The Cheezy Blog

It’s Wednesday, which means a new Zero Punctuation is available for our viewing pleasure. This week Yahtzee is espousing the virtues and deriding the foibles of Rockstar’s most recent installment of the celebrated Grand Theft Auto series, GTA 4, with his usual celerity.

He makes some good points, the game is hillariously fun to mess about in, its lauded “sandbox” world means you can bimble around to your heart’s content without ever really getting anywhere, but still ending up with a sense of achievement.

The game is not without it’s issues however, for me the most notable is the awful save system when you are doing the missions. The main problem is that the missions are often preceeded with a long, drawn out expositionary element, where you have to drive accross the city without attracting the attention of the errant LCPD, sometimes following gang bangers or drug dealers who drive like a senile old grandparent. Once you arrive at your destination, you then usually have to face a fast paced gun battle of some description, which often ends up with you waking up outside a hospital to find some kind doctor has half-hitched a sum of cash that could keep the NHS going for a decade, and a mocking text message asking you if you’d like to repeat the entire experience, exposition and all.

This is probably the single most frustrating gameplay element I’ve encountered this side of the Japanese version of Super Mario Bros. 2. Several times I have contemplated defenestrating my XBox due to this, and it is almost responsible for me giving up on the game entirely. The ability to save when and where you want to would, in my mind, make the game far more eminently playable.

He does take issue with the game’s somewhat subdued colour pallet. But I don’t think it really detracts from it as much as he seems to believe. Like most cities, New York is a dirty, swrawling mass of dull grey buildings, and I feel that this is reflected well.

Just seen this awesome graffiti animation. It must have taken weeks to paint and film, and I’m surprised it didn’t get the guy put away.
The video is very freaky but is truly excellently executed.

It’s well known that Aussies love their beer, but it never really sunk in before until I read this BBC News story about an Australian man who was pulled over, only for the police to find a case of beer strapped in with a seatbelt and a 5 year old child sitting on the floor of the car.

The mind boggles sometimes.

I know I’m a few days late with this, but it would seem Yahtzee doesn’t appreciate the world of hatemail he recieved over this review of Super Smash Bros. Brawl.

He’s hit back with this run down of the worst mail he’s recieved, ridiculing and correcting where neccessary.

Good stuff.

Snickers bars, after two decades under that name, are being returned to their original and far superior name of Marathon, The Telegraph is reporting.

It took them long enough to realise no one liked the name Snickers.

Just one or two gig each month…

iD software today announced that they were working on the 4th sequel in their legendary Doom series, commonly considered to be one of the most influential series of games of all time.

They’re still in the process of hiring developers for it at the moment, so the game itself will still be a long way off. But here’s hoping it’s at least as good as Doom 3 was.

NaturalMotion’s europhoria seems a fairly funky idea. Kind of like intelligent rag dolls, saving you the need to hire expensive motion capture equipment, or rely on keyframe animation, giving you a slightly different result each time. The demo is pretty fun too.It’s currently being used in a couple of recent games, including the much hyped GTA IV.

Roman Cortés has done an exceptional image of Homer Simpson using just CSS styled text.

Ned Batchelder has added some JQuery magic to the image to show how it’s put together.

How it is possible to find someone guilty of first degree murder, when there is no body / evidence that the "victim" in question is dead?

I couldn’t say whether he did it or not, but it seems that the whole thing has been based on circumstance.