Grand Theft Auto IV: Day 3 - Slow News Day

Not much happened yesterday that was worth talking about.  I took it easy.  Watched some TV, drove around the city, slapped some people around, got into fights, shot some bums for cash, banged my girlfriend a couple of times, got involved in a multi-vehicular chase with the cops...

 

 

 

Oh, and I managed to squeeze an hour or two of Grand Theft Auto in there too.

 

WACKITY SCHMACKITY DOO!

 

 

Thank you very much!  I'm here all weekend.  Don't forget to tip your waitress!

 

Grand Theft Auto IV: Day 2 - When Worlds Collide

I had school so I was only on the streets for three hours last night. Shook down a laundromat owner for that douchebag Vlad. Took my girlfriend Michelle out for a game of darts and then was invited back up to her place for "warm coffee." Listened to a Divorce Court-type show on the radio wherein the husband proclaimed that he took a shit in his wife's air conditioner so that it smells whenever she turns it on (probably the most brilliant method of non-violent revenge I've ever heard). Drove home drunk and put my cousin Roman in the hospital. (Lesson: Don't drink and drive, kids... and they say this game has no morals).

I also found my real neighborhood. Astoria and Long Island City have been mashed up into East Island City in the borough of Dukes and a section of Dukes Boulevard (I wonder if there are a higher number of hit-and-runs there than anywhere else in the game?) goes right alongside the water next to a park and it all looks remarkably like Astoria Park, near where I used to live. The detail in this game is tremendous!

And I discovered something that just made me love it even more. You can watch TV in the game. That, specifically, isn't the great thing; what's on TV is pretty outstanding. There's a show called 72, where the main character is an anti-terrorist agent who stays up for three days at a time to torture any brown-skinned person he comes across. Hilarious. There's also Republican Space Rangers, who invade other planets and spread freedom throughout the galaxy (wow, is GTA getting political here?). But my favorite, and the specific reason the TV blew me away, is the documentary on Liberty City that is almost a dead-on-balls accurate spoof of the Ric Burns New York documentary that I've been obsessing over for the last month!

All these little things aside, the game is epic thus far. The best thing about it is that I have no idea how it's going to end. I just checked my stats last night and I'm just at 10% in right now, so the major plot points of the game have yet to be revealed.

Tonight: I pay my Xbox Live gold membership and play online for the first time ever.

Grand Theft Auto IV: Day 1

I've had an Xbox 360 for just about two months now and in that time, I've completed only two games (John Woo's Stranglehold and Bioshock), having dabbled in a few others (including the much-hyped Gears of War which didn't sit well with me when I started playing). But with the exception of Bioshock, I would gladly trade in any of those games for a good movie. What makes Bioshock different is that the story is taken seriously, was written well and served to give you a reason to shoot, stab and bludgeon anyone and anything in your way. Of the other games I played, the game was just merely something cool to look at and figure out, a giant puzzle if you will; if I never complete Mass Effect or Lost Odyssey, I don't think I'll lose any sleep over it.

On the other hand, Grand Theft Auto IV... well, all I can say is No Sleep Til Broker!

I spent four hours yesterday playing GTA IV and I'd have played longer if I didn't have to go to work today (and if my wife didn't want to watch "Countdown with Keith Olbermann" last night). This game is everything I hoped it would be and a lot more I didn't even know I wanted. And it made me realize something: one thing you can trust the gaming community on is to give you an honest review. If a game sucks, they'll tell you it sucks. If it rocks, they'll shout it to the heavens to make sure every man, woman and child knows it. Video game reviews are the last bastion of the critic acting as true consumer advocate; nowhere in the media will you find a movie or music review that speaks to as large a percentage of their fanbase as a video game review. I don't know why that is. Possibly it has to do with there being so many technical aspects of a video game to take into account. You're taking an active part in your own entertainment, versus passively listening to an album or watching a movie or TV show. So the rave reviews GTA IV has been getting are all deserved. Having only played for 4 hours means I'm hardly into the game at all, but I've seen enough to know that it's only going to get better.

I've never subscribed to the idea that that interactivity is the reason that video games will one day overtake film as the dominant form of entertainment. I don't believe that, in our lifetimes, we'll ever get the same kind of masterful storytelling on par with Citizen Kane or The Godfather, Lost or The West Wing, A Tale of Two Cities or Lolita, in a video game. No computer-generated design, no matter how elaborate, can compete with Marlon Brando or "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times..."

However, GTA IV has given me hope that video games will one day, though maybe not soon, achieve at the very least a degree of legitimacy on par with film. The writing is sharper than that of any game I've ever played (again, Bioshock excepted) and the directing of the opening sequences really floored me. The voice performances are also compelling (though probably wouldn't hold up in any film) and add a great deal to the draw of the game. This is the first time I've played a game and was, from the first moment, actually caught up by the story and not simply waiting for the game play to start.

(And of course, there's the added bonus of realistic physics missing from previous Grand Theft Autos, so that if you decide to plow your car into a brick wall at 100 MPH, you go headfirst through the windshield and into that wall. Lesson: Always wear your seat belt. And they say this game has no morals.)

I'm only four or five missions in but so far, I've gone on a hit with a Rastafarian gangster, beaten the shit out of two Albanian loan sharks, pushed another one out of a window, lost at bowling, and forced my girlfriend to prematurely sink an 8-ball (that's not some sort of code for sexual violence, we were playing pool). This is a fully serviceable world and, thus far, the fact that I can travel all over the Brooklyn surrogate of Broker puts this game just ahead of Bioshock for me. Take this with however many grains of salt my gaming inexperience warrants but I think I can safely say that GTA IV is the best game I have ever played.

And I haven't even left the borough yet! Imagine what awaits me in Manhattan... umm, Algonquin!

Nor have I looked for cheat codes yet. I'm playing this one straight. Until I beat it. Then it's Travis Bickle time.

I'll report more when I've played more. In the meantime, if you look at the last.fm player to your right, you'll see that I've compiled a small playlist of songs about New York in honor of GTA IV. Enjoy.

When There's No More Room In Hell, The Dead Will Walk Long Island

 

I was born too late.

 

I was surfing around today and I came across this picture, a promotion for George Romero's classic, Dawn of the Dead (my favorite horror film), at the now-defunct UA Meadowbrook, which I used to live near.  The Meadowbrook (its deteriorated state prior to its closing gave rise to our nickname for it: "the Ghettobrook") was a one-screener that ended up getting overhauled to six screens around 1989-1990, which was the last time it was probably cleaned.  I look at this photo from about 30 years ago and I can't help but think that, if I was born 15 years earlier, I'd have been in this photo.

 

I've been talking for years about trying to open my own revival theatre and bring some of the moviegoing "experience"  to the moviegoing experience.  Big screens, balconies, real butter on the popcorn, interactive promotions, reasons to look at the movie screen as more than just a big TV.  I would have people doing the sort of stuff like in this photo all the time (imagine what a promotion for Caligula would look like!). 

 

Once the Meadowbrook closed down, the building sat there for months afterwards.  I used to fantasize about opening it back up and restoring it to its original glory.  Sort of like Jim Carrey in The Majestic.  But then, it was demolished and replaced by a Commerce Bank.

 

Like I said, I was born too late.

Bustin' Makes Me Feel Good (not in a dirty way)

I'm so psyched right now!

I went to IGN.com this morning to read the sterling review of Grand Theft Auto IV that someone told me about last night. When I got to the site, something caught my eye that managed to do the impossible and take my attention away from GTA, if only for a brief time.

I clicked a link and happened to find this picture:


This is one of the coolest things I've seen... ever! Yes, you are indeed looking at a bona fide screenshot of one of my wildest dreams coming true: a Ghostbusters video game. I'm usually not a big fan of modern entertainment gurus cannibalizing the sacred cows of my childhood but, in this case, I'll make an exception.

I don't want to get all Harry Knowles here but Ghostbusters factored largely in my life when I was a kid. It was the first movie I ever owned on VHS. My grandmother bought it for me for Christmas in 1985, during the dark times when pre-recorded video tapes cost $80. I spent the next several years watching the movie repeatedly and memorizing not only dialogue but music cues, sound effects, editing rhythm, etc. I've seen a handful of films repeatedly - Star Wars, Time Bandits, and Trainspotting, I would estimate I've seen about 40 times each - but none more than Ghostbusters; if I had to pick a number, I would have to guess somewhere between 80 and 100 times. Let me put it this way: when I have trouble going to sleep, I run the movie in my head to wind myself down.

It wouldn't be terribly far from the truth to say that, in watching Ghostbusters as many times as I have, I learned about how a film should feel. Not look but feel. The pacing, how the music (in this case, that legendary score by Elmer Bernstein) is used, all the aesthetic aspects of a standard Hollywood film, I absorbed all of that long before I was even old enough to process it. I had a Ghostbusters lunch box (that I didn't hide drawings of dicks in, thank you), Ghostbusters coloring books, Ghostbusters story books, the soundtrack, posters, stickers (the little puffy ones, remember those?), for Halloween in the third and fourth grades, I was a Ghostbuster (after being Han Solo in the second grade). From the moment I first saw the movie, I wanted to be a Ghostbuster. One of my regrets in life is seeing Ernie Hudson in LaGuardia and not approaching him for an autograph (honestly, I think I was more afraid of pissing him off and shattering the illusion of the good-natured and pragmatic Winston Zeddemore; that would undoubtedly kill me).

And now, through the modern miracle of the Xbox 360, I can vicariously live out my ghostbusting fantasies. The entire cast is back, even Bill Murray, but what I find even more exciting is that William Atherton is doing a voice in the game. That's right, folks! EPA douchebag extraordinaire Walter "Yes, it's true... this man has no dick" Peck is BACK after getting a Stay-Puft bukkake at the end of the first movie!

The Ghostbusters game looks like the right way to go, as opposed to making a live-action movie. First off, as I said in the wake of news that the Die Hard and Indiana Jones franchises would each get one more part, ten years is the limit for gaps between installments. If you can't get your shit together and make another movie in ten years, it's not worth it. Ghostbusters II came out almost 20 years ago. The original Ghostbusters are all in their 50s and 60s by now. They're kind of too old to run around New York City chasing ghosts and it would be sacrilege to suit up some young whippersnappers to do it for them; the last thing I want to see is Seann William Scott or Michael Cera putting on a Ghostbuster jumpsuit, no offense to those guys.

Secondly, Ivan Reitman would, no doubt, be asked to come back and direct the third movie. It has to be said, though, that he hasn't made a remotely watchable movie since Kindergarten Cop. And to be honest, Ghostbusters II wasn't even really that great; it's fine but it pales by comparison to the original. It's pretty clear that whatever magic he possessed to make Ghostbusters is long gone; watch the tremendous waste of potential that is My Super Ex-Girlfriend for conclusive proof. So yeah, I think the video game sequel idea is the way to go.

Of course, we all have to wait until the fall for the Ghostbusters game, but hey... that's presumably why God invented Grand Theft Auto IV.

Here's the link to the game screenshots, including the above pic of Mr. Stay-Puft's demise.

Now watch this criminally short and almost entirely useless teaser that still manages to get me excited. I would hope that Rule #2 is, "If someone asks you if you're a god, you say YES!":

"Alright, important safety tip. Thanks, Egon."