Home of the Five Fingers of Fury

Wll the update post will have to wait as I start the jouney to Blizzcon with my girlfriend today and so the next 13 days of posts will mainly be trip reports of the trek…hope you enjoy.

The day didn’t start out too well as we awoke to find it raining but undeterred we got ready and headed downstairs for our taxi, only to find it not there. A quick call to the cab company and it seems the booking we made at 11pm the previous night wasn’t in the system so ask for a cab to be sent round asap as we had to get to the airport. 15 minutes goes by and still no cab and time for another call which finally leads to a cab arriving 5 minutes later…the driver then proceeds to almost lose control of the cab about 3 times on the way to the airport and I can see this being a very long day.

Once we hit the airport things went a little bit more smoothly with nothing major happening between canberra and sydney. The flight has a very weird feeling to it though, as it’s only 25 minutes in the air it feels like, just as they turn off the seatbelt sign because of hitting flying altitude, they turn it back on to get ready for landing.

Things started to get better at sydney, the rain had cleared and we got a small upgrade from economy to economy plus. Checking in and heading on through to the plan was fairly painless with the only real security point coming just as we headed into the United departure area with a full body wanding but other than that the security didn’t really seem intrusive at all which was better than I had thought it would be now.

On the plan finally and things took a small dive as the seats, which we had been told had an extra 5″ of room on them, were very tightly packed and it wasn’t possible for us to sit comfortably without being pressed against each other or another passenger in our aisle. The flight itself was long, boring and annoying…the cramped confines making it hard to eat the meals without elbowing the person next to you as you cut things and getting out to use the bathrooms was an excersize in mass movement depending on relative position to the aisle as it wasn’t possible to slide past a person in their seat.

The plane was reasonably old it seems, with ill-fitting and fauly equipment abounding but the service was quick and good and the meals were better than I was expecting…well except the scambled eggs for breakfast what which has a consistency that took me back to the taste and feel of my mothers first attempts at scambled eggs in a microwave when they first became available, hard, rubbery and grey inside but they were still tasty imho though my gf didn’t really think so….probably better to ake her opinion on this over mine though so I’d avoid the eggs on a United flight if you can.

The only other slightly interesting part of the flight was the guy in out row of three seats that had like 5 gins in about 20 minutes after takeoff and was cut-off by the staff for an hour or so, but he seemed like an alright guy and pretty much just crashed for most of the flight like we tried to. Apart from that the flight was very uneventful as the raid had cleared and I think we hit one pocket of turbulence that had us have to put our seatbelts on, but it lasted like 30 seconds….the rest of the time we were flying at about 10km up and around 950km/h.

On arriving at LAX after 13 hours (thankfully we were on schedule, though headwinds for a bot made it look doubtful for a while) I was expecting long delays to get through immigration and customs but we were though in about 30 minutes, including around 10 minutes waiting for baggage. The only difference I noticed we had to go through was having our index fingers scanned and photo taken at immigration but even that only took a few minutes and was very uninvasive. Finally, after about 17 hours of travel (and arriving 15 minutes before we had left australia, freaky timezone thing) we had exited the airport and arrived in Los Angeles, now we just had to find out shuttle.

The shuttle was easy to find, being almost right outside the exit of the airport, so that was cool and in about 30 minutes we began the trip to anaheim and our hotel. On the shuttle were a local couple heading home from some trip so I took the opportunity to quiz them on a few things such as places to go, places to eat etc and get some info on Las Vegas as well since they go their with a bowling league a few times a year. They were pretty cool to talk to and their home was in a town called Fullerton so we got to see a little bit of real world locations too, instead of just the tourist areas, and that was nice but after that it was about another 20 minutes to our hotel and so finally, after about 18 hours, we hit our hotel and had a chance to crash for a while.

After about 3 hour nap we got up and headed to Disneyland to grab our tickets for there and universal studios as well as see the fireworks which is only put on on saturday nights. Let me say, off the bat, the only really annoying thing I noticed was that to get our tickets for universal studios (and Sea World and San Diego Zoo, but we wont have time to use those) we had to go into Disneyland itself and so spend one of our 3 days of the pass on that…I can see how this could have really screwed us up if we hadn’t got in till like 10pm and had to go to universal the next day (which we do), as there would be no time at all to get any thing seen at all and it seems there is a LOT to see.

Before we went in we had a look around Downtown Disney, which is the shopping and restaurant area before you get in to Disneyland itself, and had dinner at the House of Blues which was actually really nice and reasonably priced with food + drinks for two coming in at $37. Here was the first real difference between australia and america, when we ordered a hamburger the waiter asked how we wanted it cooked (nice to have a choice if you prefer meat medium, etc) and then there was the tipping issue…I didn’t just have to tip the waiter but when I went in to the bathroom there was a guy in there to keep it safe, hand towels etc and had to tip him as well (though it was worth it as the taps and toilets here are very weird, will get to it in a bit). Overall, in the first day of being here, I think I have tipped more often and more total than I have in the rest of my life in australia and so that’s something to be mindful of.

After dinner we went back to having a look around and ended up buying a Fossil watch each as they were a good price and I needed a watch as I had left mine with a broken band back at home. After this we were both feeling the effects of the plane trip in our backs and feet but pushed on in to Disney as we needed to get the ticket for universal and see the fireworks at 9.30pm. Let me just say, entering Disney is not as you would expect it…the first thing to know is that Disneyland is actually two parks, Disneyland itself and Disney Adventures opposite it with the two entrances coming off the Downtown Disney walkway.

Once we got though the entrance into Disney land we were greeted by a lot of lighting and sparkles but noticed a lack of any characters walking around. Given however we only got as far as the end of Main Street I’m thinking they might only hang out in the three park areas and not the second shopping area (seems they get you coming in and going out for souviners but cant blame them really) but it just seemed strange not to walk straight into a Mickey Mouse walking around as you enter…the only other possibility is thye dont do them at night.

The initial area though the entrance is a shopping area called Main Street which is pretty much just stores selling Disney mrchandise and food/drinks so not much really to report there so we continued walking around and trying to find a spot to watch the fireworks display as we’d been ready to head back to the hotel for about the last hour…..we really should have just gone back when we were ready to as when the time came for the fireworks we were told they’d be delayed due to safety concerns with winds in higher elevations. This was the end for us so we headed on back out to Downtown Disney, at which time the familiar explosive sounds of fireworks started up and while we could turn around to see them a little bit, the full spectacle of them over the Enchanted Castle was missed.

Thankfully Disneyland is only around a 5-10 minute walk from our hotel so we were soon back in our room and getting ready for sleep and preparing for another big day tomorrow at Universal Studios with the bus arriving to pick us up at 8:15am so stay tuned for more tomorrow about that.

Photos will be up at some stage, so stay tuned and keep reading.

Well, had my folks down visiting a couple of weeks ago and during that time I decided to move my workspace around….Murphy’s kicked in and my old AMDx2 machine decided to fry it’s cpu when I turned them back on (yes I know, a UPS is next must-buy). It’s been sitting round looking all forlornly at me, but since it was a socket 939 there was not much I could do but retire it, scavenge parts and build a new box.

Looking over it, the only thing I could really salvage were the 2 7800GTX’s and the hard drives since when I decided to test the PSU with another older mobo/cpu I had, that cpu lasted about 5 seconds before frying as well so I figure the PSU was effectively dead and don’t want to take the risk. The hard drives were all PATA, which posed a small problem (this box was my file server) until I found an item called a TeraBox at the computer markets…it’s a small box with a 150W PSU that holds up to 4 PATA drives (to 2GB total) and can either have them set as individual drives or seen as one and then connects to a PC through USB. Given I have previously had issues with spanned drives, I have set these up as individual drives and has worked flawlessly so far under XP, Vista and a Mac, the only issue found with the Mac was I had to let the Mac reformat one of the drives to be able to write to it since it seems they can read NTFS but not write to it.

With the drives sorted, and my mind already set on what I wanted out of the new PC (quad core, sli, 8Gb RAM), I decided that I could get by with just getting the RAM, CPU, Motherboard and case/PSU this week and use the GTX’s initially to see if I need to look at upgrading to the 9800 series (either GTX or GX2) so off to the markets I went this weekend and grabbed what I needed, to be pleasently surprised. I ended up getting an evga 780i motherboard, 8Gb of PNY RAM (though a little annoyed, thought it was 5-5-5-15 but is 5-5-5-18), a Q6600 CPU and a cheapish case with PSU for $800. The case I gimped myself with as my current main machine was in a Super Lanboy case with a 650W Antec PSU so decided to put the new build in that and so just needed something to hold the current build of Q6600, 4Gb, 9600GT and this seems to be holding well. If it becomes an issue I intend to grab an Antec 900 case and 850W modular PSU anyway so it’s not a major problem to have that machine out of action for a week till the next markets.

I spent all saturday putting the new pc together (well also taking the other one apart and putting it back together in the new box) and installing Vista64 SP1 which all went reasonably quickly, the only concern I had was the new botherboard has an 8 pin power2 while my PSU only had a 4 pin but reading the manual it seems the 8 pin is only needed if running quad SLI so I gave the 4 pin a try and the system fired up and appears stable still.

Once built and in place I ran the first testto see if I could see any improvement in multiboxing World of Warcraft, and I put one monitor on on card, the second monitor on the other and had SLI disabled (mainly because I intend to run 4 monitors on this machine) and found the effect to be disasterous…I was getting single digit framerates on all 5 instances of WoW which was unacceptable, machine was turned off and both monitors plugged into card 1.

For the second attempt, I’m not sure what the issue is but I am getting only around 15fps on all 5 instances when running at the same time, and only around 35fps when running a single instance of WoW which is about 1/2 of what I was seeing with a single 7800GTX under XP32 SP3…at this stage I am thinking it is something to do with having the SLI bridge in place between the two cards, so I’ll likely try taking that off tonight and see if I see any improvement, and I also have to see if going to SLI shows me any upgrades with FSX.

At this stage I’m happy with the new pc, but not ecstatic since I haven’t seen the improvements I’d expected and found one of the reasons for going with a new SLI build (running monitors on all cards) is likely not going to work. It might be the 7800’s that are the issue so the next phase will be to finialise what I planned and add either 2 9800GTX’s or 2 9800GX2’s, so will update this once I get them in place and tested.

I’m going to have to answer with a resounding “Hell NO”.

I put it in last night for a quick 30 minute while I waited for chicken to defrost before I cooked dinner…4 hours later I managed to put it down long enough to go cook, eat and get back to it. The missions flow on easily from each other, the story is actually really good (yes, I was suprised because I had low expectations for it) and, for me, the best part has been the upgraded physics.

Each vehicle has very distinct physics and handling and should actually make it necessary to make good choices for each mission. For example, trucks/vans handle like crap and understeer like a bitch so you won’t want to be taking one of those for a chase mission…on the other hand, something like the Maclaren Mercedes style car is beautiful to drive, handles corners like it’s on rails but is slightly fragile so it would not be a good choice for a mission that requires ramming an opponent out of their car. This leads to players having to make more decisions about missions apart from just what weapons to take, and more choices and decisions is always a good thing in a game.

Now onto what may be the most controvertial subject regarding the game, sex and censorship. Yes, the game has been censored in Australia and no-one is quite sure what that entails (R* isn’t talking at this stage, most likely to avoid giving out spoilers on the game and that’s fair enough) but after what I saw last night I would say some of it is the sex in the game. Without giving away spoilers I hope, last night I picked up a hooker to see what happened and once you go to a secluded area the camera pulls back to show the rear bumper and lights of your car with some bouncing and that’s it. One of the other ways sex is involved in the game is through girlfriends for Niko and getting them to invite you up to their place so I worked on that for a little bit last night too and managed to get invited up, again the camera just cuts to an outside view of the apartment they are in, there are sounds and the controller rumbles and that’s it. Taking these two instances into account and comparing them against what has been said by R* about the game I think we can safely conclude that these are likely places that censorship has been put in and to me it doesn’t impact on the game or the story so I don’t have a problem with it, though it was funny that the hooker was allowed to say “So, you going to fuck me like the nasty bitch I am?” when I picked her up but then we go to a G rated cut-scene…guess it just goes to show the double standards that are prevalent in regards to games still.

I haven’t bothered trying multiplayer yet, and likely won’t until I finish the single player game and given I’m about 13% finished after around 6 hours I don’t see myself getting into the multiplayer aspect for a few weeks but when the single-player is honestly this good I don’t think I want to split the experience up until I’ve fully experienced it.

After pre-ordering Grand Theft Auto 4 back in August 2007, I now have my special edition in my hot little hands and from what I can see even from the contents of the pack it was worth it. I was going to put some photos up but the batteries in my camera are dead and I have none recharged so that will have to wait, if I get round to it. For now, it’s off to load it up, so if I’m not seen online or in WoW for a few weeks just look for me on Xbox Live!