The northlondonhippy

Archive for May 24th, 2008

There’s about one week left to enter my rock­ing Bub­bler con­test. You can really win a brand new Bush­mas­ter Bub­bler, plus other cool prizes. You want some cool shit from the hippy, don’t you? Click here, click now!

I took deliv­ery of a Playsta­tion 3 this week, along with a copy of Grand Theft Auto 4 (GTA 4). I’ve aban­doned north Lon­don and am now a res­i­dent of Lib­erty City. Just call me the lib­er­tyc­i­ty­hippy from now on.

I’ve never been much of a gamer, the last con­sole I owned was a Nin­tendo NES, back in the early 80s. I haven’t really played any com­puter games since then.

I debated buy­ing a PS3 for a while as I think hav­ing one is the equiv­a­lent of giv­ing up on real­ity, though tech­ni­cally I gave up on it a cou­ple of decades ago. I’ve got friends who have been telling me how cool they are for a while and with the release of GTA 4, I thought it was time to take the plunge.

I very nearly bought a PS2 and GTA San Andreas, but con­vinced myself my free time would be bet­ter spent pur­su­ing ran­dom acts of cre­ativ­ity. I’m feel­ing far less cre­ative at the moment and rather than try­ing to extract blood from a stone, I’ve elected to spend my leisure time in a vir­tual world where I can steal cars, shag whores and kill peo­ple. That’s bet­ter than explor­ing the same activ­i­ties in real­ity around north Lon­don, I guess.

Video games are time ban­dits and they will eat up your free time quite effec­tively and if you’re as crap at play­ing them as I am, they will take up even more of your time.

I thought long and hard about this pur­chase, see­ing it as a mini-surrender to hav­ing a life. In some ways, this is me giv­ing up, just a lit­tle. Not for­ever, not even until I fin­ish GTA 4 (which at the rate I am going will take years), but just enough to clear some of the cob­webs out of my skull. It was either this or some LSD and find­ing qual­ity acid these days seems like too much of a strug­gle, so I am now a gamer.

Set­ting up the PS3 was a breeze, I’ve con­nected it directly to my Bravia’s only HDMI input and I have the out­put set to 1080i, which is the best res­o­lu­tion my tv can deliver. The audio also goes via the TV and is then fed back to my ampli­fier via a stereo cable – not ideal, but ser­vice­able. I only have 2.1 audio, so its not like I am miss­ing out on the 5.1 sur­round sound – I don’t have enough speak­ers to ben­e­fit from it.

I was also able to get the PS3 straight onto my home wi-fi net­work, which means online game play and updates are already within my grasp. I’ve actu­ally run some updates already and my oper­at­ing sys­tem is bang up to date.

I bought 2 games with the con­sole, the affor­men­tioned GTA 4 and Gran Tur­simo 5 – The Pro­logue, on the rec­om­men­da­tion of a mate.

Gran Tur­ismo is pos­i­tively stun­ning, espe­cially the back­grounds. I’ve been doing laps around a track in Lon­don and it is pin sharp and photo-realistic. If you’ve seen it, you’ll know what I mean, it is pos­i­tively jaw-droppingly good! I’m still crap at con­trol­ling the car, though and I def­i­nitely need lots of practise.

GT5 is a taster of the full ver­sion of the game, which is due to be released next year and only cost me 17 quid, which I thought was a real bargain.

GTA 4 is unbe­liev­ably involved and has a scope and scale which is mind bog­gling. The game­play takes place in an expan­sive and extremely real­is­tic realm, which is mas­sive and has a level of detail which would thrill most fea­ture film mak­ers. I can’t get over how good it all looks.

The main rea­son I really bought all this is I’ve felt for a while that I was miss­ing out on a sig­nif­i­cant part of home enter­tain­ment by not hav­ing a games con­sole. Video games are big busi­ness, mak­ing as much or more annu­ally than most fea­ture films. I think I read GTA 4 took over 50 mil­lion dol­lars in its first week of release, mak­ing it the best sell­ing game of all time.

GTA 4 cost nearly 40 quid, which may sound expen­sive, but if you fac­tor in the num­ber of hours I’ll be play­ing it and the shear size of the play­ing field, you can see why they are that expen­sive. The amount of time and man-hours that go into devel­op­ing such a game is immense and they have to make it back somehow.

I also think there’s prob­a­bly work to be had in the world of gam­ing, for a middle-aged, make-believe hippy from north Lon­don. Some­one has to write the sto­ry­lines and cre­ate the char­ac­ters – I could do that! I would love to do that! Games prob­a­bly reach more peo­ple than films, so it’s a big audi­ence to sat­isfy and sat­isfy them, I would!

So who out there has any con­tacts with the major gam­ing devel­op­ers? Wanna hook me up with a highly paid, emo­tion­ally sat­is­fy­ing posi­tion com­ing up with con­cepts and sto­ries for future games? I promise you that given the chance, I could come up with the most com­pelling games imaginable!

Like how about this…a northlon­don­hippy videogame! You would get to be me, in an RPG sort of way. You could hang out in my vir­tual lair, roll and smoke vir­tual spliffs, watch TV and play PS3 games, as me. And then their would be mis­sions, like scor­ing weed on a Fri­day night, but still hav­ing time to get home and order a nice Japan­ese take-away, before the restau­rant closes.

You’d pay 40 quid for that, wouldn’t you?