I finished the GDI campaign in C&C3 tonight.  I'd heard some complaints from friends that it was too short but I really don't feel that was the case.  The GDI campaign alone felt pretty epic, and I still have a (presumably equal length) Nod campaign to play through.  Actually I got as far as starting a few of the Nod campaigns, and as someone who generally likes the cheesy video sequences in the game just having a new set of people doing briefings changes the vibe of things a lot.  Seeing actors from sci-fi fan favorites like Battlestar Galactica and Lost is kind of amusing too, even if none of them exactly rise above the source material.

Josh Holloway (Sawyer from Lost) in particular is basically playing his exact same character in C&C 3.  I dunno if it's lazy writing or not, but it is kind of amusing in a very meta fashion...

Not directly game related but a friend recently turned me on to XKCD, a very very funny web comic, at least if you are on the same math-geek-gamer-linguist wavelength.  There's a bunch there that I totally love, but this one particularly struck a chord with me... I had pretty much exactly the same reaction back at MIT.  Personally, I take that equation as proof that we are living within a computer simulation...

So I'm plugging away at the PS2 version of Vice City Stories still.  Overall, it's pretty good though much like Liberty City Stories I would have preferred to just get a real expansion pack to the original rather than a technically inferior PSP port.  But hey, with three years between mainline GTA games I guess beggars can't be choosers.

In the GTA games (at least of the GTA III line) the combat is widely acknowledged as the clunkiest and overall most poorly implemented part of the game.  So why it is in GTA: Vice City Stories that they put you in a firefight in an incredibly cluttered and poorly laid out area full of half obstructions and camera barriers, surrounded by 12 people shooting you with very strong weapons that will kill in about 5 second flat, make it so you can't do any meaningful tactics, and surround it on *both* sides with additional missions so you can't just pop in and try the hard part, and even doing the hard part isn't enough to assure victory.

It's maddening.  I've tried this mission about 20-30 times now and while I never had to cheat to beat any of the other GTA games, this may be the first one where I use bona fide cheat codes just to make progress in the game.  What a frustrating and clumsy part of an otherwise well put together game.

I've watched the GTA IV trailer probably 30-40 times since it was released, and it still never fails to bring a smile to my face to watch it.  The style is quite interesting, and as I quickly learned from the internets, based on the style of a 1982 movie, "Koyaanisquatsi".  I'm not quite sure how I missed this movie all my life, being pretty much a professional media consumer, much less the two follow-up movies in the trilogy (the last of which was released in 2002).  Maybe being 11 years old when it was released had something to do with it.

Anyways, I immediately put the movie at the top of my Netflix queue and watched it tonight.  Breathtaking film.  While it is a little dated in parts it is an amazing visual and musical experience.  It certainly isn't a movie for everyone (no dialogue or story per se) but I was just entranced by it.  Finding out about this film via the GTA IV trailer is certainly an obscure (and geeky) route but it is one I'm quite glad I followed. 

Hooray, waiting for me when I got home today was my Guitar Hero 2 for the Xbox 360, complete with snazzy guitar bag from RedOctane.  I was worried that I might be screwed buying direct when I was reading all weekend about people picking up copies from Best Buy and such, but my fears were unfounded.

So far, well, it's Guitar Hero 2 still, and that's a great thing.  When they allow downloading of the song list from GH1 it will be an awesome thing.  Achievements are what I thought would really motivate me to play this game through (and why I stopped playing GH2 on PS2 so that it would still be fresh).  But now that I've played a bit, I wonder if it is really Leaderboards that will be a motivator.  Already I'm 2,107th in the world on "Strutter"...

On the Achivements, the only thing that really bugs me is that there are like 300+ achievements that are only possible playing co-op locally with a skilled partner.  It's one thing to require multiplayer when you can coordinate over Xbox Live, but to requite two great Guitar Hero players in order to get the achievements, that doesn't sit right with me.  On the up side, they have an amusing collection of little 10-point Achivements for doing all sorts of random stuff...

I have to admit that I've bought pretty much every single expansion pack they make for The Sims (1 and 2).  It's not that I really spend all that much time playing it, but I really love the idea of a modular game where you can assemble a sort of uber-game out of the pieces.  Plus, it's just a fascinating piece of game design space, "reality"...  so when I saw the latest expansion for Sims 2 out, Seasons, I had to get it.

Like every time I get a new Sims expansion pack, I'm currently in a phase of playing it a bit.  While normally I expect my "just one more turn" addicitons to come from strategy games like Civ 4 or Heroes of Might & Magic, I'm a sucker for it here as well.  I sit down for a minute just figuring I'll poke around, maybe work on a skill point... next thing I know it's 5 hrs later, one of my Sims has just joined the City Council and we have a new sim-baby on the way. 

With Seasons, Sims 2 has definitely reached a critical mass of interesting stuff for me.  I really like environmental effects that make it feel more like a living world, so this has been one of the strongest expansion packs yet for the game.  A lot of gamers just turn their noses up at the Sims... heck, I was able to generate a great deal of laughs by giving a copy of "The Sims: Hot Date" at the company Christmas party a few years back.  But really, you'd be missing out -- there's a very good reason why this franchise has dominated the charts for so long.