PS3, GTA4

[davidn]

We have unexpectedly become part of the fifth, seventh, whatever number it is console generation!

This was Whitney's doing - we hired a car for the beginning of the afternoon on Saturday and drove up to a large shopping centre to get a new artificial Christmas tree that could be seen without the aid of a microscope, and she said during the week that as long as we were there and were planning to get a PS3 for ourselves for Christmas anyway... you know, to save on shipping costs and everything... we might as well get one while we were there. And I had to agree that it made sense, after we'd survived the effort to get to the place we were going once while avoiding Boston drivers who were reversing down the street, parking sideways and in one case turning head-on down the wrong lane of a dual carriageway. It says something that now the system, along with an extra controller and obscenely expensive HDMI cable, and a warranty for it along with a game from the $20 bin, comes out to rather less than the original price of the console - staying behind the cutting edge is a good position. I've read that we have the "slim" 120GB version of the console, and if that's true then I dread to think what the "podgy" one looked like, as this one is fairly monolithic as it is. This was the one that we chose out of the three consoles of this generation, mostly for Whitney's reasons of having Blu-ray capabilities as well as the way that it has MGS4 and Little Big Planet (and by extension Stephen Fry) on it.

I spent a while going through its menus - I love the "tuning up" startup noise that it makes, very different from the original's bass boom and the PS2's startling dischord, and a mark of its attempt at becoming classier and branching out into a full "entertainment system" (exactly what Nintendo did in the 80s, even if it was only by name). The whole thing seems almost Mac-like, with its photo, music and video capabilities and claim of "what does it do? Everything" - I've already put several pictures on it even though I'm not entirely sure why.

The big step of this console generation seems to be online content, and without much prior knowledge of how it was handled before yesterday, it's strange to see that a lot of it seems to be basically what I'm doing for CT2 but for an entire console. You give it your name, create a network ID (if you think it would be at all helpful, add DavidXNewton to your lists!) and then your progress and activities are uploaded online as you go. There's even the option of putting them on Facebook automatically - I get the feeling that it's the kind of thing that everyone would instantly turn off, but if I do that then I will consider it my revenge for the eternal Farmville updates (and then posts about too many updates about Farmville, then posts about not playing Farmville and posts about joining groups about not playing Farmville).

In another unexpected purchase, we bought Grand Theft Auto 4 along with it - it wasn't something I ever really expected to play, but it was the only thing on the $20 shelf that I felt I could rely on not being terrible. I haven't really played a GTA game since the couple of top-down originals - I was given Vice City for one birthday or another at some point but I never got into it, finding it not to handle very well at all even though I really liked its intended 80s theming (complete with Commodore 64 loading screen).

I haven't played much of it yet, but what I have seen has been quite a revelation as to what games can do now. The city really does feel like New York (although the roads are oddly deserted compared to the eternal traffic jam of the real thing, for the most part) and I love the details like the realistically cycling traffic lights and pedestrian crossings. During the SixAxis motion control tutorial there's a point where you can just fly your helicopter up and look out at absolutely miles of buildings, which is spectacular, especially considering that draw distance for anything approaching this detail ten years ago was about four inches in front of your face. The actual motion controls are something that I'm yet to get used to, seeing as I then accidentally tilted the helicopter upside down and shaved off the rotor and tail section while tumbling back to earth.

The game itself got off to a slow start, though... in GTA1, you were dumped straight into the game, directed down to the phones and were instantly doing spectacular Italian Job-style getaways. The beginning of GTA4 by comparison is as if someone found the original game in a time capsule and remade it while tragically misinterpreting the theme, as what you do in the early stages amounts to trundling around and inviting people out bowling. At least, that's what I thought at first - I then realized that the in-game characters seemed to know exactly how life worked within the game, when I picked up Nico's cousin's friend for the second time and she suggested that they "find a car" rather than offering me hers as she had before. So I obligingly stepped out into the road to stop one, and the two characters casually had a "How are you enjoying substitute-New York?" "Oh, it's not so bad" conversation while Nico dragged the occupant out and beat him over the head with a tire iron.

So you could say that I'm no longer at the technological level of Strong Bad, until you remember that this console of the new just-released generation actually came out three years ago. That's scarier than anything that happened this Halloween.

Comments

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

I dunno, I was used to always having tons of demos... my dad was the computer teacher at his school, so there was a lot of disk-swapping going on, even before he had internet access back when that was a big deal (I used to go nuts on HappyPuppy :P)

What I'm not used to is being able to convert those demos to full games :P