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One of my most memorable competitive experiences was the Unreal Tournament over at the Fragwire party about a year ago. I won the tournament, but it wasn't an easy trip to the top. By the final three matches, I had some fierce competition. I started a match against a guy named Falcon and I quickly went down by 3. It was the first time I had no competitive nervousness. I just kicked it up a notch and said to myself, "I CANNOT lose." My mind, in its indecipherable language, knew that it was impossible to lose that game. Sure enough, I pulled off the greatest comeback I've ever accomplished and won the game 10-8.

Little did I suspect that I'd be presented with a harder challenge in real life in which my brain is reacting in the exact same way - real life. "I CANNOT fail," I thought to myself, once again thinking over the horrible consequences of failing - this time just a tad more painful than being knocked out of the tournament. Unfortunately, there's five months (to the day) remaining until we know which way this one goes.

Gave up on playing through Command & Conquer: Generals. It's loads of fun, but boy oh boy, do I suck at strategy games.

Promptly replaced on the "currently playing" list with Splinter Cell. I'm lovin' it so far.

Attention everyone:

I'm going to one-up the only persistent music mixer I know and assemble the great high-school-nostalgia mix cd. Except this time, it'll go light on stuff ripped from 102.1 and heavy on music with a bit more meaning, a bit more edge, and perhaps just a bit more nostalgia. You, the everyones, come in to fill in any of the gaps I might miss.

I'm talking mainly to three groups of people here:

The Amigos: you know who you are. If I spent the last summer with you, you fit. Stuff like Frontier Psychiatrist, Mr. Skruff - what else have we been obsessed with?

The Band: Eric, Greg, Daniel.. Does anything really need to go in here besides old-school Blink-182 songs and maybe a Pennywise tune? Oh, can't forget NOFX's 'The Brews.'

The Group Consisting Entirely of Aroon: Man, does that sound lame.. what an unnecessary ego boost for aroon. :p Regardless, musically, you deserve it man.. Deftones, old-school Limp Bizkit, Stabbing Westward, old-school Incubus.. what else?

An early and very tentative list:

-old-school days (junior high)
Deftones - Be Quiet and Drive (far away)
Limp Bizkit - Pollution
Stabbing Westward - Save Yourself
Orbital - Halcyon + On + On
Incubus - New Skin

-Times with the punk band (freshman year)
Pennywise - Every Single Day
Blink-182 - What's My Age Again . honorary mention - all of cheshire cat
NOFX - The Brews
Goo Goo Dolls - Broadway

-Ty introduces Blake to trip-hop and IDM (sophomore year)
Aphex Twin - Windowlicker
Thievery Corporation - Focus on Sight
DJ Cam - Dieu Reconnaitra Les Siens

-Somewhere in between
Millencolin - No Cigar
Incubus - Aqueous Transmission (space permitting)
Linkin Park - Pushing Me Away (space + patience with LP lovers permitting)
Tosca - Orozco (space permitting)

-Times with the amigos (junior/senior year)
The Avalanches - Frontier Psychiatrist
T.A.T.U. - Not Gonna Get Us

-Steph's phase (senior year)
Vanessa Carlton - A Thousand Miles
John Mayer - No Such Thing
Telepopmusik - Breathe

-It's all over
Opus III - It's a Fine Day (radio edit) - brownie points to he or she who can find an mp3 of the edit playing on KDL
Dzihan + Kamien - Colores (space permitting)
Michelle Branch - Goodbye to You . All You Wanted (space permitting)

and to close things out...
Incubus - Nice to Know You

If you think this needs any changes, leave comments or bug me personally. Free copies to anyone who wants one.

The snagger.org domain name is down for a couple days for a DNS switch. Site can still be reached at snagger.blogspot.com.

GTA: Vice City postmortem:

An absolute masterpiece of a game. The best title to come out of the UK since GTA3, and before that, well, it had been quite a while since a great game came from over there. Vice City cashed in on the commercial success of GTA3 and did the impossible: Rockstar North took a successful execution of a very ambitious design and improved on it. In typical sequel fashion, they took most aspects of GTA3 and simply made them bigger. More radio stations with longer soundtracks. The 80s music license was a smart gimmick, but now they're in danger of using the decade gimmick over and over again a la Austin Powers. Rockstar, luckily, is smart enough not to do so. [Clarification: the game is published by Rockstar Games, and developed by Rockstar North - the newly-renamed DMA Design after a buyout after GTA3's release.] More vehicles. Motorcycles were well-balanced, which was a huge relief. More weapons. Now if only the M4 had auto-targeting. More missions and plot branches. More extras. Upon finishing the plot line and triggering the end credits, the statistics menu revealed I had completed 60% of the game. And that was after acquiring most of the real estate properties and completing their missions. Unlike a typical sequel, though, the attention to detail actually went up as the size of the game increased. I remember watching with amazement as Cubans and Haitians got into a gunfight, seeing ambulances show up, reviving the Haitians and seeing the Cubans kill them once more while the paramedics got killed in the crossfire.

The single biggest change in VC had to be the creation of a main character. Tommy Vercetti is easily one of the better video game characters ever created, and we have Ray Liotta to thank for the brilliant voice acting that brought him to life. This was a huge undertaking for Rockstar, but it was worth every penny they spent toward all the added dialogue, voice, and animation that gave us a round character to play through instead of the comparable silent automaton we were given in GTA3. Tommy didn't make the game any more immersive, per se, but it made the player so much more proud to act as badass Tommy than the nameless goon in GTA3 who was always someone else's tool.

Gameplay in VC is grand enough to fill its own dedicated novel. But anyone who's played the game knows exactly what's going on. The beauty of it is the percentage completion system. The minute I get the time I'm going to pursue the 100%, something I haven't actively wanted to do since Donkey Kong Country.

Graphics are the game's only weak point. The environments are absolutely beautiful, as positively everyone has seen by now. The problem is that these gorgeous views are ahead of their time. The PS2, with the current knowledge programmers have of it, isn't powerful enough to handle the complexity and detail of the VC world. Maybe in a couple years, when developers know how to get more power out of it, we'll see a future title that handles the visuals a little better. Framerates were noticeably slower than GTA3, and that's even with blurry-screen mode turned on. I can't count the number of times I drove along a sidewalk only to suddenly run into a palm tree or a lamppost or a police officer that popped up three feet in front of me. Yet I saw the Downtown skyscrapers even from Washington Beach. Oops.

Sound: very, very nice. Extremely high production values. I didn't think the radio, with all its cleverness, could stand up to GTA3 coming into VC. Once again, I was pleasantly surprised. Huge kudos to both studios for adding all the extra material. Even after finishing the game, the radio hasn't gotten so old that I just have to turn it off. Even the classic sarcastic humor managed to stay in, which kept me hugely amused. I don't think I'll ever understand the world's obsession with Lazlow, but I'm personally ecstatic that Fernando Martinez made such a triumphant return. Avery Carrington (Burt Reynolds) was hilarious, too. Kudos to the brothers Houser and Lazlow for some good material.

Production value: dear Lord, I don't think any studio has ever done it this well. These guys have redefined attention to detail, and they've done so in style. It's easy to see that all the talent used in this game cost millions of dollars, not even counting the 100+ development staff. It's considered poor taste to give one person credit for a great game, but it's obvious that the Houser brothers have been keeping tabs on every aspect of the game's development and when the right guy with the right vision gets authority over everything, good things happen.

Oddly enough, I just discovered that I've followed Gamespot's review system up to this point. But their Tilt idea is retarded so I'm going to just close things up:

Vice City is easily one of the best games I've ever played. It's wholly gratifying to play, is extremely well-written, and raises the bar in game development for Rockstar North's ability to top themselves on a very ambitious sequel to a very ambitious title, and even to Rockstar themselves (as much as I hate giving publishers credit for doing anything valuable for games) for expanding North's operating environment and giving them access to so many more resources to make a truly great game.

What's next: Two rumors are floating. One says GTA: San Andreas will be more material following the Vice City formula and will be out this fall.* The other says North is going to go back to the drawing board and release Grand Theft Auto 4 late in 2004 (expect delays into late 2005). My prediction says both will happen, but expect one or both of them to hit the XBox.

* Recently, a Rockstar employee registered the domain name www.gtasanandreas.com. On the other hand, Vice City had kentpaul.com - not exactly a dead giveaway.