jibber jabber 

one more thing before i go to bed.

Little Big Planet is the best frickin’ game ever!

i’m currently in between houses and so we’re house sitting in a place with a 20 inch LCD tv. i brought my PS3 with me as one of my ‘essentials’ so i could keep playing GTA4. well that plan has gone to pot.

apparently having a ginormous HDTV masks the failing eyesight that comes with old age. trying to play GTA4 on this tiny tv means i have to sit like 3 feet away from the screen to be able to see the map or read the cell phone messages. bah.

oh and in case you didn’t know, if you move your ps3 to a new tv with different inputs you will be left scratching your head trying to figure out how to change your video settings blind since nothing appears on the new screen. seems the ps3 doesn’t gracefully degrade the video signal. it just keeps pumping out the last used video setting even if it doesn’t work or the cable is no longer connected. gave me quite the scare cause i thought i broke the thing during the move.

luckily the interwebs came to the rescue. hold the power button down for a long time until it beeps a second time. that should reset your video settings. now you know.

i’ve been playing GTA IV this past month. its been a lot of fun, but now that i see this newspaper article it makes me rethink what i’ve done. god, i love the onion.

damn the stupid playstation network and their downloadable demos. demos are responsible for us buying almost every game we own. luckily this game is a cheap one. this one was more of a steph driven purchase as she was instantly hooked. its like asteroids on crack. the premise is simple: “destroy everything”, the controls are easy: two joysticks and 4 buttons, but its so fun. fun gaming doesn’t have to be hard and require the memorization of 24 different buttons and what they do in different situations (all the EA sport sim games i’m looking at you).

check out a teaser here

i asked for this game for christmas and its pretty crazy. i got sucked in right away. i only got to play for an hour or two while packing for Paris and then it was in the back of my head during the whole trip. of course now its progressed to the point where its pretty damn hard, even on the easiest mode (i’m not much of a twitch gamer) that i’m dreading turning it on again.

the visuals and art direction are crazy good and there’s tons of variety in what you have to do and the guns you get to play with but once you get into the middle of a big firefight and shit’s exploding all around you in surround sound and bullets are flying and your guys are yelling, my jaw just starts clenching. its a pretty immersive game and a lot of the time it gets so crazy i don’t know what to do.

it doesn’t help that with all the shadows, darkly lit, or night levels, it becomes too hard to tell who is friend or foe. there’s too much crap going on for me to see the little green name popup.

perhaps its because i have a little bit of programming background but i’ve always been somehow able to figure out AI and game trigger points. with this game its a little harder to figure out but there’s still points where you can skip hard portions by just running like mad for the next trigger point. its also kinda weird that when you don’t know what to do and you’re ducking for cover, the other guys on your team take care of shit for you and then there’s nothing left to do.

oh well, still a pretty rad game and i’ll finish it one day…

funnest f’n game ever. it’s consumed up the past 3 weeks of my free time but it’s been a blast. i mean you get to play as a frickin pirate with a peg leg, hook, eye-patch, a ghetto limp and you run around yelling “arrrr!” and “yarrr!”. there’s secret doorways where you have to dance a pirate jig to get in. oh and then there’s the groovitron bomb which when you throw it turns into a disco ball and your enemies get distracted and dance dance dance while you blow them to pieces. how rad is that?!?!

yeah…that’s me…i got a PS3 as a gift. go me. it only took 4 months of constant whining a la “are we there yet? are we there yet?”

its pretty pimptacular but now i need to upgrade my receiver cause i don’t have enough inputs. oh and i suck at first person shooter games.

i did however get pretty damn good at resident evil for the wii before the ps3 arrived. so good apparently that i make slashing motions in my sleep.

ahhh…the good old days of simple side scrolling gaming. fun little flash game to kill some time. love the art style.

not nearly as frustrating as Zelda which has sucked up quite a bit of my time lately (on my second set of batteries for the wii-mote). its now become more of a finish it because i’ve started it rather than actually enjoying it but TVs been sucking lately and its a good way to procrastinate on all the real things i’m supposed to be doing.

but goddamn if the stupid save bugs in that game don’t make me want to kill. if you save in the middle or even right before the end, you have to start at the beginning again. and then there was some other little bug that erased a bunch of the items i had collected. almost makes me want to play Doom or some such game… i said almost…

spent several days looking for a wii-mote and wasn’t able to find one so i figured i’d get wii-play. $15 more than a wii-mote by itself and you get the wii-play game. thank god it was only $15 more cause it sucks. if you don’t need another remote, don’t bother.

the minigames are so “mini” that you won’t spend more than a few minutes at each one. all the games are designed to familiarize yourself with one aspect of the remotes movement but having already played wii-sports that comes with the console most people should already be more than familiar with the movements. to top it off the games aren’t even fun, with the exception of the cow-racing which for some reason i found hilarious. oh and did i mention the graphics are so juvenile and basic that it looks like you’re playing one of those fisher price game pads.

but i do have another remote now so that’s all good.

i got a wii! after a few weeks of fruitless searching, the girlfriend ended up wandering into a future shop where a line was forming for a shipment that was just being delivered. luckily she managed to snag the last one. woohoo.

anyhoo, add me to your friends list. my mii code is:
6901 1345 7361 2781