Playtest

Due to the vagaries of rotating rosters, yesterday was my housemate’s saturday, and, still having our friend’s PS3, he endeavoured to rent a copy of GTA4. Let it simply be said that I didn’t get much sleep last night and it took an extra coffee or two to get going this morning. Thesis writing and videogame auto mobile larceny really don’t mix, I was considering staying at home today to wring the most out of the overnight rental, until I realised that this was in fact a clever ploy to avoid getting out of bed for a few more hours.

The game itself is fairly hard to rate from only about 4 or 5 hours play, particularly when you don’t get the best out of the visual qualities due to your stunningly low quality TV, or having to endure your housemate’s constantly getting lost due to their poor eyesight and hard to read mini-map due to your low quality TV. But i’m just not sure its the giant leap forward suggested by the rave reviews its getting, or that its really that different in character from its predecessors. Its certainly an improvement, and a substantial one at that, over San Andreas, and it seems like the kind of game that requires a substantial exposure to until you start to appreciate it fully. I really have to get around to putting in an entry into Screenplay’s Your Turn competition, where readers submit blog entries, and the best one each month wins a PS3.

Something has gone wrong with my endnote library, every time I try to format the bibliography for my thesis draft I get a “service error: generic”. Apparently, the generic error is just that, one it could be one of many things, but at least I know its generic (hence the blog title). I’ve tried some of the fixes suggested by the Endnote website, and came up with a couple myself, such as importing the library file into a new file, but nothing seems to work. I haven’t dared try the registry editing fix yet, I’m not too sure IT services would like that too much. From the sound of it I need to “check bracket use”, which I’ve done once, so I guess another bracket sweep will have to do.

I’ve been catching up with research this morning, particularly the pile of papers that deal with player experience in one way or another that I haven’t got around to entering into endnote yet. I’m about to start writing about phenomenology and player experience, so it seems like a good place in the thesis to incorporate a lit review of the topic. Well, I just wrote an introductory paragraph so I guess you could say the I’ve already started, if you really wanted to.

update Just found the endnote problem, a single extra space between the author’s name and the @ symbol in the temporary citation place holder thing. I hadn’t noticed it before because it ran from one line to the next. Maybe soon I’ll work out my other problem with Endnote, how to have a conference name term list so I don’t have to write it out for every entry from that conference.

The big question though, will I be able to wrest the TV from my house mate playing our borrowed PS3 for long enough to watch Newstopia tonight. I wouldn’t be surprised if he insists that I simply watch it on the internet =).

Last week was full of surprises, notably the savagely bad head cold that came out of nowhere, but they weren’t all bad. Apparently a good friend was in Melbourne during the week as well, only he promptly got sick as well and spent most of the week in bed, so apart from going for dinner on thursday, we didn’t get to catch up very much.

Another friend bought a PS3 because he was ‘bored’. Funnily enough he’s going to Queensland this week to visit family, so my housemate and I get to baby sit his PS3. My housemate is a nut for Gran Turismo, I’d wouldn’t be surprised if he took time of work to play GT5 Prologue uninterrupted!