Grand Theft Auto IV
Originally published at shanefitzsimmons.com. You can comment here or there.
I cannot put into words just how much I’m looking forward to this game. I just found out that Gamestop is having a midnight release of it tonight, so I’ll be there, money in my hands.
I’ve looked forward to games in the past, but I’m afraid that over the past five years or so, I’ve become less and less of a gamer. I used to buy 20-30 games a year, of all shapes and sizes and popularity, and I’d usually play them all. It’s dwindled considerably, until the past year when I’ve bought maybe eight, received two as gifts, and I’ve really only played about half of them for more than an hour. Two of the games I’ve beaten in the past year have been packaged in the same Orange Box, Portal and HL2 Episode 2, of which took maybe 8 hours of my life combined to beat them both, and I did it over a weekend. The other three games that I’ve beaten, Gears of War, Halo 3 and Assassin’s Creed, well, Halo I beat in about a week, but Gears of War and AC took me months to beat I played them both so infrequently.
Anyway, that’s a lot of detail to just get across the meager point: I’m just not nearly as big of a gamer as I used to be. Even games I look forward to I don’t really keep major tabs on. There are really only three games I’m looking forward to this year, GTA IV, Fallout 3 and Left 4 Dead. Fallout 3 is a game that I’ve been looking forward to for the better part of a decade, but even this game just isn’t capturing me as much as you’d think it would.
Yet, Grand Theft Auto IV has recaptured that old gamer’s spirit of mine and put it in overdrive. This is a game that I’ve put countless hours into just reading about. I’m obsessed with this game on a level I haven’t been obsessed with anything since the first Lord of the Rings movie came out.
Because I know I’ll probably be locking myself in my room for the next solid week so I can play this game, I made an agreement with myself that I’d really push myself to finish my script before it came out. So far, that doesn’t look like it’s gonna happen. I’ve only got about six hours to finish it, and I’ve still got a long way to go. But, the good news is by pushing myself so hard I upped my 5 page a day average to about 8 pages a day, which ain’t bad. What’s killing me is the constant revising I’ve gotten in the habit of doing. I’d probably have finished a first draft now had I not gone back through several times to delete and rewrite a bunch of it. I’m currently on page 52, which is pretty decent, but I’m pretty sure I could tighten that up to probably about 30 if I really tried. My goal is to make this flick as tight as possible, so that it has a fast-pace and also so that it doesn’t take me forever to film it.
Anyway, as penance for not finishing like I’d hoped, I’ll probably be cutting back significantly on how much time I let myself play the game until I do finish it. But let’s face it, I wouldn’t be able to keep myself away from the game even if Amber offered me a threesome with Eliza Dushku.
… Well, probably not.