Like Jason, I’m still working taking my first steps in the larger world of GTA IV. This being my first Grand Theft Auto game, I thought I’d share with you some of the valuable wisdom that I’ve stolen along the way, just like many a sweet ride.

Women don’t seem to care if you pick them up on a date in one car, then mysteriously take them home in a cab.

Virtual people don’t know how to drive either.

Running red lights and driving the wrong way down a street are both fine, as far the cops. But do not, for the love of all that is good and holy, so much as nudge a cruiser with your car, or you are a wanted man.

Always pay your tolls. Cops have quotas to meet.

Car hoods can slow you down. Get rid of them as quickly as possible.

Most problems can actually be solved with violence or, at least, the liberal application of bullets.

Russians cannot be trusted. Especially if they claim they can be trusted.

Insulting cokeheads will make them give you money.

Molotov cocktails and helicopters do not mix. Ever seen a helicopter on fire? Not a good sign.

If you want to succeed at bailing out of moving cars, avoid bailing out directly into walls.

Popping a wheelie is fun and educational. But do it too much, and the gods will punish you by throwing you off the back. Live and learn.

When trying to escape the police, airtugs do not make an ideal escape vehicle.

Of course, there’s much much more to be learned from GTA IV: the perils of steroid juicing, online dating strategies, and the socio-political history and culture of Serbia, but we’ll save those for a future installment.

The other day, I got a handy tip from a guy on the Xbox escalated service number. This was, of course, after getting the goofball treatment from a couple people at the normal number, including one woman who insisted upon transferring me to the Xbox Live division against my protests, which led to me getting “disconnected” while on hold. But the guy at the escalated number was friendly, knowledgeable, and a gamer himself, even hazarding some “unofficial” guesses as to why my game was screwing up.

One possibility, he said, was that recovering my profile a lot might have messed a bit with my Assassin’s Creed save file. And I do recover my profile a lot—just about every time I play on Keith’s or Dan’s machines, which is every couple weeks or so, and then again when I get back home to my own machine.

Now, I don’t know if this is actually corrupting any of my files, but it is a pain in the arse to recover gamer profiles. It requires typing in your gamertag, email address, and password, and if you don’t have a little keyboard attachment, that takes awhile (and shows off your password to all who can follow the cursor). And then it takes a good 5–7 minutes just to load the stupid thing, which doesn’t sound so long, but is kind of a drag when you’re sitting in a room full of people waiting to get their murder on.

One handy solution: Go buy an Xbox memory card, and next time you recover your profile, use that as the storage device. Yes, it’s 20 or 30 bucks out of your pocket, and yes, it fills up a USB slot, but now you can take your profile around with ease and never recover it again. You can still put all your saved games and downloads on your regular hard drive.

Neat trick, huh? Just don’t tell Gizmodo.

So much effort went into making this a totally sweet toy that everyone seems perfectly willing to forgive it for its failures as a game. Hey, neat, you can bowl in the game! But I don’t want to take a virtual girl with boring dialog out on a bowling date. And hey, neat, random stuff just happens in the city sometimes! But that’s a pain in the ass when you’re driving said date home and the cops chase some random dude into the street, who then runs directly in front of your car, scaring your date so badly that she bails into moving traffic and gets killed instantly. Oh yeah, and you can’t just jump back to the quick save you did after picking her up and bowling because there are no quick saves—you have to drive back to your cousin’s apartment and sleep for six hours to save. If you want to undo the weirdly accidental death, you have to jump back in time before the date even started. Great. Time for more bowling!

Well, at least the multiplayer is pretty awesome. Too bad you have to play the single player (at least until the first of the infrequent autosaves), or else it loads the intro credits and cut scenes every single time you turn on the game. Why is that again? Oh, right—because you can only access the multiplayer mode through your cell phone in single-player mode, the most mind-bogglingly stupid game interface decision since trying to quit Assassin’s Creed. Granted, these are my impressions only after a couple days of playing, and I’d normally wait until finishing a game to write up a quick review—but honestly, I don’t know if I even want to bother with the single-player drudgery much longer, knowing how much fun the multiplayer can be.

Remember that time that I was having problems with my Xbox, dealt with a bunch of stupid people (and a couple nice, smart, helpful, honest people), and then got my Xbox back without any complaints? Yeah, well, we knew that wouldn’t last.

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Awhile back, I implored you, the internet, to make me a Mac Dashboard widget that would quickly and cleanly tell me what my Xbox Live Friends were doing at any given time. First, Jacob answered with a mockup, and once again I asked if anybody wanted to help finish it off.

Then, Andrew Baldwin replied, made it work, fixed a bunch of bugs that Dan and I were good at pointing out but useless in helping to fix, and even spruced up the interface after I was already impressed and using the thing. So, what does it do?

• Shows gamer pic, gamertag, game being played, and in-game status of profiles you specify
• Checkbox for whether offline names should be shown (off by default)
• Clicking on gamer pic loads that gamer’s profile in default browser
• Only lists profiles who are set to be viewable to “Everyone” in Privacy Settings
• Allows for scrolling between names with a button, to keep the widget small
• Looks pretty and compact
• Makes me happy

Had I realized sooner that simply asking for things through this blog could bring entire new objects into being, I probably would have been begging you all for sandwiches long ago. This is much cooler, though.

Thanks to Andrew and Jacob for making this happen. Thanks also to Duncan Mackenzie for running and granting permission to use the online service this draws from, which keeps track of Xbox Live profiles’ online status.

So, without further ado: DOWNLOAD THE WIDGET.

(11 old generation games left.) I hope you like jungles, lots and lots of jungles intermixed with long loading times. Far Cry looks rather nice; they clearly spent a lot of time developing the tools to render such impressive scenery (jungle, beaches, a few caves, rain forest, cliffs, swampy jungle etc.) but the gameplay is incredibly repetitive and I feel like some of the levels could have been designed by a program rather than a person. I can not remember the last time I was so aware of how boring the level design of game was, which is striking to me because the levels look gorgeous for a game of this era: they just aren’t interesting in how they are put together.

I can encapsulate the Far Cry experience as such: you sneak through the jungle, you reach a clearing with some manner of mercenary encampment, you can choose to attack or sneak around or just run through really fast, it doesn’t matter there because is another encampment a 5 minute walk away, repeat until you get to a boss fight! They include an assortment of vehicles which is kind of fun but at times feels more like a design decision to let you skips huge chunks of the uninteresting levels. Later in the game you get “feral powers” which apparently was added to the XBOX port and wasn’t in the original PC version of Far Cry. The feral powers make combat a little but more interesting, you can kill people with your bare hands (bear hands?), and see at night and such. In comparison the PC version must have been pretty dull and just a straightforward FPS without them. So a neat mechanic, but I tended to just use the “run very fast power” to skip past areas that were particularly dull.

I couldn’t beat the final boss after a dozen or so tries, but I am sufficiently bored of the game that I have moved it off the “to finish pile.” Usually I wouldn’t bother writing a review for a game I’m so “meh” about but I figure I’d write about these last few last-generation games I have. I had thought about trying to beat all of these before picking up a 360 but given that I have 11 to go and there is at least one 30 hour RPG. (I think my game completion rate since starting grad school is about 4 per year…) Then I thought I should just finish the XBOX games (only 2 remaining in the pile) and then I can unplug that and pack it away, but a recent time sensitive special deal I saw for GTA4 with an XBOX 360 might defeat even that idea.

(12 old generation games left, though Gun was also available for the 360.) Basically Grand Theft Auto in the Old West (”Grand Theft Horse” if you will.) The story of revenge, betrayal, and surprise parentage was pretty good as far as a story for a sand box style video game goes. I enjoyed the visual depiction of the wide open expanses (scaled down to be traversable in video game time) but the town areas felt empty and completely un-populated in way that just seemed lazy from a game design/system resources. Towns are simply places where you can go to accept new mission or hang around outside 3D models of buildings you can’t enter with occasional people you can’t actually interact with. My brother pointed out the somewhat disappointing game mechanic that all the horses are the same and there is no horse that is really “yours” and is faster, better, etc. Every time you start a mission or such you just grab (or “jack”) the nearest horse and away you go.

When Gun first came out there was controversy over the depiction of Native Americans, effectively the issue is that there are several levels where you just kill countless droves of them because people who design games feel that killing many people is the necessary appropriate action one must take before you can accomplish tasks such as crossing a bridge or going to the next town. Using this same kind of logic they later become your friends after you kill droves of ex-Confederate soldiers. (Remember only crazy ex-Confederate soldiers led by an evil villain were disrespectful to native peoples.) Basically the same kind of general disregard for issues of race/culture/class/gender you’d find in most video games. I played this the same week the new and controversial trailer for Resident Evil 5 came out so Gun felt almost quaint in comparison to that…

In short as far as game play goes Gun was generally fun and sufficiently engaging enough that I played the story mode all the way through, but I’m left wanting a bit more; perhaps I need to go watch some more Deadwood or play a game of Deadlands (Jason?).

Please allow me to gush for just a moment, and witness a brief glimpse at just how big a nerd I am.

For years now I have been complaining that Spider-man deserves better video games, and we have the technology. Such a game needs Grand Theft Auto-style roaming capabilities, and a feeling like you’re actually making a difference in the environment. (I also thought it would be neat if you were framed for a crime and had to do some wall-clinging stealth action scenes to find evidence to prove your innocence, but my friends assure me that Spider-man is only fun to play when he is swinging, jumping, and punching.)

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I recently played through Mass Effect for the Xbox 360, and then replayed it, and then replayed it again because there are so many paths you can take through it that it really can be a different experience each time. I love this game. After so many play-throughs, though, it occurred to me that I was getting a little too into this game, and I should move on to something else. This is proving harder than I expected.

I bought Knights of the Old Republic for ten bucks, figuring another highly-recommended Bioware title would do nicely. After playing for a couple hours, though, I can’t seem to get into it. The early, directionless search for Bastila bores me, as it has me talking to digital actors who don’t look very impressive. The overcrowded interfaces in the pause menus both bore and confuse me. The turn-based combat really bores me: The worst thing you can possibly do during combat is move, so it becomes a matter of actually doing as little as possible to survive.

Before this, I had tried playing Beyond Good and Evil for Gamecube, another game greatly celebrated for its story. I had a hard time getting into this one as well. In both games, the period of learning how to play seems far too long to keep me interested. Plus, I think I am spoiled by the stories and graphics of Xbox 360 games like Mass Effect, Bioshock, Splinter Cell: Double Agent, and Kane & Lynch.

It’s now dawning on me that I might have already played the best that contemporary gaming has to offer in terms of storytelling, which is kind of sad—both because I may have run out of stuff to enjoy and because even “the best of the best” has been imperfect to say the least. I don’t know how to look past my prejudices to enjoy older games the way others enjoyed them so much, though I wonder if there really is something that genuinely rubs me the wrong way about their design, as I did not have this problem at all with Psychonauts or Ico on PS2.

Just in case, though, I’d like to put this out before you all: Is there something I’m missing? Does KOTOR suddenly leap from mediocrity into awesomeness if I just stick with it a couple more hours? Are there other original Xbox games that better stand the test of time? Or does my disappointment sound all too familiar to you—do story games become a lot less appealing once their technology loses its novelty? And, even if that’s the case, are there other 360 games with underrated stories that I should be checking out? (I heard good things about Prey, but I am wary of a 360 game that is on sale used for ten bucks.)

Perhaps I just need to be patient until the deluge of promising releases between August and November this year (Star Wars: Force Unleashed, Splinter Cell: Conviction, Too Human, etc.), but I’m hoping that someone can suggest something else to me in the meantime.

This game quite nearly succeeds in its goal of giving you the feeling that you are directing Chow Yun Fat in your very own John Woo movie, chock full of the typical fun cliches: doves flying through gunfire, point-blank pistol standoffs, crooked cops, and firing two pistols while diving, jumping off walls, rolling on beverage carts, sliding down railings, swinging from chandeliers, and sliding over tables (in slow-motion). It actually gets quite a bit right, such as the fact that just about everything you shoot—from watermelons to stone pillars to cars to bird cages—falls apart and/or explodes when shot. On the other hand, this makes it so hard to find any cover that the game (even on “normal” mode) quickly becomes an exercise in frustration. I’d feel more like The Killer if I weren’t getting killed myself so damn much. Also, despite being billed as a “sequel” to Hard Boiled, pretty much the only thing they keep (as far as I could tell) is the title character’s name. I know this will be a big disappointment for those of you who felt very engaged with the other characters, themes, and nuances of plot in that movie.