The Past and Times of Yore: GTA4, The Ballad of Gay Tony, Bringing back the crazy-go-nuts

Title: Grand Theft Auto IV: The Ballad of Gay Tony
Developer: Rockstar North
Publisher: Rockstar Games (Parent Company: Take2 Interactive)
Platforms: Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PC
Multiplayer: Up to 16 players on consoles; 32 on PC.
Website: www.rockstargames.com/theball...
Release Date: October 29, 2009 on X360; April 13, 2010 (USA) on PS3 and PC.
Rating: MA 17+ (ESRB); 18 (BBFC)

First off I will say I have already done a small review for TBOGT back in April 2011 but having recently played the game again I did want to expand on that as much as I could.

There was a time when I thought that GTA had gotten a bit more serious, that was of course when GTA4 came out. It was so great looking and smooth and the ragdoll and physics effects were awesome and the driving and shooting and overall animation and graphics were much more realistic overall, which wasn’t exactly too hard coming from San Andreas. While this newfangled animation did resolve with some ragdoll fun, most of the time I found myself trying to play mildly realistically even so much as early in the game and sometimes when I felt like it even abiding to the local street signs and traffic lights. With the release of the “Lost and the Damned” expansion this didn’t really change much, the biker gang story was just as gritty as the main GTA4 storyline. But I enjoyed the realism and playing properly though I couldn’t help thinking there was something missing.

GTA was based on gritty realism, TBOGT is safe to say is not in most regards.

When the newest expansion for GTA4 “The Ballad of Gay Tony” (TBOGT) came out thats where a lot of things changed. In contrast to the gritty underground life that was the Lost and the Damned This ‘episode’ focuses on the glitz, glamour, money and business of the Algonquin (aka Manhattan) night life, the game introduced new weapons, new vehicles, new radio tracks, new interiors, and new missions that offer a fresh way to explore Liberty City. The story starts off quite simple (in GTA terms), you are Luis Lopez, a hispanic American who has had a troubled childhood with both his friends and his family and has been through some rough times with drug gangs and jail and has just recently survived a bank robbery as an innocent bystander in which we all would know which bank robbery it was and who the culprits were. I love the fact that the main characters of the expansions have missions that intertwine with the ones from Niko who was the main protagonist in GTA4. So anyway Luis is now in a business partnership with Tony Prince aka “Gay Tony” who is a nightclub entrepreneur with links to the Ancelotti Crime Syndicate. Gay Tony operates two nightclubs in Algonquin - Hercules and Maisonette 9, he is also a drug addict, with many debts to pay off, and he relies on Luis as his bodyguard/business partner.

Tony and Luis hold a tenuous partnership

The first mission started out pretty normal, you drive to the two clubs and see Luis and Tony together and got to know the two personalities. I did notice that Rockstar had added new “clubber” citizens with the appropriate clothes and I have to say they did a pretty good job of simulating a nightclub, the music was there, the new radio stations and tracks were especially good in the club scene, the alcohol, the people, the vibe there was even people outside the venue drunk and throwing up. It became apparent in the second mission that this was not going to start off slow at all, you travel with Tony to the golf driving range where you take shots at a union official who is tied to a golf cart before his mafia friends arrive and you jump into your own golf cart for a short guns-blazing-golf-cart-chase through the city. After that things quickly spiral out of control and you’re doing jobs all over the place for eccentric millionaires, annoying pricks and powerful criminals alike to save Tony’s skin, things that involve blowing up speedboats with sticky bombs, stealing armed helicopters from luxury yachts, skydiving out of planes, jumping off buildings and stealing a moving train carriage using a skycrane.

Just a usual day at the office

All the side missions this time around are all just as crazy, they involve helping your friends Armando and Henrique steal drug shipments, base jumps from buildings, cage fighting and triathlons involving helicopters, speedboats and fast cars, you can also enjoy the clubs if you with, either by doing the dancing mini-game or working there as the manager occasionally being called out to do a favor for a celebrity of some sort. One of the main things that adds to the action is the introduction of some fairly ridiculous new weapons and vehicles which include:

Like Planet Rock!, we just don't stop we gonna drive you nuts!

• A longer more silly looking handgun.

• The AA-12 automatic shotgun with explosive rounds no less

• The P90 Assault SMG

• A Golden SMG that has a ridiculous 1000 rpm fire rate

• A heavy M249 machine gun

• A chunky looking advanced sniper rifle with laser sight.

• The return of the sticky bombs and grenade launcher from the Lost and the Damned as well as an armed helicopter with chainguns and rocket launchers and last but not least a SWAT tank with a full on assault cannon. If that doesn’t spell chaos then I don’ know what will.

Budda budda budda budda! kablamo! wachow! badda bing bong!

When playing GTA San Andreas it was hard to believe CJ went from a low-life gangster in LA to being a part owner of a Las Vegas Casino and The Ballad of Gay Tony does seem a lot like the time CJ spent in the Nevada desert doing seemingly secret-agent style missions. I’ll always love the whole “starting out in a new city with nothing and working up to something” style of story, but it was somewhat fun to be “starting out with lots of things and trying to stay alive” sort of story and throughout the missions there were a few times when I did think to myself “wow how are we going to get out of this one” as Luis struggles to deal with all the problems he has going for himself with his troubled mother, his friends Armando and Henrique, his suicidal stalker ex-girlfriend Margot, and not to mention all the people Tony has either pissed off or borrowed money from with his drug-fuelled antics.

Luis' friends Armando and Henrique aren't exactly supportive of him trying to reform his life though either does he the way he's looking with that fully automatic shotgun "Grrrrrrr"

I had only one occasion where I could experience the multiplayer and it was fun, but not as fun as it could have been, I played a bit at a LAN we we used the Simple Trainer to spawn cars, obstacles and generally cause some ruckus but what I really wanted was to do multiplayer base jumping and skydiving. I was really interested to see if they had a game mode where you could do the triathlon race with the helicopters, boats, cars and nitro with your friends but looking at the multiplayer modes unfortunately this wasn't the case though as you'll see below I did find some press screenshots of it so I don't whether it was originally in there or what.


"This ain't checkers" Triathlon Mission with Mori

Why wasn't this a multiplayer game moooooooooooode!

Overall I found The Ballad of Gay Tony a pretty fun experience, it brings back a few of the crazy things from San Andreas that were missing from GTA4 and really finishes off the game with a bang (literally!) It pays tribute to what the original game was built on freedom, chaos and thoughtless crime. This ‘episode’ has vice, sex, action and explosions out the wazoo and would satisfy anyone who was disappointed with the simplification of the original game. Sadly the multiplayer was never very active on PC at least though I thoroughly recommend for any fans of the GTA series.

JD

 
The Ballad of Gay Tony Debut Trailer

Menergy!

My Usual Spiel: F1 2011, To strive for perfection or misbehave

Release Date: 23 September 2011
Genre: Driving/Racing
Publisher: Codemasters
Developer: Codemasters Racing
Platform: PC, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3

F1 2011 was a game that was suggested to me to try out by one of my friends Aaron Simpson, a friend whose experience with Japanese swords I couldn’t question but with video games I really had no idea. Though I was only trying out the game free of charge this time around unlike the instances of Magicka, Diablo III and possibly Arma II which I purchased on the proposition from friends that it was a game I would enjoy and found I actually didn’t in the end. But anyway I’d never played am F1 simulator before and who was I to refuse a driving game. I found starting out with the game pretty easy, I thought It was going to be a nightmare settings up all the controls and options but it turned out to be pretty easy almost over simplified I think as it struck me straight away that this was not a serious racing simulator such as Grand Turismo and not a crazy arcade racer like Burnout but sort of like a middle of the road one like Test Drive Unlimited 2 for example which is what I’m used to.

Ah the very start of the race, quite chaotic especially in Singapore at night

The experience of being a new F1 driver is fairly thorough you get a full on introduction and media interview though they don’t actually react to your answers, you also get a laptop with emails from your Team Manager your Race manager your PR Manager and your Manageering manager of managerial services but this is just formality basically as you are told what your targets are for each race anyway, things like placing 18^st or under which is pretty reasonable for your first time. So you select the race (Australia is first up as usual) and then you get straight to the garage and in the driver’s seat and have options to configure all this stuff and view these screens with things like, tyre type, weather, engine set up etc, but basically depending on the difficulty level you have it set on the options should be picked for you and you can go straight out and start.


"C'mon let's go man! it's all good, I'm good! I'm fine! get this damn computer off my car! dunno what most of it means anyway, wait I think I need to go to the toilet!, is there a toilet in here!? errgh aargh eeg! oh screw it let's goooo! woah! sorry about that buddy almost ran you over! woah this shit is fast!

To my annoyance you don’t actually drive the car out yourself, it’s automatically done for you to stop any speeding through the pits, but the problem with this is that the car keeps accelerating and they only give you control back on the first corner and you have to really make sure that you slow down. I actually tried turning all of the assists off and faired mostly fine without them surprisingly though I had a hard time measuring the throttle to my joystick, I use a Logitech Playstation2 style controller for PC and I use one joystick for steering and the other for acceleration and braking unlike the new PS3 one which had the bumper pads for accel/braking.

These two turns couldn't have gone any worse, I was having trouble getting used to the throttle and was accelerating way to fast.

So I did laps, and more laps, it was pretty challenging to start off with even on the easiest setting (especially in the freakin rain) but I got reasonably used to it. Though in order to get the full experience you really need the whole force feedback steering wheel/pedals set up of course I reckon it does make things harder especially when you not used to it.

You can apparently buy an F1 steering wheel pheripheral

Not that something like this wouldn't be even better.

In order to do your first race you first go out for practice to do a specific amount of laps which I’m not sure how many and ended up leaving having done about 5 and just gone with that time. I then had to do qualifying followed by the actual race. The Albert Park scene was good, I was ready to do then I did the 3 lap race and came 14^th which was pretty good, you really notice  If you happen to run into a wall and lose parts of your car the difference that it makes and how fragile the damn cars really are. I then went back to my drivers “caravan” and selected the next race which was in Malaysia and came 7^th, which was even better. It was at that time I came to the realization that being a virtual F1 Driver was quite boring, the emails were boring the interviews were boring and the racing was quite boring. SO I had to shake things up a bit (as you do)

Lookin good for Albert park Qualifying

I like this shot too, I think their just used generic buildings though unless you can recognise one

During the next race (in Turkey) I could give two shits about setting a good time or qualifying, and got myself disqualified from both events. During the main race I started to ram the fack out of my opponents, I shoved them out of the way, I blocked them (illegally, yes there’s such thing as legal blocking in F1 apparently), I ran them into the wall, I threw my cigarette lighter into their cockpit onto their crotch, you name it I did it and eventually got black flagged with race director “Andy”  all the while calmly telling me what was going on with the stewards until very calmly telling me that “this is the end of the race for us” as I was booted from the track two minutes in.

I then saw a short animation of me swiping the camera away and storming off into what I think would be the locker room. And do you think after all this foul behavior, disqualifications and failure would I get a stern talking to by Andy? A negative interview about the results of the last race, an angry email from the Team Manager? telling me to pack up my stuff and get out? No, NOTHING I did the same thing two races and two different countries in a row and nothing happened apart from some animation of me being slightly moody, the interview was the same stupid supportive crap and I received absolutely no new email from anyone, and that my friend is not acceptable. What’s the fun on doing wrong when you don’t get at least some kind of negative feedback for it especially in an industry as freakishly competitive as Formula 1.

"Get that camera out of my face!, or helmet... damn car, damn race, damn sexual misconduct lawsuit, rrrgh mffrmggr mgrghrghrr...."

But anyway I’ll continue with the review, the graphics are reasonable though a bit cartoony, it’s almost like they used the same graphical style and engine from Vietcong 2  but technically this isn’t a game which needs detailed human characters and you don’t really need that much for an F1 game, the people look decent, the weather effects are pretty good, there’s a decent vibe going when you start the race not to mention the attention to detail including all the stands with the people during the main races. The singleplayer campaign should keep you going for a while but there is also the new “Proving Grounds” which you are given specific cars and settings to make a time in as well as the normal time trial. I didn’t really try the multiplayer mode as I don’t usually bother with most racing games though I have tried with a few games recently including Test Drive Unlimited 2, Wipeout Fusion and Motorstorm: Pacific Rift. But if you’re a fan of F1 and want to play with and compete against people of the same liking then this will be for you where you can participate in the new Co-op championship mode, where you and a friend will be teammates/rivals for a whole F1 Season which sounds like a lot of fun, as well as that there also is the usual multiplayer plus a split screen mode which is rare for a PC version, there is also computer racers to fill in the gaps if you haven’t got the full 16 players on the track (imagine that)

Quite a good example of what would probably happen when you play multiplayer

Overall F1 2011 is a game mostly for fans of F1 or avid track motorsports fans in general especial the single and multiplayer co-up Championships you really get the feel of being an F1 driver, the learning curve can be a bit steep for newcomers  . I can honestly say that I’d rather be some rich bastard in Hawaii driving (almost) any car he wants any way he wants for some billionaire tournament rather than a chump who has to adhere to realistically strict rules. I can’t say I didn’t have a bit of fun, but seriously give me an open road and a Lamborghini anyday.

JD

F1 2011 Release trailer

vvveeeeeeoowwwwwnnn!....... rock'n'roll outro

Minecraft Adventures: Ozgamerparty, The Underground hall hideout and Admin tomfoolery in the 1.3.1 update

Well here we go again, I said I’d do it and I did, Ozgamerparty Minecraft is back in proverbial full swing and things have certainly started out swingingly. The 1.3.1 patch had come out along with the changes that I had detailed in the previous MC Adventures which I won't go into them again but most are good.

Early on when the new 1.3.1 map had been opened on the server I quickly joined up with my friend Atomic and his friends Brendan and that forest-burning, mass-furnace-obsessed wacko deadman47. I found they had travelled a short way across the sea to a tiny island in the middle of a huge ocean biome which wasn’t actually too far from the spawn area, and made a fairly cramped underground base and stairwell which obviously (as you know me) wasn’t going to work. 

That was our island, out in that huge mutha of an ocean, notice the Mushroom island on the lower left

It was fairly inconspicuous, apart from the torches as I got sick of the fackin spiders spawning above ground and making noise, I mean I went out one time and there was 4 of em up there.

We quickly widened out the resource room and we decided that there will be a large main stairwell as a centre for our underground base as this would allow us to have rooms jutting out from this stairwell as well as being able to have underground houses with windows to look out on to something rather than having ‘jail-cell’ like rooms. So we made the stairwell with included a nether portal, a large farm and a mine (full of slimes, no less) at the bottom. I also properly organised the chests but found when I logged in one night they were all re-organised to deadman’s liking but whatever, I don’t really care, though I had to change all the signs around cause of his lack of spelling skills  for example “caol” and “coblestone” I also really don’t understand his fascination with making large rooms with walls full of furnaces.

My design of the the Psynapse resource room. I think is pretty neat, if you ask me, yeh it takes more space then say putting the chests in rows, but I reckon it looks better..

So anyway we got our rooms underway and I went out looking for supplies, most notably wool (which I amassed quite a large amount of) flowers, possibly some coal and clay, the clay being the hardest to find for some reason. Ever since a certain patch (not sure which one probably the one which introduced swamps) clay has been in abundance, though in this map even in swamps I was finding it hard to locate for some odd reason. Though it did seem like someone had gone through the area already cause I found the clay in some out-of-the-way areas. Once I had gotten all of the resources I was eager to get started as I enjoy making underground rooms look more homely.


I done sheared dem sheep

I started by smelting all my clay into brick and making a brick wall with windows and doorway as an entrance to my house, inside I made a small work area with furnaces, a crafting table and a small open lava feature which acts as an incinerator. I also started to make a sitting area with wooden couches and a netherack fire in the centre with some iron bars around it. I’d planned to continue the brick wall all around the edges of the room (though it was kind of hard because I’d actually broken through the bottom of the ocean floor) with a combination of yellow/red/orange carpet and the roof of wooden oak just to make things look more homely and have little sign of stone.

The brick wall of my room in the underground base

My half-finished underground house

 Unfortunately  my plans and dreams were shattered as I logged in one night to find our underground home ransacked and all of my hard earned brick pilfered, not to mention pretty much everything else in our homes and all the valuable items from our storage. I was kind of annoyed about the brick, but there was really not much I could do, though I really did want to finish of that home, but oh well, it can wait for another time I was lucky enough to have made a full set of diamond armor previously so I at least had that and all of my tools.

Our post-grief-and-theft underground stairway

SO with that behind me I decided to see what other factions would take me, and right off the bat my old friend Rennz (WarpageHD) invited me to his faction of Aniki (not sure what that means). He also mentioned that his faction was “peaceful” which basically meant that they could not get griefed and could not attack others, so in other words perfect for me and I don’t know why I didn’t get my previous faction set to peaceful in the first place though you have to get admins to do it I think.

Aniki Town Centre

Fletcher's cobble castle-thing

Rennz had a pretty good faction area going already, including a town hall, several jungle trees inc one built into some kind of house, a waterfall, a large wheat farm and lake with bamboo surrounding and what looked like a villager ‘tenement’.

The resource room

I checked that egg at the wall and a chicken with a normal sized head and smaller body came out

Fletcher's Jungle tree hotel.

The Egg farm

Wheat Farm

Villager tenement (no we're not slavers)

Reed Farm

Alternate Shot of Aniki

 I didn’t waste much time deciding on what I was going to do for a house as it certainly wasn’t going to be made of brick this time. I first needed a place to set up before I could start making my house and I found this small crevasse inside the faction claim which I lovingly named the "Slum district" and made a dirty hole in the side to live in for the time being.

Slummin' it up

(chuckle)

I decided to create what I had been meaning to for a while, a giant version of a normal Minecraft tree which I have detailed in a previous post, I think it worked out pretty well though.

Aniki with my Treehouse visible

Dynamap view

I'm wearing a full set of Diamond Armor here, along with a steel sword which is for some reason shaped like a pirate sword. I went back to my old Domo-kun skin but I think I may bring back the human one if this is what i'm going to look like with texture pack armor on, even if other can't see me.

 We’ve got 4 people in our faction, Rennz, FletcherHD, Ninjasport, Blacklabelskata and me. I haven’t really interacted with Ninjasport as yet, she (or he, Rennz thinks it’s a girl due to the female skin but I have my doubts) has set up a base across the way from ours and Rennz built quite a large platform complete with powered minecart tracks all the way to Ninja’s base which was off-claim, we did actually decide to make Ninja’s claim part of ours in order for hers to be peaceful as well for protection though being fairly new to the game she was kind of reluctant as it may have sounded like we were taking over her base, but of course not we’re just ‘assimilating’ your property, said the Corporation to the homeowner.

Dynamap view of the bridge, the Dynamap for the server has had an update and is now at a high camera angle

 Due to books now needing 1 leather to create and the difficulty of finding cows when you need them we decided to create a cow farm in this open cave we mined out, funnily enough it wasn’t too hard to find cows nearby and we basically just started breeding. Which is a very surreal process as you can see below, The 5 minute time limit does make things a bit arduous though it’s ok if you make the paddock near the faction home and you can zip right back to there.

The Cow farm.

 Pigs, Sheep, Chickens, Cows and Mooshrooms enter "love mode" if fed one wheat. Wolves enter love mode when they are fed any type of meat. Cats enter love mode when they are fed a raw fish. Tamed wolves and cats must be at full health before being fed to enter "love mode". Animals in "love mode" emit hearts constantly and will path towards nearby animals of the same species that are also in love mode.^[3] The two animals will "kiss" for about two and a half seconds, and then a baby animal of the same species spawns either in between the parents or on the same blocks as the parent that was spawned first, which ends love mode for the parents. They will not be able to enter love mode again for 5 minutes. However, they can be herded with the appropriate material, regardless of age. After the baby animal has spawned, it will follow its parents for 20 minutes before growing to full size.

-Courtesy of Minecraftwiki

So there you go, you can make cows fall in love and have sex in 5 minutes, pop out a baby in two and a half seconds which reaches adulthood in 20 minutes, amazing, though this is a world where trees grow to full size in under 30 minutes.

For those who don’t know our resident shenanigan Moderator Jason1211. Recently I was warped to the spawn area to see a giant hole where the ocean should be, no doubt it was Jason doing some destructive worldediting, he then reverted the ocean floor back then the ocean itself right on top of a group of us who were watching, which made quite a cool effect while the server lag caught up.

Mod POWERR!

What a mess.

Thats the top layer of the ocean just coming down, was quite scary actually until we could swim up.

 A short time after that we apparently had all four faction members online at the same time and since we were the only players on our always responsible mod decided to have some fun with us, this started with spawning mass amounts of Silverfish in the town hall then spawning cows and sheep everywhere then pigs and punting them off Fletcher’s tower, then adding a massive amount of extra cows including Mooshrooms to our cow farm, needless to say it was an experience not to be forgotten.

Spot the Rennz

 
This was quite fun and also scary I can assure you.

Lupi was fairly antisocial this time around. also check out my sword, oh yeh

Well that's all for now, I may update the post with more pictures and happenings, don't know how much longer I'm going to be playing Minecraft for the time being. Playing F1 2011 by request from a friend, also playing GTA4: The Ballad of Gay Tony again as well as watching the first series of the simply magnificent Game of Thrones series.

Penny Arcade Expo may be coming to Australia! this is very exciting and we eagerly await which city it will be held in. Also have a look at this interview with Notch during one of the US Paxs's's's, it's quite an interesting read.

JD


Peace is underrated.