Well, not only is it not snowing.  It’s raining, and to top it off, we’ve also got hail.  BB pellet hail.  Too bad I have a Halo hat, not a helmet. 

Guess I won’t be getting GTA IV tonight at the midnight launch.  Guess tomorrow’s another day.  Another day on which I have to work till 9:00pm.  Gah!

First of all, stop saying it’s a demo. People don’t pay $40 for a demo. People don’t put over 60 cars into a driving game if it’s just a demo. Granted, Prologue is a just a taste of the GT5 to come, but it is not a demo.

I’ve heard a several reviews say that Prologue relies heavily on “grinding” to get the credits to buy better cars. Since there’s only 6 different tracks, not counting alternate setups and reverses, I can see why one might have to play the same race over and over again just to get the 2,000,000 credits for an F1 racer. On the other hand, you can also make money by running the races online; a lot more rewarding, and with human players, the races are a lot more interesting.

On that note, I think I’ve discovered why the announcement that car damage would be patched on as early as the fall came so soon after the game’s launch in Europe. Gran Turismo’s online mode seems to be heavily reliant on people.. well, not driving like a*#holes. But since they do, all that time you’ve spent in the single player learning how to follow the racing line feels pretty useless every time someone decides to just ram you from behind, rather than go around. And why not? The cars don’t break and sometimes you can get a boost by crashing just right. Don’t feel like slowing for a turn? Rub of another car to keep off the railing. The whole thing feels a lot like bumper cars at 110mph (I imagine).

While I can see how realistic damage could deter the crazies from causing so many crashes, it might suck even more when you get taken out of a race by someone who just doesn’t know how to drive.

All that said though, I’m having a blast. Online is great, just not the “real driving simulator” the rest of the game is. See my GTI? It’s not from the game, but who can tell anyways?

Well, the main point of this post is to try out some of the features on the new Windows Live Writer blogging application.  So far?  I’m pretty impressed, and I hope that this does away with a lot of the nuisances of blogging and get me back here more often.

Next stop?  A spiffier layout.

I hope Activision has some big pockets for all the money they’re about to make, because this game is going to be huge when it releases this summer.

The Forbidden Kingdom, trailer in previous post, features the aforementioned martial arts, movie stars and the guy who put together the fight scenes from the Matrix, so it looks like it’ll be a pretty cool action flick. Mixing Jackie Chan’s style of kung fu comedy with Jet Li’s serious skills should yield some interesting results.  I’m excited.  The story is something about a kid from our time looking for pirated DVDs, getting sucked into the mystical Chinese past, and having to learn kung fu to free the Monkey King and save the world. Hm.

As I said, it looks like it’ll be a pretty cool action flick.

The Forbidden Kingdom comes out April 18th. Video game adaption to be announced.

Or not.

While it’s only October (and still pretty warm, until today…) the holiday season is practically upon us. This month’ll see the releases of many pretty anticipated titles. We already got Zelda: Phantom Hourglass, (well, not me. More on that later), Folklore comes out tomorrow, and Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction comes in at the end of the month. Some other titles I’m looking forward to: The Simpsons Game and Clive Barker’s Jericho.

Those last two are probably a bit off the radar for most people, one being licensed and the other being just another shooter in the post Halo 3 era of really awesome multiplayer features. They were certainly off my radar until I played the demos that were released on PSN. The Simpsons Game was actually pretty solid and the humor that they’ve got is appropriately and unmistakably Simpsons brand. I’m seeing a lot of people giving the demo fives out of ten, which I suspect come from the “Everyone’s a Critic”- mentality, but if you’re a Simpsons fan, I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.

The Jericho demo was pretty short and didn’t really let me get a good feel for what the game would be like. There is this really neat timed button presses / interactive cutscene near the end in which a hideous monster plops down on top of you and you have to hit the right buttons to block his attacks and knock him off. I think that part is probably the best indicator for the mood of the game. You can sense the fear and anexiety in your character, something that could so easily have been lost given how heavily armed your seven man team is. I think I’ll probably rent this one first to see if I can get into it.

Is it weird for me to want a family of PSP’s?

I mean, between me and my girlfriend, we already have two, a launch piano black and an imported pink. Then, last week she tells me that she no longer likes the pink one and thinks that we should get the Slim & Lites. Black ones, since the other colors seem kind of cheap. (Plus, I’m not sure I want a Darth Vader imprinted forever onto the back of my PSP) I like all of the new and improved features, but for some reason, I don’t want to just have my old PSP put out into the wild if I trade it in.

On the other hand, if I keep all of the PSP’s and end up with four, what the heck am I going to do with them? Is there anything I can do with them? When are they going to firmware in some features for the ridiculously rich, or the hopelessly sentimental people, who are going to end up with these families of PSP’s?

By the way, has anyone seen these Slim & Lite Core Packs out in the wild?