Overrated

A lot of things out there in the world are vastly overrated. Pretty much everything is if you hear about it from the right people. Still, there are a few things which I have recently been particularly annoyed with in my day to day life, and I have to get this off my chest.

First stop, Rockstar Games, and more specifically their Grand Theft Auto series. These games have been given a REDICULOUS amount of free advertising ever since someone mentioned you can get healed by hookers in GTA3 during an interview on The Daily Show, and the mainstream media, who haven't looked at a videogame since frelling Mortal Kombat proceeded to obsess over it for what? A year and counting now? Now, don't get me wrong here. These games are quite fun, and aside from a couple obscure little RPGs, they are the only games on the PS2 really worth having. Still though, there's some things that need to be said about them.

First off, there's nothing controversial in them. If you made movies out of these games, they would be rated PG-13. Yes, you can be healed by picking up a hooker, but this takes place in the ULTRA REALISTIC fashion of the low polygon count character entering your car, and then, if you go park it in some blind alley somewhere, the car will bounce up and down a few times as your HP goes up. If you switch to the first person camera and look to your right, you will see the low poly count hooker model (which looks pretty darn bad zoomed in that far) sitting motionless in the passenger seat. Ooh! Racey stuff huh? Another little myth here by the way is that after picking up a hooker, you can beat her to death to get your money back. False. When you kill any given person in the game, they'll usually drop some random small amount of money, from paramedics to blind hobos. It's entirely possible to get absolutely no money from a hooker who just took a bunch of yours. Oh yes, and also, grow the %@#$ up people!

Second off, the games aren't THAT great. Heck, GTA: Vice City has more bugs in it than any console game I ever recall seeing in my life. First of all, it has some NASTY graphical pop-up issues. I'm not even talking about the sort of buildings appearing suddenly in the distance sort of thing, although there is a fair share of that. I'm talking about parts of the game where huge stretches of ground will just flat out disappear right under you for no apparent reason. Not just when the processor's overtaxed by a lot of onscreen characters or special effects either. That's really minor though. There's also a DISTURBINGLY consistent trend for your character to SINK RIGHT THROUGH THE GROUND. Keeping objects from falling through each other is the most basic and fundamental principle in any game programming, and they botched it. Usually you just sink into the road up to your knees and you can jump your way back out, but I've seen motorcycles fuse into the hoods of cars, people run straight through walls, and I did once see the main character fall straight through a bridge. On a related note, whenever you're running at full speed, you will pretty constantly take small amounts of damage due to what I can only assume are slight cracks in the seems of the polygons composing the ground.

There's a couple design issues in there too. At one point in the game, a pickup icon for a new costume appears INSIDE A SOLID BUILDING, where you can never actually grab it, and then of course there's the "trails" option. This causes all the colors in the game to bleed into each other as a sort of poor man's graphical smoothing. The actual effect of this is that after the first time a bright street light or even worse, a sunset, the screen will be a steady bright orange eye searing glow until you dig around in the graphics options and find how to turn the thing off.

Once again, it's a fun game and all. I'm just saying it isn't NEARLY what people make it out to be, and quite frankly there's better games out there despite what the press would lead you to believe. More controversial games too if you're into that sort of thing.

Next on the chopping block is Jimmy Kimmel. If you don't know who Jimmy Kimmel is, you lead a very sheltered life, but I am going to elaborate anyway.

We were first introduced to Jimmy Kimmel as the cohost of Win Ben Stein's money. He provided a gruff boorish flair to contrast the Great Monotone One, and quite frankly he filled the roll quite nicely.

Kimmel then went on to launch his own series, The Man Show. Now, the principal behind this is that there is a truckload of garbage on TV aimed specifically at bored housewifes, including entire TV networks, but not one thing aimed at the gruff beer swilling slobs they're married to. OK, that's a funny concept, worthy of applaud, and there's enough comedic potential there to support a short running TV series. The Man Show has however been on for something like five years now though, and not only did the novelty wear off quite some time ago, but in the brief glimpses I have unfortunately caught of this thing recently, they're writers are scraping the bottom of the barrel for ideas to the point where they're just parading around naked fat guys and having producers urinate on the audience. Seriously.

Running a joke into the ground isn't a real crime mind you, what bothers me is that based on the success of this foray, Comedy Central green-lighted another series by Kimmel and friends called Crank Yankers. This show consists of semi-notable comedians making really pathetic prank phone calls, and then acting out the recordings of these using nude felt puppets. First of all, the puppets don't really add anything at all to the experience of listening to prank phone calls. If you want to do something purely audio, do a freaking radio show or sell CDs or something. Second, as stated earlier, these prank calls are REALLY PATHETIC. I have a decent appreciation for the medium. For some reason my phone was listed under the name Nutt for several years, and not once did I not play along with the various pranks such that a good time was had by all. So if I don't find a prank call recording funny, it's not because I can't take a joke. It's because it isn't funny. The most lauded calls by the way consist of creator and star Jimmy Kimmel shouting one phrase at a random person until they hang up. This usually takes five minutes, and is just as annoying to the audience as the victim. Moreso come to think of it, because the victim has to put up with it only once, but I'm within earshot of a TV stuck on Comedy Central often enough to hear such things re-broadcast or advertised half a dozen times. Incidentally, the amount of time involved here is pretty much how long it takes to watch The Daily Show. Watch it all day and you'd hear this countless times.

I'm told Jimmy Kimmel is getting (or just received) a new series on ABC.

The final overrated thing which has been on my mind lately is the obsession people have with website interactivity. Every so often someone suggests I convert this page here into a livejournal so they could reply to stuff I say. I point out that I don't even have the time to read my friends' livejournals, let alone read replies to someone, and more importantly I like having control over the structure and content of my page, but most importantly I like having everything I've ever posted here to actually BE here a month later if anyone ever wants to go back and read it. I have a few other gripes with Livejournal that I won't get into because I'd end up on a huge three page tangent. I'd also likely tick off the person who so graciously hosts this page and also happens to work for LJ now. Anyway though, getting back on track.

I've never liked the whole concept of an unmoderated free for all forum where hundreds or thousands of people can post whatever they want, on the simple grounds that when you have that many people talking at once, you can't pick up on what a single person is saying. On top of that I've never wanted to have anything attached to this page like a message board because I doubt I could find the time to really keep up with it (unlike, say, e-mail), and I'd rather not expose visitors to what is essentially just my personal homepage (even if it is one of the top five most read personal home pages out there) to anything offensive save my own occasional vitriol and use of an annoyingly large vocabulary.

That being said, I haven't really received any feedback from you people since Sharkey launched a pretty public IRC channel save that you want some sort of forum to hang out in down in my neck of the woods, so what they hey, I'll give it a shot. Fair warning though, if this message board here explodes with so much activity that I can't stay on top of it, I'm going to step in there and set up some restrictions of some sort. Actually, I'll pretty much have to do that eventually no matter what, so enjoy the free reign while it lasts everyone!