I spent a lot of my weekend playing GTA: San Andreas. A lot. Maybe too much. I got to the pleasant part of the game where I had four or five missions available at any given time. As I recall from Vice City, it's the best part. Once you get to a bottleneck of one or two missions, it gets really frustrating. There's an extent to which you can just tool around and have fun, but when large sections of the game are still off limits, that gets frustrating. Anyway, it's staying fun, although I'm still a pretty horrible driver. I do feel like I'm better this time around than I was in VC. I'm thinking about sticking Vice City in sometime to see if I can beat any of the missions that I left undone.
Today I started my most newly-acquired game, Metroid Prime 2. Gloria went to EBX to pick up my pre-order for me while I was working, despite the fact that she knows I'll probably obsess over it. I played for a little under two hours tonight. It's good. It's a whole lot like Metroid Prime, which is good. It's the Majora's Mask of Metroid Primes, and I'm A-OK with that. I'm looking forward to getting some crazy new gear, though. So far, just bombs and double jump.
In the moments between games (and other things) I've been working on Rubric, which is actually looking nice. Sure, it's missing wildly important features (new user registration, deleting of links) but it's enough for me to use, and one or two other people are playing with it. I feel pretty good about it, and I think it's going to go well. I just need to stick with it for a while longer.
I've also been re-reading Programming Ruby, and it just reminds me how much I love that language. I need to make more time for using it, possibly by finding a killer app in it, so I can play around. (With a name like Rubric, I should've thought to write that in Ruby!) My big problem is always, "I can do what I want in Perl, and quickly. Why use something else?" I need to get involved with existing code. Existing code that doesn't suck.
Re:driving in various vice cities
rjbs on 2004-11-17T12:26:48
Yeah, I've learned a little from the driving school lessons, although I'm having trouble finishing the "Drive 5 Laps" one. The problem is that I/just don't like racing games/. I bought GT3 when I first got my PS2. It looks amazing and plays very nicely, but I get super bored. This may be related to the fact that I don't drive at all, so driving really fast holds no special appeal.
As for the bikes, I think I'd go nuts driving them in first-person. I'm much, much, much better with bikes than with cars. I always get annoyed when I can't use a bike for a mission, especially when there's no great reason not to.
Finally, if I could change one minor thing, I think it would be drive-bys. I wish I could shoot left or right without looking that way. I get in more wrecks that way...
I wouldn't consider that to be a problem, you know?
Re:No problem at all...
rjbs on 2004-11-17T12:29:09
Well, yeah. It isn't, in most cases. I'd like to be more fluent in more languages, though, and I just don't because I can already do things in one. We Americans have that problem: why learn a second language when the first will get you just about everything you need?
On that subject, let me once again note my extreme annoyance at the lack of locally available Spanish classes. It looks like I need to wait for autumn to get into Spanish I. I'm thinking about just taking Spanish II and seeing how it goes.
