually feel betrayed, but it worked well enough to make it feel unexpected. That was really it. Taxi depot and the apartment in Broker were burnt down, so now we’re in Bohan and Mallorie is going to hook us up with some new characters to get jobs with, like Manny.

Monday, September 22, 2008
Grand Theft Auto IV
Thirteen hours and only 24.81% complete. So far it hasn’t been a slog, that was more of a remark on the sheer enormity of game. After the betrayal at the hands of Dimitri yesterday, I’ve got a new part of the city to explore. I took on a mission with Manny, one of my new mission providers that Mallorie gave me. He’s already annoying the hell out of me and I just met him. It’s hilarious that his way to clean up the streets, as he’s posturing himself, is going to kill people, but whatever.

Brucie has a new mission arc open now too. My first mission is to go on a gay date with a guy who owes money. So it’s back to Tw@ to pimp out my… interesting profile to the target, French Tom. Now I got to wait from him to write back. Just like real life. Hopefully he likes me. Speaking of which, I called up Michelle for another date and then she called me up. So this relationship is going swimmingly for now. She’s a very good listener I tell you. Roman must have been feeling lonely because he wanted to go out a couple of times. The second time we went out to the bar for some drinks and I got to experience the hilarity (and difficulty) it is to be virtually drunk in Liberty City. After I took Roman back home, I spun by the old apartment to find that the cars I had saved in the spot outside were still there. Hopefully that holds, these were some nice whips.

Tuesday, September 23, 2008
Rock Band 2
Fired up Rock Band 2 just to play the Sleater-Kinney DLC song in quickplay because I wanted to try it out. I need to find some time when it’s not late at night to play the drums on the new songs. I’d like to get the new drum kit, but I have to wait on this for a little while.

Grand Theft Auto IV
French Tom liked me enough to meet up for a date back at the diner by the old apartment. Got there before him and waited for him to show up. Man, was French Tom full of himself. I waited out the conversation until it was obvious I was going to kill him when I did. Someone else at the diner had a gun, so he had to go down to. Was he French Tom’s backup? I couldn’t really tell, didn’t matter, as the shootout only lasted seconds. I ran into Brian on my way back to the apartment in Bohan and finished out his string of missions since he’s now recovering. Too bad that the dealers he owed money to wanted to beat him up rather than just take his money. They’re dead now too.

Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Halo 3
After talking to DMoTsunami about Title Update 2, I decided to put in Halo 3 and download it for myself. I happened to see him online when I got home and figured now was as good a time as ever to pick up our long abandoned co-op campaign. This probably places me in the sad minority of Xbox 360 owners who should be cajoled and shamed into playing Halo 3 into a much further state of completion. The thing is, I have a great excuse. DMoTsunami and I always used to play our Halo games co-op and we also played through Gears of War co-op, so Halo 3 was naturally next on our list. Although he finished the campaign without me, I held back on playing until we could coordinate schedules to keep playing. That was back at launch… pretty much. We’re not very far… almost done with Sierra 117 on Legendary, so we have quite the ways to go. Unfortunately.

Thursday, September 25, 2008
Samba de Amigo
My Wii console returned home today and that meant I had to break it in. Apart from downloading Mega Man 1 and Mega Man 2 to prep me for a play-through of the already (and yet to be) released Mega Man 9, I was looking forward to taking Samba de Amigo for a quick spin. I never played any of the previous incarnations of incarnations of the game, but somehow a super bright and bouncy rhythm game centered on maracas was attractive to me. After just trying a few songs, choosing “Bamboleo” over “La Vida Loca” (sorry Ricky!), I know that I’ll have to be playing a lot more of it even though I have some issues for it so far. I think the animated background is too bright and busy and tends to overwhelm trying to focus on the playfield. On top of that, while it makes sense size-wise, because the whole screen is so busy, the small blue markers to designate when you should shake your controllers are then too small to be wholly effective. Still, it’ll have me coming back for more, for now.

Saturday, September 27, 2008
Grand Theft Auto IV
Ennui is beginning to set in a little bit as I continue through Grand Theft Auto IV. There’s nothing inherently wrong with the game, it’s just that I keep looking over at my stack of backlog and thinking I should mix it up with something else for a few days. I just don’t want to end up accidentally shelving something to the point where I don’t complete it and the game is quite worthy of completion. Tonight I put a couple of hours into the game, finishing out the first set of missions for Manny so that Mallorie introduces us to drug runner Elizabeta as we look for more work. She keeps enlisting us as backup for a couple missions, but also introduces us to a few characters I know I’ll see more from–Playboy X and Patrick McCreary.

Unfortunately the bulk of the play time tonight was redoing two of those missions. I kept not realizing that Patrick was being beat up on as I was sniping his foes from a nearby rooftop. I also had to redo the Playboy X getaway as I flipped the car which led the 6 cop cars that had managed to get nearby to deploy their police officers and they got enough shots off to kill me. I’ve now unlocked Algonquin, which really felt a lot like Manhattan as I was cruising by and in Central Park as I took Playboy X home.

Michelle wanted to go on another date and this time it is definitely getting more interesting as she’s starting to ask me pretty direct questions on if I could score her some cocaine for her cousin or someone. I already know she’s not what she pretends to be from the first cutscene, but I was wondering when that would start coming to the fore. Brucie took me on a street race, which I won naturally, and found out on the way back that he’s gone a bit overboard with his roid rage and that Niko will stop taking missions from him. We said we’d be friends so I called him up and took him out to the strip club, because, you know, that’s just a alpha thing to do. Brucie now likes me enough to let me call him up and use his helicopter services to transport me around Liberty City. I took a random ride from Broker to Bohan just to check out Liberty City from the skies.

Q.E.D.