This is probably the best question Blogger is likely to ask

Q. Why does the taste of pennies remind you of losing a tooth?

A. I was born into a really poor family and one day (of many) we had nothing to eat. I dug around in my pockets hoping to find anything edible, when suddenly I found a penny.

"Yes!" I thought.

So I eat the penny. I lost four teeth and cracked a further twelve, but the important thing is I was taken to hospital after the penny lodged itself in my intestines and the hospital fed me.

The moral of the story?

If you don't have anything to eat; eat a penny.

-----

The reason it's posted here is because Blogger will never give me anything like that again. I miss the children in the sprinkler question. That was simple to tear apart.

GTA:IV from a casual standpoint.

GTA:IV from a casual standpoint.

Spoiler warning: There will be spoilers about early missions in this entry so don't complain to me if you're butthurt that I spoiled a mission that you would play five minutes into the game.

Recently I indulged in what could very well be described as bit of a gaming binge. I had hardware failures left and right and I was already overdrawn with my bank, so I figured I should amuse myself a little for some RnR. I played TF2 a little, but got bored of it so I finally decided to buy Left 4 Dead (great game, actually. I only hope Valve is going to hurry up and release more compaigns) and finally Silent Hill: Homecoming (yet to play it) and GTA:IV for PC.

We're here to discuss GTA:IV, so forget about the other games mentioned.

Let's just go over my specs, shall we?

Windows XP x86
AMD 64 x2 6400+ BE (3.20GHz)
nVidia 9600GT 512MB
4GB Geil Black Dragon RAM (3.12 detected)
Abit AN68SV MoBo
Audio Kontrol 1 External Soundcard

First of all, I pirated it to make sure it would run on my system (Note to R*: That 200k you spent trying to make this game unpirateable? You failed miserably), played a few missions and then during the third or fourth mission (the car chase one) I hit a memory leak. I go speeding into an alleyway - overjoyed that I was yet to hit a wall - and then suddenly the frame rate drops. I sat back and watch my car move at maybe 2fp/s and shrugged it off assuming that it was my CPU playing up or overheating. The interesting thing is that the audio worked 100% fine, it came up in real time (hearing Roman screaming at me for losing the car and the Mission Failed sound) yet my car had moved maybe half a metre.

I uninstalled it deciding it was a problem with the pirated version and did a bit of research and that's when I found out that I was one of thousands of people who had came across this exact same error in various parts of the game. Some people can't actually get the game to run, which surprised me until they told us the settings they were trying to run in at.

Thump's note: I know why you do this - I do the same thing. I get a game and the first thing I do is head into the options menu and crank up the visual settings, but remember that GTA:IV is a port and you're trying to play it on settings that are higher than even the consoles can play (some people were playing at twice the resolution). Take a deep breath, sit back and lower your settings. I'm playing it on 800x600 to get an increase in other settings.

Now I'm feeling a little hesitant to buy GTA:IV, but on the 24th I decided that all of these problems would be ironed out eventually, so I bought the game hoping that R* would hurry up and release patches. Let's just go over the major problems I've encountered so far.

1. Games for Windows Live/Rockstar Social Club - Really, if you're going to release a game on Steam, take your excessive bullshit out of the way. It's awful, uneccesary and you're only doing it because you don't trust Steam have the piracy issue under control.
   
2. Memory leaks - What the hell, R*? I understand that you guys have a deadline to keep but that is no excuse for problems this big. This makes games unplayable and from what I can see there's no way to combat this. Once it hits it's game over, if you haven't saved then you're fucked. The most annoying thing about the memory leaks are that it can sometimes hit in the menu... go figure.
   
3. Sometimes the game doesn't actually load - I've no idea what the hell this is about. You can get it working only by restarting the game (I spent an hour trying to load it up). When I first installed the game I tried to run the graphics benchmark and during the loading screen it just cycled the song (which isn't set to loop) and then the montage continued to loop. No graphics benchmark at all.
   
4. Games for Windows Live - Once you're signed in (online or offline) you'll get a message at the bottom of the screen informing you that you can push "Home" at any point to enter the GFW:L service. That's all well and good, but sometimes when you press the Home key and the GFW:L overlay appears, and on occasion it will stop responding entirely. Also, it appears that the GFW:L account stops you from accessing Steam's "Friends" tab. I've pressed shift and tab and got it working once... but of course it wouldn't let me close the Steam Overlay.

These are the things I've noticed that can actually stop you from playing the game. GFW:L/RSC is the most annoying thing in my opinion. It wouldn't let me save my game because my wireless connection had faultered whilst I was creating a GFW:L account. Why not just tie it into the Steam system? It does the exact same job and you don't need to fight with the damn thing to get it working.

What do I think of this as a port? I think it's probably one of the worst ports in gaming history (yes, even worse than the MGS2 ports). It seems like those long months they were porting this game they completely ignored the optimisation and spent all their time figuring out how to stop the pirates - which is a total failure. Of course, in order to pirate the game you have to jump through hoops like a show horse on steroids and have to create accounts for GFW:L and RSC which can be a bit of a hassle, but even then it's nothing severe. Once you've made those two accounts, you block the applications from accessing the internet and you're playing the game. The only possible way to prevent piracy (as far as I can see) is to refuse offline play, and let's face it - that would be a disaster.

Don't get me wrong, I feel a lot of sympathy for R* and other PC game developers. The pirates are damaging the world of PC gaming, but instead of taking advantage of it, they brag about the game being "impossible to crack" which is enough to motivate any pirate. The gaming world is suffering the exact same knee jerk reaction that almost destroyed the music industry, and quite frankly, it's quite pathetic. I admit, I have pirated games in the past and will continue to do so, but if that game is worthy of my money than by all means I've no problem whatsoever in buying the game and supporting the developers (most of the time - they really aren't worth shit).

Let's swing the argument in another direction for a second.

PC gaming isn't suffering via piracy - everything is. PC is the easiest because it requires no modification whatsoever, the 360 is somewhat easy to modify (not sure how far the dev is on the new drives) and the PS3 is naturally resilliant to modification because nobody wants to spend a week downloading a 50GB game (along with the blu-ray burner and disks). Piracy has been around for ages and will continue to thrive as long as there's something that people want for nothing -- that's just human nature and greed.

R* fucked up with GTA:IV for the PC. Yes, I pirated the game but I decided to give them the benefit of the doubt and bought the game (which I'm now beginning to regret). My chief complaint is that the game isn't optimised at all... it's an awful port of the 360 version, and they need to take a long hard look at their list of priorities and figure this shit out - preventing piracy is one thing, but preventing gameplay is something else.

Update: I actually had every intention of posting this the other day when I had wrote it, but my internet disconnected (it hates WPA encryption) and I thought "fuck it" and went to bed. Since then I've tried just about every fix I can imagine. I found an interesting fix and tried that... it gave me better graphics, but I still had the annoying stuttering glitch. My message from R* was that my processor wasn't powerful enough to run the game constantly (another nail in the R* Toronto coffin), so I replied immediately with the system specifications that they had handed out, and to no surprise of mine I got no response from them.

Sigh.

On the forum I linked to earlier, a topic caught my attention. It was entitled How I fixed my stuttering/lagging problem. Intrigued, I looked to see what it said and promptly laughed like a crackwhore being tickled with a feather by their dealer. Earlier today I figured I'd try it just to try and improve my graphics at full screen and holy shit it worked. I actually played more than two missions without a sign of lag... I was fucking amazed.

And I swear I'm going to destroy the next person who says this game doesn't work because "it's still in development". If R* Toronto weren't so eager to get the game out for Christmas, we wouldn't have had to go through this whole bullshit. Sometimes you just need to spend more time with a game before you release it - and this is one of those times.

Old Saint Nick.

So I've been meaning to update this for some time but I was either busy, or I'd forget clean about it. The past two days I've been telling myself to update but I just didn't get around to it - but now things are different!

As I type this it's Christmas Eve, it's 7°C with a general humidity of around 75% with good view - these are perfect conditions for the man we all know as Santa Claus to make his attack. I hear you all saying "Oh, but Thump - Santa wouldn't attack us!", well you're all horrendously wrong.

For me to explain this, we must look at our old friend from Lapland in many lights - some of which may very well disturb you to the point of insanity... but that's a risk we're going to have to take. Come with me as we journey into the darker side of "Jolly Old Saint Nick".

*Note: Thump is drinking so this post may or may not make sense*

The story of Mr. Claus can be dated back to the early days of Greece. A bishop by the name of "Myra" who was intensely generous and gave people gifts and shit, now that doesn't sound too bad, right? Wrong. He showed particular interest in three young girls who he gave stuff too so they wouldn't have to become prostitutes, wait, you still think he sounds like a nice guy? Well, now I have to educate you in the early days of Christianity.

See, the 4th century Christians just loved buggery (particularly young boys), and they liked their kids young - three young girls and a bishop? Aside from being a somewhat interesting sounding sitcom, that's what we now call "grooming"! Anyway, the whole idea of being generous stuck and some drunkard came in from ye olde pube and started jabbing off to his hooker about this bishop called "Mah... my... ny? Ny... ni... Nick!".

AND SANTA CLAUS WAS BORN!

Warning: At this point I'm somewhat drunk and have decided to make this short so I don't get into obscure shit.

Anyway, it's nearly Christmas and I've wrote this in about an hour and a half because I've been distracted.

So, as the story goes - Santa comes down our chimney and puts presents under the tree for all of those who have been good... those who have been naughty little brats get a lump of coal (it's officially Christmas - have a good one). Now, that's all well and good - they had open fires back then. Santa coming down the chimney was believable... but now we have electric and full grate gas fires, he can get down the chimney but then... then he hits a dead end. What?

He's a fucking Suliban!

Don't believe me? Explain how he can get through those grates on your electric fire? He's been genetically enhanced!

Now, I'm going to finish off the rest of the beer in my fridge, read over this tomorrow and cringe.

Good night to you all.

The irony of advertisement.

So I was thinking last night, "Maybe I should finally update TWAiSi" but I didn't have anything to write about. I've been exhausted recently due to ridiculous amounts of coding and of course the whole 'trying to write a full length, double disked album' kind of gets me down at times... plus college on top of that.

Then on my way back from college, I realised my error: human stupidity will never let me down.

First thing that gave me a "wait wat" moment was when I noticed a black guy walking down the street a few feet in front of me. I couldn't help but admire his jacket in all it's plain, ugly, grotesque glory. Seriously, if that jacket were a person, that person would be shot dead out of kindness. Yes, it was that bad.

The interesting thing about this jacket is that it read "Pride and honour: Modified threads". Now, I pondered over this for a few moments and realised that this man had obviously went to a cheap thrift store, bought this hideous jacket and then sent it into this prideful company to modify the stitching. It makes perfect sense! That, however, still left the question as to why this man would degrade himself to wearing such shit... and then I realised!

This guy was walking around making us all feel so much better for the terrible clothes we were wearing. Fuck, his clothes were so bad he had to get somebody to modify the stitching for fuck sakes. You could literally see the sheer delight of the homeless people lining the pavement, secure in the knowledge that they are better dressed than at least one person in the world who probably has a job and a home!

Literally five minutes after I saw a man worse dressed than Jeremy Clarkson himself, I noticed an interesting little advertisement on the side of a truck. Now, I can't remember the exact wording, but I'll try my best:

"Traffic Direct

Keeping the traffic moving"

...it said as it was broke down on a major road heading out of a busy city centre in the middle of rush hour.

Well shit, that's the exact kind of company I want to be directing my traffic. At this point, it's worth mentioning that reading that gave me an audible laugh... however what I witnessed afterwards literally split my sides.

They had there own fucking bollards.

That's right. Not content with causing a traffic jam, they created a contraflow too! You could literally see the sheer delight on the Police Officers face as it suddenly hit him that he now had paperwork to fill in (in case you're completely retarded, diverting traffic is illegal unless you are working for the council or similar, and even then you need to fill in paperwork and all that fun) as he took the registration of the vehicle (I think it was 70t4l 7ard).

As much as I would love to write more about this interesting subject of more idiots, I'm afraid I have to be leaving to do... that's right! Work.

Have fun.

Stop saying "cummed" you fucking idiots.

Remember when you first went into school and learned about languages and numbers? Remember when you were told off because you said "I've beened to the park"? Right, you were told off because (now this might surprise you) the word "beened" isn't a word at all! I just made it up, right off the top of my head which is exactly what we used to do when we were kids. We invented our own grammar and we didn't let a silly thing like the English language get in our way!

Now you're all grown up and you still don't let a silly thing like the English language get in your way. Do you know what we call people like you?

You guessed it! Idiots.

Seriously, you are all a bunch of idiots. The lowest form of complete and utter fucking inbred retards.

Now you're all more than welcome to come and say "lol but if u hang sum1 dey havnt ben hung dy wer hanged" and to a certain extent, yes, that's true. Unfortunately those grammar laws are kept around for the sake of tradition. The language has long since evolved since then and you're still an idiot.

Kill yourself.

Stop emailing me.

Really, it's getting annoying. The more you email me, the less time I have to do my work and the less time I have to actually post new material. I'm juggling a lot of different things here so please be patient. Doing so much at once is difficult as it is without having to sift through "OMG U NEVA POST NEMOR".

Jesus, now I know how Maddox feels.

Stop suggesting topics to write because I won't write them, even if I was intending on it. Writing about fat girls might sound funny in your head, but I can assure you it isn't half as funny when put into context. One day, when I get around to it, I'm going to write a script for my email that filters all the common misspellings (such as 'u', and 'yoo') simply because the second I see that, I click 'delete'.

Long and short of it: Kill yourselves and save me some time.

Feminism

http://theproblemwithwomentoday-reality2008.blogspot.com/

Words actually fail me. I mean literally fucking fail me.