Goodbye, forum. Hello, San Andreas.
I think this was bound to happen eventually. As you may have noticed, I've done away with the forum link up top. I know, I had a bustling community of 9 whole members, and the number of moderators actually exceeded the number of regular users. It was like a paradise. but every good thing has to come to an end. You should note that I have replaced that button with an e-mail link, which you should click on immediately. I have a mailbag to do and I'm tired of reading spam about "Ci allia$$."
In other news, I may very well be the last person on the planet to have purchased Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. I didn't pay any attention to it for a year and a half because, even though I loved the other two games, I have something of a moral objection to it. No, I don't think the violence and sex is abhorrent -- I quite like it. No, my objection is to the fact that Rockstar Games has essentially sold us the same game three times and we've lapped it up. Let's face it, really. No matter how many motorcycles or dating missions or new maps they add, this is a game with a five-year-old graphics engine and the same basic gameplay of two other of the highest-selling games ever. It's like those damn Madden games, except it requires 70 hours of gameplay. Yet, I remain hooked. Those fuckers.
The worst thing, though, about the game that I've discovered is that it's apparently broken my Playstation 2. Let me explain. The game freezes, like constantly. Basically any time you walk out of a safe house it takes about 7 minutes to load the gigantic game map, which I'm willing to say is not the intended load time of the game. So you can rest assured that, when I left the main character's house near the beginning of the game and saw this screen for way longer than it should have been up:
...that I knew something was wrong.
So the first thing I did was take the game back to the store and ask for another one, because I thought there was a problem with the disc. Surprisingly, the girl there just tossed the thing aside and handed me another one -- she barely looked at my receipt. I wanted to ask, "Aren't you...I dunno...supposed to ring this up or something?" but I didn't want to push my luck, and considering that I was hauling in a faulty game about lots and lots of stealing, I realized that she probably thought I had proved myself as having more than my share of non-illegal real-world courtesy.
So anyway, I come home and put the new game in and see that I have the same problem. I also notice that textures in certain areas are looking really muddy and aren't rendering right. The game even starts just freezing up entirely when I'm trying to drive around town. So I start searching around online to see if anybody else is having this problem to find that indeed they had, and that the fix involved opening up my PS2 (but I'll void my warranty that actually ran out three years ago!) and cleaning the laser lens, among other things.
Here's a word of advice for you: If you don't have to open up a piece of expensive electronic equipment to try to fix an extremely sensitive part, don't do it. Every little thing you do could possibly break the shit out of the thing, especially when there are tiny little delicate wires that are apparently the whole thing's power supply. Anyway, I open the thing up, spray it with my newly-bought thing of can air and rub a Q-Tip with alcohol all over the stupid lens. I also put cooking oil on the stupid little bars that move the lens, because apparently that's good.
After all that's done, I put the thing back together and fire it up. The good news is it's not broken. The bad news is it's still fucking up. So I read on a little more and find out that there's yet another lens that maybe has to be cleaned too, and that's a lot harder to get to and that makes it even more likely to break the shit out of the thing if you try to touch it, because you basically have to pry the thing off of its little housing and then remove all its tiny parts.
So essentially I'm screwed. But I'll be damned if I let it keep me from playing this game -- I already have gone through two copies and nearly broke my work horse, Christmas 2000 Playstation for it. So I'm playing the crap out of it. And unless some amazing person offers to fix my PS2 or offers me a new one, I'm going to be spending lots of time looking at loading screens. And by God liking it, even if it means I never post on here again (which seems to have already taken hold, and for that I apologize).
At the very least, I'll always know what part of town I'm in.
--------