Beat Grand Theft Auto 4. Goddamn is it good. One of the most compelling characters in anything I’ve ever seen. Niko Belic is a character that sticks with you. Good acting, good design, good game programming. It’s bigger than this blog is so I don’t need to go on about it.

I skipped the pigeon shooting in GTA4. It’s a mini game where you go around the city and shoot the “flying rats”. There are a crap-ton of them so I was marking them off in a digital map with a photoshop clone named Pixelmator. My little system was working great until I counted up how many I had left. My count was 57 and the game’s count was 58. That means I marked one down wrong. I spent some time backtracking but it was too much to deal with. Finding a missing bird is harder than finding a bird (and they are already hard to find). A bird that exists at least has a red glow on it and a missing bird is not as obvious. So I gave up on the whole goddamn thing.

The image above is from Beyond Good & Evil. Hmm, how to describe BG&E. I’ll keep this short. It’s an underrated and undersold adventure game from Ubisoft. It’s not as good as the fans say imo. I enjoyed parts of it (like the parts near the end) but it’s not the underdog that everyone says it is. I found it very frustrating and not that engaging. It had a very european developer feel to it (nothing wrong with that). It was just a little bit off most of the time. The controls were weird, the game engine didn’t keep up and the camera and level design was like playing blind pinball. I nearly sold it but then took it off the sell pile to put a nail in it. I’m just glad it’s done.