The Hollywood Asshole is a huge fan of the Grand Theft Auto series.  For months and months, I have been waiting for GTA IV.  I bought a PS3 and an HDTV mainly for this game.  I took off work when the game was released.  It has been a little over a month since the game hit the shelves and I’m done with it - I beat the story about a week ago, but I still play because it’s fucking GTA and the games are meant to be enjoyed even after the story.

For those who don’t know, the game focuses on Niko Bellic, a veteran of the Serbian War turned criminal, who has been invited to Liberty City by his cousin, Roman Bellic, who claims to be living the American Dream: living in a mansion, fucking four girls a night, owning many sports cars etc.  Niko accepts the invitation and arrives to the city, only to find out that Roman lied - he lives in a shitty apartment, runs a small taxi depot and is debt with numerous criminals thanks to a gambling addiction.  Thus begins Grand Theft Auto IV, a journey into the criminal underworld of a satirical version of New York City, where shallow materialism is rampant, post-9/11 hysteria has overtaken common sense and everyone seems to be an asshole in some way or another.

The game is massive and beautiful.  You begin in Broker (Brooklyn) and Dukes (Queens).  As you help your cousin out with criminals who are after him (i.e. killing them), you gain unwanted attention from even bigger fish.  Unlike Vice City, Liberty City Stories or Vice City Stories, this game isn’t really about taking over.  In San Andreas, you took over turf, but CJ never really became much other than a rap manager for Madd Dogg.  In GTA IV, Niko kills important people, but all he ever gets is money (and a safehouse in just one mission…and that’s optional).  He goes from rags to better rags.

Niko is by far the best character in any GTA game to date.  He beats Tommy Vercetti only because of an in-depth backstory and a cool twist on why he does what he does.  Vercetti was just a psycho killer who wanted power.  Carl “CJ” Johnson of San Andreas often didn’t make sense to be a GTA protagonist because he seemed like too good a person.  The worst was Victor Vance of Vice City Stories, who was a good person and had major qualms with dealing drugs, but he did so anyway, contradicting his character.  Niko, however, is fully aware he is a killer, despite the fact that he is generally nice to people.  He has accepted his role as a hired gun, but is depressed about it.  He reminds me of Leon from “The Professional” in that aspect.  Niko also has major flaws, such as being unable to forget his past.

The game also has great characters.  Roman, while annoying and a buffoon, soon evolves into someone that greatly cares for Niko.  Little Jacob, a Rastafarian, is easily Niko’s greatest ally in the game and possibly the greatest friend in GTA history - he never betrays you and insists on joining you for missions when he feels Niko is walking into a trap.  Brucie, a loudmouth steroid popper, is a macho moron but he and Niko become unlikely friends.  Brucie is the satiricial epitome of the current American male - he works out non-stop, he talks about boning chicks, has Chinese characters tattooed on his body, yaks on about cool Internet sites and says “bro” way too often.  He is probably the funniest character in any GTA game I’ve played.

The game does have flaws, but the positives greatly outweigh them.  There are a ton of geeks out there on the Internet who claim the game should only get a 6/10 due to these flaws, but there is something mentally wrong with them.  These people must never be happy with anything in their life if the minor bad shit in GTA IV upsets them so greatly.  It really tells you a lot about their mental state.  For a game so massive to have so little wrong with it is incredibly impressive.  Remember, this an open sandbox game and it has GREAT graphics!  The ones on PS2 had OK graphics because the world was so large.  Now we finally have a huge world and amazing looking graphics, but the geeks just bitch how it isn’t as big as San Andreas, there are fewer customizing options and the game is too realistic, i.e. it doesn’t have many action movie missions, where you blow up a dam or something.  Guess what the biggest gripe was with San Andreas?  It was too big, there were too many customizing options and it was too unrealistic i.e. blowing up a dam or something.  The geeks are never fucking happy, but that’s why they are geeks, complaining to each other on message boards when they should be having a real life.  Honestly, I was a geek in high school, but I was never anything compared to the elitist “gamer” set of geeks on the Internet who insult everyone non-stop using racial and homophobic slurs.  It’s disgusting, but the anonymity of the Internet lets them think it’s OK.  I’m sorry, but you people are not gamers - you are geeks.  That is it.  Accept it.  It’s a title you bestowed upon yourselves, like hillbillies wanting to be called “Sons of the Soil.”  You geeks are pathetic complainers and when you get older, you will have no one to love and you will die alone with your dicks in your hands.  Now go post a pic of a lolcat or a faildog.

Anyway… 

Here are the flaws that I found: my main gripe is the story falls apart a bit when the game moves to Bohan (Bronx).  You are introduced to Manny Escuela, who is a completely pointless character.  Instead, they should have removed him and given his missions to Elizabeta Torres, a far more interesting character that you only work for three times before she’s gone from the story.  The Bohan missions are a complete throwaway.  The story gets back on track when you move on into Algonquin (Manhattan) and have to make a pretty difficult decision in killing either Playboy X or Dwayne Forge, two gangsters who ask you to kill the other.  While the choice overall is easy, Niko makes good points about not killing either, and it was a surprisingly tough choice.

But then the game putters out again when a government agency makes you work for them in exchange for a favor.  It reminded me too much of Mike Toreno in San Andreas - both games had a big problem that were resolved by a shady government agency.  Then the game gets back on track when the McReary’s are introduced, but I didn’t really care about Derrick McReary or Kate McReary.  The game tries to introduce Kate as Niko’s love interest, but I didn’t buy it.  I couldn’t care less about them.  Near the end, the game goes back to familiar GTA territory with Italian mafia wars, which was a letdown.

There are also several glitches.  The game froze on me while I was playing darts and again when I parked in front of a fire hydrant as I picked up a friend.  The friend didn’t know what to do and just stood there - it was a semi-cutscene as he walked to the car, so I couldn’t pull up to let him in.  I had no choice but to restart.  That’s all I dealt with regarding glitches, I’m happy to say.

I wasn’t a huge fan of the friendship system.  You have a total of five friends in the game (one optional) and they call you to hangout.  It’s annoying since you have to drive a ways to get to them and then usually do a fairly lame mini-game, but they offer a special ability when they like you enough.  The majority of the abilities get pointless - Roman’s ability is a free taxi when you call him, but you’re so rich later on, a $30 taxi ride doesn’t matter much and they’re usually everywhere.  The same applies with Jacob’s discounted guns.  I’d say the best ability is Dwayne’s (an optional friend since you can kill him earlier in the game), who sends two homies to your location.  I heard you can even call them during missions, which would have been awesome had I learned that before I beat the game.  The guys can take a lot of damage, but Niko calls them off after 12 hours gametime.  I only tolerated the friendship system because you learn more about Niko and his friend when they chat during the drive.

Grand Theft Auto IV is a great game.  Is it my favorite?  I think so.  I still love Vice City and San Andreas, but this game transcended them graphics-wise and character-wise so much.  Plus Liberty City is beautiful - I never get bored of it.  And even the Vigilante missions are much more fun this time around, as are stealing cars for people.  It is easily the best game on PS3 right now.  If you don’t have it, get it.

The mind-controlled gaming headset is on it’s way and it promises to read your thoughts, (versus using a manually operated proxy interface). Sound scary? Well it is. The Emotiv EPOC and is a lightweight and sleek neuroheadset unveiled at the Game Developers conference in San Francisco, and will set you back an estimated $299. You can use it to map different thought waves to perform different actions in video games, and it will positively perform according to the player’s mind. Accoring to EPOC Designs:

The Emotiv headset uses a set of sensors to tune into electric signals naturally produced by the brain to detect player thoughts, feelings and expression. It connects wirelessly with all game platforms from consoles to PCs.

It is slated to recognize 30 different emotions, to name several …

Immersion, excitement, meditation, tension and frustration; facial expressions such as smile, laugh, wink, crossed eyes, shock (eyebrows raised), anger (eyebrows furrowed), horizontal eye movement, smirk and grimace (clenched teeth); and cognitive actions such as push, pull, lift, drop and rotate (on six different axis) as well as a completely new category of action based on visualization, the first of which is the ability to make objects disappear.

Beta testing sessions for this puppy will finally be held in March and April of 2008. While I am sure there will be definite issues in detecting the exact degree of what one player is doing - or thinking - I say, forget gaming, I want to be able to control basic computing using this baby as a secondary interface! Imagine, “Oh, this website is lame” I burrow my eyebrows, and the browser is x’ed out. “I’m just not in the mood to listen to “The Final Countdown” right now!”, I sit akimbo and it skips to another favrotie track of mine. And then, just between you and I, I can set it up where every time my boyfriend watches amateur porn online (pervert) it closes out when he winks. Mwahahaha! Evil? Psh, semantics!

*Video of Emtoiv in action after the Jump …

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The PolyStation 3, a blatant PlayStation 3 rip off is here, and it’s a steaming pile of dogshit. Particularly right after the dog ate a heaping plate of beans and corn. You can’t even plug this 100% cheap plastic, battery powered baby into a television. Instead, it has a mini (ridiculous) screen that “pops” out for your viewing pleasure. Like most imitation products, it is a total let down.

This reminds me of the time we decided against splurging on a trip to Disney World, but instead ventured to the local mall carnival. Halfway through our ferris wheel ride, it broke down! We were stuck in our cart, which was thankfully near ground. Thankfully, or so I thought. That’s when a carnie, dressed like a perve drenched clown, came over and said he was “working out the kinks”. Seemed fine, until he pulled down his clown pants and flashed my little brothers Timmy, Kip and myself his anatomical mix up. What a nightmare. A contorted, wrinkly, vomit inducing nightmare. At least when the characters at Disney take their costumes off and the “magic” is lost, I don’t lose my freaken lunch with it. Ugh.

Want to get your hands on the next best thing if you didn’t make it into the music industry? Gamestop is now taking pre-orders for the RockBand Stage Kit which will ship out on June 23rd. Never heard of it? The RockBand Stage Kit is a $100 add on to the game which provides an “interactive light and smoke stage show”. Sounds totally awesome! Awesome like peeling peanuts out of their shells, or watching a 72 hour Columbo marathon. Not too awesome, huh? I apologize if you were thinking, “I’m so buying this!”, but let’s be honest, you weren’t. It’s like every other cool game add-on out there, just without testicles. There has been a lot of activity in anticipation for this add on though, considering all the game QA’s who fell off their make shift stages and began seizuring into their self made audience of stuffed animals. Ouch.

As if gamers who are already going ungodly hours without sleep playing Mario Galaxy needed help from their favorite speed demon, there is a new* Super Mario energy drink -”Power Up!” - ready to catapult their asses into sleepless brain damage. Now you can host your gamer parties with these puppies - and vodka. Or stay up long enough to get the princess alone to prove maybe she isn’t cock tease. Ehhhh, unlikely.

The 8.4 oz drink, which proves no sector is safe from Super Mario Bro’s grasp, apparently tastes like “blue-raspberry”. Which is a shame because I was hoping it would follow through with its mushroom advertising on the can. I guess it’s not all bad though, considering the last time I ate a mushroom like that Winston Zeddmore showed up on my doorstep and cajoled me into drinking my weight in bourbon and then driving my ex boyfriends car into a river. Yikes, shouldn’t have let me keep those keys.

(*Yes, this drink was released in past times, but with recent questioning I discovered many people did not know of it’s awesomeness. Now you know!)

Dear Santa,

This is JD Sphinx, Zubazpants.com writer. I am writing you my only Christmas wish, to be taken to Madrid to see the pac-man Christmas tree! I know it sounds like the stupidest creation ever, but listen! It is a fully-animated version of the classic arcade game, rendered across thousands of colored LEDs. Of course when they say “fully animated” they really mean it moves as fast as an inebriated sloth - but I can look past that. You see Santa, despite its shortcomings the pac-man tree really shows me the meaning of the Christmas season - video games! After all, what would be grander than waking up Christmas morn to this sparkling beauty. I’ll gaze at it while sipping from my frothy mug and showing grandma pictures of the 50 hottest video game chicks in PC gamer - “Look grammy, a nipple, can you believe it?” I’d call to the children to come hither from the fire place and admire the tree. Of course after learning it’s not an actual arcade game they can really play, a vicious wii saber fight would ensue.  Little Kip would further damage his patched eye and Aunt Betty’s nativity scene would be demolished in the scuffle, but damn it, that’s what the holidays are all about! I know the tickets to Spain may be costly, but wouldn’t this be easier than selling my wedding ring and massive beanie baby collection for thousands? I mean neither of those things truly mean anything to me, but you know the husband, he’s ugly, he has nothing else. That’s where you come in Santa! So please, one trip to see the pac man Christmas tree.

Sincerely,

JD Sphinx

::Additional horribly shot video of the tree in action after the jump …

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The first knock-off light up saber is now on the market for anyone too antsy to wait on practicing their sabering skills with their wii controller. The thing is, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, isn’t available until some time next year. So basically you’re practicing for nothing in my opinion, and this little toy ultimately becomes a short, thin, pathetically incapable dildo in the mean time. Awesome.

That dude teaching sabering lessons at the Jedi Academy must be thrilled though. I can’t imagine how fulfilled he must now feel at the end of the day when he goes home to his room in his aunts poorly lit attic and passes out onto his bed, which is a pile of dozens of stuffed ewoks. Aw.

My favorite part is how these “teachers” are self confessed “heroes”. I mean wielding a saber apparently ain’t that easy. Forget untying little old ladies from railroad tracks, or preventing head on collisions between 18 wheelers with your pinky. If you can wave your saber around like a freaken botard, you might as well wipe your ass with a cheese grater from now on; it couldn’t hurt you because you’re that bad-ass. I think wearing those yoda masks during sex is clearly screwing with these people’s oxygen intake and fucking their brains up. Ah well, you say tomato, I say retarded. As yoda would say, “happy, whatever makes you.” Right.

Is something that could perhaps follow in the footprint that their first T-shirt is making. Though … I’m pretty sure this footprint is a little more like a Paris Hilton boob than a Kim Kardashian butt cheek if size has anything to do with it.

The Web 2.0 Tee has a colored list of all the popular social networking sites beside their icons. You use a permanent marker to check off all the sites you belong to. Then you’re supposed to wear it out and let everyone know just how geeky you truly are. I’m not so sure that’s a ticket to touching a knocker, young male dweebs. Matter of fact that’s a bit more like stuffing your ticket down your throat, digesting it with a cup of mayo, pooping it out, dousing it in gasoline, torching it, then sprinkling the ashes over your shrine for that entirely unknown anime character with those ginormous mammary pillows. Ya know the shrine next to your Zelda soundtracks collection. Hey man, I performed the tests, and they resulted in a resounding “NO pass to the beaver base.” I’m no doctor but I wore a white lab coat and used a clip board so that makes it legit. Pshh, semantics.

Killing people. This is the type of message video games such as Man Hunt 2 and GTAIV are absolutely delivering … among brain dead morons who get high off smoking mother fucking mothballs. The game world took yet another unfair blow to the ballsack for games boasting brutal violence and sexual content. We know the drill. Mass complaints yada yada + I can’t parent for dog shit, yada yada = media conglomerates “cave” under the ESRB verdicts and dilute and re-issue their games, igniting fire in the souls of nerdboxes who now “can’t experience the game the way it’s meant to be played.”

Yo, I didn’t see anyone asking Kubrick to go back to the studio to “re-shoot and re-issue” A Clockwork Orange. Let’s say, we created a game. It’s called PEDOHUNT, where the player gets inside the mind of a child molesting pervo (or David Copperfield, ya know, whatever you’re feeling) that preys on suburban youngin’s. If it’s rated M+ (whether that means AO or not) the 10 year olds who couldn’t get in to see Clockwork Orange are the same 10 year olds who can’t buy the damn game. Give it a rest, it’s a game for crying out loud. While LocoRoco isn’t promoting world peace, sisterhood or racial unity, GTAIV and Man Hunt 2 aren’t the go to documentaries for kiddie’s who aspire to kill a bitch with a rifle.

While I’m not about to go join the army of statement hungry gamers who are currently constructing bombs in their attics to blow Jack Thompson off the planet, I gotta say- in a world where Jewel is allowed to wear clothing below her collar bone, Duane “Dog” Chapman gets more press than the freaken war in Iraq, and Criss Angel is allowed to breathe without catching shit for breaking out of his velvet curtained cage again and somehow tearing off his pink diamond encrusted muzzle, I’m confident when I say motion captured DD funbags are the least of our freaken worries. But seriously, just cut the overwhelming and unnecessary controversy, and bring on the tournies. The game is gonna sell no matter what rating you give it and I just want to see a digi-bloodbath - and no, I ain’t talking no Marilyn Manson and Evan Rachel Wood sex tape style stuff bitches.

And that is the case with very-rarely-tainted-by-virus Mac computers.

While I was getting wasted, tripping and falling in the center of NYC streets while clink-clanking around in an Oscar the grouch garbage can and lid, this Halloween, two pro interweb criminals were caught using a Trojan Horse software that for the very first time has an OS X specific attack. Of course what could be wiser than to place this virus in the vein of, you guessed it, porn! I know what you’re thinking - “But JD, no one uses the internet for porn, so we’re all safe, right?” Well, Mac users visiting Betsiesbackyardbones.com, or whatever, encounter a quicktime codec which disguises itself as video-decoding software, but instead installs rogue code. Evron and other observers do predict that attackers will have a field day with Macs, as well as with Apple’s new mobile platforms… Still, considering how much easier it is, and has always been, to hack the Windows-based platforms, I honestly don’t think Apple is in for that big of a scare - their past infection rates never seem to climb.

I mean cyber dweebs fear attention of the socially normal and blow their freaken load at attention of the uuber geeky. Even if hacking into Macs systems weren’t profitable, as they haven’t been in the past with Apple lagging behind Dell and HP, they would have done it anyway just for winning dweeb drenched raves. Looking at Apples linux heritage I’d say Apple should be alright, for the time being that is. Luckily, the virus can not install itself and requires an authentication code from its user. Somehow however, I don’t think newer mac using pervoids who gain millions of free orgasms from gloriasgoldenshowergalleries.com will neglect to provide this info. This could further open the door of possibility for future threats on a rapidly growing entity. We can’t compare the present with a huge and uncertain future, so the next few years for Mac should prove interesting (think finding holes in OS X security for one - nothing is 100% secure ppl). Still, I would not rule out waiting for Leopard 10.5.x if you’re craving it as much as I am right now - which is a fucking lot man, a whooole fucking lot.

Apple’s season has finally come. Well, all the more reason to step outside your granmammy’s basement, put on some saucy new knickers and meet some real ladies and gents in the flesh my pervacious friends - geez.