I got a few new toys on tuesday. You can probably guess what one of them was.
First, I got my first new console since the CD32; a PS3 with GTA4. Why a console with only 1.5 games worth having? Because that's what most of my friends have, and because I want it to not die in the first 5 minutes.
My opinion on GTA4 so far? Well, every review site that gave it a perfect 10, or 9.8, or whatever: they're *so* full of shit. This game has flaws, annoyances, glitches, lockups (apparantly related to network code) and misfeatures like any other. For instance, the phone is a cool way of interfacing with missions, but does Niko really have to pull it out in the middle of a firefight and make shooting impossible? Great, I just completed a mission, but now I need to escape the cops, and I can't even fucking run away or shoot back without aborting a bunch of dialog.
Not that it's a bad game; it's really, really good, but it's not the flawless orgasmic experience everyone says it is.
In addition to the PS3, I got a new monitor; a Dell 3008WFP, since my pair of NEC 2070NX's are getting pretty long in the tooth (nasty persistance issues; like, the tops of windows burning themselves into the top of the display), and I needed something to plug the PS3 into.
The good: it's huge, and got lots of pixels. The colours are good, it's got more inputs than a cheap hooker, it's got a scaler so whatever input you give it get scaled to the full size of the screen, and it's got plenty of controls for tweaking.
The bad: it's huge. Too huge. Why can't you get intermediate resolution displays that are a bit smaller? As soon as you drop down from 30" everything's 1920*1200 at best; half the number of pixels, even on a 27".
Second, it's bright; too bright. A brightness of 0 means "a bit too bright"; the default brightness of 50 means "DO NOT LOOK AT MONITOR WITH REMAINING EYEBALL"; who the fuck calibrates these things, Ra? You basically have to wait for the backlight to start to die so you can display a pure white display (like, say, most websites) without burning out your retina.
Third, and this is the worst; it's got nasty backlight bleeding. The whole lower right of this display basically can't display black unless you sit 4ft away; this is apparantly not an uncommon problem with these panels. I wonder if this is one of the reasons they currently have a 2 month lead time on new ones. Completely unacceptable for a monitor that retails at £1500.
Fourth, input switching is a chore; you get to switch between each one individually each time. There's "auto select", but it doesn't seem to do very much.
In retrospect, I think a pair of 24"'s might have been better. But not one of Dell's, which are all crappy PVA panels. Not that it isn't fun having 720p HDTV content playing in a corner at full resolution, with a maximum-usable-size web browser and a very large TV guide either side of it.