Apr. 10th, 2005

prog: (Default)
Rented GTA: San Andreas to see if Rockstar had fixed its pacing problems, as one of my friends suggested they had.

Summary: Er, no.

The very first mission has your friend going "Follow my lead!" and then zipping away on his bike. Which is, unlike target vehicles in Vice City, not on the radar. Then you get gunned down and run over and sent to a hospital that's a five-minute drive away from the mission's restart point. I retried it three times, more because I wanted to feel I was getting my $4.50 + tax worth out of the dumb thing than because I was having fun. (I didn't, and I wasn't.)

This game fails utterly; they managed to take everything I didn't like about the previous game in the series and put it right up front. Impressive!
prog: (Default)
Finished Pattern Recognition. I really liked it, all the way through. I hold firm to my theory that Gibson is so much more readable when writing about real technology than when trying to write about its extrapolated future. In this book, both author and protagonist are confident endusers but not techies, and I never lost the sense that the former knew what he was writing about. The characters do no hacking other than social engineering, leveraging the realistically ubiquitous communication technology in a completely believable way. (He does take a couple of magic-word liberties to let some of the hairier plot points squeeze through, but I found it easy to forgive him, particularly since he lets minor characters do it.)

Liked the characterization, too. The hero is lovable, a sort of caricature of pop-culture befrazzlement incarnated in a way that reminds me of many of my friends, and infused with just a breath of whimsical fantasy over a dollop of personal tragedy. That's a terrible description, but I really liked her.

It's also evident that Gibson wrote quickly; 9/11 factors significantly into the story, and the thanks-everyone afterword is dated August 2002. I found it interesting that the chapter in which the main character recalls that day's events is titled "Singularity", a word that doesn't appear in the text itself. I don't think that he was identifying 9/11 as Vinge's Technological Singularity, even though that was certainly what he was referring to. But he's right, I think, to use the word. I hadn't thought of it that way before, but it's true: my attitude towards things produced before 2002 often takes a dismissive tone, despite myself, because here is something made for a different world than mine.

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