Service resumes, Grand Theft Auto V, and the Great News Vacuum of 2013

Do you have any idea how hard it is to start a Youtube channel that operates on a level above “foreshortened face breathing heavily into a webcam”? And to do so alone? Answer: Really god damned hard. So hard, in fact, that my creative brain has now died, and what’s left has been topped off with Premiere and After Effects walkthroughs, pixel widths, and file locations (so many files...). Also, with the limited budget at my disposal (did I say “limited?” I meant “non-existent”), getting my first video just the way I want it is a bit like working on a car without the proper tools. All the anger and swearing in the world won’t help you get that bolt out if you don’t have the right socket.

So, putting this project that is now three months in the making on hold before I stop shaving and haunt my own apartment in nothing but a bathrobe and Ninja Turtle slippers, I figured a return to my blog and daily updates was in order. And here we are.

Today? Grand Theft Auto V. Because everyone seems to be hurling opinions on the console war into the news vacuum left in the wake of E3 like the Planet Express crew trying to clog a black hole with Earth’s garbage. Oh, there you are forced metaphor. And before 11am. Lovely.

So this GTAV gameplay trailer everyone has been talking about (and by everyone I mean, well, everyone. Twitter, Reddit, NeoGaf, every game news blog that looks and sounds exactly like the next game news blog) does look pretty fucking fantastic. Max Payne 3 style shooting, GTA: San Andreas depth, polished GTA IV graphics, Beyond: Two Souls character switching. All good things. But I’d like to focus on one important aspect of the trailer that everyone seems to have missed. Oh, I've embedded the trailer below in case you haven't seen it. Or need to watch it again and don’t want to open a new tab. Believe me, I understand dilettante levels of laziness. Borders on sloth, but you work out every day to hide the truth from the world? But it's there, just beneath the surface... Oh shit, that went weird. Nevermind. Watch the shiny:

Let’s focus on Trevor, dismissed (sort of) in the trailer with the line “...the less said about him, the better.” From what’s been revealed so far, Trevor is completely out of his mind. Lives in the desert, is constantly getting in trouble with the law (as shown during the character switching portion of the trailer) and generally comes off like a bat-shit crazy meth cooker with a drinking problem and no hair. 

It’s not much of a leap to imagine him driving over a pile of pedestrians on a sidewalk, beating a hooker to death with a blunt object, or shooting at a police helicopter with a rocket launcher for no reason other than shits, grins, or perceived persecution. He’s completely unhinged, mad, wrong in the head. Unrealistic.

Rockstar is known for putting characters in GTA games that are so over-the-top as to be satirical, adding to the landscape they’ve so painstakingly cultivated in the years since the original GTA, but these characters were always supporting characters. In spite of the madness around them and the occasional silly situation, the main characters have always been more grounded than the schizophrenic theme park around them, conceivably to aid the player in connecting with the game world. Or simply for contrast.

Now, this might be a bit of a stretch, or not (and it is the internet, so someone else might have come up with this already) but I think Trevor is us. The players. The representation of what we all become when we enter the GTA game space. All the errant aggression without a whiff of consequence, all the urges that don’t exist or are suppressed in real life. He is our lizard brain. Our id.

Expanding on this: Michael, the ex-criminal (for a moment, anyway) that attempted to leave it all behind and put on the mask of a stand-up, Beverly Hills (or whatever they call it in GTA) family man. The super-ego. The opposite end of the spectrum from Trevor. And, based on what we can tell as he’s “convinced he’s surrounded by morons,” we have Franklin. The ego. The mediator. Somewhere between the polished criminality of Michael, and the “fuck it blow things up” attitude of Trevor. Of course, this is based on what little we can gather from the story and gameplay trailers, but there could be something to all of this.

Trevor, Franklin, Michael. Id, ego, super-ego

Or I could be reaching. Freud’s falling out of favor anyway ... Does that I mean I can start openly hating Kafka now?

Irish Coff---CIGARETTE! NOOWWW!

Breaking format. Don't care. First things first, this is going to be another weirdly formatted blog in which I have to stick to the facts and type really quickly. Why? Because it's day TWO without nicotine and I'm having a really hard time maintaining. It's not even just that I don't have any cigarettes in my life, it's that I've never once worked without the benefit of a cigarette break, and as such I'm having a difficult time focusing. So type fast, focus focus focus, don't lose your mind. Another thing to bear in mind is that I'm really hyperactive now. Like a five-year-old in a candy store with a pocket filled with disposable income and a life filled with unfit parents. Seriously, why aren't they watching their kid? He's just going to eat all the fucking candy in the world and probably go into some kind of diabetic shock. I'm calling the cops.

Uh-oh, went a little sideways there, but it's going to happen. I've never had this much energy in my life... to the degree that I think cigarettes have been abating some pretty awful behavior. How am I going to control myself without them? I don't know. If right now is any evidence, not well at all... OH RIGHT VIDEO GAMES!

These...

...are a fuck-ton (sort of a fuck ton) of hi-res GTAV images, and my god they're gorgeous. It must be said that up until very recently, I wasn't very excited about GTAV, but upon hearing about live-switching between characters (as in, press a button or two, watch the camera swing across town to pick up the story of another character), the fully fleshed out underwater world (which can be seen in the above pictures), the Heat-style heist planning (taking knock off to a whole new level and making it into a bonafide game mode), and the sheer size of the map, I'm finally sporting a semi for the next entry in Rockstar's series.

I think my concerns were justified. The first trailer just looked a bit vanilla compared to some of the high end graphical offerings like Watch Dogs doing their turn on the catwalk. But what I should have remembered was GTA San Andreas. I should have remembered that it was the last GTA for PS2 and that it was gi-fucking-gantic. Graphically, nothing like the eventual GTA IV, but so stuffed with content that I boot it up more often than GTA IV when I want a GTA experience.

And that seems to be the case here. As opposed to wasting time and resources on a next-gen GTA, they just spit-shined (or didn't... you can never tell in promotional material from Rockstar) their existing engine, and set about adding gameplay elements that risk busting the edges of even a blu-ray for sheer size of content. Something I think will be interesting to see handled on the Xbox... how many DVDs are we talking about here?

Ok, that's it... Can't concentrate anymore. Desperate for nicotine. Going to go do some pushups and hope the exercise helps. Then eat something. PROTEIN!

Irish Coffee, May 7th, 2-SOMEONE GIVE ME A FUCKING CIGARETTE!

Weird blog, weird format, weird day. I quit smoking yesterday, as I promised myself I would upon turning 30, and good god has it made me weird. I didn't think it was that bad, but I just reread what I wrote here today and fuck... It's not very "Ned," I'll tell you that much. But whatever, it's not too bad. Back in the saddle again after one of the worst hangovers I've had in my life, but if you ever aim to quit smoking cigarettes, I have a plan for you: Spend the evening prior drinking yourself into a stupor and smoking enough cigarettes to feel like you were orally molested by Joe Camel. When you wake up, you'll feel so completely like shit and your desire to smoke cigarettes will be so completely removed from your thoughts that you'll have no difficulty getting through the first 24 hours of non-smoking. Historically the most difficult. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to curl up in the fetal position and sweat like Rent-boy for a while. See you tomorrow!

Saint's Row IV

Today in Atomic Nut-Kick news, there's a new trailer for Saint's Row IV that's showing off a bit more in the way of hand-to-hand combat and the superpowers to be expected from the protagonist.


While I'm as excited as I was when the original launch trailer dropped, it's fairly obvious that aside from the super-jumping, super-body-slamming, and super-nut-kicking, not a whole lot has changed. The last game was all about regular jumping, body slamming, and nut kicking, so without a major engine upgrade the whole experience could start to feel familiar in spite of its zaniness.

I'm sure there will be enough jokes for the whole thing to be worth the price of admission, but I can't help but think it would have been a better idea to wait until next-gen to give us more Saint's Row, rather than throwing this content into a nearly five-year-old game engine.

Either way, they've already got my money... What? There's gonna be boobs...

Next-Box

And if you missed it yesterday (and why wouldn't you have, I was too hungover to blog), it seems the next Xbox will not in fact require a persistent internet connection as has been rumored for some time (that rumor extending to one particular Microsoft employee leaving the company after publicly embarrassing himself on Twitter.)

However, the verbiage from their press release (click here for a look at it on arstechnica) is still a little bit vague, and exactly what is meant by a scenario in which the "users expect [the console] to work without an internet connection," hasn't been made expressly clear, and personally I'd imagine that's because the next-box will in fact work offline, but will be completely fucking crippled without an internet connection.

This will be especially true if Microsoft decides to make it impossible for users to play used games on their new console, a move that will more than likely sell a few PS4s. But again, all rumor at this point, and Microsoft fans are wringing their hands in the hope that their chosen console manufacturer isn't so unbelievably fucking stupid. The big reveal is only two weeks out (May 21st), so all (or most) of our questions should be answered soon.

Summer-summer-summe---ahhh, screw the whole thing.

So here we are again. In the summer lull. Nothing amazing coming down the pipe for quite some time. We were to have Grand Theft Auto V by now (today, I think, was the original release date), but they've held back until this fall. Not that I have a problem with that. I always approve of a game company taking their time and delivering a product that's as clean as possible and worth everyone's time. Yet now, I've nothing to get me through the summer. Again.

If there were a GTA game out right now that was bigger than San Andreas, it would have my attention for 3 months. But no. Nothing to play (FWPs all day). Blood Dragon has come and gone and was only a 4 hour affair (even though it didn't need to be any longer than that), and the landscape looks bleak. Why the fuck does the video game industry so consistently abandon my birth month? I'm sure there's some bullshit excuse like "Oh, a lot of big movies are coming out and people want to spend their time outdoors." Well fuck them and their tans. I want games dammit.

Ok, admittedly, this coming summer is looking a lot better than summers past. In just a little over a week we're finally going to be able to play Metro: Last Light, a game I can't believe more people aren't talking about. I watched the first demo video for the post-apocalyptic shooter (I know, we've never played one of those before), and I gotta say there are some really great mechanics and animations at work. Take a look for yourself:



Then, of course, in mid June; The Last of Us. I've never disliked a Naughty Dog game, and based on the "meet the infected" video from yesterday and everything else I've learned about the game, I don't think I'm going to start now. If you don't know anything about it, check out the link from the last sentence, Google "The Last of Us," then punch yourself in the face for reading a video game blog and not knowing anything about a game that will probably be at the top of many "best of 2013" lists. Here's a screen shot, slacker.

Much like God of War 2 on PS2, it's quite likely that The Last of Us will be the last truly good looking AAA game on the PS3. So enjoy it while you can, and before you get knifed waiting in line for a PS4. Or GTAV.

And enjoy the summer lull, I suppose. Come fall, we'll all be risking our lives for PS4's, Grand Theft Auto V's, and Watch Dogs's's's.