Hilary "Bulldozer" Goldstein's GTA4 review is up and hell if it doesn't make me envy pAjAmO's ablitiy to get advance copies all the more. I on the other hand have to wait until Monday nite nite. Still I'm very excited, especially since Hilary sez that the main character has a lot of heart and the story is more layered and subtle. Now I thought that is what made its predicessor one of the best games I had ever played but no one spoke on that much at the time. So I'm well interested to see this for myself.

On other fronts the IGN networks are tent calling for Age of Conan like mad, and it done got me an open beta key. 12 gigs are downloading as we speak. Which is a little bogus because I just had 12 gigs of the Gamespot beta but it wouldn't transfer over. Oh well, when servers open on May 1st I'll be there man. Ooo! I wonder if I'll be able to play the single player intro as soon as it's installed!

So it finally happened. Much like all things, the good folks are Harmonix, makers of the fine "Rock Band" have failed me miserably. Today the first full album became available for download and play. It is "Screaming for Vengeance" from Judas Priest. An interesting first choice to be sure, especially with nuggets like "Who's Next" and "Nevermind" rumored. Still, I was very excited to finally see it, as the ability to play a full album was something I really wanted to experience in Rock Band. I thought it would be the perfect culmination of learning how to play the game and figuring out where I stood in the difficulty hierarchy. "I have an hour to play something, I'll pop in 'Pinkerton'" I imagined myself saying in the months to come.

But what we have so far is a failure to combine interface with intention. So as it stands the play-experience for an album is to first write down the order of songs, then go to the quickplay, choose song #1, choose difficulty, play it, choose "new song", look up what song 2 is, find it amongst the 100+ tracks, choose difficulty, play song, and repeat until album.length = trackNumber. Talk about buzz kill. Shouldn't it be enough to pick what album you want to play? To let the players change difficulty after a failed attempt but keep their place in the setlist? It seems like such a minor adjustment would be needed from the gameplay they already have implemented in the Band World Tour. This is going to stick in my craw for a while. I feel gypped by laziness and greed. And no one outlazies and outaverices me! With only a week until GTAIV comes out, I'm afraid the best gaming movement of the last year has completely lost steam.