I'm back from my trip visiting family. And while I admit I'm pretty poor at hiding my affection for Final Fantasy, "visiting family" does not, alas, mean that I was away attending the Squeenix party. Game | Life brings you more awesome pictures, video and news from all things Square Enix; all I have to bring you are stories of how I survived my family solely through drunkenness and eight-hour Puzzle Quest marathons, which usually overlapped.
I just realized that it's possible to change your character's portrait, and that instead of being the dorky-looking, bird-loving Druid I currently am, I could have been a marginally cooler-looking one, possibly even a hot chick. It's tempting to punish my own obtuse ignorance with a total reset, but I have come to love Dennar the Default Druid-- even though I shoulda been a warrior-- so I decided just to let him continue his amoral siege of death unmolested.
So I'm back in New York, future scene of the new Liberty City in GTA: IV. I have to say, I'm especially excited about this-- how often do you get to play a video game played in an area so closely analogous to your real-life stomping grounds? In the past, I always knew I was playing too much Vice City when I'd step out into my ghetto neighborhood and the sights and sounds-- rap, tires squealing, fat women demanding you get out of their way-- almost made me start looking for cars to steal. The suspension of reality is likely to get a lot worse in a game actually modeled, even only somewhat, after my hometown. The first thing I'm gonna do when I get that game is drive uptown and see whether my neighborhood is there.
Sucks if you live on Staten Island, though. Everyone knows there is absolutely no reason to go there, ever-- unless you've invented a machine that identifies bad smells on the air and you want to test it out. Including SI among the five boroughs sort of feels like including your "special" five-year-old sister in your LAN party. You do it to be nice, you know? Apparently Rockstar is not as nice as we are, because Liberty City, featuring four instead of five boroughs, gave Staten Island the big shaft.
South SI rep Andrew Lanza told the New York Times (as reported by GamePolitics) he's "glad" SI's left out of the "poisonous" game, theorizing that the exclusion could be "because they know Staten Island is the safest place in the entire city."Whatever helps you sleep at night, dude!
