Grand Theft Auto IV -- It might feature crime and prostitutes.

there was some great stuff for sure but it really felt like a beautifully-constructed set with nothing to do

it's kind of evil to present you with a city that seems so realistic except you can't really do ANYTHING with it besides knock people over, get chased by cops, and trigger animations at various businesses. and not even that many of them.

it LOOKS like a world but doesn't feel like one. like a weird purgatory.

ha WELCOME TO NEW JERSEY

yeah, but doesn't the "realistic world w/ nothing to do" complaint fit with the previous GTAs, too?

isn't that also one of the half-assed defenses of No More Heroes' lackluster overworld, that it's a parody of how little freedom the various GTA's open-world environments actually provide you with?

One thing this game got me thinking about is how I should go back and start playing "The Warriors" again.

amazes me how the cops can find a path to you. Like in playboys house, the cops will climb the stairs in the building opposite just to take a pop at you.

i've been enjoying the vigilante gang-warfare missions lately, these and the criminals on foot missions are a great way to top up your weapons.

and held a huge seige in my house on broker last night, just standing inside loose aiming at the door with shotgun and pistols. Many many dead and some horrific explosions outside sending policemen flying through the door. It all ended when one plucky cop just came running in all the way up to me and knocked me down with the butt of his rifle.

much fun still

I've hit a bit of a Call Of Duty 4 wall so I picked this up again this week. I wish I liked it more than I do. I think my biggest problem with it is that I find the controls just so awkward. Maybe I just need to spend more time with it.

well i've played this thing for hours and I'm still grumbling with some of the combat controls tbh. driving is a doddle now though.

Yeah I love driving, the cars handle beautifully. Shooting while driving though - that's a different matter.

i hate not being able to aim without firing off a round, with shooting from cars.

sometimes the button response in combat becomes ridiculous when things get busy on screen, and you end up pressing overly much - obv causing more stress.

One thing that I do ALL THE FUCKING TIME is jumping out of moving cars. Why do I keep pressing that triangle button? Why??

lol mutlpiayer racing chat:

"how come you're all so fast?"
"use your boost, press triangle"

lol akin to the old f10 gag on counterstrike et al

or "type 'gg 16000' in the console for extra money!"

what does that do?

gg kills the game

(counterstrike, that is)

*might have been in CS 1.3 or something, haven't tried it in years.

Just looked it up. gg tried to run a demo in Game Gauge mode - you put 16000 or whatever after it and it exits your current game with a "demo not found" error.

So you'd get
noob: how come you guys all have better guns than me
onimo: we're using the cash cheat in the console, type 'gg 16000' in console to get 16000 dollars
noob has left the game

"noob has left the game"

This is the part that cracks me up

I've found a good dozen or so pigeons in the past few days, I have 45 left to locate and it's just going to get harder.

I have noticed that a lot of them aren't really 'hidden', and you can find them just perched on walls and stuff in the open.

Also my timer has fucked up, it's stuck at 298 hours of play and won't go any further but I've heard of other people with the same problem as well.

Another thing I had fun with, causing trouble with the local gangs in coney island. all you have to do is steal a car in front of them and all hell breaks loose.

298 hours!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

i've seen things you people wouldn't believe.

also damn it i usually find at least one pigeon at lunchtimes, today? none!

i walked past an old man and i heard him say
"As long as I've got a face, you'll always have somewhere to sit"

i spied a trashmaster that had mistakenly spawned on the roof of a building, it was trapped so I decided to help by lobbing a grenade up to him to try and dislodge it.

Unfortunately it worked, the grenade landed between the truck and a wall and lo and behold the truck shot off the roof with a hell of a blast and, sigh, headed straight for me. splat!

working very slowly through the game, just took kiki to the comedy club....

ricky gervais is as funny as cancer.

i was watching my brother play this, earlier today. he was throwing a plastic cup at people.

amazing, after many many hours of playing i find another secret mission.

my quota for pigeon hunting is going sweet, one per day and an extra one today.

Just started, reached my second safehouse. Question: why is Roman upset about our prospects? With the 10 large in cashmoney I've got, I could always get a favorable loan!

"F10 for stats" still works in CS:S.

I just finished my first race, and am amazingly covetous of Stevie's car. It just sits outside my place, I never drive it, for fear of losing/scratching it. Maybe I'll take it to the carwash later...

what's the car? if its a fast sports car, keep it! You may never see it spawn again!

great causing mayhem at gas stations, as the cars just keep pulling in no matter how much fire and chaos is still happening.

It is a GOLDEN SPORTSCAR and it glides like QUICKSILVER (QUICKGOLD?)...

Yesterday on multiplayer, I found a sportscar with batwing doors (like on a delorean), which I've never seen in single player.

[bat-doors] thats the Infernus and i've never seen it spawn in single player other than a reward or for a mission, keep it if you see it.

Stevie's car is the Comet (the Porsche)! I know this because I just played it like 5 times (nice to see that the computer still cheats in races grrrrrr).

who's on xboxlive here? i have the BLOODLUSTT (stevietonychick)

[leee, my advice on the racing is STEELY COMPOSURE, CALM, and NO MISTAKES. i was sweating like a bitch at the end of it.]

amazingly found 2 pigeons last night, something like 34 left. and it was only a random visit. one was embarrassingly right outside one of my safehouses.

i've found that the helicopter is almost useless for pigeon hunting

http://kotaku.com/5064303/san-andreas-rolls-onto-xbox-originals

I finally won last night XD took me way too many tries...

XD?

Oh wait, is that a smiley.

Ugh that Snow Job mission (SWAT = BOOOOOurns). Elizabeta, get your own darned powder!

I hear the wussy way out -- make a mad dash out of the area and cool yer heels until the heat dies down -- is a way to go, and I will investigate it further.

yeah that took me a bunch of tries too. getting a good position is the hard part. I decided to kill every cop in the city if they walked into my little corridor and eventually they stopped coming.

it took two days to download, but it is good to be back in san andreas again.

played gta4 last night though - am finding the first "?" mission to be veh hard, the one where you have to wreck oleg's car, the dude whose laptop you snoop around. any hints?

HMV are starting to offer trade-ins on videogames (in an attempt to muscle in on the 2nd hand market)

anyway, they will offer you £19 trade-in on GTAIV

compare this to game (£8) and gamestation (£9) and that's quite a good price

played gta4 last night though - am finding the first "?" mission to be veh hard, the one where you have to wreck oleg's car, the dude whose laptop you snoop around. any hints?

I'm not sure, but a lot of the driving missions will not let you damage the guy's car until you have chased the guy for awhile, so if you can stay on him long enough, that might help. Focus more on the chase and less on shooting him up for awhile.

Ugh that Snow Job mission

I booked it out the front and jumped in the water, swam to a less hostile location a bit up the shore, and then lost my wanted level. However, this bit from a gamefaqs walkthrough sounds pretty nice:

"When you go to do it, instead of going to the main entrance where there is a car and two guys standing, go to the very south of the island (and take a car with you for a getaway). The reason for this is, there's a ladder at the back of the abandoned hospital which takes you to the roof! You can get clear shots of all the guys who shoot from the roof from here. Its also way easier to pick people off from the bottom since enemy AI is somewhat lacking for shooting you from a height.

Once you climb up, you'll be faced with a few guys on the roof who you can kill. Carefully make your way across the top of the roof past the thin walls and you can get straight to the room with the cocaine (since its an open-top room), while only killing a minimal amount of people (I killed around 6-7). Pick up the cocaine, and it'll get to the cutscene where the cops arrive.

If you did it right, there should be lots of enemies remaining when the cops arrive. The cops spend most of their time gunning down these gang members which gives you a great opportunity to escape. Outside of the room with the cocaine keep going straight to the end of the hall, and there's a red wheel-like cannister that you can jump on. From the cannister, if you jump southwards back
up onto the wall, you'll just about be on the roof again. From here, you can carefully make your way to the ladder you came up.

You'll now be outside of the hospital whilst the cops are still killing all the gang members. I ran across the opposite way around the hospital, grabbed a car and made a getaway.

All in all it made the mission a whole lot easier I managed to complete the mission without taking a single bullet wound."

that was definitely a hard one. i think i just rambo-ed it.