Watched it live and it was pretty cool. Here are my impressions.

The new dashboard interface looks cleaner and easier to navigate

Avatars are pretty gay and I would only have one to play the primetime games

Primetime games look cool and have a lot of potential if done right

Netflix is an awesome addition, but I see some issues with this (at least for me). I only have the 20GB HDD and I am not getting raped for the $200 to upgrade. The 60GB drive upgrade is a joke with what MS is planning for live. For their plans we should be seeing 250GB+ drives available or some type of empty housing we can buy and put a drive of our own on. Some of these HD movies ar 5-6+ GB in size each which has two issues anyone with a slower connection can be waiting forever for them to download. Secondly, what about people with download caps (mine is 90GB a month with a fee for every GB after that)? Those are some pretty limiting factors for many. The Xbox360 is a noisy device for watching moves when the jet engine fans kick up.

"Parties"? I don't know about this. Other than gaming, this is kind of lame. Seriously,is someone going to hookup with 7 friends, share some photos or songs, play some games and then watch a movie together? Unlikely I think. I have visions of people who no longer see their friends hanging out virtually. Sad really.

Dashboard blades are now available while in a game(minus the marketplace) which is quite cool

Copying games to your drives is fantastic, problem is...ahh just see my Netflix rant about the hard drives.

The Lips and Movies games are pretty throw away. Lips is to try and garner a stronger Asian market share.

The FFXIII annoucement is to once again gain support in the Asian Market.

Gears 2 was awesome. What was the deal with the black screenand restart? pre-recorded as not to glitch? Cliffy, sup?

The rating system Gamespot uses to allow users to rate games lacks quite a bit of detail. I see a pile of 10's for GTA4, but I would like to see the makeup of those ratings, something IMDB does very well for movies. So, take the example of GTA4 and its ludicrous number of 10's. What I would like to see as a 33 year old male is a breakdown of the ratings based on the following:

- Male or Female

- Age groups (18 or less, 19-30, 31-40, 51-60, 61-dead)

- Difficulty, time spent, etc. per age group

- Platform (Xbox360, PS3, Wii, etc)

Finally, I don't think GameSpot should allow an anonymous user to rate a game to weed out scoring padding/spamming. It's easy to nuke your cookies and vote again.

Just my thoughts, but I think then I can get a better sense of the real value of the player scores as it puts context around them. I think in the case of GTA4, almost every kid between 12-18 (sorry for generalizing here) is going to give this a ten because it looks pretty, it's violent, you go to the strip bar, hire a hooker, etc. That coupled with the fact that some of these same players might not have seen or played previous installments in the series makes this game seem revolutionary. At 33, I have played a lot of games and all the GTAs (at least the 3D ones) so hookers, strip bars and other fluff doesn't impress me.

There's my $0.02 for now.

Here is my first blog.

I wrote an initial review on GTA 4 (http://www.gamespot.com/ps3/action/grandtheftauto4/player_review.html?id=571371) back in early May with my initial impressions because I was blown away by the sheer number of 10's and had to get something out a little more based in reality. Here I am a month later and here is my latest impression.

The game is a letdown. I have yet to finish the game (I'm about 73% complete) due to lack of interest. The game is plain old boring and I am not sure I will finish it. I have undertaken Bully Scholarship edition in the mean time and unlike GTA4, I am enjoying it. The same old mix of past GTA titles with some flashier graphics. So let me list the pros and cons in a simple, old-fashioned list:

Pros

• The graphics are better and utilize the next gen hardware quite well
• The sound of the guns, cars and background happenings is done well
• The voice acting, story and characters are pretty good
• The Cell phone is kind of cool (but please see below)
• Taxi's are awesome as I can get to my destination almost ASAP (covers the crappy driving)

Cons

• Everything in the game has really been done before and in some cases it is a step backwards
• Some of the evolutionary elements of San Andreas (massive sandbox, varied landscapes, huge arsenal of weapons, planes, jetpack, etc.) are missing here and I re-iterate that this is an enhanced Vice City.
• The Cell phone is irritating. Your virtual friends call you in the middle of missions, when you are hanging out, etc. IF you turn them down, then you lose "like points".
• Virtual Friends and hanging out is a VERY boring element. Perhaps because I do not come from the MMO generation where my "friends" live on the computer, I don't understand the lure of this aspect of the game.
• Handling of the cars is bad, plain and simple. The better cars are fun to drive, but the low end suck.
• I can't buy anything with my money
• I can't really customize my character
• I can't customize my car
• I don't have gangs
• I can't start wars and take over territories
• The ALL CITY setting is boring
• The controls are clunky
• The cover system is flawed. If you are copying Gears of War, get it right.
• Anyone use the subway?