Beaverton, Oregon will celebrate the 200th Anniversary of Mexico's Independence. Here is an interview by radio host Lars Larson with City Event Coordinator Erin Hickey. This interview is exasperating, but entertaining. No, Beaverton does not have a July 4th celebration. They also celebrate St. Patrick's Day (?) with a "Pooches on the Green" event (???).

Via Brickmuppet: The Herding, by Baldilocks. Anchor link is messed up and will deposit you in the middle of the article. Don't miss the link to part two at the bottom of the article. Excellent essay for all of us racist white folks.

I've been sitting on writing a summary of my experience playing San Andreas for a couple of days, mainly in the hopes that I could come up with something really significant to write. But I got nothing, really. So here goes.

One of the few real debates amongst the Grand Theft Auto faithful is whether Vice City or San Andreas is the best game Rockstar has made. Having played both now, I've really been going back and forth on the question myself. The bottom line, I think, is that I would have liked a lot of the game mechanics, the somewhat refined graphics, and the HUGE size of the gameworld in San Andreas to have been available in Vice City. I would have liked San Andreas to have been as fun and irreverent as Vice City was. San Andreas is clearly, technically the better game, but I had a lot more fun playing Vice City.

Ultimately my enjoyment, or lack thereof, is rooted in the story and characterization. And it should be fairly noted that GTA III, Vice City, and the two Stories games don't really have much of either. GTA III features the silent protagonist Claude Speed obediently following a chain of missions that are linked by arbitrary but not necessarily nonsensical plot points. Vice City added a ton of characterization to the main character, Tommy Vercetti, and his many minions and compatriots; but the missions that form the story didn't always fit together as nicely as they seemed to in GTA III. The two Stories games cut back a bit on the story and characterization, to the point where the games were even more just a list of activities to be checked off.

San Andreas tries very hard to bring a good story into the game and fit everything together into a cohesive whole, but after the first third of the game the plot just seems to get stretched too thinly. The final act seemed especially silly to me. Maybe it's a cultural thing, I don't know. I'm the right age, but I am neither of the proper geographical or racial demographic to truly identify with 1992 Los Angeles (as presented in the game). Of course I don't have the proper background to identify with a New York Italian mafioso taking over the underworld of 1986 Miami, but I didn't really get the feeling I was supposed to. Rockstar seemed to try very hard to get the player to identify with Carl Johnson and internalize the story of San Andreas, and it worked for a little while. I was really into the game through the first major story arc, but everything just seemed to collapse after that. Although I really liked Wu Zi. I would play the game again at least through the Wu Zi missions in San Fierro. But after that the game just doesn't seem to have much to offer.

The single biggest problem, though is that San Andreas isn't nearly as over-the-top as Vice City and GTA III. There's still a lot of comedy, and one of the real joys of the game is hearing the dialogue that occurs during missions, mainly when driving. Generally, though; the game is much more serious in tone and style. This appears to have been Rockstar's intention; from what I've heard San Andreas is a laugh-a-minute madcap adventure compared to GTA IV.

Which is why I am now trying Saints Row 2. Getting scored for how well I fling myself into oncoming traffic sounds like just the thing.

I posted a couple of years ago that I didn't even start playing the GTA III games until, well a couple of years ago. I've finished III, Vice City and Liberty City Stories. I tried Vice City Stories and didn't like it very much, and I tried San Andreas right after I finished Vice City. I didn't really like San Andreas much either, but I put that down at the time to being so much larger and a bit more realistic.

Thanks to one of the many Steam sales, I picked of San Andreas for PC and decided to try it again. After spending a day and a half trying to come up with a decent control scheme (I ended up using my PS3 controller), I'm now several hours into the game and can give a few thoughts. I'm trying to play the game a bit more naturally than I did GTA III, Vice City or Liberty City Stories. I haven't gone out of my way to do collection games or mini-games until they're introduced in the story or I stumble on them. Of course, I still looked up the Graffiti Tag locations online, and even then I missed one (ONE! out of one hundred) and had to cross check with another guide to find the exact one I missed. I found the burglary mini-game by accident (got in the truck) which was really handy; finishing the burglary game is one way to get unlimited stamina. I have tried but not completed the standard Paramedic, Vigilante and Firefighter games. The Firefighter game in particular seems to be much harder in this iteration.

I visited the gym after it was brought up in the story and got my muscles maxed out. Either something has bugged, I completed some unknown achievement, or I've just managed to keep things really balanced lately because sometime in the last few missions I stopped periodically losing muscle tone (normally, it seems to lose it slowly and have to keep working out to keep it up, which makes sense).

Here's our protagonist, Carl Johnson; or C.J. to his friends and tormentors:

Here's how he looks when he wants to show off:


The last mission I did brought in one of the things the GTA games have always done that really bug me: Changing the rules for a specific mission. After rescuing someone from a shootout, you have to get them home safely. Right as you take off, a rival gang shows up in a couple of cars. They don't shoot, they just try to ram you. You can't shoot them, they're bulletproof. Your car is somehow limited to about 40 mph, so the rival gang can easily slam into you over and over, spinning you around and eventually doing enough damage to cause your car to catch on fire. BS like that drives me nuts. It would be a hard enough mission with two normal cars full of gun-toting, vengeance-seeking rivals to dog you all the way home; the handicapping is a bit silly to me.

The only other thing that really bugs me in this game is that there's no reason in the world to keep a car for personal use. Every time I take my favorite daily driver out to do a mission, it will disappear after the mission starts or after it ends. Additionally, if you leave your car for an extended period of time, it will almost always disappear. At first I thought they were just being stolen a lot, but after I while I confirmed that the car would be there one minute, then I could literally turn my back on the car then turn around again and it would be gone.

One neat addition to the game is bicycles. They're a bit weird, in that if you're in good shape you can outrun almost anything, plus you can go just about anywhere. Of course, you're completely unprotected and everything else on or around the road can knock you off and send you flying...which is bad when your doing 80 mph in downtown LA on your Huffy.

Generally, the controls are better than the last GTA game I played; the story as well. There hasn't been a cut scene yet that felt out of place, and the only really silly mission arc so far has been C.J.'s attempts to help a friend (who was a prison bitch, apparently) become a rapper. Or hip hop artist; or something. This missions include dancing well enough to get invited into the D.J.'s van (so you can steal her equipment); and stealing famous rapper "Madd Dogg"'s Rhyme Book, because your friend can't rhyme or write worth anything.

There is the general silliness of C.J., the budding crime lord, rescuing a girl from a fire he started (this is after slitting the throats of "Madd Dogg"'s guards in order to facilitate the theft of his rhymes for a former prison bitch (apparently) who can't rap worth spit.) Oh, and after winning the pimping mini-game, stealing guns, and killing crack dealers for dealing crack while killing rival crack dealers so your buddies and make a buck.

On the plus side, C.J. bet all his money on the long shot at the horse races to win twice in a row and made 1.4 million dollars.

You'd think he would smile more.