More Sims, Minesweeper: The Movie, and Uncharted 2

Hi Danda,

So, now that your wife is in Spain, I imagine you will be playing more video games again! :)

I haven't played a lot lately, but I'm still itching to complete GTA IV. It's taking me forever.

I do like games like The Sims or The Movies and such, although I find it's easy to get tired of them if you don't really have a defined objective. In The Sims, your objective of course was to improve in your job (or at least I think it was), and that was fun until you had to have a certain number of friends in order to progress in your job, which meant you had to have people over and then talk to them again and again till your sim basically collapsed due to exhaustion. It just got tiring after a while. Years ago when I was playing it and got bored with it, I decided to just create a commune of 10 people in it to make it more exciting, but I didn't have enough bathrooms and they kept peeing on the floor and threw their trash everywhere. Shocking.

Picross is fun, as is Minesweeper. I don't think the payoff in Picross of seeing a new image or animation is really more exciting than simply winning in Minesweeper, though. Also, have you seen the trailer to the Minesweeper movie? Hehe.

By the way, you wrote JR that you're going to get Uncharted 2? I saw a review of Uncharted 2 a while ago and it looks awesome. It's too bad they're not making this into a PC game. Sad also that it's not even out for the Xbox 360, even though that's the console I think I'd be getting if I were to get a console. Oh well.

Also, there seems to be a scene in the game where you have to fight your way along a moving train, and it reminds me very much of a really old game where you also had to do that, but for the life of me, I can't remember what that game was.... Any ideas?

Anyway, have a good day!

Game on,
-- SuperViv

The Sim that cooked itself and the ubiquitous GTA IV

Hi Danda!

Oh yeah, I've heard a lot of bad things about Acer. This girl I knew had a laptop by them, too, and after a while it kept switching off randomly. I suppose it also was related to an overheating graphics card, even though she probably didn't have the best of the best, since the only games she was ever interested in playing were Minesweeper and The Sims. (I think she got annoyed with The Sims and stopped playing when she finally found her Sim a husband, who then promptly set himself on fire and burned to death when he tried to cook a meal.)

I have a Dell Inspiron 8200 and I've had it since 2003 or 2004, I believe. A few months ago it broke, showing graphic errors and not loading correctly. Customer service told me it was most likely the graphics card (duh) but that they didn't have parts for such an old machine anymore, so they couldn't fix it. Then, a few weeks ago, my brother took it apart, cleaned everything out with a brush and put it back together, and miraculously, it worked again for a few days before it once more refused to start up. At any rate, it was a good laptop and I was happy with it for a long time. Maybe I'll find a used graphics card for it on eBay.

As for Beyond Good & Evil, I actually played it for a while before I had to reinstall Windows. However, I didn't find it particularly gripping, or at least the first hour wasn't. But I suppose I should give it another shot, since you seem to like it so much!

I think the city and the cars in GTA IV do look really nice, and it's fun to see the effects on your car that come from crashing into stuff. The other day I crashed into a concrete block on the road and the car headlight broke and the concrete block got cracks. As for the characters, I suppose some look better than others but I find they're generally nicely animated. Maybe the style isn't entirely aesthetically pleasing for everyone. Maybe it's your projector's fault! (Kidding.)

As for some of the negative things about GTA IV, my brother pointed out recently that sometimes there is a lot going on at the same time (someone talking, you have to watch the map, instructions show up on the screen that you have to read), and he found that rather annoying about the game. However, I for one will keep playing!

You're the second person to tell me that Ghostbusters is awkward. Someone told me it doesn't look nice and most of the time you have to use some device that slows you down, which he finds annoying. I've watched the movies way back when, but from the two minutes of the game I played in a game store once, it didn't seem like something I'd want to get. Then again, it was the Wii version I tried, and I suppose you shouldn't judge a game by its Wii version.

Well, let me know what you think of Jade Empire. I haven't played it, but it looks promising on Gametrailers.com.

So long!
-- SuperViv