Mel Bytes The Fuss

GTA CW on the PSP gives you two extra Chan Jaoming missions, bookends for three extra Melanie Mallard missions.  The final cutscene is a bit moody, as though it weren't all sound and fury, nothing signifying, after all.  Nice touch, R*.  A bit like class, almost.



Melanie, Marcy and Cherie could be sisters.  Hmmm...  Same voice actress playing three different roles? My guess is either Meg Ryan or Theda Bara.

I found a curious glitch in the second Wade Heston mission. If you fail to stay on the tail of the Korean car, and take your time restarting the mission, Wade demands his "2 bags of coke" ... which you've got, and brought with you twice now. The game founders, Titanic-like, on a floating impasse. A message comes up saying you still need 64491 bags of coke. (Bear in mind, 50 is your carry limit!) O-kaaay....

You get two more bags from the usual sources, to no avail. Wade still thinks you're stiffing him, the game remains stymied, and the message rather snidely comments that you still need 0 more bags of coke. Yes, zero more bags! Wow, simultaneous Tea and No Tea, anyone? I guess the lesson is, always use more than one Save slot, so you have a way to Restore.

GTA: Random and Incoherent and Darwin

It occurred to me this morning that I've never read Charles Darwin's Origin of Species from cover to cover. That's because, though I worship Darwin dearly, it's boring. When I tried to read Voyage of the Beagle under the misapprehension that it's the kid's version of evolution, I fell asleep in Argentina. Now that I'm old, I realize that we've got people to do those jobs, and life is short.

In a connect-the-dots sort of way, I suppose there's even a plausible pathway that leads from Darwin to Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars, but only in the sense that maybe it would have been better to see the PSP version before the NDS version. There are evolutionary lessons to be learned. E.g., the PSP has only a vestigial scratch card interface, because you no longer have a DS stylus to scratch with (or a DS microphone to blow away the scratch crumbs). That's evolutionary! Graphics are cooler though. Maybe. And the PSP game has Melanie Mallard, sort of an Archaean revolution in its own right.

_{Melanie's Theme seems vaguely reminiscent of Gerudo's Theme from Ocarina of Time. Unfortunately, she gets blown away in her last mission, so Rockstar has missed a substantial bet for the future. They do these things for the gratuitous shock value, but life is no game either, I suppose. Hence: Darwin. But I hate R* for killing off Ling in her second appearance!}

Update: 12/23 Finally got past Raw Deal...!