The supreme commander has called me and told me her trip to stay with her mother for a week has been cut short by several days and she is on the way home by bus. Pick-up service will be required around midnight at the bus station. This gives me enough time to wash the dishes, make the condo look respectable; and play Grand Theft Auto just a little longer.
The game provides me with a huge range of statistics as to what I have been doing. Most alarmingly, it tells me I have been playing for 33 hours; but this is understated because it excludes time spent on fruitless adventures that ended in death (mine, not the 465 people I have killed), after which I loaded saved games. So probably more like 40 hours; and I am only 48% through the game. Still, not bad for the first week. I am also advised that I have stolen 168 cars, shot 9,487 bullets and spent an hour on the phone.
My in-game love life was going quite well until the girl I was dating turned out to work for the government. My latest date is the sister of a mobster who threatens to kill me if I touch his sister, but no danger of that because she refuses my advances after every date. Still, I beat her at pool and she talks amusing crap when she is drunk.
Best mission to date closely mirrored the shoot-out after the bank raid in the movie Heat (Michael Mann classic movie). Took about 30 minutes and I had to play it through several times before I cracked it. A close second was a shoot out in the national museum. Priceless vases, dinosaur skeletons and assorted priceless heirlooms reduced to rubble; thanks in no small part to my recently acquired bazooka.
But now my eyes are bleeding and my bum is numb and I think I need to take a break for a couple of days. But maybe one more quick session before she returns…..