Grand Theft Auto IV

The Grand Theft Auto IV trailer came out on Friday. Whoop-de-fuckin'-doo. I was told that GTA4 would be a new evolution in the series. My achin' ass. Evolution, in terms of GTA, is not graphical, and it's not even in the variety of ways you can maim and murder people. It is two things. Firstly, it is the size of the world. Secondly, and more importantly, it is the variety of the people you maim and murder, and I simply didn't see much more variety in the trailer then what was in GTA:SA. GTA4 is not true evolution. True evolution in terms of the GTA series would have been children and retards. If I can't throw a grenade in a baby carriage or run into a Wal-Mart and blow away a couple of 'tards and fat chicks, well, it just isn't an evolution for GTA.

Another question I have: where are all the fucking cripples? GTA4 will simply not be a complete gaming experience if I can't knock some schmuck in a wheelchair on his back with a well-placed shotgun blast. Bloodlust aside, having babies (in their carriages) in the game would be a definite plus, as it would allow Rockstar to blatantly steal yet another cinematic crime drama staple: the climactic scene from The Untouchables. Sure, stealing the entire premise and various plot shifts from Scarface was great, but God damn it, I want to be forced to make the moral decision between saving a baby in a carriage that's rolling down the steps of a train station, continuing to shoot the cocksucker across from me, or taking the high road and shooting the mother.

Now, all this talk of mothers and babies brings up another quip I have with the game: no pregnant women. This is definitely something that GTA4 will need to have. And not just women ready to burst. I mean women in eight different stages of pregnancy, so if you run over a woman who isn't visibly pregnant yet, you get credit for two kills, but you only get in trouble for one! Think of how much fun it would be to wander around hunting for pregnant women with just a tiny, little, barely noticable bump!*

I suppose the overall point I'm trying to make here is that GTA4 desperately needs Rain Man taking one between the eyes. Well, that and infanticide. Lots and lots of it.

P. S. - If we get my wish for pregnant women in GTA4, perhaps we could get some really cool, deformable physics.

P. P. S. - Some people have told me that this article is completely over-the-top, but I'm just acting in everyone's best interests: we all want to see more compelling gameplay.

*Be certain to back up over her to make sure she's dead!

Rachel Ray, Regis Philbin, and Kelly Ripa: The Three Faces of Evil Starring in the Orgy of Filth Known as ABC Morning Television

I was in my doctor's office one morning well over a month ago, and they had ABC playing on a ten inch television in the corner of a room that was thirty feet across. Now, because I go HIP, this was the waiting room for people going into surgery, podiatry, opthamology, or neurology. I guess they decided to make people with brain problems, eye problems, foot problems, and problems that require surgical reconciliation of any kind wait together in a room for some reason. I guess that reason would be, "Well, why the fuck not?" The problem at hand here is not that they had people with issues pertaining to three completely unrelated fields of medicine and people with issues pertaining to one extremely general field of medicine waiting in a room together. The problem at hand is that they had people in pain waiting in a room with ABC morning television playing on the television. I can imagine how the meeting went now: "Hmm, how can we make people sitting around in pain for hours on end (because we've booked each doctor's appointment slot with four appointments instead of one) more comfortable? I know! Inflict more pain on them! Ha ha ha ha ha!"

So, I come into the waiting room at the tail end of Live with Regis and Kelly, and they have on the Senior Editor (or some shit) from Wired magazine, who's showing off a bunch of dogshit phones with needless features and horrendous prices. Regis plays up the whole "I'm an old fogey and I don't like this here technology!" thing while Kelly listens to music playing through headphones connected via Bluetooth to a cell phone with an mp3 player in it, all the while doing a dance that just reeks of "I'm not actually listening to any music", and the idiotic crowd thinks it's fucking hilarious. After this, some chick from American Idol who can't sing, named Alice McGhee or something, comes on and sings. In a move of mercy, the show cuts out before she finishes.

(Does anyone, like me, remember when Wired was a legitimate technology magazine, and not just another run-of-the-mill, unpaid advertisement for overly small, inaccessible objects you don't need? No? Just me? Alright, moving on.)

To the people who are curious as to how I've failed to see ABC morning television up until this point, go back in the article and read the part where my health insurance comes in the form of an HMO, and consider that because the state of health care in this country is, as Lewis Black would say, "a fruitful fucking waster", I'm only allowed to have one hundred medical appointments of any kind each year, not excluding any recurring appointments such as physical therapy or the intense, daily psychology that I so desperately need.

So, on comes Felicity Huffman, and as she comes out to an over-exaggerated applause from a suspiciously all-female crowd clad entirely in dogshit emo glasses, the camera shows an incubus a young woman with fake blonde hair and a bullshit perm that cost enough to feed all the starving children in the world three times over gasping "I LOVE HER!" What about her is it that you love, exactly? Is it her wooden portrayal of an insensitive, air-headed adulterer who's not happy that she "has" to stay home alone for eight hours out of the day and live the high-life, so she works out her frustrations by having kinky sex on a ladder with the only kind of man she's attracted to: an illegal immigrant from Mexico who's landscaping her fucking attrium?

As my HMO-employed doctor called me in after waiting somewhere in the area of thirty-three hours, I recapped what I had seen on ABC over the period of time I was waiting, and could only pray that the pain my doctor inflicted on me would be physical, and not mental. My mind could take no more. I was John McCain on the final plane out of Vietnam. The only thought that came to my mind after recapping what I had seen was a wish for the same thing to happen to Regis Philbin, Kelly Ripa, Rachel Ray, and Felicity Huffman as Bill Hicks once wished would happen to drivers who are the first in line at the red light and the last to see the light turn to green: "Finally, the guy snaps, 'Oh, shit!' and putters through the yellow, and I'm sitting here stuck at the same light. I'm thinking, 'I hope that guy dies on his way home. I hope he gets cut in two by a train in front of his kids. Those kids can watch their moron daddy wiggle on the hot pavement like a worm cut in half. You're too fucking stupid to drive, you should've been a blowjob!"

It occured to me a moment ago that I would be in the unfortunate position of being unable to knock ABC as a whole because Day Break was quality entertainment, but then I remembered that ABC fucking cancelled it! Day Break and Lost are perfect examples of everything I hate about the two-faced American viewing public. When it comes to Day Break, the response is, "What, plot devices? No! Why God, why must I be forced to use expend a tiny amount of my neural energy to follow a plotline?" Yet, when a show like Lost comes on, people exclaim "Ooh, plot devices! How unique and interesting!" completely ignoring the fact that Lost doesn't have a single plot device, it just has hundreds (literally, hundreds) of unsolved problems. Plot devices are used to fix seemingly unfixable problems, not create them!

I didn't put up the preceding rant the day said events occured because I had some shit to do (SEE: Recovering via an IV drip of grain whisky directly into my temples, as well as mechnical and visual stimulation in the form of Knuckles the Enchinda in Sonic the Hedgehog), so I decided I would reward you for reading this far and thus proving yourself more patient than the average American public by inflicting further pain on myself: I was going to provide you with an account of an intentional follow-up viewing of ABC morning television. Unfortunately, I turned it on a few minutes late, so I was forced to throw something large enough at my television to destroy it completely with a single blow when I saw that I was just in time for the obligatory low-angle shot of Rachel Ray from behind. When Dr. Phil talks about apples and pears, he isn't fucking around.

P. S. - This is already a month and a half past, but Brett Favre refused to retire yet again. Maybe the additional season of play for him will allow football commentators to finally make their insane commentaries sound cohrent on how it's the open receivers' fault when Brett Favre overthrows a pass to them by thirty yards.

P. P. S. - In the future, expect postscripts. Lots of them.

P. P. P. S. - Beware the Ides of March. Always.