monkeyplus1

I’ll spare you most details about what I think of GTA IV, other than to say it’s great, it deserves the 10/10 scores it has received across the board. Game of the Year, easy.

What I was most curious about was what it feels like to fly the helicopters, since that has barely been mentioned in any review or podcast I’ve come across.  The instruction manual doesn’t say much either.

I joined a multiplayer match in “Free Mode”, drove myself to Heli Tours (on the SE tip of Algonquin), and found 4 or 5 Blackhawk-esque helicopters there.

The right-trigger lifts the helicopter up (”pulling pitch” on the collective), the left lowers the helicopter.

The right-bumper pivots the helicopter to the right around it’s center axis, the left goes the other way. In a hover, you can pivot in place.

The left thumbstick tilts the entire helicopter in the direction you’re pushing.

To move forward, for example, you push the left thumbstick up while pulling some pitch on the right trigger to maintain altitude.

As in the past GTA games, the helicopter will level itself out if you don’t touch the controls, though you will still retain some directional inertia of the way you had been traveling.  This is not like the Battlefield mod “Desert Combat”, where if you are rolling the helicopter and take your hands off the controls, it will continue rolling.

Compared to other next-gen games featuring a helicopter, GTA IV’s choppers don’t feel too dumbed-down. It takes some practice to do low-level flying, and especially landing. Kind of like driving in GTA IV, the main rule of thumb is to be gentle on the controls, overdoing them will result in a quick death.

Once I got the hang of the controls in Free Mode, other players would hear, then see me flying overhead and ask for a ride.  I’d tell them to find an open space (a street intersection if nothing else, or a park), and I’d gingerly set down, and give them a lift to wherever they wanted to go.  Other times, someone would get lost, or find themselves too far from where the shit was going down.

“Hey I need a ride over here!”

“Ok, what’s your color?”  (asking them what color icon they have in Free Mode, everyone is different).

“Uh… orange.”  I check the map, find Orange.

“Ok, I’m coming to you, find an open spot.”

They’ll hear me approaching, and wait for me to set down. Then off we go.  Loads of fun.

The blackhawk helos do have a minigun, but it’s very hard to hit with them. That will take a lot more practice, though I did shoot down someone else flailing around in a helicopter, witnessed by several players on the ground who saw the rain of destruction.

I re-joined Xbox Live.   Send me a friend request, I’m “Spacechump”.   And Liberty City is where I’ll be.

I was to take the day off tomorrow, as has been my tradition with every GTA release since GTA3, but a job interview trumps a video game.

the Portland Beavers, triple-A baseball team, that is.

There’s an awesome little stadium tucked into downtown Portland where I’ve watched at least a dozen Portland Beavers games.  They Beavers have won at least one of those times, but I’m there to enjoy the game and soak up the atmosphere.  I don’t follow the teams at all, so I couldn’t guess at their standing or reputation, but based on what I’ve seen, they’re ho-hum.

The beers are a little steeply priced, but on “Thirsty” Thursdays it’s discounted, and due to that, can sometimes become more of a meat-market of sleazy tramp-stamped girls and backwards-baseball-cap-wearing jocko douche-fucks.

hmm… let’s see.

reading, keeping my book list up to date on goodreads

one of my half-sisters is getting married in Texas. I’ve only met her once, but wish her well.

my house is officially up for sale. The official listing went up last week, but it was my posting on craigslist that brought the first potential buyers. At least a half-dozen people have come to take a look, but so far, no offers.

Something that caught me by surprise. If you go through a realtor, the selling and buying agents will split 5-6% of your selling price. That comes out of the amount of cash I have towards a new house, and in my case, roughly $10,000. POW! right in the ole wallet.

That reminds me, a new addition to words that people commonly mis-pronounce by adding an extra vowel:

so many people pronounce “realtor” as “ree-litter” instead of “realtor”.

like “nuclear” as “nu-kyoo-ler”,

“aluminium” instead of “aluminum”

Why the extra vowel?

We are still looking at a lot of houses. One house that we both like is still sitting on the market, so hopefully an offer will be made on our house, allowing us to make an offer on our next one. The equity we have in our “starter home” should be a great boon in getting a leg up to a much better house, but right now, very few houses are selling in Portland at any price-range.

still working on learning the bass guitar, trying to practice daily. I have had a very sore left-thumb for four or five weeks, hardly getting any better. I think I strained it one night practicing over at a friends’.

trying to get a job; my current one ends in mid-May. I’ve had a dozen phone interviews, and had to turn away one lucrative job due to its location in Beaverton, and another because the pay was only $60k. Lots of fringe benefits, like 75% off classes at the university, but I just can’t afford that much of a pay cut. Living in Portland is not cheap.

My parents are in town for the summer. They retired last year, and now spending their time camping in a luxurious 5th wheel trailer, but spending the summer here to see their grand-kids.

GTA IV comes out next Tuesday. Sounds like the fucking best-game-ever, the fantastic single-player I would have expected, and the 16-player multiplayer that is a great surprise. I’m not going to have much of a life this summer, thanks to this game. I’ve waited three long years for this, though my faith in the company has paid off very handsomely in stock trading (and now the IRS would like their cut).

Although NASA’s Apollo 17 was the last manned mission to the moon (on the books), some video surfaced a while back from an alleged Apollo 20 mission.

Now, I’m sure this is probably a hoax, but a good one!

The story is that on one of it’s orbits around the moon, Apollo 15 photographed a strange-shaped object sticking out of a small crater. This part appears to be true, you can see the shadowy object in question on the NASA JPL website.

In 1976, three astronauts, were launched in secret from Vandenburg AFB as Apollo 20, as the story goes. Two Americans and a Russian.

As they approach the object, it is clearly not a natural feature of the moon, but some kind of craft. One of the astronauts comment on how long it appears to have been there, as there appears to be damange from meteorites.

They land, and inside the craft find two female occupants, EBEs (extraterrestrial biological entities). One is blue-grey skin and is obviously dead, it’s neck having been severed by a traumatic impact. The other, evidently the pilot, is not dead, but not alive either, in some kind of stasis. She is six-fingered. They took her back, naming her “Mona Lisa”, along with the skull of the other EBE.

Here is the footage:

Some pictures of “Mona Lisa”, the EBE they brought back.

and here is some footage of the Mona Lisa EBE