First let me say that I respect the game and the series immensely. I get it. Its fun to be in a living, breathing city that is this life like and be able to wreck shit. In GTA4 the city is even more believable. Its really an amazing world. What I don’t get is how gamers can suffer through such terrible gameplay in order to experience it.

I want to play this game so badly that I throw fits in anger trying to get past missions. Why bother I keep asking myself. Tonight was the last straw, I think I am going to stop bothering and trade it in.

The basic reason is the same reason I never got very far into the other GTA titles. The control sucks!

Tonight sent me over the edge during a mission for X. I pick him up. Drive five minutes across town. Get some guns in an alley. Go up a huge elevator. Snipe some guys on a construction site. Raid the construction site and kill some more guys only to die because I got stuck behind the wrong cover point or couldn’t run fast enough to somewhere I could get away.

I went through this sequence three times, each time dying because of the awful controls. Not because of any reason I could control myself but because the game just doesn’t work.

This is a common problem because the cover system, aiming and running just don’t work. Yes I said the running. Have you never heard of analog control Rockstar? Where if you push harder on the stick your character runs harder? Or how about not forcing the camera to snap back when I try to get a better view of who is shooting at me?

Back to tonight. The straw that broke the camels back was when I was chasing down the last guy I had to kill. I tried climbing down a ladder but fell instead, next I tried to climb up another ladder but couldn’t. All this with just a tiny bit of life bar left. Nikko just would not climb the ladder. After fumbling with the ladder the enemies I left behind came behind me and killed me. All this cause the game wouldn’t work.

The funny thing is I had way more fun with Saint’s Row than this game. I put in more than 40 hours into it and loved almost every second of it. The game suffers from the same repetitive gameplay, but the control actually works.

Turning right when a biker is passing you in the bike lane

When you don’t use your turn signal in this case I assume your going to continue driving straight. Why would I ever assume otherwise? When you suddenly turn right and almost hit me its your fault, not mine. I saw you, I saw that your turn signal was not on and I continued riding. YOU are the one who didn’t tell me you were turning, I would have stopped if you would have said so.

Thank you jerk face.

Turning left while a pedestrian waits to cross at a cross walk

Without your turn signal on the I think your going straight. When I attempt to cross the street and you turn at the same time your not allowed to honk your horn and act like its my fault that you almost ran me over. See, I have the right away. Its a cross walk OK guy?

Use your turn signal jerk face!

I worked on the homepage Flash and a simple slide show that integrates with our REIgnition CMS on the Locals and Meeting Planners homepages.

Since its on the homepage, I had to take special care in loading the Flash and all of its assets. Each “scene” is loaded individually, but in the end the parallax layers work as they would if everything were static. It was a lot of work, but doesn’t compare to the amount of work the rest of the team put into the site.

1172: Definition fl.video:VideoEvent could not be found.

In order to access a number of the “fl” packages you need to have a component in your library. In this case I added the FLVPlayback component and all was well. Apparently you can use flash.utils.getDefinitionByName as well.

Pilar never missed a chance to annoy me. She would try to steal my yogurt, knock over half full glasses of liquid, jump on my lap just as I was about to get up and wait until I was asleep to come into bed, waking me up in the process. She had one last chance before she left, she stumbled over to the faucet in the Dr’s office and I turned it on so she could get a drink of water.

She was a good cat. The queen of our pets.

She was friendly to strangers, loved to go outside and loved junk food.

The house doesn’t seem the same without her.

So if I want a PlayPauseButton to work with SoundPlayer I need to roll my own. If I want a BufferingBar to work, I need to roll my own.

Hopefully in the next version of Flash they will resolve this and give us components that would accept an interface for a target.

Could have fooled me.

I have been to LA and Phoenix and have seen the clouds of smog than linger over them. I was in Joshua Tree National Park and saw the huge cloud of smog that prevents us from seeing as far as we once were. I have been to Philadelphia, Cleveland, New York City etc, these cities are far more filthy. But this study article points out air pollution measurements, and the saddest thing to me comes from this statement.

Although much of the country may have a stereotype of Pittsburgh as a blue collar, steel mill town, Leikauf says that’s no longer the case. According to him, more than 80 percent of western Pennsylvania’s particulate matter actually drifts from Ohio power plants.

80% of our air pollution comes from another state. That pisses me off.

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