I have to admit I'm enjoying the multiplayer mode in GTA IV a lot more than I expected to.  But I find myself in a dilemma -- I haven't finished the main storyline game yet.  I like using voice comms in multiplayer games, but all it takes is one jerk in a ranked game spouting off about the game's ending to ruin it for me.  Fortunately that's much less of a risk just playing friendly games with people I know.

I've become a person really good at acquiring and processing information.  Being in a mode where there is information I am actively avoiding is very odd, but you just can't un-learn knowledge.  I'm running into this problem with my other current obsession, which is downloading episodes of Survivor from Amazon's Unbox.  Elise and I have become quite addicted to the show, which I somehow completely wrote off when it first aired.  Now we're catching up, but Amazon makes it quite difficult for those wanting to avoid spoilers -- the very pages where you go to download the episodes list the winners of the game!  So now I'm becoming strangely adept at navigating their web pages with my hand strategically placed to block out information.

My vacation in Liberty City is almost over - at least the immersive, stay-home-from-work-and-clear-the-schedule part of it anyways.  I am continually grateful for how understanding my wife is of my odd obsessions.  :)

I hope to write up some more detailed thoughts once I've finished the game and it has all settled in on me.  I'm about 35 hours of playtime in on it (plus some assorted multiplayer), not rushing through the missions but just enjoying the experience.  I had very very high expectations of the game, and despite a few warts I'm pleased that it has met (and sometimes exceeded) those expectations.  I'm not quite convinced it will displace San Andreas as my favorite of the entire series, but the two are apples and oranges in some ways...

Speaking of rushing through the game... apparently there is an Achievement for beating the main storyline in < 30 hours.  I sure hope no one tries to do that on their first time through.  This is a game to be savored, and just played for what it is rather than trying to beat the clock.  Personally, I'm saving that one for my inevitable second playthrough...

One week from now I expect to be headed home with a copy of GTA IV.  Man, I'm not sure I have ever been as excited about a game as I am for this one.

Sorry for the lack of updates -- been busy with things at work and home.  I imagine my upcoming extended vacation in Liberty City will not help matters in the short term...

I finished the "100%" achievement in Bully over the weekend.  It's not a particularly hard one to get 100% at compared to some other games out there (like GH3 with it's abysmal achievement design).  But it was a first for me.  A few other games I thought I would come close -- I'm still plugging away at Orange Box and Oblivion.  Most games I have put perfect completion simply out of reach, either by having a multiplayer component that just doesn't fit with my time availability, or by having ridiculous difficulty requirements. 

Much like game difficulty itself, I think that there is a general bias towards making these things too hard.  The "currency", as it were, is already devalued heavily by sports games or games like Avatar that give you 1000 /1000 trivially.  So what's the harm in letting a dedicated, but not insanely awesome, player of your game achieve full completion?

I admit I'm constantly battling between my feeding my Achivement addiction and trying not to let it steer me into just plain un-fun territory.  So I'm plinking away at 5-starring more songs on Guitar Hero 2 and 3 because that's a happy middle ground for me -- I like playing the game even though I know realistically I'll never 5-star Raining Blood or Psychobilly Freakout on Hard for either game.  But playing the game without sound, or not using the guitar controller?  What's the point of that.

Rock Band's "World Tour" mode was an excellent case in point on that.  When the game shipped, my wife and I played a lot of it, and pretty quickly hit the limit of the # of fans we could get at the "Medium" difficulty level.  If I encouraged her to play at Hard, it just wasn't any fun.  So our progress was stymied.  Fortunately, Harmonix recently patched it so that you can get more fans (and thus access more venues) at Medium.  I still hope we'll move up to hard eventually, but now at least we can move forward.  It's all illusory of course -- nothing prevented us from playing those same songs in Quick Play mode.  But context is important...

Ugh.  Game backlog overflow, which I never really cleared out from Holiday '07, is starting to ramp up on me again.  Now I'm feeling it most seriously in my "games to play after the boys are asleep"... My rediscovery of Fatal Frame 3 and my 360 re-play of Bully: SE are vying back and forth for that precious spot.  But just today it got even worse, as I've just acquired a copy of Condemned 2. 

The original Condemned was a pleasant surprise -- a bit unpolished, but with some of the scariest moments in gaming for me since the original Silent Hill.  Most notably that department store... (shudder).  C2 looks pretty good and apparently has more of the CSI-style investigation work, which I quite enjoyed in C1.

Much to my surprise there is also quite a backlog overflow filling up for my on portable gaming... Advance Wars and Professor Layton were quite demanding of my DS time, before Phoenix Wright put them both on notice.  I've barely even booted up Patapon, and now Wild Arms XF is sitting there teasing me with it's hex-based goodness. 

To top it all off, I only have 45-ish days to clear through anything I'm really going to play until midsummer, since when GTA IV hits on April 29, that's all that I'll be playing for a while...

Clint Hocking is my hero.

Now, I have no idea whether anyone from the Canadian Teacher's Foundation will actually take him up on his offer to play Bully to have a more informed discussion about it.  But his approach is 100% dead on, in my opinion.  We need to take every opportunity to engage those who are uninformed about games and let them form their opinions on the actual merits of our work. 

I developed a lot of my love for games out of a love for literature, so the comparisons that Clint makes in his challenge ring true for me.  My 12th grade AP English teacher recommended the book "Godel, Escher, Bach" to me -- which forever changed my worldview and philosophy and guided me directly towards computer science (and eventually, game development).  I think there are a lot of really good opportunities for us to use games as educational tools not in the way that Reader Rabbit works but in the way that traditional literature works -- by causing us to ask questions about ourselves and the world we live in.

It is true that many games don't hold up particularly well along that lens -- Pac-Man isn't trying to make a statement about world hunger.  Maybe even our best isn't yet up to what we can learn about the human condition from reading Victor Hugo or Jane Austen.  But I think games are getting there in their own way -- Bioshock's commentary on idealism and the veneer of civilization, or Silent Hill 2 posing questions about marital fidelity and abandonment in the face of a terminal illness. 

As for Bully itself, I think it holds up better than most under this kind of scrutiny.  I'm deep in the middle of my second playthrough on the Scholarship Edition and finding it just as enjoyably immersive as ever.  I won't claim it holds some deep meditation on humanity, but underneath the wry sarcasm it covers some territory not often ventured into by games: social cliques, school dropouts, and standing up to bullies.  It may not be Lord of the Flies but it does harken back to my own school days in a way very few games even try, much less succeed at.

So hooray for a great response, Clint.  I'm doubtful that the CTF will actually take you up on your offer but it's the right response regardless.  I wish more of our official representation in the industry were as eloquent or as bold.

I have to admit I don't understand quite all the fuss about the Smash Bros. line of games.  Don't get me wrong, I have fun with them, but for many people it seems like the new Smash Bros game is on par with my fervor for GTA IV (which has two awesome radio track samplers now, BTW:  IF99 and Vladivostok FM).  Maybe it's a function of how I tend to play -- I can see how in a dorm-like setting the constant pick-up-and-play multiplayer chaos would be a lot more appealing.

However, I know that my older son, Xavier, will absolutely flip out over the game.  He is excited about anything with Mario, Peach, Starfox, Link, Pokemon, and Samus, much less all of them.  As it turns out, his birthday is this Tuesday, and we're having a swim party on Sunday -- just in time for me to pick up the new iteration of Smash Bros Sunday morning for him as a present.  Who am I to turn down such an obvious sign?

In what is turning out to already be a surprisingly active Spring for game releases, this week Bully: Scholarship Edition came out.  I was a huge fan of the original Bully so I've been quite looking forward to returning to this game in hi-def with a smidgeon of extra content and of course, Achievements.

Overall, I would say it doesn't disappoint.  What was good about Bully PS2 is still good about Bully: SE.  I'm not sure the new additions are all that worthwhile unless you're a huge fan of the game, but hey, I'm a huge fan of the game.  Unfortunately the technical quality of the port is substandard -- random lockups and some choppy stutter playing back the intro cutscene don't set a good tone.  But then I get back in the swing of going to classes, throwing firecrackers, collecting rubber bands, and generally exploring the school / town, and those problems are quickly forgotten.

So someone did a little thread necromancy on this 2-yr old thread over at QT3 about the Fatal Frame series.  Much to my surprise, I found there was a Fatal Frame 3 that I'd totally forgotten about -- at the time I think I hadn't played Fatal Frame 2 yet so I just skipped over it mentally.  I really love the Fatal Frame series (sometimes more in concept than in execution) so after reading the positive impressions of the third one there I resolved to find a copy.  While apparently now they've just done another print run on it and Fatal Frame 2, I was not so lucky and paid the going (high) rate for an original copy.

It seems to play fine on my PS3 so far, though I guess it has issues on the other, less-compatible PS3 models.  Sure, it is a bit dated but nothing that keeps it from being the same ultra-creepy Fatal Frame experience.  That dev team (Project Zero at Tecmo?) are the masters of understanding a particular kind of creepiness that comes from playing with your perceptions and knowing what psychological buttons to push.  Sure, they aren't afraid of a "cat scare" every now and then but the real power in Fatal Frame comes from this sense of the real world and the spirit world colliding in a disturbing way.  Pacing is key for this kind of experience, and they totally get that.  The actual combat & exploration mechanics aren't necessarily anything to write home about, but it delivers exactly what it needs to for the game -- tension.  Seeing the world through that tiny camera viewfinder is an intense mechanic, and it is one of the few games that can reliably creep me out.

Fatal Frame 3 has a different vibe so far that the first two, and actually feels a lot more polished.  I hear rumors of a Fatal Frame game for the Wii, which would be pretty cool to see.  The prerendered cutscenes are great and they do a LOT with the post-processing effects the good old PS2 can crank out, but it would be nice to bring some of the tech a little up to the modern era.  I'd much rather see it on the 360 of course, but I'll take what I can get...

On a totally different note, if you live in one of the primary states make sure you vote!  I'm thrilled to finally have a chance to actually vote in a primary, since usually the states beyond Iowa, NH, and SC rarely matter.  Texas has a pretty messed-up primary system involving both a vote and a caucus, so we'll be dragging the kids out to join us in some caucus action this evening...

I've had the opportunity to fool around with some XNA Studio 2.0 stuff at work recently -- mostly using it as a quick 2D prototyping engine for showing people some system dynamic or another in motion.  I have to say, it is pretty slick.  Combined with the joyousness of C# programming, I've been quite pleasantly surprised how quickly I can turn something around from a discussion of a concept to a running app illustrating it.  Of course some of the cool things it can do (like all the Xbox 360 stuff and the potentially-disruptive distribution model announced at GDC) are not really relevant, but they do add to the package for most people.

When I have a little spare time I plan on making a little weekend project of getting a game up and running at home and on my 360, so I can start to talk to my kids about what programming is.  Heck, maybe I'll make a little educational game out of while I'm at it...