I’m wrapping up this triplet of GTA posts with the one I should have started with: why it’s worth talking about in the first place. I can’t agree with its most frequent criticism - that it’s merely the same game tweaked - because none of the three things that keep bringing me back to it were present in any meaningful sense in its predecessors. Those would be:
Online
Right now I have raw ache in the back of my throat, from laughing. Earlier this evening Tim actually cried. It’s probably the fourth or fifth time three or more of us have piled into the Free Mode map - just GTA sans missions, optionally sans police, and plus de joueurs. And so far it seems like our vocal chords will wear thin before the game mode does.
The objective-based modes are fine, but they’re just fun missions in which you can also do ridiculous stuff. Free mode is based around our own objectives. They don’t have to be particularly well-conceived ones. Tim wanted to know if a bike could jump through the doors of a helicopter. Rob wanted to know how many of us - each with varying Wanted levels - could ride together in a bus. I wondered if we could accurately bail from maximum-altitude helicopters above Central Park and land safely in the lake.
No, all of us, and no. What we did discover was that a helicopter propellor will swat an airbourne moped far enough that, even after the laughter had died down, I was able to truthfully say “Guys, I still haven’t landed.” And that while a bus makes a forceful and hardy getaway vehicle, there’s only so long it can wait for me to fumble with its diabolical automatic door under a monsoon of gunfire and a barrage of unbraking black-and-whites before it really ought to get going. And that, on a breezy day, ensuring your helicopter is geostationary over a large body of water is no guarantee that you’ll land in it when you bail.
New York
Liberty City - this Liberty City - is faithful to New York on a level GTA has never tried before. As well as the structure and detail, it captures the character and subtlety of a real place that games struggle to make up.
New York is my favourite place, and having a digital replica lets me explore it in ways I couldn’t even if I lived there. I don’t like to call these things too soon, but I don’t think I’ll ever actually find myself superbiking through Times Square in a thousand dollar suit. I hope I’ll never have to snipe Union workers down by Pier 45. And though the urge to throw myself off the Empire State enters my mind every time I top it, I can’t imagine it would really be as fun as it was in GTA IV. Doing these things gives me a feel for New York I couldn’t get otherwise, even if I spent significantly more on a trip there than I did on this console. It’s a new, cheap, bloody form of holiday.
So Rockstar can’t take all the credit for its exquisite sense of place, looming scale, gently fading ambience, but we get the full effect. It’s a city you can almost smell. So many different parts of it are beautiful in so many different ways, at so many different times. The runway lights at Francis bleeding blindingly into the mist on a foggy morning, Central Park blushing amber at sundown, rain-slick midtown Manhattan festive with red brake lights reflected in the wet tarmac, Times Square mall-bright in the dead of night, and the lazy, immobilising heat buzzing off the cracked streets of Broker on a dazzling day.
Next to the majesty of the city they built to set it in, GTA’s actual game seems puerile and sad. You could write an epic in this place, it could have a force and resonance we’re not used to. Violence could mean something here, it could be shocking again, and provoke something from us. That’s partly why I can’t join the chorus praising Rockstar’s storytelling; an arbitrary variety-show of charicatures, taking turns to step up on a non-interactive stage to tell a meandering story so apparently slave to the episodic mission structure that it’s impossible to believe in. It’s not that it’s worse than a typical game story - nothing is - it’s just unworthy of this setting.
Police AI isn’t the next one. But if you watch my legs adjust to the bounce of the rowboat I’m crouching in, you can see - even through the abysmal video quality - a bit of Euphoria going on.
Euphoria
Traditionally, people in games are acting out pre-recorded animations until they’re killed, whereupon a simple mechanical physics system takes over to simulate how their limp body falls and how it reacts to what it hits on the way down. That means any time a game character collides with something his pre-defined animations didn’t account for, the developers have to decide whether he should fail to react to it at all, or die.
GTA IV is the first major game that can handle the in-between cases. It licenses a piece of witchcraft called Euphoria that can blend physical simulation in with set animations, so that whenever anything hits anyone, they’ll be knocked by it in a physically convincing way, react to it in a humanly convincing way, then return smoothly to one of their normal animations. I have no idea how it works.
Actually, I know almost exactly how it works - anyone who’s thought about this problem for a second since the birth of 3D gaming could tell you how the eventual solution would have to work. The mystery is how the hell it ended up running smoothly on a home console. It’s essentially having to simulate the musculature of the human body in real-time, plug that into a mechanical physiscs system and motion-captured animation, and then make it work on as many interacting bodies as you care to run down in one spree. On a system where some developers won’t use ragdoll because it’s too processor-intensive.
The upshot for the player is the most reactive game I’ve ever seen, and a proper milestone in the progress of game ‘feel’. Both of my other obsessions in this game - our suicidal crash-tests and the intense impression of existing within this city - draw their power from the physicality Euphoria lends to every interaction in the game.
Achievement unlocked: wrote about GTA IV for one thousand words without mentioning the phrases ‘American Dream’, ‘fresh off the boat’, or ‘living breathing city’.
Rob: Chalk up a few more laughs for that video. Right before it loaded I was picturing some kind of Benny Hill type moment.. and there it is.
John: Euphoria really does feel like a step forward in games evolution. The same way that it feels odd to go back to a game without ragdoll, it'll soon feel odd to go back to a game without Euphoria.
“Oldman kidnaps the most closely guarded man on the planet in order to negotiate the release of a dictator who’s being held by … Russia. That’s right, he’s threatening to kill the President of the United States to scare a country that just spent the better part of a century glaring across the Bering Strait and muttering ‘motherfucker’ under its breath.”
Thomas Lawrence: Absolutely nothing to do with the above: have you gotten around to Twilight of the Arnor yet, Tom?
Pentadact: Got to play it a little at work, but I have something else to review first so I didn't get very far. I've been trying to install it here at home this weekend, but Stardock Central isn't as good as I thought at unattended installs.
Any minor temporary glitch halts the whole process, and when a game has pre-requisites - GalCiv2 itself for example - it stops to ask you if you want a desktop shortcut to that game before getting on with downloading anything else. That is why, after two nights of attempted downloading, I still don't fully have it.
Thomas Lawrence: Ah, so you are lined up to review it for PCG? Good good. Will it be in the July ish?
I've played a couple of games of it now, my first experience with GalCiv II having bought the megapack on a whim (another sale secured almost entirely by your AAR blog with the Spectres of Agony, no doubt).
In any case, I like it. The fancy new race specific tech trees are mostly well done (although there are a few annoying flaws at the moment connected to some races missing starbase upgrades). It strikes an interesting middle ground with them - they aren't utterly distinct (a good 60-70% tree is still more or less identical for each race), but it isn't just a few token techs for each race either, and in some cases it does require an interestingly different approach. Particularly with the Thalan, although their tree is one of the ones most hampered by lacking starbase upgrades they ought to have.
This one goes out to anyone who ‘cannot wait’. I will help you wait.
Everything that bothers me in GTA IV is a case of the game trying to guess what a I want to do, and failing bizarrely in some really easy cases.
Please look in the direction I am travelling. For a game about cars, you’d think this would have come up. But no, every time I turn a corner, reverse, or stop reversing and drive forwards, I’m left barreling forth blindfold into heavy, cop-ridden traffic. Is it hard to detect which direction I’m travelling? Is it hard to move the camera? Is it unimportant to see what you’re about to drive into? Are cornering, stopping and changing directions quirky edge-cases you hadn’t considered? What is unusual about the way I’m playing that makes this a problem for me?
Please get in the car I am closest to and facing when I press the ‘get in car’ button. This is my cause of death around sixty percent of the time. I’m knocked from my vehicle, I run back to it under a hail of gunfire, and standing in front the door, physically touching the car and facing the drivers seat into which I wish to get, pressing the ‘get in car’ button causes Niko Bellic to turn around 180 degrees, run ten meters across a busy highway, open the door of an ice-cream van, punch the refreshment vendor inside, drag him from his lofty perch and then fall on top of him as the thirtieth bullet he’s taken during this procedure strikes his last functioning organ.
Please target the enemy I am looking directly at when I press the ‘target enemy’ button. Here’s how you can tell which one I mean: if I fired without targeting, which would require me to hold a trigger in some kind of elusive quantum state between off and on, my bullets would hit this guy. That guy. That is the guy that I mean, the guy I am facing and pointing my gun at. And who, by the way, is pointing a gun at me and about to fire, so let’s hustle a little here.
But just to be absolutely clear, I’ll detail some examples of who I do not mean. I do not mean the civilian driving a van in the opposite direction three lanes over. I don’t mean the other gunman fifty feet away and forty degrees to my left, who is completely invisible to me as he has fully concealed himself behind a concrete pillar. I definitely don’t mean the cop, who currently only wants me for a mild traffic misdemeanour and has no intention of firing at me or calling for backup unless I do something utterly, inexcusably, surreally moronic like turn around and shoot him six times in the pancreas instead of defending myself against the armed drug dealer who’s about to murder me.
Please leave cover when I press the ‘leave cover’ button, the ‘jump’ button or attempt to run, as fast as I can, away from cover. This is where I’m stuck right now. A mission where I get to walk freely around a venue before choosing my moment to attack three people within it. Once attacked, they flee.
The first time I got that far, I’d taken cover behind a wall, and urgently needed to abandon my hole-up-and-let-them-come approach for a run-after-them-and-kill-them ploy. My instinct was to move in the direction I wanted to run away from this wall, hammering the sprint button. This caused me to tango stylishly up and down the wall with my back to it, three times.
Thinking remarkably logically for the circumstances, I tried pressing the ‘take cover’ button, which I hoped might have become a ‘leave cover’ button. Niko span round to face a locked door on an adjacent wall and hurled himself at it, rolling impressively and then gluing himself to it with the same adhesive I was already wrestling with.
By this stage three different men were firing on me not two metres away, but I couldn’t fire back because every attempt to leave cover reset my aim to be parallel to the wall I was stuck to. Clearly the Machiavellian club owner had taken the precaution of coating his walls with a sort of fly paper for gangsters; once touched, forever ensared.
After trying the imagined ‘leave cover’ button two more times, thrashing Niko wildly around in his sticky prison, I resorted to the ‘jump’ button. He left cover, faced the wall, and took a giant leap directly into it, sliding nonsensically down its surface and taking a full second to recover to normal stature. I should say ‘at least a full second’, since at that point, yet again, the last healthy centimeter of me was shot off.
Seriously, I’m asking: is there a button to leave cover? Everything I try works when I’ve glued myself to a plain wall in a sleepy street, but in a tight backroom full of gangsters, every button initiates equally unhelpful, time-consuming actions that leave me facing the wrong way or adhered to the wrong thing. Until I find one that doesn’t, I’m never touching the cover system again.
There are other failures, the usual GTA stuff: your moron friend ran out into enemy gunfire and died, mission failed. The cutscene ended with you standing dumbly in the open with four armed drug dealers firing at you, mission failed. You fell slightly behind a fleeing criminal on a straight road with no exits, mission failed. You failed the mission, mission failed and you have to return to your contact, then come back here, then do the three other stages of the mission you’ve already completed successfully three times, then when you complete this part of it using the foreknowledge you gained last time, we’ll suddenly introduce a new arbitrary failure state you couldn’t have prepared for and you’ll have to start again.
But that stuff I can forgive - it’s all about the missions, each of which is finite and most of which are optional. And all could be fixed with a simple ’skip mission’ option after two failures (or even a cheat - are there any?). The improvements GTA IV makes to the formula more than compensate for the series’ traditional failings, it’s only the infinitely recurring control problems that can’t be ignored. Talking about those improvements would probably help dispel the impression that I loathe the game, but unfortunately I’m out of terrible out-of-focus photos of a low-res screen to punctuate this text, so that’ll have to be another post.
SenatorPalpatine: I want to play this game soooo much.
Reviewers see things differently than customers, because they play a lot more games than the customer, I mean they're paid to do it. It's an inherent flaw in the system, reviewers have a different perspective than the average reader perspective. It's not a very pronounced difference though, so it's easily unnoticed. I'm definitely overthinking htis.
Jonty: Couple of things, the simplest first:
1. That mission. You can stab the first guy in the office without raising the alarm. Then I favour shooting the second guy, then running through with a machine gun and dashing out of the back for a car chase. The car provided is irritating but workable. This is a strategy born of experience rather than planning but it has worked for me.
2. I really didn't have much of a problem with the controls. The cover fell down occasionally when there was lots of of it, but pressing the right shoulder button cancels cover and moving the right stick so you walk unambiguously away from it does the same; that always worked fine.
Basically: I've not experienced the problems you describe. Man, what a great telephone support statement that is.
RobotLiberationArmy: Weird experience: seeing a comment by someone you know in real life and talk to nearly every day on the blog of someone who lives on another continent and you only through his writing and realizing how uncomfortably close we've all become.
Anyhow: I'm tempted to say "it's because it's a console game" but I'd really just be being an asshole. Seems fun I suppose, but it's not something I can say I particularly care about.
Jay: Apparently, there are cheats, but they prevent you from getting achievements
Tentaculat: I've found myself wrestling with the way the game handles cover as well. The only reliable way I've found of leaving cover is to just pull down on the left stick, which is obviously how you must be doing it already because I don't think there is another way.
roBurky: I've only ever played the 2D GTAs. Whenever someone complains about having to contrinually redo a 3D GTA mission, it just sounds bizaare because it always used to be that missions stayed failed if you failed them.
The complaints I hear about the 3D GTAs almost always seem to come down to that backwards step of making individual missions necessary for progression.
Pentadact: Yeah, that was ace. In theory, the logic behind insisting you complete one mission before receiving the next is that it allows them to build up a narrative based on what happened. But they don't. The cut-scenes follow on from each other, but you'd get those even if you failed your first attempt. Almost all ignore what actually happened on the mission, because as ever, the legwork they actually have you do is mostly repetitive murder of irrelevant nobodies and anonymous gangsters. "Good job, I have another situation that needs taking care of. But first, watch ten minutes of me bickering with this auxhilary character in exactly the same way we did before your last three missions from us."
ImperialCreed: By a startling co-incidence, the episode of Futurama you reference in the title is the one I have just finished watching before reading this post. Weird.
I have nothing useful to add about GTA4.
Tentaculat: After reading through the other commments again, "Because it's a console game" is probably the most accurate reason you're finding these faults. Blame the consoles, they suck! If only this were on the PC, where issues with targetting, driving camera and coming out of cover would not exist.
I've just learned how to get reliable headshots while auto-targetting, which is satisfying and improves matters somewhat, though woefully inferior to aiming with a mouse. Typing URLs into GTA IVs own Internet browser with the 360 controller is something else that is *really* tedious.
Mind you, the PC controls for San Andreas were a little bit wonky, it was impossible to do certain driving moves (unless you had a really swanky keyboard that allowed more-than-the-usual number of simulateous key presses), or a controller, which was awkward at best, and negated most of the benefits of playing on the PC in the first place.
Crane: I doubt it's just a console thing. Gears of War on the PC had the same problems with making you press your back to a pillar while leaving your soft tender belly exposed to a hail of bullets.
Rob: I have to assume you're kidding about the problems being console specific. GTA works marvellously well on 360 and PS3 (as in car driving, shooty bits, running around bits), and it hasn't played well on a PC since GTA 2 - even given the atrocious targetting system that GTA III introduced on the PS2 (which is finally fixed here), it was cack-handed on the PC and playable on the consoles; best on Xbox 1.
For targeting problems, just turn off the auto-aim. You'll get a reticle which you can point where you want. Auto-aim was introduced for people on consoles who don't know how to use a reticle.
Can't agree with you about the cut scenes, at all. I can't help but think you're being unreasonably flippant. GTA IV has some of the best storytelling in all of games, voice-acting, directing, humour, and the way they use multiple game areas to tell the story (cut scenes, missions, radio and now internet).
Although I agree that a 'skip to mission' seems a natural addition, actually it's more that GTA IV should have finally seen Rockstar attempt a branching narrative in the Deus Ex/Looking Glass aesthetic.. you fail a mission and it opens up the plot in a different way. That's ultimately the major thing holding back GTA. It's 'unrealistic' that someone as good at his 'job' as Niko would fail missions by dying or whatever. Every time I die I'm enfuriated because it's essentially a breaking of the illusion.
I feel this about a lot of games. I shouldn't be able to die, really. I can still fail missions, but failing should only lead me down a different route. Until games do this regularly they're pretty backwards thinking.
Tentaculat: I have to disagree, aiming in the PC version of San Andreas was far, far easier than the console versions. Thumb-sticks are awful for aiming, they just lack precision of a mouse, which is why in those rare online shooters where PC players and console players can play on the same servers, the PC players kick their collective arses. I can only think of Quake 3 at the moment but there are other examples.
Driving is fine for consoles, it's something they excel at, but camera work is also so much easier with a mouse. This is not down to personal preference, this is fact, and I'm trying not to sound like an elitist PC Gamer, but consoles are comparitively crap with shooters, but good enough for the casual masses.
GTA does work marvellously well, which is why it's been praised so highly, but it would work better with a mouse and keyboard, especially the shooty bits. Any problems with the PC versions are down to laziness of the people porting it over.
Dan: I'm not really experiencing these problems. Not to the massive degrees you obviously are.
I've got to totally disagree with you on the "skip mission" feature idea. It makes no sense. Sure in terms of the mission meaning little it does, but in the fact it's a game which you are meant to play it doesn't.
Once you add a skip mission feature you might as well as a "level select" one, as that's basically what it equates to. Plus it seems the only reason you have for skipping is your failure to complete a mission. You wouldn't expect a game such as Half-Life to have a "skip mission" feature so why expect it of GTA? (I do understand GTA is mission based, but all games are mission based in there way. You always have constant objectives all the way through etc.)
Hermes: hmm. really not experiencing any of the problems you seem to be having. This camera issue, completely in your head I think. Let me introduce you to the concept of using the brake, you must slow down before taking corners.
Hermes: honestly while reading this it was as though it were a rant by some Fox News reporter who has never played games before. i.e. the Mass Effect debacle. Try to get off the 'counter-all-reviewers-who-praise-this-game' horse, you look foolish.
Iain “DDude” Dawson: I still want to play this soooo bad. Just not as bad as I want to play MGS4...
My poor, money-less, console-less, life...
Pentadact: The wonky car-cam and horrible auto-aim would cease to be problems on the PC version, as in both cases it's easy to over-ride the game's bizarre idea of what you intend with a quick and precise mouse-movement. The thumbstick theoretically can do the same, but I'm nowhere near good enough with it to aim at someone manually before they shoot me, and trying to use both thumbsticks at once while driving - to keep the camera aligned with the direction I'm actually moving - is nearly impossible. I suspect even seasoned console gamers prefer not to do that, since most reviews mentioned how hard it is to aim a weapon and drive at the same time, which is essentially the same challenge. In fact, I seem to find that easier.
Rob, a lot of people agree with you about the cut-scenes, but I just don't see it. I've watched the same argument between the same two characters so many times in some mission-sets that I've just started skipping them. The story they tell amounts to: person X is hot-headed, but person Y is more calm! Or person X is vain, and person Y is scared of him! This gets communicated to you the same way - an argument - three to five times, then one or more of the characters dies or betrays you, or simply stops giving you missions forever, and you move on to a completely unrelated pair of morons and their own ham-fisted personality clash.
Dan, the difference between GTA and Half-Life in skipping-mission terms is that Half-Life is a linear journey, you're actually travelling forwards. If you jumped ahead, you'd lose your sense of where you were in the world and how you got there, and you'd miss out on all the sights and sounds in between. In GTA, the missions all take place in the city you already know, feature no new elements, seem to have nothing to do with one another and don't advance the plot. You could flag a couple as plot-critical, since one or two have featured actual events so far, but that's out of sixty missions I've done, all the rest of which were to kill someone who's never referenced before or since.
The reason I want a skip mission cheat is only partly due to difficulty. The two missions I'm on at the moment I'm sure I'll complete next time I try them - each failure occurs when the mission parameters change without warning, and now I've memorised those changes and can prepare for them. But I don't want to. They're not challenging skills I have any interest in honing, or presenting obstacles that are fun to negotiate. It's not an interesting challenge to me.
In one of the two, my task is to follow a train. I've failed it twice because I bumped into something I couldn't see, and couldn't catch up before the game pronounced that I had 'lost' the train. IT'S A FUCKING TRAIN. It's on rails. I don't think it ducked behind a bush or switched clothes and doubled back on me. I know where it's going - I could drive there right away, but that fails the mission too because doing so takes me outside the arbitrary 'follow' radius.
Not an interesting challenge.
Pentadact: Hermes, as I say in the post, I actually love the game. And as I said in the last post, I trust most of the reviews I've read. A few of the reviewers are friends of mine whose opinions I usually share. And nearly all the reviews mention more than one of my complaints.
Sir, you have incorrectly identified the horse upon which I am mounted, and I refuse to come down.
Jason L: A link to Quest Que C'Est, a previous discussion of all the mission stuff with regard to San Andreas:
Cossak: Definitely in agreement with you over the camera controls; they are fiddly at best and certainly not up to the standard of the rest of the game.
One thing I have found with the game that no one else has mentioned, is how unbelievably dark it is. As soon as the sun has gone down, and indeed well before this point, the light seems to be sucked out of New York as if a lid has been placed over the top of it. This was particularly bad during one mission where I had to kill a house full of people with 'Little Jacob'. After clearing the house, I emerged out of the back of the building and found myself completely unable to see anything, my TV screen was entirely black. After several minutes of trying to escape this light-less prison using only the minimap, I fell off a ledge and landed sandwiched between three walls in total darkness. I could only tell there were walls there because whenever I tried to turn the camera to find an exit it span wildly as it was pushed against the wall. After eventually finding some stairs back up to the ledge and finding the correct path back out, I emerged back into the semi-darkness of the street outside.
This problem may be related to the fact that I am playing on a non-HD TV, but even this is a non-excuse for some truly abysmal lighting in the engine.
Dan: You have a few good points, but at the same time.. you could blame your mistakes on noobness, once you get used to the controls most of those problems go away (bad starting spots and "enemies escaping" is always a problem though)
Alex Holland: Having played much of GTA3 and GTA:VC on the original X-Box (with original fat bear controller), I must say that I find it more natural to aim a gun with a joypad than drive a car with a mouse, so I'd largely dismiss the console vs PC argument. I would say that with each port, more things tend to get fixed - the X-Box ports of the original GTA3 trio were more pleasant than their PS2 counterparts.
There were always crappy missions, mostly of the stupid-bullet-magnet-friendly-NPC variety, but most things I was prepared to accept in the name of amusing randomness - it's not as though dying actually has any genuine consequences, even in gaming terms, and I always made a point of having fun on my way back to the mission (or getting distracted and re-creating my youthful love of Chase HQ in the Vigilante mode).
GTA for me isn't about missions, it's about driving a burning ice-cream van off the top of a multistorey car-park, plummetting straight into the scattering of police cars stuck behind the tanker I abandoned straddling the dual-carriageway. For example.
Pentadact: Jason: ha, roBurky and I said the same stuff back then. It sounds like I wrote that shortly after failing a San Andreas mission where you have to protect the dude loading the forklift - it's a very recognisable level of frustration.
I guess Rockstar read the post, because they added exactly the feature I ask for: the ability to jump back to the mission-giver, rather than skip from there to the mission. They also agreed that death shouldn't be permanent for allies if it isn't for you, but since you still fail the mission when they're hospitalised in GTA IV, it's not much use. READ BETTER NEXT TIME ROCKSTAR.
Cossak: it's been pretty decent for me so far, brightness wise. Lighting has always been a real weak spot of GTA engines - San Andreas is just horrific to look at today. Everything is the same shade of drab, and there's so little shadowing I actually bump into things because I didn't realise they were sticking up. If I were you, I'd crank up the gamma in the options menu even if it makes the daytime scenes more washed out. The sun is sometimes blinding on mine, and I rather like it that way.
Dan: I do suck, no denying that. But there are challenges where I suck and think "Goddamn it, I can do this," and challenges where I suck and think "Goddamn it, I'm not doing that." Aiming with a thumbstick that can only register eight directions and has a maximum tracking speed falls under the latter.
Alex: I'm partly the same, certainly if GTA were missions-only I'd have no interest in it at all. But I can't stay entertained just mucking around for long. It quickly starts to feel hollow, futile, random. It really hurts that respawning at the hospital costs money. Great satire on American healthcare, guys, but kind of discourages the spirit of experimentation and fun your game is built on. Money isn't tight if you're doing regular missions, but I've spent enough time mucking about since I last successfully completed one that I'm actually close to broke now. I've spent something like fifty thousand dollars on medical bills since my last job.
Cmdt_Carpenter: My least favorite part of some games with driving (including some GTA games, I believe) is when you start backing up, and the camera swings around to give a nice view of the front of the car, but takes painstakingly long to turn back around when I accelerate in the forward direction. It really pisses me off when I go from backing out of one wall, to slamming into another.
Rob: We'll agree to differ on the storytelling aspects, then. I just particularly dig the GTA series' story content. I like Niko and I think the whole integration into America arc + random bizarre characters like Brucie is entertaining.
That 'chase the train' mission is a total rotter. It's completely unforgiving, requires failing at least once to learn the route (or lucky guesswork), and is way too short and pointless to merit inclusion (a really half-arsed French Connection homage).
I like that it pops up the VERY HELPFUL 'press B to zoom to train' hint, which basically causes you to crash your car and fail the mission the first time you do it.
It's the epitome of your 'go here shoot X' argument, and I wish it wasn't in the game.
..as for the controller, the whole mouse+keyboard argument is totally moot, and always has been. Yes, a mouse offers more sensitivity of movement by construction, but since consoles games are designed for a joypad, the controller is just as accurate. If you have a multiplayer FPS game on a console using a joypad, there is exactly the same modicum of skill amongst the top players as on CounterStrike on the PC. I know, because I've played both obsessively over the years. It's a different way of playing an FPS, but it's no less skilful or textured.
I don't think you can blame GTA for being played on a joypad, which for those who are used to it, is just as playable as those who are used to the joys of WSAD (and I would say a joypad is more ergonomic/intuitive/pleasurable, anyway).
Tentaculat: A mouse isn't just about sensitivity, it allows you to move in an infinite number of two-dimensional vectors, a thumb-stick has a very finite number of vectors, especially where velocity is concerned.
Jason L: Which is to say, it's just about sensitivity?
Tentaculat: Jason: Technically, no.
I've not developped professionally for XBox 360, but I am familiar with Microsoft's XNA. When you're designing games that can be played with a mouse and the Xbox 360 controller, you have to take into account the the control differences, and when you're actually developing user input you notice the flaws of the thumb-stick system.
It's not about sensitivity, mouse and thumbstick are two different control methods entirely: An Xbox 360 thumb-stick measures input from -1 to 1 on two axes, with 0,0 being the default position. So if x=0, y=1 then you're pointing the stick as far right as it will go. A mouse just measures vectors every frame, there is no limit.
So what does this mean? Imagine what happens with a thumb-stick when you want to change directions very suddenly? You have to move the stick across the graph.. going from 1 to 0.95, 0.90.... etc all the way to the other side of the graph. You're losing tons of accuracy here.
A mouse is always centered on 0,0, direction change is instant and 100% accurate. OK, you will eventually reach the end of your mouse pad - which is where the superior sensitivity factors in, but changing directions is a different method altogether.
Now it is perfectly possible to develop input to detect change in the thumb-stick direction, but because the thumb stick cannot go past an absolute value of 1 (all the way to the right), the amount of sensitivity lost is simply not worth it.
In short, the thumb stick blows for shooters. You can be very skilled at using a controller, no doubt about that, and I've met some very talented players, but they could not compete against a mouse user in a multiplayer shooter and expect a fair fight.
Pentadact: Interesting stuff. The reason I struggle with it, and this may be repeating what you've just explained, is that the position of my thumbstick determines the movement of my crosshair. I'm used to the position of my mouse determining the position of my crosshair.
Tentaculat: Yes, that's a far better way of explaining it. You should write for a games magazine.
Jason L: There's not really an argument going on here, but I disagree with your language:
a) There is a cap on mouse speed too - on a high-end gaming mouse maybe it's beyond the physically possible, but on a standard Intellimouse Optical or such it just starts stuttering if you move too fast. You have to crank up the multiplier, losing sensitivity.
b) What you're describing is the definition of sensitivity in an input device; how many different levels of input can it describe? That determines how small a movement you can get if you set Vmaxdev == Vmaxgame.
Rob: Well I just find it discouraging to debate controllers, since there's usually some ulterior motive. I'm not saying that's going on here, but some of the comments err on the side of 'if only 'twas on PC like the good old days'.
When there's never any reason why the two should be competing, each platform's controller is 100% accurate for the games on that system. That's why it's moot.
My friend argued this out with me years ago, when I was in the middle of a few years long cycle of FPS games on the original Xbox, and he put it down the fact that the mouse is more intuitively matched to the sense of turning your head left to right. You move your head and your viewpoint changes, just as moving the mouse moves the reticle; on a console you essentially tell your head to move one way at a certain speed until you tell it to stop (by resetting the stick).
Anyway, yeah, moot, but interesting. Still, I think the 360 controller is the most ergonomic gaming peripheral we have at this point. It's a long way from Quickjoys and Competition Pros..
Pentadact: Heh, you mean the part where Tentaculat says "If only this were on the PC"?
These do too often degenerate into fairly transparent cases of "On the contrary, it is clear that the controller I am more accustomed to is superior! Good day!"
But luckily James commenters are the intellectual elite of the internet, so instead we have a lot of reasonable points, an interesting technical insight from someone who evidently has some development nous, and a rigorous semantic policeman.
My post about what I actually love about GTA is gathering dust in my drafts folder, I want to have another bash at multiplayer before I finish it. In other news, I did that stupid train mission last night, and the new batch of jobs I've been given truly drive home the length and breadth of my suckhood.
Jason L: I actually find the 360 controller to be the second least comfortable controller to date, which almost certainly means it's excellent; disregarding the Wii's lateral exploration, my comfort with a controller and its generally accepted ergonomicity display a correlation near -1. So far, Mad Catz knockoffs have always fit me to a T. It's bizarre.
Pentadact: I'm afraid it's more serious than we thought, Mr L. You have a rare, non-treatable form of Crazy Hands.
Getting back to the early comments in this epic odyssey, I finally tried those cheats Jonty suggested, and my life is measurably improved. They only disable a couple of irrelevant achievements, one of which I already have, so I'm not being shy about steaming ahead with the plot.
The game is so much more enjoyable when tiny bumps, scrapes and stray shots aren't going to leave you with a health level that might make the rest of the mission uncompletable. I'm only using the health-restore cheat, and in emergencies, the Wanted-level-down one. I think of it as implimenting a much-needed health-regeneration system, and the ability to lean on my 'contacts' as the LCPD to make my problems go away.
You don't have to dial the number each time, but you do have to select the cheat from your phone, which leads to some amusing mid fire-fight phone calls. I only use the cops-B-gone one when they're after me for spurious reasons - last time, it was when gangsters shooting up the car I was hiding behind caused a chain reaction of explosions that presumably killed some nearby peds. This was deemed my fault, and I had to deal with three-star heat in the middle of a huge gangster massacre.
Or when the mission just sucks. I got sick of dying to auto-aim weirdness on Snowstorm, and just told the cops to go home.
The critical adoration of GTA IV has been really interesting to me, because I’m sometimes one of the critical adorers. There’s always this period when half a dozen journos have played the game, the rest of the gaming populace has not, and a war breaks out where the few desperately try to convince the many that it really is as good as we’d all hoped it might be, and the many insist that it is not.
The many, with no actual information to fight with, must use the journalists’ own words against them: “You said there were pop-in and framerate issues, therefore it cannot warrant a ten for graphics!” “You mentioned flaws! How can you give it a perfect score?”
Some of the many are fighting on an entirely different side, a sort of religion for whom the game is a necessarily perfect deity, and all criticism is dangerous lies. When reviewer Rob Taylor mentioned he completed the main storyline in 24 hours, you could almost see the tears well up in a million fanboy eyes as the e-mails stammered: “But I thought it would be at least forty!”
That interview aside, the few remain mostly silent after their opening salvo of reviews. The real assault comes when the game is out, and they become solely responsible for every technical, personal and emergent flaw nine million people experience in this digital playground.
The reason this is particularly interesting this time is that I’m a proper outsider - I never read a preview of GTA IV, only saw one trailer, and had no idea about its key features (Euphoria physics, the mobile phone interface, the new Wanted system) until a few days before release. I wanted to know if coming to it fresh like that, and playing it semi-casually, leaves you with a different opinion than years of trembling previews, ravenous info-consumption, and one intensive week-long binge.
Terrible screenshots brought to you by Taking A Photo Of My Screen imaging technology.
I was trying to guess, before release, which of the many tiny problems the reviews mumblingly dismiss would be the one that caused banshee shrieks of rage from the playing public. It seems that - apart from a lot of retaliatory ‘0/10′ user reviews from score-terrorists incensed either by imagined bribery tainting the official reviews, or an equally imaginary quality chasm between the two consoles - the slippery handling is the source of most angry noises. This is interesting because it’s almost certainly the result of a difference between how reviewers played the game and how consumers usually do.
Playing all day every day for a week is intense, and a publisher with any doubts about their game at all wouldn’t want critics to do it: recurring flaws are inescapable and frustrations magnify. But it does mean that any problems limited to the early sections are on your mind for only a day, and soon pushed out by whatever delights the real meat of the game holds.
The handling thing, by all informed accounts, is a problem with the early sections. I can vouch for that - I’m not halfway through, but already I never have to settle for anything that steers like a cow. And I also get the impression that the main storyline does something really special later on. But the early sections are incredibly long, and even if you play for three hours a day, they’re what you’re going for almost all of launch week. And I’m pretty sure that’s all there is to this disparity of perspectives.
You could take that as a condemnation of the way expansive games are reviewed, but personally I think it’s a strength. If the handling was bothering me to the point that I was considering giving up, I’d want reviewers to dismiss it as a droplet of gripe in an ocean of awesome. I want the after-it-all perspective, not a horoscope prediction of how I’ll feel the week I pick it up. One of the most useful things a review can ever say is “Bear with it,” because that’s something very few gamers do.
It’s not a big deal to me, perhaps because I’ve always found a perverse pleasure in steering GTA’s most unwieldy vehicles. Would I score it as highly as the pre-release reviewers did? Not yet. I’m twenty-one hours and 25% in, though I would guess at least halfway through the main plot. I’m stuck on two really irritating missions, but I’m going to bear with it because people I trust have told me to.
I doubt I’ll end up with exactly the same opinion as them, though. It would have to hit a crescendo of BioShockesque proportions to completely wipe my current complaints from my mind. What are those complaints? That would be a very dry, whiny and technical discussion, so I’ll devote a whole post to it.
Lukasa: I have to say, I'm intensely looking forward to this game, but it poses a problem for me. Namely, I cannot afford to sustain two gaming habits. I choose PC or I choose a console. I've chosen PC, and my punishment for this is the fact that I need to wait at least 8 months for me to see if it's as good as it is trumpted to be.
Oh well. Twilight of the Arnor will have to fill the void. =D
Iain “DDude” Dawson: Thanks. Now I cannot wait. I need a console and GTA, and I am poor, with approaching exams. Hmmmm.
Grill: Personally, it feels closer to Saints Row than it did to GTA - and curiously, that sense of psychopathic glee I got from GTA and GTAII seems to have been replaced by po-faced nonsense.
I’ve wanted a service like this for years: I tell it my favourite bands, it lets me know when they have a new album. I have far too many favourites, far too many of whom rarely release anything, to keep track of them manually, and too few people share my particular cross-section of interests to be comprehensive sources of information. I sometimes find out the third best band in the universe had a new album two years ago and no-one told me. Worse, I sometimes don’t.
Finally, there’s something a bit like that. I’d thought it would make a good Amazon feature - anything comes out by anyone I’ve rated highly or bought something by, mail me and you’ll probably get yourselves a sale. But it’s a Last.fm mashup that’s finally answered the call. This is great for me, Tom Francis, but possibly awkward for you, non-Last.fm user, because you can’t quickly make a Last.fm account and add a load of bands to it. The site insists that you use its Scrobbler in the background while you listen to your music normally, so it can spy on what you really listen to rather than taking your word for who your favourite bands are.
It’s called Soundamus, and it just generates an RSS feed of all new releases by all the artists you’ve listened to according to your Last.fm account. It’s actually slightly awkward for me too, because however much I love Buck Rogers, I don’t really care that Feeder have a new album. But on the other hand, this system is far more comprehensive than any that relied on me to remember who I like. The reason this is a problem that needs fixing in the first place is that I’m incapable of remembering that more than the last fifty bands I listened to even exist.
Having played about ten rounds on TF2’s shiny new map today, it remains enormous fun. It’s mostly the game-mode rather than this specific map I love: that your progress is so plainly visible, and related to a physical object in the world, gives it a drama and immediacy that control points and capture tallies don’t come close to.
Splitting it into sub-maps like Dustbowl is also very smart: the map is cleverly designed to make that very last stretch to the final checkpoint of each map mercilessly exposed and close to the defenders’ spawn, and fighting for that last stretch makes the match feel close, even when it’s really not. A few times as attackers it’s felt like we were inches from victory just because we had the cart so close to the final checkpoint on the first of the three map segments. In truth, even if we’d made it we’d have been utterly screwed on the next two much tougher legs without any spare time in the bank.
Which raises the other main point: we’re really not very good at attacking. The game mode sounds like it would be impossibly hard for the attackers, but our playtests at Valve showed almost the opposite: more often than not the cart tipped into the final cap and blew the shit out of the place. The game was harder for attackers back then, too - the cart gave neither ammo nor health to those near it.
This leads me to the conclusion that it’s going to get progressively easier to attack and harder to defend, until it’s about even. I’ve learnt from experience - if I hadn’t already predicted it - that initial “omg so imbalanced” reactions to Valve stuff are generally disproved with time. I was dead wrong about the last cap on Badlands - now that players have learnt to defend it well, it’s a mercy that it’s so fast to capture if you do manage to break through. Hopefully once we all know the routes better, formulate counters to killer Sentry positions and learn to have fewer than nine medics per team, attackers are going to have a chance. For now, though, I’d just like to see that cinematic physics explosion once.
Update: After some disastrous Demomanning this lunchtime, I gave up trying to be a team player and went back to Spy. When you’re a defender disguised as an attacker, the cart heals you, so you can actually survive as much spy-checking as the attackers are likely to be able to put on you with all the fire they’re taking elsewhere. Then if they reach it, you can reveal instantly to block the push.
In my experience so far, they tend to be extremely surprised by this and take several revolver bullets to the eyes before they competently react to the situation. Since their life-span is usually limited at this point, what damage you take from the encounter is then regenerated by the cart when you re-don your disguise. At one point I stood on top of the cart, disguised as an enemy Heavy, yelling abuse at my ostensible team: “ENTIRE TEAM IS BABIES!”. It’s not really applicable versus concentrated attacks, but it lets one player completely halt the trickle of lucky breaks that can otherwise inch the thing forwards and prevent rollback.
Once things heat up, of course, I go rogue and surgically remove the Medics from the team. More than most maps, Gold Rush has a very clear frontline, which lets Medics hang safely back round the corner from their patients. That’s a bitch for the damage-dealing classes to deal with.
roburky: I've been on the winning team as attackers several times now. You don't get to see the explosion. You die instantly, along with everyone else, and then the freezeframe goes to the bloody flying head of the person who last damaged you.
FunkyLlama: No, you only die if you stand right next to the point. So I advise that you don't.
Andrew: You die if you fall in the pit. I celebrate as red, when I am not dead, but jumping to my doom :D
Great map, but can be frustrating since it is too slow for the thing to move with one person, leaving you stuck if your team decides 3 engineers and 5 medics with you as the only offensive class is a *good idea*.
I've been victorious 50/50 so far, the boom at the end is sooo satisfying to see!
Lack_26: I was on the PCG server, during the PCG steamgroup Goldrush 'event'. Amazing fun, unfortunately I wasn't doing to well at first, but after a couple of mass-connection-losses there was only about 8 of us. Did far better then, best/2nd best on server.
Lack_26: Sorry to double post but, I've got screenies of earlier (they had partymode on)
WeakLemonDrink: Gold Rush really is excellent. As much as the new mode is a great part of why this new map is so much fun, I think the actual map and its design is completely spot on - probably the best they've done. I've never been lost (I was hopelessly bad with Dustbowl at first) and all the buildings and various spots fit together so well. It all flows so well. It was a fantastic idea to split it up like Dustbowl, too.
That explosion at the end is lovely, too. I didn't realise it was a physics explosion until I stood back and took a good look.
Jay: I was a bit dubious about the unlockables - I was more excited about the map, and it is quite good. What I like most about it is that it increases the importance of different classes, meaning that if the game should stagnate, a switch to Goldrush is a good idea. Snipers for example, are actually a lot more useful for offense as there are A LOT of flanking opportunities (eg Area C, CP 3, right of Red Spawn). Heavies are also a lot more useful too, owing to the many chokepoints and flanking opportunities; same with spies. On the other hand, engineers are having a harder time on offence and defence - the only effective defensive Engineer place I can think of is, again Area C, CP3, Right of Red Spawn.
Or course, all this'll change when the medic spam subsides and people learn the map better. A lot of Blu players still don't take the left gate in Area B CP 1, which is a lovely place to flank
Punjabi Fury: Oh my God, you made a Spaced reference. I think I love you.
Wossname: I have to chime in as well that this is an excellent map, and, like WeakLemonDrink, I've yet to get lost. A STARK comparison to Badlands, in which I find myself running around in circles quite often, or Hydro, where I keep missing the stairs in the radar dish area.
Maybe it's the additional visual cue of the cart tracks that helps so much. Yet I've gone pyro quite a bit to take advantage of the back alleys and still seem to know exactly where I'll come out. It's great fun to double back on an entire enemy team and introduce them to the cleansing fire.
Kudos to Valve on this map, whatever they did. And the bomb design itself is hilarious, especially with "cry some more" scrawled on the front -- a huge improvement from the portable fax machine thing that was in the originally distributed concept art.
ZomBuster: I normally don't play the spy that much, but when I read that tip avout standing on the train I just needed to try it out.
It was great, they didn't think of everything when I was sitting there as a pyro. After 2 minutes I jumped off and backstabbed 3 medics and a heavy.
Alex Holland: By far my favourite map in my, ooh, roughly 20 hour career of playing TF2. The attacking team has one in all but one occasion, when the cart was 1 unit away from the drop point, but we were held off, which was probably more exciting and abstractly satisfying than if we'd won.
It's the tracks that make this level work - they let you orientate yourself easily, and also ensure that there are some cracking pinch-points at which all fire will be concentrated. Great for Engineers/Demos to set up some monster fortifications, and good for Ubered-Heavies too. In the meantime, all the spies and scouts can hot-foot it down the other less regarded tunnels and attack from behind.
Having a spy thin out the Medics is vital - every win I've seen has ended in an ubered Heavy rush. I find remote pipe-bombs scattered around the cart work nicely, though - cowardly medics sticking close to some health are quickly turned to lamb tikka.
Pentadact: Crazy, I've still only seen the attackers win twice, and both times I missed the kersplosion.
It makes my geek heart (weak, fatty) swell with pride to hear you use the language of my people once again, though.
I'm [PCG] Pentadct on Steam - add me but let me know your name if it's not something obvious. I have to do a mass decline-a-thon every now and then.
The tracks are good, but I'd like to see them taken further - blue sparks on the track where the cart's already been. I sometimes find myself dropping stealthily down on to them with no idea whether it's ahead or behind. Also, we had a palm-face-interface moment earlier where my team successfully pushed the defenders miles back, were charging victoriously to the checkpoint, but forgot the cart. I had to run up to them and cough politely.
High Mementic 80s Hero: I really enjoyed playing with you that lunch, i even dominated you at one point. :D
Andrew: Dear me, that's a blunder and a half from Valve!
Netram: Page not found :(
Netram: Nevermind, have to remove http://"preview".
Crane: I just like the shot of the Medic stabbing himself in the throat.
"NO! By cheating I have dishonoured my ancestors! I MUST DIE! *stab*"
Pentadact: Motherfucker! I specifically checked for that. Fixed now.
Lack_26: I'm hoping valve give you a special skin, model or something else for people who unlock them legitimately.
Jason L: The link (as in, the text that says 'Link') doesn't have a link. I have checked that the links in other posts in the links category have links, which suggests the link should have a link, link, link, link...
Pentadact: Grr, most broken post ever. Also fixed now. At least I'm faster with my updates than Valve! Burn!
PS. The post has been updated to add word from Valve.
WeakLemonDrink: Man, there's quite a shit storm brewing on the Steam forums. Among the usual assortment of whining little bitches spouting classic hyperbole such as "TF2 is now ruined, it is worse than a MMORPG" etc, it seems some people who've never even heard of the cheat command have had their achievements reset. They could be telling porkies, but there are just too many of them for that.
I guess something had to be done to knock back the cheaters, but this seems like a big shame. I know if I'd had my measly 12 achievements reset overnight I'd be spitting actual blood.
Both GTA IV and what the common people call an ‘electronic gamer console’ are now waiting patiently with me in the office. I discuss with PC Zone’s Log about how to prepare for this revolution.
Pentadact: Do you have it yet? Log: Picking it up after work Log: I want to see to what extent, precisely, it redefines gaming Log: I’ve pulled up the tent pegs from my existing definitions Pentadact: Now you’re hovering anxiously over the terrain of possible human experience, looking for some soft ground to plunge them into. Log: And my tent flaps are moisturised for a thorough stretching <- too far Pentadact: We’re going to need new dictionaries. Log: I’m going to buy a rule book just so I can watch as the pages shrivel with obsolescence. Pentadact: I’ve removed the rubber grommets from my paradigm, just in case it needs shifting. Log: Idiot, you’ll scratch the floor of your preconceptions Pentadact: Oh, those are due for demolition tonight. Log: I forgot. You’re absolutely right Pentadact: I just hope it doesn’t raise the bar. Mine’s already flush against the beading on my kitchen ceiling. Log: I feel like I’m in the opening sequence to Torchwood
I really, really dislike review scales and these reviews of the game since the 10's cannot be true from a critical perspective. GTA4 is polished not "definition redefining" or "innovative", hahaha :) what a load of buzzwords :)
Grill: *SOB&. I've not finished GTA 1 yet so don't spoil the plot!
Lukasa: Speaking of all of this GTA based craziness, Samus Young over at Twenty Sided has done a good blog regarding the Official XBox Magazine's coverage of the game. Well worth a read, especially as he talks about games reviewing, and I'd like to hear your thoughts Penta.
Pentadact: Ah, another heroic whistle-blower has spotted the word 'Official' in a magazine title and blown the scandal wide open! And they thought we'd just go along with the story that the latest huge-budget installment by an incredibly talented developer in a series adored by millions would merit a very high score in the magazine those people read.
Ten doesn't mean perfect on a ten-point scale. Jon played the same code as everyone else who reviewed it that early, loved it, and as far as I've read, was the only one of them with the decency to be upfront about the stage the code was at.
But it's great that people who've never played the game have decided Jon couldn't possibly think it was worth 10/10 if there's a rare inconsistency with the cover system. And I really respect that they pick the novel, under-criticised target of an Official magazine, and ignore IGN giving it ONE HUNDRED PERCENT.
Andrew: Hehe, I think they're all equally guilty, although they ususally say their scales are the games "at the time of publication it couldn't be improved and/or is the best there is", which is hackneyed, making the reviews historically pathetic, since you could award a game 100% every year, or whenever a new console comes out, heh.
Shame, it'll take a while to get to a decent level of criticism where a perfect score (on whatever scale!) truly means a critically perfect game. I could be wrong, this could be it, but it surely doesn't push the boundaries of the genre or do much that hasn't been done before (nor provide a experience with much depth, rather then breadth, nor by defacto appeal to everyone), although a lot of polish is nice I guess, making it shiny and all :)
Reminds me of the catchy tune for 7/10...hehe. Why isn't 8 considered a truly great game? "We must give 95%'s and 100%'s else we don't consider this game worthwhile since our scale is pretty crap!" Hehe :)
Tentaculat: Ridiculous hype aside, GTA IV is by far the most entertaining... entertainment I've experienced in a very long time. And with that statement includes favourite movies, books, TV shows etc.
I must lead a very sheltered life, but I don't care - I have a new one in Liberty City!
Iain “DDude” Dawson: This is odd.. I appear to have got to this a day late, and as such Ross's appearance has been replaced by new news...
Is there any other way to watch the clip?
Iain “DDude” Dawson: How did I manage to post a comment in the wrong blog post...? Forgiveness please...
The BBC were in our office again today, but this time they had the courtesy to interview our own editor rather that Edge’s at our desks. It was for a segment on the 10 O’Clock News tonight about the launch of GTA IV, so naturally they wanted to talk to the editor of the only gaming magazine in the building whose platform it’s not coming out on.
Anyway, Craig found the clip online so you can actually see his poncy pontifications on the state of gaming today. Jump to the 26m50s mark for the goods:
Or a few minutes before that for the whole segment. They wanted Ross to say games were bigger than films these days, and rather admirably he declined to state anything he didn’t independently know to be true.
That claim was bandied about years before it was true by any meaningful metric, and even today it’s uselessly vague. A game costs eight times as much as a cinema ticket - are we really celebrating that the second biggest-selling game in years reached an eighth of the people that one not exactly world-shaking Hollywood flick did? Well done Bungie. Maybe one day you’ll make something as popular as The Hottie And The Nottie.
Seniath: Games on TV... I don't think my brain will ever get used to it :s.
SenatorPalpatine: Hmm, the clip doesn't want to work for me.
Andrew: Haha, rather funny, interviewing the editor of PC Gamer...sigh.
I know Games Journalism isn't top notch (just look at all the 10/10 GTA4 reviews ;) ), but I must admit, the mainstream press have really not got the grasp of games yet. At least they are vaguely trying.
Also, odd how there is some censorship in the news broadcast. If it isn't working too, you might want to try downloading the ASX file and loading it in windows media player (or possibly VLC).
Jay: Huh. Ross is balder then I remember. Does he still own Sussex?
And yeah, I agree with the price thing, I mean, a game can cost nearly five times as much as a cinema ticket, surely that already effects the figures considerably?
Graham: The problem is that these stupid "bigger than the film industry" statistics only ever seem to take into account US box office receipts. As soon as you add in worldwide gross, then DVD sales, the licensing, then merchandising, then television rights, gaming is a meaningless blip in comparison.
Marten: Thanks Ross, thanks for keeping me up for an extra hour. After seeing this at 2AM I had to get up, run downstairs and report to friends.
Thanks a bunch.
Oh, and grats :)
CloakRaider: Good to see they are actually bothering to get opinions from experts on the subject, rather than spouting off about it.
Sideath: I'm curious to see how long they actually interviewed Ross for - I mean, he only gets a few seconds on screen. The BBC interviewed me once for around half an hour, to cut it down to about ten seconds ¬_¬.
The planets have aligned and my sign is in the “You Need New Stuff” part of the sky this month, and I’ve ended up with three different things I feel like I desperately want, all costing roughly the same chunk of money.
I can definitely buy one. I can buy two if I want to flinch with guilt every time I think about either of them. Technically, I could buy all three, but even if I was prone to that kind of opulence, I just don’t have the time to play with three complex new toys. So, I need some advice. Which of these will genuinely be a life-improving joy, and which am I just being stupid for even considering?
1. New PC Bits: £250
I currently rock an ageing AMD FX-60, and last week my PC broke hard. It’s currently unusable, and I’m not sure how much of it is salvageable. I hate trying to fix PCs, and it was horribly outdated anyway, so the smart thing to do is buy a new heart and soul for the beast.
You know the E6850, the Core 2 Duo CPU that was, not long ago, indistinguishable in performance terms from the fastest gaming CPU commercially available, despite being a quarter of the price? Just lately, it halved in price. I don’t know if that price-slash wave has hit the UK listings I’m looking at here, but the upshot is that the fastest chip I could want costs less than I have ever paid for a new CPU: £120 ($240, but think of it as $160 because electronics always cost 50% more over here). With a motherboard, heatsink, RAM and possibly a new case, that runs into the £250-£300 range.
Voice of Sanity Says: Oh come on, you’re a geek. Even if you bought new bits, you’d have this PC fixed before they arrived. And the truth is that before it broke, there was nothing that PC couldn’t do - except not break in the near future. The only game in the world it couldn’t run perfectly well was Crysis, which you’ve had no desire to go back to since completing it. If you did, your office PC eats it for breakfast. And it’s not like anything else is going to be remotely that demanding in the foreseeable future. Even the very latest stuff with absurdly high minimum specs, like Assassin’s Creed, couldn’t have run better on your old rig. PC gaming’s hardware race stalled long ago, no-one told Crytek, and they fell flat on their faces. Don’t join them, point and laugh.
I should add, before it becomes a thing, that my voice of sanity is slightly creepy and more than a little insane.
Let Tom Francis tell you all what it's like, being male, middle-class and white.
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