Saints Row 2 > GTA IV again

I'm not the only one who thinks that SR2 is better than GTA IV. I agree with every point on this list bar one - the driving.

The driving was one of the things I really liked about GTA IV. It was a shock at first how much effort it was to control the cars, but I soon grew to love the genuine sense of weight of each car and how they all handled differently. There was real satisfaction in hurling a huge 70's American barge into a bend and watching it lean wildly and the tyres howl in protest as it went sideways with a little tap of the handbrake. You could get into the aforementioned barge, a small hatchback, a people carrier and a van and they'd all handle differently and usually about right for what it was.

But all the other points are spot on. SR2 doesn't even try to take itself at all seriously, and it's all the better for it. Also the sheer amount of side missions is bewildering at first. I've played it for hours and have done hardly any of the main missions.

The hitman missions are quite fun. You usually have to do something to get the target to appear, like picking a fight in the trailer park, or getting drunk in the stadium, or in an extreme case, getting killed to get a doctor to appear in the hospital.

Cough cough

Still coughing away. I hate this part of having a cold.

The author of the iFart application for the iPhone has made $40,000 in two days and it's now the #1 non-free application on the App Store. Two things came to mind when I read about this.

1) People are so damn puerile - what does it say about the future of the human race? *
2) DAMN WHY DIDN'T I THINK OF IT FIRST????

I bet people everywhere are downloading the iPhone SDK and trying to work out what bodily function they can convert into a compelling and popular application. iSneeze? iBurp? iPuke? iLactate?

* I'll admit that I was bitterly disappointed to discover that this application wouldn't install on an iPod touch.

Picking at the corpse

Went to Denbigh to see what was going on in Woolies as it was the last day it would be open. It was quite weird as loads of shelves were empty. In fact the shelves themselves were for sale along with pretty much everything else except the actual cash registers. I ended up with South Park season 8 on DVD for £4 and a new iPod universal dock for the same price because it wasn't registered on the system, and at that point the staff didn't really give a toss. They had some 360 games left but only crappy wrestling ones. I haven't seen any South Park since the movie, but the episodes I've watched so far have been quite funny. The iPod dock works great with the touch once the adapter it came with was fitted, which is nice.

Other than that haven't done much except have a go at some missions on Saint's Row 2. I've not done any more main missions, instead I've been having a go at some of the activities and diversions, some of which are actually pretty good fun. The Hitman missions are OK except I'm sat around on a pirate ship waiting for some tosser in a pirate suit to turn up.

I've resurrected the 1 string bass as a dual course slide bass, so it has two strings tuned to G an octave apart. Sounds quite interesting. However the strings are slicing through the crappy piece of wood I used for a bridge so need to find something different.

Christmas once again

Scary that Christmas has been and gone again. I'm not quite sure where 2008 has gone.

The day itself went OK, spent the morning and lunch with my Mum and then round to my Dad's for the afternoon and evening. Everything went OK and it was quite a nice day.

Today has been a quiet one. The weather was spectactularly nice, but I found that if I went outside the cold made me cough, so I didn't spent much time outside.

Saint's Row 2 > GTA IV

Yes, it's true. I rate Saint's Row 2 above GTA IV. In theory, it should be a worse game by far. The original Saint's Row was a joke compared to San Andreas. It looked and felt like a game for a previous generation machine, and tried so hard to outdo the classic GTA humour and entertainment.

But then GTA IV came out and as I've said before, it took the classic GTA format and stripped it of the ironic sense of humour and parody and the many many things you could do other than the main missions. Instead of the glorious world of San Andreas where you could do almost anything, it went all serious and 'realistic'. Saint's Row 2 is fairly similar to the first one, but it's got more fun to it than GTA IV.



I've just spent a few hours playing Saint's Row 2 in co-op with Will. We found many hilarious things. Charging around naked and streaking was a good start, followed by attempts to land planes and helicopters on the tallest building, before parachuting down off it. Ramming petrol stations at top speed with one player surfing on the car roof caused some interesting results. Then we used the pratfalls cheat in various hilarious ways before triggering wars between gangs and police with inevitable chaotic results.


After dressing my male character up in fishnet tights and a fetching dress, and Will's ambiguous fat character in a suitably bizarre outfit, we found a huge hill to throw cars and ourselves off with various results.



And of course, it wouldn't be Saint's Row without the glitches that pop up every now and again, usually with entertaining results. This guy was stuck in the side of the car for quite some time.

But this is what I miss from GTA IV. All the fun stuff that you can do while not doing the main missions. I have done some of the missions in Saint's Row 2 and they weren't too bad, although the whole gangsta thing the game is built round is quite irritating. The cut scenes are made far more entertaining if your character is naked though.

Aaaargh

The dog is curled up in a ball on my bed, which is very cute, except he just let rip with a huge smelly dog fart.

Bleurgh, the vile plague

Not much to report. Thursday night was the work do which was good fun. It's always interesting to see your work colleagues in an informal situation. Noticed I had a slight cough that day.

Friday was one of those days which was completely uninspired, due to feeling tired after the late evening and having that depressing feeling that I was coming down with something.

Yesterday I woke up feeling awful, achy all over and generally feeling crap. It's sort of like a cold without the runny nose.

Ordinarily this would have been an excuse to stay in bed with a good book but I had to go to Ruthin to drop the car off for it's service. I spent the time while it was being done with Amy and Huw where we went for a nice breakfast in Siop Nain and then took a stroll around the bypass.

The car is definitely running better now and everything is fine except that he couldn't get a gasket for the back end of the exhaust where it connects to the silencer. This means that it is still rather loud, but now it sounds different. In fact it actually sounds like it has a sports exhaust, and I'm ashamed to admit I rather like it. This will be sorted tomorrow.

Yesterday evening was the biannual pub crawl but I had to go after the first pub because I felt so crappy, unfortunately. This also meant that I missed out on the soup fest today as well, bah.

Fun with DOS (!)

I found a spare 64mb CF card knocking about and found that it fitted into the 200LX with a PCMCIA adapter. Tiny by modern standards but respectable for a DOS machine. In a search for something to run on it, I found a copy of Microsoft Word 5.5 for DOS. I was able to decompress it on XP and run the setup program, and then copied the final folder to the palmtop. Amazingly enough it works fine, once the colours were set so the mono LCD could display them properly.

The truly scary thing is that the entire program takes up just 2.6mb. It seems unreal somehow that we used to be able to get by on such tiny resources.

The 200LX is one of those machines I find really interesting because it was an attempt to compress a desktop architecture into a palmtop. It's quite unusual because it actually worked, and was a really good machine, made when HP still made interesting things of good quality. The modern equivalent is probably the OQO or the Sony Vaio UX, which are handheld machines that can run full copies of XP or Linux or even Mac OS X.

The most pointless thing of all time

Playstation Home. It's like Second Life but you can't create anything, instead it all has to be bought through microtransactions. You can pay actual money to outfit your avatar in Diesel clothes. Also unlike the Miis in the Wii and the Mii-like Avatars in the 360, the Home avatars are much more realistic.

But the worst thing is that there are many, many reports of anyone with a female avatar being harrassed and stalked by hordes of males. It's that typical thing where some people feel they can do stuff online that they would never do in the real world.

Scales

From one extreme to the other...



Dell Inspiron 9400
Dell Latitude D400
Asus Eee 900
HP 200LX Palmtop PC

The HP is a vintage relic, relatively famous in its day for being a fully PC compatible palmtop, so it can run DOS applications and even early versions of Windows if you feel like being horrible. It's not too bad to use despite the miniscule text on the screen and that calculator style keyboard.

An evil man in blue hotpants

My new evil character in Fable II is coming along nicely. So far he's managed to piss off basically everyone and is completely evil due to performing random acts of violence. There's one village which has no house with doors intact because he's been in and stolen everything from every last one, murdering anyone who tried to stop him. Most of all though, he's evil due to performing 41 human sacrifices to get a powerful sword. But he's not just evil, he's corrupt too. People don't like it when he buys out shops and jacks up the prices, and buys houses and rents them out at extortionate costs. It's somewhat hilarious though to have this guy doing all this, with great red cracks in his skin, covered in battle scars with huge horns protuding from his forehead, with people crying and screaming whenever he comes near, but yet he's wearing bright blue hotpants. Perhaps that just adds to the terror.

Other than that did a bit of tidying today and tried to work out what the hell to do with some of the more useless computer crap that's lying around. Didn't get very far though. It's been one of those weeks and as a result, it's not a weekend where I feel very motivated.

N93 anniversary

Well, it's been a year since I got the N93. It's been a really good phone, nice and powerful and with a good camera. To be honest I expected it to fall apart within months with the crazy hinge and fragile camera, but it's been really good. It's looking well worn from my pocket and I've dropped it at least twice, but it's still going strong. The best thing has to be the camera, as it takes pretty good images for a phone, and the video recording is top notch. It's really handy to have something that can take good pictures at a moments notice.

The only issues are a slightly sticky # key and the battery life. I've tried it with a couple of batteries but it seems to eat them pretty quickly and the latest one has started to swell slightly, which is not a good sign. I think I'm going to bite the bullet and just order a brand new one from Nokia.

Changing it for something else hasn't really ever been a serious consideration. The logical upgrade is the N95 but they are still expensive and I'm not keen on sliders as they leave the screen exposed. I wondered vaguely about making the leap from Nokia to something like the ludicrously named LG Viewty which has a 5mp camera with a 120fps video mode. But nothing really appealed. The iPhone might be a contender if it wasn't so expensive, locked to O2 and disgustingly trendy. The ultimate has to be the Nokia E90 but they are still pricey, and chunky too. I did use a 9210 Communicator for a while but it was too big.

Took a look in the Denbigh Woolworths closing down sale. I wasn't too fussed about anything on sale, especially as all the games were only discounted by 10%. Also all the 360 games had gone. They did have an 80gb PS3 with a nice discount but even if I could afford it, there wouldn't be much point in getting one. LittleBigPlanet looks good though. There was a good selection of DS games but a quick scan made me rethink my plans to get a Phat DS again, it's just shovelware shite like the Wii is suffering from. It's a real shame.

Badminton was OK today. One of those days where I didn't play very well but still had a good time and got lots of exercise. The Woman of Hate had some bad games which is always funny. She swears a lot under her breath.

Vectra fun

Well the Vectra is still going OK other than the loud and embarrassing exhaust. However I met up with a guy I know who is good with cars and he had a look at the various issues.

The ticking at startup is a broken manifold gasket. In itself not a huge problem, but it can have drastic effects on everything else as the leaking of air and exhaust gases affect a sensor nearby. The engine management then gets duff information and the fuel and air ratio goes all to cock. Once sorted the engine will run much better and be more economical, definitely a good thing. Apparently a properly running 2.0 should do 40-45 mpg.

It also needs a full service and a timing belt kit, this I knew anyway. It's not a coincidence that the previous owner traded it in just as it was coming up to120,000 miles, when it would be due for it's third belt. I'm paranoid about timing belts so I definitely want to get that sorted out.

He also popped it up on a ramp to look at the blowing exhaust, and we found a dodgy weld where the centre part connects to the rear silencer and three neat little holes where it had rusted through from the inside, hence the loud and embarrassing noise.

Other than those issues and the central locking, everything is working OK. I might look into getting the air conditioning fixed but that can certainly wait until it's warmer.

Stuff, stuff and yes, more stuff

Friday was a peculiar day. It was proceeding uneventfully when I was suddenly called upon to move a whole load of data connections and phone lines. This took most of the day and a lot of repatching and faffing around under desks (ahem). As a result, when I got home, I fell asleep and woke up too late to go to badminton. Given that I sleep during the day about once a decade, this shows how exhausting a day it was.

Saturday was spent doing some Christmans shopping in Ruthin, which was surprisingly stress-free. I then carried on with Fable II, enjoying the wealth that had built up while the Xbox was away. Today hasn't been much more than Fable II either. I've now completed the main storyline, which was quite rewarding. There's still plenty of side quests left to do though, so that's good. One of the hightlights was getting blackmailed for bigamy, which was quite funny.

It's definitely been one of the best games I've played on the 360, despite having RPG elements. Normally I can't stand RPGs but fortunately it's not a big part of the game. It does have quirks and glitches, such as my wife suddenly disappearing for a while and then unexpectedly reappearing in a new area hundreds of miles away, but on the whole it's a well put together fun game. The combat is reasonably straightforward and you can do plenty of other things than the main quest if you want. I like games that let you do this, GTA San Andreas took it to the extreme and was all the better for it.

A day with ups and downs

Work was a bit much today. However the following good things happened:

1) My 360 came back. The replacement has a manufacture date of 12th October 2008 and both the system fans and the DVD drive are much quieter than the old one. So that's good. Ironically, the day I got mine back, Will's died.

2) Had a good time at badminton. Didn't win any games but had fun hurtling around the court. She Who I Dislike seems to have calmed down a lot recently but she still gets frustrated. There's also a Man Who Annoys Me, and he plays it like tennis which is annoying.

Random

Top Gear is just brilliant for the simple reason that they get do do everything that nobody else can. Watching a bendy bus powerslide round a corner with the rear section flailing wildly followed by a double decker crashing onto it's side was a truly awe inspiring sight.

It's too cold. The Vectra has a great heater but the least efficient rear demister I've ever seen in a car. I can set off from Ruthin and it isn't clear by the time I get to Denbigh. The only car I've had which was worse was my old Series III Land Rover, which didn't actually have a demister. A minor thing though.

Fun.

Feck

Going back to work after a holiday is always a painful experience, even more so today.

Got the car back which is good.

The Monstrosity 2 is no more, I tried to make it into a 6 string which fouled everything up.