Been Playing GTA V Along with the Billion Other People

Been Playing GTA V (I've heard people pronounce it GTA Vee, which seems dumb to me. V is 5) Liking it so far. They addressed a lot of complaints people had, reducing the amount the euphoria physics affects the player and the heavy cars and heavy damage. Problem is now people are complaining again that they removed all the realistic driving etc, that was in IV. Truth is you'll never please everyone.

Anyway, so far the experience for me has been solid. The graphics are pretty good, considering it's on old hardware, and it appears R* are pushing boundaries, regarding what you can get away with in a video game.
Textures can get a little muddy (Blame low RAM) and the frame rate seems to hover around 30 (With drops here and there) The resolution is also 720p with very little AA, so it can look a bit bad at times, but never awful.
The amazing thing is the countryside. Leaving the city on a highway/freeway and it 'feels' like you're leaving a city. Everything looks sculpted, and I have to say looks better than Skyrim in terms of the wilderness. (But Skyrim is doing a lot more things in the background that can slow a machine down, so graphics take a hit for performance.)

The game allows you to take pics in game. Not as good as "Print Screen" on PC. (Or other image capture software) The resolution of the images just plain sucks.

Declasse Tornado. Based upon the 57 chevy Bel-Air with some Cadillac Eldorado influences. (Look at the ground. Muddy/blurry textures are everywhere in the wilderness. Still looks amazing though considering the age of the hardware)

The thing I've always liked about GTA is that it's a showcase of the worst parts of American society. Be it Misogyny/Murder/Robbery etc. It takes the piss equally out of Liberal ideals as it does Conservative ideals. (Both tending to go too far one way or another)

It certainly won't keep me as long as Skyrim has due to the fact that GTA even on PC is inherently less moddable.

JG

Fan Fiction and Me

I was thinking recently about the misconceptions and biases towards Fan Fiction. To those who have never read it, or know what it's about, they usually see it as something "Nerds" or "Wierdos" do. They see it as badly written, and also as mostly slash fiction, that is there solely to quench some sexual desire that the writer has.

In the late 90's (I would have been 10-13 at the time) I wrote fan fiction on half A4 sheets, that I bound with glue in a cardboard, and tried to make books. They were Star Trek DS9 stories and were absolute trash with no merit to them whatsoever. They usually involved them flying somewhere in the Defiant, finding some-thing and then flying home again jiggidy-jig. At some point I stopped doing it as I grew up and the very memory of it vanished until recently.

Jump to 2005. I thought that fan fiction was trash. I'd never read any, but I thought it was trash. I thought that Fan Fiction prose was just Kirk/Spock stuff that I had no interest in reading that.

Around this time I saw a Fan Production by the name of Star Trek New Voyages: Come What May. It was truly terrible. I thought it was nothing more than a stupid 'High School Play' level of production. I shook my head and thought that fan-made stuff was simply garbage. (Come What May is still truly awful)

It wasn't until I caught their episode To Serve All My Days, did I start to take notice of what fans were capable of. I waited with a strange excitement when I saw their trailer for World Enough and Time, which at the time I kept calling "World Not Enough and Time" for some reason. In fact my last name appeared in the e-mags they used to release, with my short forum review and my forum name (which was my last name) misspelled in it.

Anyway, this took me onto the Audio-Drama side of things. Things I could listen to when walking. I caught something done by Darker Projects, but they mixed in other Sci-Fi universes and I didn't like that. I also listened to Star Trek: Defiant (Which has since vanished from the face of the internet) and then later Star Trek: Outpost (Which I still listen too)

But before Outpost and after Defiant, I read my first full Fan Fiction. It was a TOS fan fic detailing Scotty's time at the academy. I think this was 2009 or 10. I wish I knew what it was called. All I know was that it wasn't on the Fan Fiction site, and on another with a load of other fan fics. I know the cover image was of a bridge or something. I really enjoyed it and now am quite sad that I cannot find it again.

Then As I'm writing this, I found the story on Ad Astra, an archive for Trek Fan-fic. It's called On the Nature of Wind. This was the story that made me second guess the legitimacy of prose in Fan-fiction.

Jump ahead (or maybe this happened before reading On the Nature of Wind, I can't remember) I wanted to do something with Audio. It never came about, but instead Ideas for writing came about. I think in an earlier post I mentioned it when discussing my Trek story that is sadly on hiatus right now.

Anyway, at this point I still had no real interest in reading it, even if I wanted to start writing it. Though it wasn't for a year or two till I started writing, and strangely enough it was Elder Scrolls and Fallout that I started with. I continued with ES and Fallout kind of fell by the wayside, and for some reason I thought it would be a good idea to add a Trek story to the mix (Don't try and write more than one story at a time. You'll either lose interest in all three, or two of them won't see an update for MONTHS)

At some point I started to take a gander at other fan-fics. I would tell you my first favourite (Which I favourited to know what stories I was reading, but I cannot remember and I'm getting a 408 time-out error when I try and access my profile on FanFiction.net. and has completely ruined the end of this post.

JG

Edit:
Heh, my first favourite is a story I've not actually read.
Second is Solace in the Sand by Banger1897, a Fallout Fan-Fic that I haven't read any of the updates in a few months.
Third is Accident and Destiny by SuperGreG. The first Elder Scrolls Fan-Fic I saw that wasn't "The Ever Repeated Adventures of the Champion of Cyrodiil/the Dragonborn" Four days later I favourited his second.
My foray into the world of written FF is a rather new one, and I'm glad I found it.

JG

Skyrim Modding Peeve.

Why, oh why are mods that make the women of Skyrim look 14 years old so popular?
Yet another mod that changes the appearance of the women (This time the housecarls) has been released. And they look like teenagers.
What's worse is that it's a hotfile on the SkyrimNexus. This really annoys me because there are people out there making interesting mods that get little recognition.
The mods that make certain women look like 14-17 years olds are the worst, and is just plain creepy. But I guess people like 'em young looking. (Too Young FFS)

Maybe I'm overreacting.

JG

Edit: To be precise, it's Jordis that looks 14. I also feel that the others look like they're barely twenty. When I played Skyrim, I got the impression that Lydia and Iona were later twenties at their youngest and early thirties at their oldest. I want them to look and feel like they have experience on the battlefield, not like they're barely out of school.

on Rails, Amazingly Generic Entertainment (RAGE)

I've started playing Rage on the PC. While it looks really nice, and runs in 64bit, I can't help but feel like I'm on a rail. The shooting parts guide me down often narrow hallways, and you know for sure when the area gets large and square that it's a mini arena to fight a load of guys or mutants in.
The driving parts aren't much better. The world exists in long canyons, and it almost feels pointless to have it in at all.
Early on you have to retrieve parts from the dead city. You get glimpses of a giant creature roaming about. But the problem is I knew the exact moment I was going to have to fight it, because literately in the area you fight it in, you get a rocket launcher with an infinite ammo cache nearby. It completely spoilt the whole fight because I knew the creature was going to show up right then and there.
If there's one thing I have to say, is that it's generic. It starts off well, but the first gun the game gives you is a pistol with absolutely no feel to it whatsoever. The first time I shot it, it just let me down a little. This game was made by Id. And from what I understand, they used to make killer games.
I can't help but feel that the RAM of current games consoles are partially to blame for how this game turned out. The PS3 uses 512mb of RAM divided by 256 for the video and 256 for the memory (If I recall correctly) and the 360 has 512 unified (I believe) even in 2005 they must have seen this as becoming a problem well before the system's life cycle were out.
That's not to say I'm not enjoying RAGE. I wasn't expecting much to begin with. Overall it's a modern shooter. That's to say it holds your hand, and carefully guides you to make sure you don't accidentally graze your knee.
One thing regarding FPS games. I've never played a Call of Duty game and I plan on never playing one.

Reviewing Chapters are Tedious Yet Necessary.

Reading through chapter 4 of "Dagger in the Wind" and fixing errors in the text, adding comma's, changing sentences so they read better etc. The annoying thing is that I've read through it perhaps a half dozen times and I'm still finding problems with it, and some of these problems are so Obvious.

For example: one of the characters did say. "It couldn't help." instead of "It couldn't hurt." I'd read through this chapter about five times before I noticed this clear error. Another thing is a lack of comma's. It really helps to read it out loud. Where I stop naturally in a sentence and take a pause is usually where I place a comma, given that it makes sense within the sentence to put it there.

Reviewing chapters and fixing errors is really the stalling point of writing. I can see why authors like to write the whole story from start to finish before the editing phase. But then again if I did that, the editing and checking would be quite daunting.

Anyway, I'm going to finish reading through the chapter, upload it to FanFiction, and then give it another once or twice over to make sure it's ready.

JG

The Last of Us - My Thoughts

Well today I finished the Naughty Dog game The Last of Us. I can't say I enjoyed it, as it's not really a subject matter one can enjoy. Instead, I'll say that it was great at what it was trying to accomplish. The gun play was shaky and imprecise, which is what you want from a game that makes you feel that you are constantly on the verge of  horrible death, and the hand to hand often left you exposed, as did stealth executions.
What the game does kind of well and poorly at the same time however, is play with expectations. As a player who's played many games, I have certain expectation of how the storyline will play out. While being brutal in the first few minutes, it's kind of expected. Later on though, the game will not give you what you expect, the storyline starts taking turns.
The biggest turns of the story however, do exactly what is expected. Sometimes the ambiguity of who lived or died lasted for only minutes, others for an entire "level". I would have preferred certain events to have played out as they seemed to at first, disliking how it eventually turned out.

Spoilers on how I thought things should have gone.
I would have preferred it if Joel died at the point he was impaled, and had Ellie finish the story. I think it would have been far better. I really like Joel, but to have the player think he's dead, hope he's not, then reveal he is in fact still alive is too expected.
Again at the end, I would have liked it if Ellie had been given the chance to except her fate and become a kind of martyr. She had the cure within her, and she should have given her life in order for there to be a cure. It would have been upsetting as I really bonded with the character, but it would have made this game truly a game of a generation to kill off all the protagonists.

Those are my honest thoughts on the game.

JG

Stories, Covers and Stuff

Right now, I am writing a rough draft of part 2 for TotBatB. While I am doing this, I am slowly planning out where I want to take my star trek story. While the trek story is an old idea, I hadn't properly fleshed out what would happen in finer detail other than 'this and this and that happens'. I want to try and give all the characters something to do, give them more depth and as such it will probably be a while before any updates are done.
As for my Fallout story. That's on hold for now. I really didn't have a game plan for the individual stories, only where I wanted them all to end up. This was seriously bad planning on my part, and right now I don't have the necessary drive to continue on right now. (Perhaps I should start playing the games again to get me in the mood. Right now however, I'm playing Morrowind for the first time, so that's got me occupied on the gaming front.)

As for TotBatB I edited the cover image for "Old Wounds" to lessen the obvious triangles and edges created by the polygonal construction of the models. I also added hair sticks as it is described in the story near the beginning that she wears them.

In about ten years people will look back on these graphics and say "Why they so pointy?"

Anyway, I have the cover for both the second and third books done. here's the cover for the second 'Novel'.

Big, big images. Won't show the third books cover as it kind of reveals how book 2 will end regarding some characters. Of course book 2 is very rough at the moment with a basic outline. The first few chapters are written however, as they have been for like five or six months now.

Overall I have got a lot of motivation right to keep on writing this "series" and I'm going to run with it. I feel that if I try and refocus my attention onto, let's say the Star Trek story, that I'll essentially stall and loose the locomotion I have with writing.

That's all for now
JG