Weblog Sin Pies

By Charley Daniels

This week I partook of the sweet nectar that is “what everybody else is doing” (versus my usual activity of “mostly working and not much else”). Yes, I picked up a copy of Grand Theft Auto IV: Lord of Illusions and I went and saw Iron Man on opening weekend.

Iron Man made eleventy-billion-ten dollars and seventy-five cents domestically, and five-twenty times that combined with its international numbers. (I know because I work in entertainment journalism, so don’t get too impressed.) Oh, and the $10.75 was from me, thank you very much. So you know it had to be a good movie, even if our particular screening didn’t show the secret scene after the credits.

Grand Theft Auto IV, on the other hand, lets you punch a bitch out for absolutely no reason. If you’re like me, you do this often enough that it actually gets in the way of your trying to do the missions in the game. Like, I’ll need to get from point A to point B — it’s simple really, just go there. But on the way a homeless man asks me for money, so I hit him with a brick. Then the cops come (since when do cops care about homeless people?) and I have to steal a car for a fast getaway, which makes them even more duty-bound to stop me, or whatever. So now I really need to escape, except I’m not very good at driving yet because I’ve spent most of my time hitting people with bricks. It doesn’t help that in my panic I inevitably grab some delivery van or airline luggage cart. So it takes a ton of time to lose the fuzz, and by then I have to go do something in real life, and I can’t finish the original mission: getting from point A to point B.

You learn a lot about yourself from playing this game, which means it’s educational, which means it’s good for kids.