Save Points

Oy. We were dogsitting this last week and barely got any sleep--I think I logged about six hours a night at best and four at worst--which conveniently robbed me of the willpower to do anything more productive than GTA:LC. This means that I've progressed quite a bit further in the game and yet probably won't be able to tell you much about it.

I've made it to, Staunton Island, the second island, for example, and I'm mortified by how little of it I remember: tons of stuff around the safehouse from GTAIII, sure, but after it's all gets pretty foggy. In a way, this makes playing the levels more challenging. On the other hand, a lot of these levels don't need any help in the challenge department. They're more than sufficiently rough, particularly missions with the first-person-rail-shooter perspective: it doesn't matter if I turn the inversion-look option on or off, I still end up pointing up to the sky when I'm trying to lower my gun sight and vice-versa.

Not that I can really talk: when I first hit Staunton Island, I spent a ton of time just driving around, looking for hidden packages, stealing cars for a garage that'd pay me, won a few streetraces. It must've been at least three hours before I even attempted the first mission. I'm sorta bummed they didn't throw in any gmabling minigames a la San Andreas since there's a casino on Staunton, but I'm also glad I don't have to exercise, or buy clothes or shoot hoops, to be honest.

And the game quality seems a little higher overall--or maybe my expectations have finally drooped sufficiently. Danny Mastrogiorgio, the guy voicing Fred Flinstone/Tony Cipriani, has grown on me over time with some of the line readings in his scenes being utterly convincing or amusing. The guy doing Donald Love (the same actor who plays Finn on The Sopranos? Huh!) is also quite good. And the chatter from the passerby is funnier than it's been in a while, probably because it's making fun of start-up gibberish from 1999 and I've been hearing more of that stuff now in 2006. ("www dot we're all going to be rich dot com!") And I'm relieved that even this far into the game (30% or so), dying is never that much of an inconvience, leaving me to try all the stupid stuff I want. (My favorite so far has been accidentally lobbing a grenade at oncoming police and blowing up a traffic jam of nine cars more-or-less immediately. I was the ony person to survive the debacle, and only because I had full health and a bullet-proof vest when it happened.)

So, yeah. Better than I initially thought. But will I enjoy it as much once I catch up on my sleep and my brain starts working again? I almost hope not--I've got a lot of stuff I wanna do this summer--but I'll keep you posted.