Mo­torstorm came with my Playsta­tion3 pack­age, just like some F1 rac­ing game I for­got the name of. I tried the F1 rac­ing thing first, but I don't be­lieve I en­joy watch­ing a screen from a per­spec­tive where the part you can an­tic­i­pate on is tiny. The whole view­port trans­la­tion of real-life to the screen is not com­fort­able, or I'm sit­ting to far from my 40" screen while the av­er­age PC gamer has a 22" 1600x1200 screen just a few feet from his face. So the F1 rac­ing was out, and I tried the Mo­torstorm. In the be­gin­ning I just picked the first bike to come up and do some rounds to get used to the SIXAXIS mo­tion sen­sor as con­trol. Those con­trols are good, and it feels nat­ur­al to use the SIXAXIS to con­trol the ve­hi­cles (just switch­ing be­tween this and GTA IV con­trols is a bit tricky). But once you get the hang of us­ing the boost it get's a bit to easy, and the AI starts to show. Boost­ing means you get enough pow­er to pull the ve­hi­cle sta­ble again from an un­sta­ble sit­u­a­tion and han­dling the gas or steer­ing isn't very im­por­tant any­more, just keep boost­ing to the max and make any ve­hi­cle drift as you want. While that would make you faster, it doesn't mean win­ning more. The AI seems to just keep up with you and to win most­ly means over­tak­ing the whole pack on the last stretch, it doesn't mat­ter what hap­pened in the first two rounds. So for the tick­ets in the first two lev­els it's a nice game, then you start to think "Rain God Mesa in a bug­gy, again???". And while I love the GTA IV sound­track, turn­ing of the mu­sic in Mo­torstorm was about the first thing I did. I hate col­lege rock adding ar­ti­fi­cial cool­ness to bor­ing stuff, the same way look­ing through a mi­cro­scope in CSI is tried to make more in­ter­est­ing by adding a pompous sound­track.

And then the Fudge Pack­er event, The Ten­der­iz­er on a Bike. The track is a canyon on a fog­gy morn­ing, mak­ing it dark, hard to dis­tin­guish the rocks from the mud, mud in your face mak­ing that even hard­er and then you're on a bike that ex­plodes as soon as any­thing comes near it, and the op­po­nents do that all the time. Sure, Doom 1 had to be played with an al­most dark screen, but Mo­torstorm is an HD game. I didn't buy a $2000 screen to be an­noyed by not be­ing able to see what I'm do­ing... So it's back to GTA IV while wait­ing for Heavy Rain (Yeah, hav­ing to put a disc in the sys­tem to play a game means there is a def­i­nite de­ci­sion to take it out and not put it back in again for a very long time).

PS: Fuck Sony for not al­low­ing to move the lo­ca­tion of a PSN ac­count to an­oth­er coun­try.