I must admit I love Eeyore, he's practically my role model in life, but growing up in the Eighties, Optimus Prime was my hero and the hero of every boy my age. Most of it was because of Peter Cullen's voice. You just had to listen to what he said.
Optimus Prime was like General Patton with lasers that transformed into a giant truck. There was nothing better than him when I was young.
I started reading it, figuring there's always a chance it might have some sort of point. I got a little suspicious when they started using "we" to refer to the reader, and stopped as soon as it got to "we should listen..." Most real scientific articles, or news articles in general, do not tell us what we should be doing.
That's just a little ridiculous. When I talked about the revolution, nobody thought I was discussing overthrowing the government. "Revolution" is usually associated with something new and different, and when referring to a product, it makes people think that it will have a large impact and be like nothing beforei it. It was a fairly good description for the console.
"Wii" doesn't mean anything in particular, and as a noun, all the meanings associated with its pronunciation are unfavorable. When you use it as an object in a sentence, nobody is going to think "we," as in togetherness. Furthermore, since the spelling is so obfuscated, a lot of people won't even know how to say it right. And pronouncing it "why" is an even worse product image. It doesn't make you think "gotta have it."
As for those other system names, taken alone they're pretty mediocre, but they're mediocre along acceptable product marketing guidelines. Sure, "Dreamcast" sounds pretty sissy, and it may have had something to do with why the system didn't make it to mainstream popularity, but it still gives people an idea of what the system is. You hear "dream" and you think imagination, or things not of this reality. "Dreamcast" could mean that it projects dreams to the player.
"XBox" is about as mediocre as it gets, but it still gives some sort of meaning. Prefixing something with "X" means that it's experimental, extreme, or exciting. Something powerful and technological. "Box" is at least descriptive of what it is. Someone looks at a box with an "X" and can tell it's an X-Box.
At the very least, the others sound like they might be a game system. They follow certain guidelines. If they'd called it the "WiiCube" or "WiiGo" or "ZoomWii" or whatever, at least it sounds like a name for a system, albeit a ridiculous one. Right now, the name is both ridiculous and completely abstract. It has nothing to do with anything gaming-related, despite what the little paragraph explanations try to tell us. Unless they want to change the name to "WiiAsInWeMeaningPlayingTogether," because that explanation is going to have to go along with every mention of the name from now on.
Here's the thing, though. When I talked to people about the Nintendo Revolution, they just sounded interested and wanted to know what it did. Now, when I mention the Nintendo Wii, the response is more like:
"The Nintendo What?"
"The Wii."
"...Why?"
"Yeah, I know."
At that point they usually shrug and we talk about something else.
While the concept of molesting a child for profit is really disturbing, it's still rare compared to all those people who molest children for their own personal gain. I've already sat up enough nights listening to friends' descriptions of things their so-called loved ones did to them as children. I don't have to be convinced that it's bad.
Even so, I don't see child pornography as a justification for keeping permanent logs of everyone's internet activity, just as I don't see child abuse as a justification for keeping logs of what everyone does in their homes. Hell, at least the latter might be effective. As it is, I figure child pornographers are fairly good at anonymity. There are many ways to work around the problem, making such access logs useless. Sure it would be a nuisance to the bastards, but not nearly as much as a problem as it could represent to the rest of us, privacy-wise.
Personally, I really don't want to know. I'm sure the testimony is terrible and disturbing, and involves terrible, terrible things. But I don't think it justifies anything near the measures taken here, and I really doubt that they will restrict themselves to using these records for child pornography purposes.
Thinking about it, I -really- hate the government for going on about child pornography this much. I know a lot of people who were sexually abused as children, and I've heard enough stories of how it happened, and not once did it involve this "child pornography" that the government fears so much. Child abuse is a horrible, disgusting thing, and the fact that they're focusing on this small minority of cases where they film it, presumably because if they can't see it happening it's not real, pisses me off a lot.
Child sexual abuse has little to nothing to do with the internet, and the fact that they use something so serious as an excuse to restrict privacy makes me extremely angry.
People keep complaining about how unscientific Mythbusters is, and I often see problems with their experiments, but personally I just like the creative ways they use their special effects skills to build test cases. It's just fun to watch, and it makes me wonder about the actual myths.
Mr. Wizard always bugged me, because it was targeted toward children as actual scientific experiments, but it was really obvious even when I was young that they just took existing facts then had these kids do rigged and generally flawed experiments to demonstrate them.
There was one that I still remember from when I was young where he had a kid test whether vision or hearing was more sensitive. They had the kid match a tone using a generator that had 1000 different tones, and was off by one. Then they had her match a shade of blue out of a range of a hundred cards. Again, she was off by one. Since 1/1000 is more exact than 1/100, obviously hearing was more sensitive.
I got really upset about that one and went huffing off to tell my mother how they didn't use an equivalent sample set or use the same gradation of sound/light frequency between the two experiments (not in so many words, of course). The way Mr Wizard told the kid that the results demonstrated her hearing was more sensitive than her vision really irked me and turned me off the show completely.
At least with the Mythbusters there's that general sense of "Huh, well this seemed to work," and they're open to retesting a theory if people call them on it. Personally I think incorrect conclusions and an open, experimental mindset are better science than established facts and weighted demonstrations. For kids these days, it's easy to look up information, but the inquisitiveness and cleverness in experimentation they demonstrate is a lot more compelling to young minds.
Didn't they make Discovery Wings into its own channel?
What makes me sad is they got rid of cable in the classroom and other initiatives to put actually interesting documentaries and such on cable channels. I used to watch History Channel at 4am and see the most interesting things. Now it's infomercials.
I don't know, it seems to me that working to cure malaria and HIV, or at the least ease some of the suffering they can cause, pretty much eclipses any history of mediocre software and mean business practice he might have. Fifty years down the line, the world is not going to care very much about Mac vs. Windows as combating some of the world's most widespread diseases.
That said, I don't really see him as a great philanthropist. He's pretty much required to do some good right now. If he hadn't spent his billions on charity, I'd see him as some kind of monster. It's not like I'm picky about charity, either; if I see a middle-class up-and-comer give his Starbucks money to a poor person in the morning, it warms my heart. But really, Bill Gates spending half his fortune on charity just means he's worth as much as the country of Luxembourg rather than the United Arab Emirates. I'm sure the giant golden statue of him they erect after his death won't be able to shoot lasers from its eyes like he originally intended, but they'll still be able to scuplt the pools of blood oozing from those he is crushing under his massive feet out of solid ruby.
Either way, if he gets rid of malaria, he could reunite the Spice Girls for all I care and he'd still go down in history as a hero.
That is pretty neat, I agree, but I can't tell yet if it's a gimmick or if they'll really do much with it. I didn't really like anything they said about the Live service at the unveiling back at E3.
Either way, I guess all I can do is wait and see how it turns out.
I guess that's what I worry about. I don't really want the next generation of consoles to place emphasis on online gaming. I like console games for the advancement. Completing goals, figuring out puzzles, following stories, etc. You can't really do that kind of thing with online games. They're mostly just "beat this guy" or "clear this area" type of games. And if console game makers are going to start focusing on them, I'm going to be seeing a lot less games I'd like to play.
On the PC side, it's possible to make a decent mid-range gaming rig for under a thousand, and if you're really good, you could get a workable gaming system for like five or six hundred. Sure you won't play the latest FPS at 1600x1200 at 90fps, but it will work well enough to be decent. The graphics on the 360 don't measure up to my current PC, which I got at the beginning of the year for about $1200. Today, it'd be even less. Spending $150 on a new graphics card every 18 months isn't terrible, either. It's not as inexpensive as an XBox 360, sure, but as I said, most people who have broadband have a PC anyway, and that $400 right now could get you a GeForce 7800 which would blow the hell out of the 360 and last for years.
I am so sick of reviewers complaining about the lack of online multiplayer in games. I really don't care about online multiplayer on consoles at all, and I don't know anybody that actually uses it. I do not want developers wasting their resources tacking on awkward multiplayer modes to games designed for a single player. When I'm on a console, I want to play a game I can play myself. If I want to play a fighting game, I have my friends over. That's what they're for. If I wanted online gaming, I'd play on a PC. It works so much better that way, and I'd think anyone with broadband connectivity for console games would have a decent PC already.
Honestly, how big is the market segment for online console gaming? Ten percent? Fifteen at most? It doesn't seem like a good demographic to target your games toward. Maybe I'm wrong and next year everyone in the country will have broadband access on their home appliances, but I doubt it.
IQ tests were originally developed to detect children with learning disabilities, and they're still good for that, though in a more detailed form. I took the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale test in college to determine if I had a learning disability, and I found it to be fairly comprehensive for what it does. It doesn't reduce a person's thinking ability to a single number either, which is nice.
But I do agree in general. Using IQs as a general measure of a person's ability to think is pretty useless.
Actually the way they write the article, it almost sounds like people with the bad gene have lower IQs than is normal, rather than people with the gene being geniuses. That would make more sense (if there really is a direct link), because a genetic defect may cause the brain not to function correctly.
The article actually mentions that so far they just see a correlation, and further study is required to determine if there is actually a direct link. That was fairly surprising compared to the way most scientific journalism presents these studies, I thought. Almost, you know, responsible.
People with higher income tend to have smaller families than people with lower income, actually. I don't have the numbers, but I believe they have enough kids on average to sustain the population (2 kids per two adults), while poor families are larger. It likely has to do with differences in education, as well as cultural differences.
Well, I sliced off the tip of my thumb with a cheese slicer a year or two ago. You could see the layers of skin like an onion with just red in the middle. There isn't even a scar now, though. I was fairly surprised how well it healed.
Well obviously most people don't know much about computer heat requirements. They expect their XBox to just work like their other game systems and consumer electronics just work. Overheating is a serious design flaw for a home appliance. I can imagine it being pretty frustrating to someone living in a hot area already. I'm sure a lot of people are going to be unhappy come summer.
But coming from a guy in Chicago in December? It makes me wonder if Sony has offices in Illinois.
My phone has a setting for its GPS ability to toggle location tracking either always on or 911 only. I guess they could be secretly tracking me anyway, but I doubt it.
It's one of those games where your expectations coming it do a long way toward how much you take from it. Since it has such a broad presentation, people see it as different things, so they judge it differently.
Me, I see it as an update to the old school adventure games, with the action bits tacked on. So while the targeting issues and such can be a little bothersome sometimes, it just makes me work harder to figure out creative ways to solve the problem. Then again, I hate FPSes and such and would get bored pretty quickly if all I was expected to do was run around and shoot rival gangs, so it works out for me.
Anyway, as the other repliers (replicants?) are saying, the PC controls are apparently a lot better for targeting than the console, obviously, so that might be worth a try.
I don't really get it when people say the game hasn't grown. I mean, sure, they didn't add yet another dimension to make the first 4d game or anything, and they didn't break new ground by turning it into an underwater high-crime baking sim, but they took the stuff that worked and expanded upon it, and fixed the stuff that didn't. Hell, in San Andreas I could break into the airport, steal a 747, and fly twenty minutes in any direction. There's a frigging Harrier jet.
Personally, when I first got that game, I spent the entire day riding a mountain bike through the countryside north of Los Santos, finding paths and doing jumps. I kept getting lost, though. I think San Andreas' map was six times the size of Vice City, at least. Los Santos proper is probably bigger than the entire area in the last game.
Personally, while I agree GTA3 was pretty generic, Vice City and San Andreas really had decent stories. They're not oscar contenders or anything, but compared to most insane video game plots, they're quite well-written and keep my attention. I liked the characters I was supposed to like, hated the characters I was supposed to hate, and was appropriately outraged whenever I was betrayed. A popcorn flick at best, but that's still high praise in the game industry.
Of course, it depends on what you're looking for in a game. As another reply states, there are a lot of games that do specific things GTA does and does them better, but that's obvious. I like it because I have this large area, the open-ended feeling, and all these possible choices. Sure I could grab a game where I'm Bike Man and do crazy bike tricks, or Nameless Racing Person in a car with better graphics and courses, or Heavily Armed Guy In Space Armor that specializes in running around and shooting stuff, but it loses the experience that GTA has. I like being Tommy or CJ, with the silly little catchphrases and the outfits, going through my town and wreaking havoc or playing relatively harmless games as I choose.
That's the one other thing. The violence was hardly the focus for me. I mean, sure, I'd run down gang members when I had the chance, and I hated drug dealers, but I'd swerve to avoid the elderly and some of the more likeable citizenry. In San Andreas, when you were given the option to chat with passers-by, I was very polite to people that complimented me. It just made the game more interactive. That was why I played. It's a city sim from the little guy's perspective. And you can do whatever the hell you want with it.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't really understand what your point is, though. Slashdot doesn't check any of its stories anyway.
I must admit I love Eeyore, he's practically my role model in life, but growing up in the Eighties, Optimus Prime was my hero and the hero of every boy my age. Most of it was because of Peter Cullen's voice. You just had to listen to what he said.
Optimus Prime was like General Patton with lasers that transformed into a giant truck. There was nothing better than him when I was young.
I started reading it, figuring there's always a chance it might have some sort of point. I got a little suspicious when they started using "we" to refer to the reader, and stopped as soon as it got to "we should listen..." Most real scientific articles, or news articles in general, do not tell us what we should be doing.
That's just a little ridiculous. When I talked about the revolution, nobody thought I was discussing overthrowing the government. "Revolution" is usually associated with something new and different, and when referring to a product, it makes people think that it will have a large impact and be like nothing beforei it. It was a fairly good description for the console.
"Wii" doesn't mean anything in particular, and as a noun, all the meanings associated with its pronunciation are unfavorable. When you use it as an object in a sentence, nobody is going to think "we," as in togetherness. Furthermore, since the spelling is so obfuscated, a lot of people won't even know how to say it right. And pronouncing it "why" is an even worse product image. It doesn't make you think "gotta have it."
As for those other system names, taken alone they're pretty mediocre, but they're mediocre along acceptable product marketing guidelines. Sure, "Dreamcast" sounds pretty sissy, and it may have had something to do with why the system didn't make it to mainstream popularity, but it still gives people an idea of what the system is. You hear "dream" and you think imagination, or things not of this reality. "Dreamcast" could mean that it projects dreams to the player.
"XBox" is about as mediocre as it gets, but it still gives some sort of meaning. Prefixing something with "X" means that it's experimental, extreme, or exciting. Something powerful and technological. "Box" is at least descriptive of what it is. Someone looks at a box with an "X" and can tell it's an X-Box.
At the very least, the others sound like they might be a game system. They follow certain guidelines. If they'd called it the "WiiCube" or "WiiGo" or "ZoomWii" or whatever, at least it sounds like a name for a system, albeit a ridiculous one. Right now, the name is both ridiculous and completely abstract. It has nothing to do with anything gaming-related, despite what the little paragraph explanations try to tell us. Unless they want to change the name to "WiiAsInWeMeaningPlayingTogether," because that explanation is going to have to go along with every mention of the name from now on.
Here's the thing, though. When I talked to people about the Nintendo Revolution, they just sounded interested and wanted to know what it did. Now, when I mention the Nintendo Wii, the response is more like:
"The Nintendo What?"
"The Wii."
"...Why?"
"Yeah, I know."
At that point they usually shrug and we talk about something else.
While the concept of molesting a child for profit is really disturbing, it's still rare compared to all those people who molest children for their own personal gain. I've already sat up enough nights listening to friends' descriptions of things their so-called loved ones did to them as children. I don't have to be convinced that it's bad.
Even so, I don't see child pornography as a justification for keeping permanent logs of everyone's internet activity, just as I don't see child abuse as a justification for keeping logs of what everyone does in their homes. Hell, at least the latter might be effective. As it is, I figure child pornographers are fairly good at anonymity. There are many ways to work around the problem, making such access logs useless. Sure it would be a nuisance to the bastards, but not nearly as much as a problem as it could represent to the rest of us, privacy-wise.
Personally, I really don't want to know. I'm sure the testimony is terrible and disturbing, and involves terrible, terrible things. But I don't think it justifies anything near the measures taken here, and I really doubt that they will restrict themselves to using these records for child pornography purposes.
Thinking about it, I -really- hate the government for going on about child pornography this much. I know a lot of people who were sexually abused as children, and I've heard enough stories of how it happened, and not once did it involve this "child pornography" that the government fears so much. Child abuse is a horrible, disgusting thing, and the fact that they're focusing on this small minority of cases where they film it, presumably because if they can't see it happening it's not real, pisses me off a lot.
Child sexual abuse has little to nothing to do with the internet, and the fact that they use something so serious as an excuse to restrict privacy makes me extremely angry.
People keep complaining about how unscientific Mythbusters is, and I often see problems with their experiments, but personally I just like the creative ways they use their special effects skills to build test cases. It's just fun to watch, and it makes me wonder about the actual myths.
Mr. Wizard always bugged me, because it was targeted toward children as actual scientific experiments, but it was really obvious even when I was young that they just took existing facts then had these kids do rigged and generally flawed experiments to demonstrate them.
There was one that I still remember from when I was young where he had a kid test whether vision or hearing was more sensitive. They had the kid match a tone using a generator that had 1000 different tones, and was off by one. Then they had her match a shade of blue out of a range of a hundred cards. Again, she was off by one. Since 1/1000 is more exact than 1/100, obviously hearing was more sensitive.
I got really upset about that one and went huffing off to tell my mother how they didn't use an equivalent sample set or use the same gradation of sound/light frequency between the two experiments (not in so many words, of course). The way Mr Wizard told the kid that the results demonstrated her hearing was more sensitive than her vision really irked me and turned me off the show completely.
At least with the Mythbusters there's that general sense of "Huh, well this seemed to work," and they're open to retesting a theory if people call them on it. Personally I think incorrect conclusions and an open, experimental mindset are better science than established facts and weighted demonstrations. For kids these days, it's easy to look up information, but the inquisitiveness and cleverness in experimentation they demonstrate is a lot more compelling to young minds.
Didn't they make Discovery Wings into its own channel?
What makes me sad is they got rid of cable in the classroom and other initiatives to put actually interesting documentaries and such on cable channels. I used to watch History Channel at 4am and see the most interesting things. Now it's infomercials.
I don't know, it seems to me that working to cure malaria and HIV, or at the least ease some of the suffering they can cause, pretty much eclipses any history of mediocre software and mean business practice he might have. Fifty years down the line, the world is not going to care very much about Mac vs. Windows as combating some of the world's most widespread diseases.
That said, I don't really see him as a great philanthropist. He's pretty much required to do some good right now. If he hadn't spent his billions on charity, I'd see him as some kind of monster. It's not like I'm picky about charity, either; if I see a middle-class up-and-comer give his Starbucks money to a poor person in the morning, it warms my heart. But really, Bill Gates spending half his fortune on charity just means he's worth as much as the country of Luxembourg rather than the United Arab Emirates. I'm sure the giant golden statue of him they erect after his death won't be able to shoot lasers from its eyes like he originally intended, but they'll still be able to scuplt the pools of blood oozing from those he is crushing under his massive feet out of solid ruby.
Either way, if he gets rid of malaria, he could reunite the Spice Girls for all I care and he'd still go down in history as a hero.
My excuse is that I'm not blind or deaf, and have both hands. Now if you excuse me I'll be playing Resident Evil 4.
That is pretty neat, I agree, but I can't tell yet if it's a gimmick or if they'll really do much with it. I didn't really like anything they said about the Live service at the unveiling back at E3.
Either way, I guess all I can do is wait and see how it turns out.
I guess that's what I worry about. I don't really want the next generation of consoles to place emphasis on online gaming. I like console games for the advancement. Completing goals, figuring out puzzles, following stories, etc. You can't really do that kind of thing with online games. They're mostly just "beat this guy" or "clear this area" type of games. And if console game makers are going to start focusing on them, I'm going to be seeing a lot less games I'd like to play.
On the PC side, it's possible to make a decent mid-range gaming rig for under a thousand, and if you're really good, you could get a workable gaming system for like five or six hundred. Sure you won't play the latest FPS at 1600x1200 at 90fps, but it will work well enough to be decent. The graphics on the 360 don't measure up to my current PC, which I got at the beginning of the year for about $1200. Today, it'd be even less. Spending $150 on a new graphics card every 18 months isn't terrible, either. It's not as inexpensive as an XBox 360, sure, but as I said, most people who have broadband have a PC anyway, and that $400 right now could get you a GeForce 7800 which would blow the hell out of the 360 and last for years.
I am so sick of reviewers complaining about the lack of online multiplayer in games. I really don't care about online multiplayer on consoles at all, and I don't know anybody that actually uses it. I do not want developers wasting their resources tacking on awkward multiplayer modes to games designed for a single player. When I'm on a console, I want to play a game I can play myself. If I want to play a fighting game, I have my friends over. That's what they're for. If I wanted online gaming, I'd play on a PC. It works so much better that way, and I'd think anyone with broadband connectivity for console games would have a decent PC already.
Honestly, how big is the market segment for online console gaming? Ten percent? Fifteen at most? It doesn't seem like a good demographic to target your games toward. Maybe I'm wrong and next year everyone in the country will have broadband access on their home appliances, but I doubt it.
IQ tests were originally developed to detect children with learning disabilities, and they're still good for that, though in a more detailed form. I took the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale test in college to determine if I had a learning disability, and I found it to be fairly comprehensive for what it does. It doesn't reduce a person's thinking ability to a single number either, which is nice.
But I do agree in general. Using IQs as a general measure of a person's ability to think is pretty useless.
Maybe that means you don't have it? =)
Actually the way they write the article, it almost sounds like people with the bad gene have lower IQs than is normal, rather than people with the gene being geniuses. That would make more sense (if there really is a direct link), because a genetic defect may cause the brain not to function correctly.
The article actually mentions that so far they just see a correlation, and further study is required to determine if there is actually a direct link. That was fairly surprising compared to the way most scientific journalism presents these studies, I thought. Almost, you know, responsible.
People with higher income tend to have smaller families than people with lower income, actually. I don't have the numbers, but I believe they have enough kids on average to sustain the population (2 kids per two adults), while poor families are larger. It likely has to do with differences in education, as well as cultural differences.
Well, I sliced off the tip of my thumb with a cheese slicer a year or two ago. You could see the layers of skin like an onion with just red in the middle. There isn't even a scar now, though. I was fairly surprised how well it healed.
Well obviously most people don't know much about computer heat requirements. They expect their XBox to just work like their other game systems and consumer electronics just work. Overheating is a serious design flaw for a home appliance. I can imagine it being pretty frustrating to someone living in a hot area already. I'm sure a lot of people are going to be unhappy come summer.
But coming from a guy in Chicago in December? It makes me wonder if Sony has offices in Illinois.
My phone has a setting for its GPS ability to toggle location tracking either always on or 911 only. I guess they could be secretly tracking me anyway, but I doubt it.
I see where you're coming from, only this article takes place in Britain, where youth crime has apparently become a bit of a problem in some areas.
You're being so negative about negativity, man. It's bringing me down.
When people around me complain incessantly, I take the opportunity to cheerily irritate them until they shut the hell up. It really brightens my day.
It's one of those games where your expectations coming it do a long way toward how much you take from it. Since it has such a broad presentation, people see it as different things, so they judge it differently.
Me, I see it as an update to the old school adventure games, with the action bits tacked on. So while the targeting issues and such can be a little bothersome sometimes, it just makes me work harder to figure out creative ways to solve the problem. Then again, I hate FPSes and such and would get bored pretty quickly if all I was expected to do was run around and shoot rival gangs, so it works out for me.
Anyway, as the other repliers (replicants?) are saying, the PC controls are apparently a lot better for targeting than the console, obviously, so that might be worth a try.
I don't really get it when people say the game hasn't grown. I mean, sure, they didn't add yet another dimension to make the first 4d game or anything, and they didn't break new ground by turning it into an underwater high-crime baking sim, but they took the stuff that worked and expanded upon it, and fixed the stuff that didn't. Hell, in San Andreas I could break into the airport, steal a 747, and fly twenty minutes in any direction. There's a frigging Harrier jet.
Personally, when I first got that game, I spent the entire day riding a mountain bike through the countryside north of Los Santos, finding paths and doing jumps. I kept getting lost, though. I think San Andreas' map was six times the size of Vice City, at least. Los Santos proper is probably bigger than the entire area in the last game.
Personally, while I agree GTA3 was pretty generic, Vice City and San Andreas really had decent stories. They're not oscar contenders or anything, but compared to most insane video game plots, they're quite well-written and keep my attention. I liked the characters I was supposed to like, hated the characters I was supposed to hate, and was appropriately outraged whenever I was betrayed. A popcorn flick at best, but that's still high praise in the game industry.
Of course, it depends on what you're looking for in a game. As another reply states, there are a lot of games that do specific things GTA does and does them better, but that's obvious. I like it because I have this large area, the open-ended feeling, and all these possible choices. Sure I could grab a game where I'm Bike Man and do crazy bike tricks, or Nameless Racing Person in a car with better graphics and courses, or Heavily Armed Guy In Space Armor that specializes in running around and shooting stuff, but it loses the experience that GTA has. I like being Tommy or CJ, with the silly little catchphrases and the outfits, going through my town and wreaking havoc or playing relatively harmless games as I choose.
That's the one other thing. The violence was hardly the focus for me. I mean, sure, I'd run down gang members when I had the chance, and I hated drug dealers, but I'd swerve to avoid the elderly and some of the more likeable citizenry. In San Andreas, when you were given the option to chat with passers-by, I was very polite to people that complimented me. It just made the game more interactive. That was why I played. It's a city sim from the little guy's perspective. And you can do whatever the hell you want with it.