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At least the kid and I do. Or will. Anyway.. First it started with the wife knitting Az a baby Cthulhu which peaked The Kid’s interest. A monster? What kind of monster, from what book, H.P. who? And so it began, the subtle and purposefully slow education of my son regarding the harrowing tales of Lovecraft. The topic resurfaced when the wife finished a giant version of the baby Cthulhu she’s made for me (it is about the size of a toddler, but twice as tasty *smacks greasy lips*). This time around I added some of the fun stories from my role playing days, a few Deep One tales, and introduced the concept of insanity and things too vast and too horrible for the mind to understand. Then fortune smiled its crooked toothy grin down on us when I purchased a Popular Science mag for The Kid at the airport before we headed off to North Carolina. The theme of the mag was colors and optical illusions and how the mind processes information. The Kid ate it up. And then he comes across this one article on the strangeness of colors and the article mentions the story, ‘The Colour Out of Space’. The Kid went round and round with the concept of a color you have never seen and couldn’t describe. How could such a thing exist? What would it look like? Why would it be horrible (considering that it is a horror story)? Off and on over the course of the next 4 days we probably talked about it for an hour or so. The hook, having been tantalizing close, even gnawed on a smidge was now firmly stuck in my son’s curious gob.
And now there might be a visual to go with all this reading fun. Del Toro (of ‘Fellowship of the Ring’ Fame)has supposedly signed on with Cameron to bring the ‘Mountains of Madness’ Lovecraft tale to life. In 3-D no less, then again what isn’t in 3-D now (look for ‘The Vagina Monologues’ to come to Imax early next year!)? I’m hoping this can be the first horror flick The Kid and I go to together.
As a father I have found that I don’t get many of these type of moments. I can’t tell you how happy I am that the kid is a reader, of his own volition, driven by his own newly minted manic need to find the next best story. That I can also steer his interest a bit towards various fictional oasis’s that hide amongst the staggering piles of pablum is icing on the cake. Good stuff.
It is annoying enough to have Brighthouse run an incessant stream of commercials telling me how wonderful they are. I could almost live with it if I didn’t have to see the same series of commercials over and over and over again. At this point it is becoming such a headache I’m thinking of switching carriers. But then again, it is one thing to run ads that promote your business, I can almost not blame them for doing it: they own the delivery system. But.. but, when the message becomes some sappy meaningless advice I have to wonder what the point is, who Brighthouse is trying to reach and how much more I can endure before I buy an industrial strength weed whacker and visit my local Brighthouse call center. The ad in question is the one where this annoying lady explains to me the utter basics of how to determine who I should and should not open my front door to. Presumably most adults make it to adulthood through the ‘don’t talk to strangers’ rule. Does this basic tenet of 21st century living fly out the window when someone buys a house? “Oh, someone rang my doorbell, I must invite them in!” Who is Brighthouse talking to here? The lady in the ad goes through great lengths to explain that it is my right and indeed not rude to kick an unwanted guest out of my house and call 911. Of course, in my sick twisted head I imagine piles of police rape reports where one of the questions asks the victim why they thought the rape might have occurred and scores of well meaning women answer: because I didn’t want to be rude and ask them to leave. Now, of course I don’t believe this is the case. Hence, the perplexity over this stupid stupid commercial. I have to imagine that the people Brighthouse might actually reach with this pseudo-informative wasted 30 seconds of time are so inept at living their lives they could not muster the effort needed to pay a simple cable bill. I suppose it is the true definition of charity when the people you are reaching out to are the ones that are incapable of buying your product. Perhaps it is I who is incorrect. Perhaps Brighthouse should be lauded for the efforts to educate the truly ignorant, this previously overlooked class of people that were somehow smart enough to purchase a house but not wise enough to not open their doors to the hordes of rapists and would-be attackers that, according to Brighthouse are roaming the streets dressed as air conditioning repair men (now there’s a group that will rape you, or at least your wallet).
I went to Brighthouse’s website to see what future commercials I might be afflicted with. Sadly, I was not surprised to see a campaign to inform the public of what you can and cannot insert into a plug socket, and a Tampa Tribune sponsored effort to educate the public on the safe handling of newspapers, which I presume to be a campaign designed to reduce paper-cuts. Orwell, you were truly a prophet.
Giant insects fascinate me. With the exception of the roach anytime I see a insect of unusual size I have to investigate. I think I have Az to thank for it. His spider phobia inspired me to investigate the more bloated and gigantic members of the species that live in my yard (living near a swamp.. er lake we get tons of large critters). Once I appreciated that the largest and ugliest of spiders were often the most harmless my whole attitude towards insects changed a bit.
Tonight on the window at work was a grass hopper that could have fed a family of 4. It was about 3 inches in length and pretty darn chunky. The fun thing to do with giant mutant insects is to touch them. Yes, touch them. Giant insects, it has been my experience have an odd confidence about them. I think when you get so large that most birds would choke on you then you start to get a little bit cocky. I remember a giant moth in Riverview that was almost as large as my hand and bright orange. It didn’t flinch when I petted its head much in the same way I might pet a hamster. So I reached out to the giant grasshopper which had two rather long antennae whipping about. One antenna hit my finger with no reaction. Then the other whipped over and when both of them touched my finger the green monster jumped back a couple of inches. But see that’s the difference between regular insects and ones possibly exposed to mutating amounts of radiation: a normal sized grasshopper would have been out of there, but the giant grasshopper takes a few steps back to decide if I’m a threat or not, possibly mulling over the idea of kicking me in the head with a giant spindly leg.
On a side note, when my idiot antics finally catch up with me and my ignorant fondling of some deadly species of bug leads to my death please try to phrase my obit in such a way that I don’t look like a total moron.
The dream sequence.. that tired plot device that has long been the tool of soap opera writers and their ilk. It ranks up there with the unknown twin, the wakened coma victim and the not so miraculous return from death. It has always bothered me to spend all that time watching something, getting hooked, reeled in and then.. and then.. the character wakes up and you can write the entire season off (yeah, I’m talking to you, Sopranos).
But what if you took the dreaded dream sequence and made it into something awesome? Took the reality warping effects, amped ‘em up on crack and let it rip. Then you would get the movie ‘Inception’. This movie is so many things and all of them awesome. It is first and foremost intelligent which that alone puts it a cut above 95% of the movies written in the last decade, hell the last 3 decades (man, the 80’s sucked). It is well written, well acted, and extremely well thought out. By the end of the movie I was managing to keep up with all the various plot points, twists and turns, but just barely. And then the ending hits, and hits you again and again and again. And get this, this is a bon-a-fide action flick. A well written, densely plotted highly creative shoot em up blast with all the tension of a great heist movie.
My one criticism is that this movie bares some resemblance to the Matrix. Conceivably this movie was written and being re-written when the Matrix came out, and it is also conceivable that the similarities of the two movies influenced Inception. At one point in the movie one of the characters tells the other that he needs to dream bigger guns and pulls out a grenade launcher. This concept was never fully explored. The movie stayed along conventional means (machine guns, pistols, etc..) and the act of ‘dreaming big’ was, sadly not explored further. I can honestly see why, the whole plot would have changed had everyone been able to become bullet proof projectile launching supermen. If there was a sequel to this movie I would love to see that side of it explored.
This movie is an event. It is so many things that movies today are not. It says something that it supposedly took 15 years to write. Still, this is not a sequel or rehashed idea. This movie is almost cut entirely from whole cloth, an act of creation that utilizes all of today’s special effects capabilities. It should scare the utter living crap out of every focus group watching, sequel obsessed, creatively bankrupt movie exec that continues to spew out vomit like GI Joe and Final Destination 5. Hell, if I was a movie executive whose job suddenly depended on flexing creative muscles I’ve never used before, well I might just hope I was having a terrible dream.
Go see this movie. This is not the newest and coolest 3-D movie on an alien planet with a sturdy script and amazing graphics. This is the rarest of the rare, an action flick that delivers on every level, it might take another 15 years before we see another of its kind again.
On our trip to the airport at the end of our North Carolina adventure we stopped for a brief moment in the little college town of Ashville hoping to find some local grub (which later become the NC bar-b-q tale told a few posts down). We found ourselves in a mixed college neighborhood with shop lined narrow streets with high end dress and antique shops next to head shops next to tiny bars across from nuevo-Indian curry stands. My kind of place, really. I may not like the food, or afford the apperal, or drink the micro-brewed beer, but there was more creativity and entreprenuership in one square block of that town than exists in all of Brandon, Florida. And I’ll applaud that all day long until the blisters pop.
As fate would have it the only place I could find to park was next to a used bookstore. My thoughts of hunger quickly receded, replaced with the hopes that only a used bookstore in the heart of a college town can inspire. I can’t properly describe the joy. This was the real deal. I’m not sure what this space was used for long ago, but it wasn’t a bookstore. Brick walls, tin cielings, makshift partisions, badly built new floors added to deteriorating old. Mortar held in place with several decades worth of advertisement. Odd alcoves and makeshift shelves. Every inch of space lovingly maintinaed by a staff of dedicated if not mildly distracted brand of hippies sent down by God to look after great books and in the case of used music, great music.
In one of those hidden alcoves was a staff favorite section. Being hidden and far from direct lighting the only source of illumination were several strands of Christmas lights strung over the top shelf of the display. And there on that top shelf was one of my all time favorite titles, from an author I am honor bound to rescue in the event I should find him or his works neglected in just such a type of establishment. There sat Mark Helprin’s ‘Winter’s Tale’ with a loving anecdote from an appreciative member of the staff telling me what I already knew, which is just how wonderful this work of fiction is. I left the book alone. I figured it was doing more good singing its praises to the masses then it would by being ‘rescued’ by me. Besides, it was clearly loved.
I roamed the stacks, I looked for other authors I feel I have to liberate (Eco, MacDonald, Hammett, Crowley to name a few) and there on a dusty spinning rack full of used DVD’s that no one had touched in a while was a little piece of gold;’Maybe Logic’ by Robert Anton Wilson, co-author of the Illuminatus Trilogy and founder of the Church of the SubGenuis, and, sadly recently deceased. Wilson faces potential obscurity and the world would be lesser for it, do your part, Hail Eris and keep the memory alive.
Also on the bookshelves I found another Helprin title I did not own (“Ellis Island and other stories”) in hard back for a reasonable price. I took my loot to the register where an aging hipster rang me up. I mentioned Helprin and she beamed, we both sang the praises of “Winter’s Tale”. I then tested a theory that has panned out several times before and asked her if she had read another favorite book of mine, “Little Big” by Crowley. Her smile broadened, indeed she had read the book and loved it. My amateur unscientific study gains a little more weight. We briefly chatted a little more about favorite authors and for brief moment all was good in the world.
I asked her where we could eat, what she would recommend. Well, she was a vegan and recommended the veggie burrito from a place up the street. And then it hit me, two people just about as far apart ideologically speaking as you can get sharing in the mutual love of wonderful fiction. How great is that?
Got a little bonus from work, so it was off to the used music store for another foray into the sometimes strange, occasionally weird and perhaps a bit mellow land that makes up my musical tastes.
I am listening to Feist’s Let it Die. My second album from them, a band dubbed by someone as ‘low-fi’ (LOVE that term) has a quirky sound that defies easy classification. The songs on this album are all over the place, but I must say that “Now at Last” stands out as a powerful ballad with some real muscle behind the lyrics.
Calexico is one of those bands that sneaks up on you. Reminds me of Wilco before Wilco made it to the big time (big time defined as the impulse counter rack at Starbucks). I had a few of their songs kicking around my Ipod and every one of them grabbed me. The kind of song that made me stop and look at the screen wondering just who was playing and why did I not own more of them. I found the ‘feast of Wire’ Cd in the used pile at Sound Exchange and scooped it up. What a CD. Its like a soundtrack to a cool movie from a time not too long ago when villains were villains and the good guys were flawed but in such a way that made you root for them all the more. Good good music, I will be searching out more of their stuff.
I heard of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds back in my Family Christian days. They were on the original ‘Passion of the Christ’ dedication album, until they got booted and the album rerelaesed sans Cave. Since then I have sought him out off an on. One good sign is that I have been very unlucky to find him used at the used record store. My luck finally turned the other night and I picked up ‘The Boatman’s Call’. Strong, heady stuff. Yeah, there’s some God in there, and a whole bunch of other dark gritty shit. Think of Nick Cave as a christian Tom Waits if Tom Waits could be a christian and still sound like the pitchman for drinking whiskey in windowless dives among the less well-to-do of LA’s seedier drinking establishments.
Speaking of Tom Waits, I scored the CD ‘Swordfishtrombones’. I was a bit worried about this as it is an 80’s release. The 80’s killed so many artists (Roberta Flack, I will remember you) that I hesitate now when I see an 80’s release date (if you need a relevant modern experience to understand just what the 80’s did to the typical artist, pick up just about any Alecia Keys CD and hear the over-produced jarring noise that some focused group crazed music exec is trying to pass off as music). Please forgive me for thinking that something as trivial as decade long cultural shift towards shallowness could ever influence someone like Waits. Despite the almost pythonic name the Cd is typical Wait’s goodness; dark, gritty, self effacing, sheep dipped in hard earned wisdom and just plain good.
Round out the musical selection with a David Gray album (always good stuff, White Ladders is an awesome CD, Life in Slow Motion is just shy of the same quality), A Belle and Sebastion Cd, a new artist (to me) that I took a risk on and it paid off. Some of the stuff is a little too touchy feely (called ‘Twee’) but most of it is spot on lyric powered goodness, a Decemberists Cd, and the latest Indigo Girls release (a live 2 Cd box set with great liner notes and some truly inspired performances). Oh, and 2 Monty Python music collections that are just what the doctor ordered.
I WILL own every Waits and Calexico CD. I am becoming a Feist fan, and Nick Cave intrigues me in a way that few artists do. All in all a good outing at the used music store. Which brings to the forefront the true star of this post: Sound Exchange. Whether it is the joy of the hunt of finding music you want at less than full price, or the kooky store environment including the various iconic music store employees right out of central casting, or the sheer joy of walking into a retail store that is not a cookie cutter version of countless clones of itself, Sound Exchange fills a much needed niche.
A good catch all around.
I don’t know about you, but I was a tad discouraged when I found out that NASA was abandoning the shuttle program and as far as I can tell, any attempts to put man into space for a long time to come. I guess there will still be the International Space Station, but we will have to pay the Russians millions to ferry our way up to that floating 6 pack in the sky.
But then I heard what NASA’s new mission would be and I have to tell you I was not very happy when I learned the details of NASA’s new focus. But then I thought about it for a while, weighed the implications as much as my limited understanding would allow (if you didn’t know, I’m not a rocket scientist) and came to the eventual conclusion that this is a tough mission, perhaps even tougher than going to the moon. You might be asking yourself: just what type of earth bound mission is tougher than travelling through the harsh environment of space to traverse the alien lunar landscape?
Well, folks NASA’s new mission.. is to help Muslims “feel good” (please notice the quotes, those come from the chief of NASA himself during an interview on Al Jazeera) about their contributions towards math and science. That’s right, the next mountain NASA’s going to climb is the Muslim world. We are going to send scientists, forever known for their social and personal interaction skills and task them with chatting up the Arab community, get them dialoguing about arithmetic, talk about the heady hay days of inventing the 0.
I know, some of you are wondering just what great inventions and advances will come from this type of NASA mission. Previous NASA missions have helped revolutionize just about every aspect of our lives; hell just look at Velcro. What kind of inventions will NASA have to come up with to get fundamentalist Muslims to stop wanting to strap on bombs and stop killing innocent women and children and start rapping about the joys of Arab based contributions to science and math? Well, to start with a time machine. That’s right, NASA’s new mission will inevitably lead to the creation and use of a time machine. This way NASA can actually go back to the 5th century, the last time it appears Muslims were comfortable with themselves and convince the Arab community that unless it changes its ways its gonna be pretty much 500 years of misery and shit. Of course that won’t work, which will leave our intrepid scientists tasked with a job well outside their emotional comfort zones to come up with even better and more task oriented machines to make Muslims happy. Now we’re talking emotional influencing devices usable on a massive scale, weather machines to make the Middle East a verdant plush Eden, fabrication machines designed to create endless supplies of toilet paper, and holographic simulation chambers (now with SensoGrip!) so that even the shabbiest of zealots can have the 40 virgin experience. By the time NASA is done ‘helping’ the Arab world feel good about itself the entire Muslim community should be about as compliant as your typical white trash mother of 5 hopped up on Funyons and Ho Ho’s.
I would argue (quite convincingly, if I don’t say so myself) that this new mission, far from tarnishing NASA’s global image as a leader in science and space will actually propel NASA to such great heights of scientific achievement it will be as if someone took the entire space program, strapped it to the flying brick called the space shuttle and launched the whole damn thing into the dark recesses of space.
This is not an exact time line, but you get the point.
First there came the french fry redux as BK tried to revamp their fry to taste more like the competition. That didn’t go so well. They followed that with apple sticks and chicken sticks. Personally, I think these are the same products as they are all relatively tasteless fried stick like objects that give me heartburn.
Then there came the Angus steak burger. A point of confession here, I fell for the advertising hook, line and sinker. As fast as I could I was in a drive though buying what I hoped to be fast food beefy nirvana. What I got was an overpriced meat patty of questionable pedigree that tasted like school lunch meat loaf.
Then.. (no more ‘and then!’!) came the giant headed creepy weird king dude who first made his commercial debut skulking around neighborhoods and people’s back yards like a schizophrenic pedophile off his meds. Of course, it all made perfect sense when we found out the weird looking bearded water on the brain nut-ball was in fact the newest pitch man for BK.
Now.. now I have yet another reason to avoid Burger King. The latest BK commercial shows hordes of Twilight fans descending on unsuspecting customers in some asinine attempt to convince these poor hapless diners to decide between two of the numb nuts that star in the Twilight movie. Never mind that the food at BK sucks, or that they slap the once proud name Angus on everything (New Angus shakes!). Ignore, or at least try to the hulking plasticine V for Vendetta knock off that wants to eat your children. No, now I can’t eat there because if I do there is a good chance I’ll catch a murder charge. I do not have the intestinal fortitude to safely navigate out of a mob of too strident 15 year olds hell bent on converting every one in their midst to the Ultra Shallow side of the Force. I’d snap like an over cooked chicken fry. You would see me on the news playing teenie bopper whack a mole using the creepy king’s head as a hammer.
‘But, Brother Lud it’s fast food, it is suppose to suck.’ Do yourself a favor and avoid the crap at the top 3 fast food joints. These guys haven’t made a decent burger in years. If you want a good burger go to Hardees or 5 Guys.
I have been on vacation. Despite somehow having a negative number of readers (scientists are looking into it without actually looking at my blog) I thought it would be safest to not broadcast to the cyber world that I was going to take a vacation. With my luck that would be the one day that a real Russian mobster sees my site, uses gangster magic to track down my house and then, once realizing that the only cash to be had is $50 in silver coins worth roughly $60 would then set my house ablaze. Given the sheer amount of paper in my domicile I would have been able to see the bonfire from my seat on the plane.
Anyway, the wife’s family was having a reunion in the mountains of North Carolina. With the exception of one brief moment/memory in my youth I have never spent any time in the mountains. Let me tell ya, it is a little different up there.
Things change in the mountains, definitions change. Highways to us flatlanders are busy things with multiple lanes, maintenance plans and a relatively low risk of death. Down here distance can be measured by units of time; drive 60mph’s and you can go 60 miles in 60 minutes. For most of us when the GPS makes a mistake its a funny and sometimes frustrating thing, usually fixed by an upgrade on the computer, or by cross referencing your GPS with a printed map. In the mountains… There are no straight lines. My GPS tells me that my destination is 3 measly miles away. What it fails to tell me is that there are 8 miles worth of switchbacks as I gradually ascend and then descend a mountain to get to where I want to go (arriving 30 minutes later). On these trips I stuck to the major highways, but major, I quickly find out simply means paved and two-laned (as in I’m gong one way, often around a hairpin turn looking over a cliff and another car is coming from the other direction, often in the middle of both lanes moving at a speed just shy of certain careening death). GPS helped most of the time, but it would often get confused. The roads would go up the mountain so steeply that they get stacked on top of each other in the computer’s little brain, so it would get half the journey right and then plant me in some one’s driveway while encouraging me to traverse their backyard and search for the bypass that surely must be through those trees over yonder. Combine this with the GPS’s tendency to get the street names wrong, local maps that were not drawn to scale (says so right there in bold print), and North Carolina’s inhibition when it comes to putting up street signs and you start to get the idea. Of course, nothing can really properly describe the feeling of hurtling along narrow roads, navigating 180 degree turns with deadly unforgiving drops on one side (not big believers in guard rails up there) and crazy local drivers on the other. It was like five days of being tied to the most shoddy slap dashed carny ride a meth head has ever performed maintenance on. Good thing the rental company gave us a 4 cylinder Altima. The radio doesn’t work well in the mountains, but that’s OK because once we hit an incline that little engine would start singing like a castrated 14 year old opera singer fresh from having his balls snipped.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I had a lot of fun. It really was wonderful to go and experience a place so different from were I live, and so beautiful too, and to do it in the safe confines of the United States. The mountains of North Carolina are the opposite of Florida in just about every way, and for that alone are worth visiting. At night I would sit on the screened-in deck and listen to the quiet sounds of nature, relishing the absence of the Floridian AC hum (AC units are not too common up there). The abundant wildflowers fill the thin air with perfume so that when I found myself taking a few extra breaths I was happy to do so. And despite the fact that condos scaled the mountain walls like something out of a documnetary on the Mayans, the roads were blessedly empty of people compared to the density I am typically forced to suffer. Adding to all this was the almost constant barrage of beautiful picturesque scenes that seem to be spaced out about every 10 minutes or so, a casual majestic beauty that often stopped us in our tracks.
Somehow we managed to go almost 5 days without eating North Carlina bar-b-que. I put my foot down on the drive to the airport, unfortunately the closest place was in a strip mall sharing space with a gas station. It was 4 in the afternoon and the place was a buffet, not exactly the best time to visit a buffet (the fat man sagely offered). So, with grim determination we ordered our food to go and was off to the airport. And what a perfect topper to our trip: perfectly cooked beef ribs the size of my forearm that I ate with my fingers, mac and cheese cooked southern home style with a crust and chunks of gooey cheese spread throughout, hush puppies.. man o’ man. That meal become a symbol of my vacation; an event initially filled with trepidation that turned out to be a thing of beauty. -I never picked the rib up or used silverware, I just pulled chunks of juicy meat off with my hands, I think at one point I heard angels singing.
I’ve always been a Western fan, though I don’t think I ever read a Western novel and have only watched relatively few Western movies. I love what the West represents, the freedom, the expansiveness, the way nature almost over powers the senses. My brief time in Arizona has always left me wanting more.
I say all this because it was the hopeful impetuous behind why I spent full price for Red Dead Redemption. The idea of a free roaming game in a western environment was just too much for me to pass up. The fact that Rockstar Games put this game out was a source of both hope and a little chagrin. Will this be Grand Theft Auto on a horse? I must have read that exact same question a dozen times as I searched various web sites for signs that my pre-ordering the game was a smart move.
Well, it was a smart move, and yes this is a little like Grand Theft Auto on a horse. If you didn’t tell me who made this game before I played it I think I would have been able to figure it out. The only thing that would have thrown me is the weapons selection wheel from Assassin’s Creed. Here you find Rockstar’s familiar mission structure, save points, dedication to character acting and a strong attempt at ambiance and immersion.
The game is a blast to play and relatively easy to play all things considered. This is a double edged sword as most of the missions are entertaining with few of those pesky impossible bits that make you replay one moment over and over again for hours on end, but the ease of play means things often end quickly. There’s a fairly good variety of missions, the side quests are fairly well done, often varied and occasionally creepy, and the story line is fairly solid. The weapons hold up pretty good, I’m only 55% of the way through the game but I would love to see two double action revolvers at once. The semi-automatic shot gun is a thing of beauty and I just discovered dynamite, but I have the distinct impression I will do both Nobel and JJ Evens Jr. proud. One of the things I find most enjoyably in the game is shooting things, especially bad guys (or sheriff officers, or bounty hunters, or the Mexican army). Rockstar has done a phenomenal job of combining graphics, sound effects and rag doll physics to create your very own Clint Eastwood moments. The graphics are just pretty (although they can’t seem to get a dog rendered correctly), the music is often spot on and sometimes fun and quirky. All in all the game is fun to play with maybe 75+ hours of potential game play.
The drawbacks? I saved the game about 20% of the way through and decided to go on a rampage. Waves of sheriff officers came at me and I mowed them down all the while my honor is dropping while my bounty is going up (I had played it goody two-shoes up to this point). Eventually I die and the game starts back at my save point, but it wasn’t until a few saves later that I realized that while my honor and experience were what they were prior to that rampage that they had not changed since. And they are stuck there as I type this. My experience is that Rockstar games are sometimes a bit fragile, that’s a lot of story to keep straight. I have not even thought about using a cheat code. It bothers me that you can’t refuse missions: scores of people pick you out of the milling crowds to save their horse/business/life of a loved one. Sometimes you might see the ‘X’ of a mission and try to avoid it but you get sucked in because the trigger point is a 30 yard radius around the X. Picking flowers is a bit odd. I wish I could challenge people to gun duels. Liars Dice is a little too easy to beat. Bobcats come in pairs? Water is a little too deadly. Sometimes it’s a little too easy to catch a charge (get a bounty on your head), and the economics of the game can be seriously tightened up. Several times my finger slipped and I bought or sold things I didn’t want to, it takes way too long to sell stuff, the game tells you new stuff is available when it isn’t, and the regional price differences are either not worth mentioning or non-existent. Oh, and I have $11,000 dollars, I guess in a saddle bag somewhere (that must be the equivalent of 150 grand today) and that’s with me buying every bullet in two countries.
All in all this is a great game. It delivers the Western genre, it offers hours of game play and it satisfies on a variety of levels. You can see Rockstar evolving with this game, and that alone if nothing else is awesome to see. Assuming Rockstar stays the course and continues to evolve (big if’s) then who knows what these guys will be able to deliver in years to come.
P.S. Every time I see the bow legged half step trot of the main character I think of Steve McQueen in the movie ‘Tom Horn’ who seems to be the model the game makers were using, they got the walk down perfect. The ‘Shootist’ is playing right now, an awesome John Wayne western that should be required viewing material for all of western civilization “I’m a dying man scared of the dark”. And it is also a fitting end to this post.
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Comics and art work
errata (this word is neat!)
Music. Neil Diamond rocks!
Sci-Fi stuff
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