Killing Spree!

OK, so if we came up with a list of things that I do on a normal weekend it would include things like:
1. Eating breakfast at a French restaurant.
2. Reading the Sunday New York Times online (usually on Saturday)
3. Starting/finishing a book by some foreign author (usually Japanese), often dead.
4. Buying more used books.
5. Going to the fabric store/sewing.

Things that a normal weekend doesn't include:
1. Playing video games.

Sure, that list could go on and on. But let's stop there for a moment. In college, at various times, there were both a PS2 and an N64 at my house. On the PS2 my game was very similar to the mulit-player part of the James Bond games where a person wandered around trying to shoot their friends. Only the characters were teddy bears. On the N64 I played, of course, Bond. I sucked at both. A few times I tried my hand at Gran Turismo. I was good at one thing in all of these games, dying rather quickly.

My point is that I am in no way qualified to discuss the merits or the difficulty of any video game. I sucked at Mario back in the day and Pac-Man. Forget it.

However, when I found myself in front of an HDTV that probably cost about as much as I paid for my first car with a controller right there and the new GTA on the X-Box I thought, what the hell. And wow! My five minute killing spree was a blast. OK, five minutes is pushing it. First I stole a helicopter (thanks to the cheats and a friend giving them to me), flew that around for awhile and the crashed it into the ocean. Swam for shore and the capping began. (I also had a great stockpile of weapons thanks to those cheats that were mentioned above.) Yeah. Despite being a big, squirmy mess when it comes to killing on a movie, doing on the video game was fun. When the fuzz started to show up I pulled out the grenades. Bad idea. Or at least, throwing them and then running directly in that direction was a bad idea. Yup, I'm so bad at video games I went out in an unintentional suicide bombing.

So the low down: The graphics are amazing! Killing people (including oneself) is easy and I'm sure my feminist sensibilities would be hugely offended had I gotten to the point in the game where the ho's begin to show up, but since I didn't, I can say I loved it. And I'll probably never play it again.

Yeah GTA4.

Oh, and, yes, I really, really wanted to ram my car into someone on the way home. No, the game probably isn't a great idea, but it is a lot of fun.