GTA4: Jamaican Heat

GTA IV - Jamaican Heat

I do not play much. Just got my Xbox360 home, again, I am starting, again, to play GTA IV. And I will probably post here the missions that I complete. Do not expect me to spam the blog, as I do not play much. Really. And that is especially true because I am playing with an old CRT TV. That makes it quite difficult to read and see some details. I really want to buy a 22″ LCD monitor to use with the XBox and with my Mac, when working. It needs to have HDMI. That amounts to about 150 Euros, that I can not afford at the moment. So, I will need to keep playing on TV.

Back to the mission, Jamaican Heat is done. The task is to help Little Jacob to kill some guys. Not anything fancy. The interesting thing? Little Jacob smokes too much. When driving the car with Jacob inside, you will notice the smoke getting out from the window. Great detail, Rockstar!

Zuma’s Revenge

Zuma's Revenge

In an old post I wrote about Zuma. I bought it for the ClickWheel iPod. It is a nice game, playable and enjoyable. Unfortunately it is too small (or I am too good). After 17 runs (yeah, iPod counts the number of times you run an application) I reached The End of the game. I am sure it weren’t just 17 plays, but never more than 25.

Today I was looking into the iTunes store and found that there are no interesting games for ClickWheel iPod. Then, visited PopCap website searching for more games from the same company. I found that there is a followup on Zuma, not for the iPod but for the PC/Mac. Downloaded the trial version, that gives you the ability to play for 60 minutes. After 60 minutes I reached the middle of the game (about 26 levels) and had 8 lives (you start with three lives).

Now, I do not think this game will worth the $20 that it costs for more two or three hours of play… but if run smoothly in the iPod… that would might be different…

Zuma – iPod Game

Zuma is the second game I buy for my iPod Classic 5th Generation. The first one was a car simulator. Let me say it is crap. Great it was just 5 Euros.

In that occasion I saw the Zuma screenshot on iTunes Store and noticed it might be a nice game, as the type of game is very adequate to the iPod touch wheel.

After about one year I decided to buy it. The game is pretty nice and playable. I just have two complains. First, the music. It is always the same. I think it repeats every five seconds or so. Yeah, I know I can make my iPod musics to play during the game, but the music could be better anyway.

My second complain is regarding efficiency. The developers of the game know exactly the hardware where the game will run, but the game still have problems running there. Sometimes you notice glitches in the music, and more rarely, on the game itself.

Ford Fiesta @ Forza Motorsport 3

Forza Motorsport 3 has some good simulation decisions, which makes more difficult to handle cars than in other games, like Need For Speed.

At the moment I just finished running with a Ford Fiesta Zetec S, like the one in the picture. Accordingly with the web, this darling has 1.6cc and a lot of horse power.

But then, I own a Ford Fiesta from 2003, with 1.2cc, and I get easier to 180Km/h than with Forza Motorsport 3. OK, I confess I can not get more than 180Km/h and with Forza Mortorsport 3, after being with the accelerator down for kilometers, it raised to 200Km/h. Or that, or I have too much love to my car

Forza Motorsport 3

I bought a new xbox 360 and, instead of buying the vanilla edition or just the Elite version, I bought the Elite version with a game, Forza Motorsport 3 included. There was another option, but I can not recall what game it was. But this game is more on my style. I like racing games.

At the moment I am with some problems. First, I have a two decade old television set. It is mono, it is small, but has a scart port. Good enough for my first games. Then, I am not used to the controllers yet. I am used to the usual triangle keys, up, down, left, right… also, now the controllers are analogical. That makes a difference as well.

My first win was being able to drive a Ford Fiesta. Unfortunately it is the new model, not my 4 years old car. But it is always cool to try your car on a video game.

Max Payne (2008)

Yes, I normally pass a long time without seeing a movie, but when I start it takes some time to end. Hehehe. Kidding.

This time it was Max Payne. You know, I played to some of the Max Payne games and I liked them. Not because it was just another first person shooter, but because it has some nice movements from the main character. In fact I think that what sold Max Payne games was that allied with the nice performed videos.

Unfortunately the movie could not mimic both things. The atmosphere is similar to the video game, but the main character is not. It just has two or three movements that remind us of the video game. Remaining is crap.

Regarding the story, it is easy to predict. It is just the same story of every time where the criminals are the… oops, do not want to spoil the story. Also, the story is not complete. A lot of loose ends are present, that make the watcher ask, and why, and what happened, and how, and so on. This is not the kind of questions I like to have after watching a movie unless the answer is really in the movie and some though lead us to the answer. I do not think that is the case with this movie.

To conclude, the movie was prepared for a sequel, as can be inferred from the last scenes (after credits). As far as I can say from searching IMDB it is not being prepared. More and more directors think that following a good character (say comics books or a video game) is enough to have a good book. That is not true and Max Payne is one of the examples. If you want another, look to Transformers. I am not sure how they managed to get a sequel…

Diablo III – The Monk

And as a coincidence, Blizzard just announced the forth character for Diablo III. It is a monk and it seems tough.

Diablo II – Druid game

Yes, I know that Diablo II has about 9 years of life. Nevertheless Diablo III is taking too much time and I needed some interesting game for vacations.

In previous games I finished Diablo II Lord of Destruction only with the Assassin character. This year it was the time to finish it up with Druid.

As I lack imagination or creativity on naming my characters I choose the names based on well known characters. That is, my druid’s name was Panoramix. Hope you know it. If not, you can have less culture than myself

When building a Diablo character you can not invest on all of its powers. Druid can use shape shifting, nature phenomenon, or some kind of summoning creatures. To be able to have all these powers well developed you need to play more than once each level (in normal mode). Panoramix was built based on nature phenomenon, like fire, lava, tornado and the like.

My next character is a Barbarian, named Conan. At the moment at the beginning of the third act (just killed Duriel yesterday).