Never Clever

I bought GTA IV, played it for a week and then stopped. Some of it is Rock Band’s fault, but mainly the game doesn’t do it for me anymore. GTA III was an amazing experience. Vice City was more of the same fun. By San Andreas, it just feels like work: go here, get this, do that, drive around. Even driving around looking for new stuff doesn’t thrill me. I bought the most recent copy hoping all the glowing reviews reflected something new. Junot Diaz sums it up for the WSJ:

GTA III was the tipping point: Everything else after was, no matter how awesome, just another better brighter, smoother version of the same . . . What else is the new GTA not? Well, despite all the critical adulation over GTA IV’s characters and purported subtlety, this isn’t a game that is nuanced or subtle.

If you like the article even just a tiny bit, I heartily recommend Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. And it’s nice to think of the WSJ copyeditors having to ok the article’s language as is.

Interesting to me for the bits they discovered in well-known songs’ master tracks:

Even a seminal punk band like the Clash yielded some surprises. Even wonder why the drums sound so good on “I Fought the Law”? Because there’s two drummers on it (or more likely, drummer Topper Headon recorded his part twice)—something that became clear when Brosius picked the mix apart. Thus, the drum parts you play in Rock band are a composite of those two original drum tracks. The Spanish backup vocals that you’re used to hearing on the middle verse of “Should I Stay Or Should I Go” originally ran through the whole song; and the parts are still there on the tapes—You can hear a little more of the Spanish bits on Rock Band than you can on the record

In the interests of keeping fun levels low, the first thing that happened after I created my Rock Band band was a warning that while I could name the band “Trucker Sex” if I wanted to, it would appear as “ROCKBAND1″ or some generic placeholder text. This is to prevent offending the legions of small children who’ve spent $170 on a game for their $300-500 console. It also suggests a deep disconnect between theory and implementation; who’s protecting me from being called any number of inaccurate ethnic and sexist slurs by those kids on X-Box Live? No one, that’s who, which is why my headset is still in the packaging a year later.

Is “Trucker Sex” truly offensive? I don’t think so. I think it’s sordid. It was two words that came together one night (and left each other early the next morning) in a perfect coupling. I like sordid. The Hold Steady^{1, 2}, Raymond Chandler³, James Ellroy, I’ve got 0 interest in starting each day with tallboys and booger sugar, but I sure as hell like hearing about it. It’s every “bad” kid when you were growing up, that feeling of being scared and feeling sad for them at the same time. Didn’t even want to be invited to Krylon huffing parties, but it’s fun to imagine it. So cram it, failed nanny from Washington state (and cram that tone of “Do you really want to go through with this”; you ought to be praising me for spelling two consecutive words correctly given typical video game message board dross). We’re sticking with the name. Heck, the first couple covers (inspired by chico’s inspired design exercise) are already in progress.

1. “White wine and some tallboy cans. They powered up and they proceeded to jam, man.”

2. “Mary’s got a bloody nose from sniffing Margarita mix.”

3. “I had been shot so full of dope to keep me quiet that I was having the French fits coming out of it. That accounted for the smoke and the little heads on the ceiling light. The doped whisky was probably part of somebody else’s cure.”