The Long and Winding (and Violent) Road

Just finished playing through the main game of GTA: San Andreas. Much has been made of how frigging huge this game is, but you don't really get a perspective on the thing until you play it through. Let me put it to you this way: I got the game at Christmas. It took me until two days ago to finish it. Granted, I had to play it around Tom's schedule (this game definitely should NOT be played in front of sensitive ears), but it took me FOUR MONTHS to play it through.

So yeah, in the words of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, GTA San Andreas is big. Really big. You might think HALO is pretty impressive looking up close, but that's peanuts compared to San Andreas.

When you play it, not only do you get three seperate urban areas, each roughly equal to the total play areas of GTA III or Vice City, but you also get two large wilderness sections, one consisting of woods and farmland, the other of barren desert. In those areas are no less than seven seperate small towns with multiple streets and buildings of their own, and also minor roadside attractions like oil derricks and tourist traps (both animated. I'm especially fond of the giant bobbing chicken head near a motel.) I haven't tried it yet, but supposedly it takes you a minimum of a half-hour to physically travel from one corner of the state to the opposite on foot, and I believe it. It takes you almost a half-minute just to cross the GTA equivilent o the Golden Gate bridge.

And you can traverse it all without worrying about being interupted for a data load, unless you trigger a mission or enter a building on foot.

Oh, and the buildings you enter are rarely just static. Safehouses will probably have console video games to play, several AmmuNations have gun ranges, there are two large casinos, each with at least a half-dozen different gambling games to play, and totally unrelated to any scenario there's also a strip club where your character can get a private dance.

Real Big.

I'm at a loss though, to imagine what Rockstar will do for an encore, if they stick to the PS2. They might be better off waiting a couple of years for the PS3 to be created to handle improved graphics and an even bigger play area.

Destination Moon 2

This is an idea that's been itching in the back of my skull for the past couple of weeks. Of all the movies that might be worthy of re-make, Destination Moon has the potential to be one of the least cringe-worthy, if it's properly handled. Most especially by endeavoring to make it as scientifically accurate using what we know today, much as it's predecessor was as scientifically accurate as they could manage in 1950.

Plot Elements that could carry over:

1. Idealistic Industrialist makes the case for a moon shot. In first film it was an aircraft manufacturer, backed up by a scientist and an ex-Army Air Force general. This time around it could be a sodding rich dot com executive (loosely based on the guy who sponsored SpaceShipOne), paired up with a bitter ex-NASA engineer and a Burt Rutan clone.

2. Launch vehicle is nuclear powered. I imagine this time around the ship would look like a scaled-up version of SpaceShipOne, with a larger conventionally powered carrier aircraft to boost it to 50,000 ft. before letting the nuclear engine ignite.

3. Last minute attempt to stop the launch by the Guv'ment, backed by Shadowy Forces. In the original it was strongly implied that the Communists were actively sabotaging the program. This time around a less paranoid option would be anti-nuke activists who convince the NRC and NASA to intervene and cancel the launch. Depending on the tone of the screenplay, various characters could rail against NASA's hidebound ways and the idiocy of anti-nuke activists (thus putting the film on Jerry Pournelle's Top Ten Movies list)

4. Launch goes ahead after a hasty schedule change, barely beating out the guvment's stop order. There's a last minute crew change to allow the Guy From Brooklyn to come aboard and ask dumb science questions.

5. Some minor foulup occurs during the trip to the Moon, necessitating a space walk. Guy From Brooklyn screws up and has to be rescued from floating off into space after failing to secure his tether.

6. The Landing goes arwy. Like in the first movie, it can be that the initial landing site was suboptimal, nessitating a longer landing burn. The result is the same too; the crew doesn't have enough reaction mass to take off and escape the Moon's pull.

7. Which brings us to the Great Tearing the Ship Apart Scene. After some exploring, and perhaps a Momentous Discovery (ice water?), the crew starts pulling the ship apart to ditch enough weight to launch.

8. But they come up short. In the original film they solve the problem by MacGuyvering a way to throw out the last spacesuit. That might work again, or perhaps they can jury-rig a way to use the water-ice as reaction mass (in the original movie that *was* the reaction mass. Perhaps in this one the engine uses l-hyd.)

9. Big Safe Landing scene (unlike in the original, which ended with the takeoff from the Moon). The crew and the manufacturing company get a Presidential pardon for violating the NRC's stop order. :)