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.

By Charley Daniels

I know this is old. Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw tears Halo 3 a new one, and he’s absolutely right, for the most part. I enjoyed the game, but everything he says in this review is true. The multiplayer aspects do make it worthwhile, but the single-player campaign is terrible. Most importantly, he’s pretty funny.

By Charley Daniels

Man, the last few weeks have been kicking my ass. It’s been like this: Work work work NaBloPoMo Work Work BuzzDash BuzzDash work work work Blog NaBloPoMo work work blog BuzzDash work work.

But the end is in sight for a lot of that, so no more complaining. Well, maybe a little. I got two games in the last five days that I haven’t had time to really get into. I mentioned Rock Band in a previous post — though that one’s more Isabelle’s, even though I love it — and the other is Assassin’s Creed.

The reviews for Assassin’s Creed have been mostly positive, but there’s one question/complaint that keeps popping up: They set the game in the present and have the protagonist do a genetic-code time-warp thing (it’s complicated, just go with it) to make it so you control a character in some medieval era. Why not just set the whole thing in the era where all the action takes place?

To which I say, “Duh!” This way they can make innumerable sequels set in all different time periods, with a storyline unified by the genetic-code time-warp phenomenon. It’s genius! In fact, you could technically be the same character in any time period throughout history with this backstory. I like it. Hypothetically.

Now I’m going to go start playing it to see if there’s any way my theory is plausible.