plasticflesh

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Posts posted by plasticflesh

  1. Posted

    I've just noticed GTAV's Snapmatic photos are available in the social club. Here's my most interesting one...

     

    0_0.jpg

     

    Here's an animation bug of Michael's wife coming home with shopping bags. Except the bags alone were stuck in a loop trying to get through the front door.

  2. Posted

    For parachutes,

    I think they become standard in any aircraft you fly after a certain mission, I forget which, and I find it's not entirely reliable. I think it was a heist prep mission where you steal an helicopter and return it to the desert airfield. You can see if you have a parachute on your person in the bottom right of the weapons menu. For aiming my descent in parachutes, I try and keep my target just above the character. For landing, I try to bring it in to a story or two above the target, with it still about 50yards ahead of me, coast at that altitude until I'm like 5 yards away, then drop in the final dozen feet at the last second. Otherwise I over-shoot, under-shoot, or destroy myself with too much speed.

  3. Posted

    I concluded some missions with a terrible feeling of antithesis... 

    I had heard you can get a cool 1 million at the end of the Epsilon cult missions. But I did not read that you have to betray the Cult and kill them all and steal their money-car at the last minute to do so. And replaying missions keeps you from reaping the benefits. Kifflom! Kifflom, Kifflom! My end-game Michael already had 4 million, so I am entirely greedy, but every million counts when you want to buy that 200 million dollar golf course.

  6. Posted

    That is definitely a gross mission.

    you can rush through that sequence, the tools you use make no difference, you'll end up using them all, and you can skip all the cutscenes.

  7. Posted

    For one of the Kifflam cult missions you have to run 5 miles in the desert. I have my controller taped up so Michael runs in circles. Last time I tried to 100% a game was with Fez, I changed my xbox clock for that game...

     

    as they say, "Kifflam."

  8. Posted

    Lvl 99, that's very true...

    The one time I almost pulled off one of Lester's trading schemes, I could have made 2,000ish dollars off the stocks I had, but I decided to risk it another day. Well the stock went straight to it's original price. So those are literally day trades. There's all the data about record highs and lows for each stock which I didn't account for.

     

    And totally true about making money legally being discouraged through low profits.

  9. Posted

    I have voraciously consumed the content of this video game. Here are some thoughts. I'm trying to spoiler-proof the right stuff, but I probably missed a lot. Read with caution, and please message me if there's an egregious spoiler that needs blocking.

     

    I really enjoyed the multi narrative aspect. It was my favorite part of L.A. Noire, Im glad it's here in GTA V too. There were certain missions early on where the characters intersect with each others lives in such a way that was compelling and fun. Near the end of the story,

    the narrative is stretched a little thin, the plot begins to overstay its welcome, the character dynamic between Michael and Trevor becomes especially repetitive. This is sort of normal and expected from my experience in GTA games, at least GTA IV which I know best. Nikko's story becomes repetitive around the 3/5th's mark. So this is an improvement.

     

    The multi-part Heist missions are great, and reminiscent of research for Assassins Creed 1 research missions, in a good way. They are not super interactive, each has 2-5 variables of plan of attack, and selection of support crew which allegedly changes the way missions pan out.

     

    Most missions keep the tone of a 80's action movie, which supports using all sorts of vehicles and extreme setups, with early missions having a pretty front loaded variety of vehicles. The implicit violence could have had better efforts to walk the audience into the business of mass murdering the community, with two specific instances where I thought 'this is some gross violence':

    The first was an early mission with Trevor and Lamar, Lamar's first shot on a guy at the drop of the hat was disconcerting. ...The following 3,000 murders I committed I was pretty desensitized to, but that first death is always weirdest. And all the cutscene deaths of supporting cast. They can't just spend 5K to repair their injuries like my three characters?

     

    The racial nature of most gangs is really aggravating to me.

    The Ortuga, Balla, Triad gangs are a small step away from being blanket Mexican, Black, and Chinese gangs. Redneck and Hipster class warfare hate crimes, no need to dress that up too much. These archetypal gangs are a historic part of the series, and I suppose it is representative of real life crime life, but it's still bothersome to me. more on this in the Rampage section below. The second is Trevor's torturing sequence, which I rushed through. There's some voice over humor to lighten the scene, but barely.

     

    The way the game frames certain more 'arcadey' missions is interesting.

    The first time you are introduced to a Rampage mission is a hallucination Michael has where aliens are attacking him en mass. Later on you have the first of 8ish rampages with Trevor. Michael's hallucination took the edge off the goofiness and horror of this Rampage activity. And it opens a small door to it all being in Trevor's head, which it is in a way since he rampages with next-to-no provocation, besides racial or caste bias or being called 'chicken' or some such. Trevor's rampages are basically all extensive hate crimes, and Michael's hallucination rampage helps take a huge edge off that.

     

    Then there's the first mission with Dom.

    Dom is an absurdist extreme athlete that has you parachuting onto bicycles and such insanity. The first mission with Dom has you following a dog who you psychically communicate with who leads you to Dom, after which the dog disappears. It sets a scene of unreality nicely.

     

    There's a lot of collectables.

    4 types, with 50 instances each. Normally I ignore these, but I am so enamored with helicoptering or flying around, I took the time to find at least the 50 'spaceship parts', and enjoyed doing it. It was a decent excuse to explore nooks of this neat huge world that the missions hadn't walked me through. Actually the amount of collectables leads me to believe they are still-born missions. The 'Social Club' website has a checklist specifically for certain of the more esoteric collectables. It was as if they didn't have time to even introduce the scrap paper collectables, at least I dont recall it being introduced. Actually what's fascinating about this checklist is how it can track what collectable you have in real time. They are paying attention to a lot of data in your game at that Social Club.

     

    There are certain specific aspects of GTAIV that I missed.

    In Ballad of Gay Tony and Lost and the Damned and maybe Nikko, I forget, you can call your friends and request they drop off a car for you. This keeps you from running errands to pick up cars and let's you do the more fun... errands. There was definitely enough support cast to allow this- Michael's son, Franklin's friend Lamar, Trevor's friend Wade. On top of that, the Car Company never works for Franklin after he becomes the owner of it.

     

    There was a loop in the game mid-story where I was obsessed with buying the Cab Company

    The game seemed designed to keep Franklin from earning tons of money, missions never pay out well for him. Maybe that's true across the board and I just wanted the Cab Company... a lot. And the existence of high priced properties to buy offered a mechanical motivation to turn to crime and perform the story mission heists, which was a neat feeling of ludo-narrative harmony. I did try running Cabs for the cab company, but the pay out was too little. After a while I stopped returning stolen purses, people never pay out big rewards. If I could just transfer money between characters, the way the characters can do in cutscenes, I'd have bought that Car Company a little earlier. Franklin's Los Santos property in the desert is better anyway, but I forget the price difference.

     

    Tried to mess with the stock market, but no huge turn outs. This game has not helped my cynical view of stock markets.

     

    Driving feels nice, not as wobbly and wild as GTAIV, more reminiscent of Sleeping Dogs, but not nearly as toy-car feeling. What Sleeping Dogs obviated to me was the need for not just good car driving, but a dense and varied map. Which this or any GTA is all about. 

     

    The last weird thing is the undocumented tackle animation, where when running forward and hitting (X)jump then (B)punch, you cancel your jump animation and flail forward, face planting or tumbling away. It is fun slap stick, but seems like a un-polished thing they kept in from LA Noire or specific parts of GTA IV. I don't recall tackling being an all the time thing in those two?

     

    For a game about driving cars around big cities like a jerk, this one is pretty neat.

    ATV's and bicycles are very satisfying. The Mallard plane is super maneuverable. Haven't managed to steal anything off the military base outside of missions yet. So no jet fighter experience.

     

    As for women characters and the way they're treated or portrayed,

    Franklin's life seems to have the most interesting women. His aunt Denise and towing boss Tonya are pretty empowered and thought out characters and both say some funny stuff, and neither revert to the less interesting archetypes of 'slut' or 'mother'. Michael's wife and daughter are less interesting, but they're not totally annoying. I was most offended by the epilogue introduction of Trevor's mother. I guess the humor . Oh yeah and strip clubs. Skeevy.

     

    Technically, I do notice pop-ins, especially at the peripheral vision when turning quickly. Only occasionally do I crash into an object as it pops-in right in front of me, but I'm off roading at those points anyway so it's of acceptable.

     

    As for the dry sales pitch, I am creeped out by all advertising. All of it. It is creepy. I don't need to be determined for it to irk me, advertising is creepy by design.

     

    Hopefully that wasn't too spoiler-y, or too verbose, or too repetitive of existing input. 

  10. Posted

    Frenetic Pony, many apologies for missing your point about GTAIV vanilla's admitted flaws. Level of Detail models can look funky (exemplified in your daytime screenshot), and there's all sorts of pop-ins to always crash into. And I have no idea what size tv screen Niko's cell phone is meant for, it's small on every screen I've used.

    It's sort of interesting how Ballad of Gay Tony managed to clean up the shaders a bit. And the font size on the cellphone in that and Lost and The Damned is a mandatory improvment.

    And being a xbox player I'll never persue the pleasures of sweet sweet mods. Only the ocassional benevolent modder in freeroam and their "Trials HD"esque constructions. Modders are common place, and frequently annoying (warping you around, trapping you in jail, attaching geometry to you). But when they're benevolent it's funny(giving you sweet indestructable cars, attaching geometry).

    Sadly I've never felt ready to pull the trigger on the Saints Row series. Everyone looks like a WWF actor. Its just has too much machismo for my taste? GTAIV has its sexism but not ALL the women are in thighhighs.

    Sleeping Dogs was a fun ride, for GTA-likes.

    /me hops in a airport golf cart, does back flips off the curved airport walls

  12. Posted

    Late entries on satisfying game endings that are certainly heavily tinted by nastalgia.

    The ending to 'zelda: a link to the past' had a wonderful epilogue cinematic showing all the characters going about their lives. 'Super mario world' also did a similar nice thing. As did toe jam and earl. Most of this content occurs during the credits, and feels optional.

    But endings change with the times. In elementary school I recall being taught dramatic 5 act structure of prologue, exposition, conflict, climax, epilogue. It was hard to think of a movie with falling action longer than a minute. I could only percieve 3 acts of exposition, conflict, climax. But watching many films from the 30s through the 70s, they might seem to drag on after their ending, because they actually had falling extended epilogues, for better or for worse.

    The core period of interactivity in games typically is the conflict act. If a game *wants* to mimic dramatic structure it adds conceits like time limits, ticket amounts, end bosses (or ancients) that need defeating, a sequence of linear capaigns/levels, and so on. But typically the journey is the destination.

    By this analogy, sandbox games could be argued as one act plays. Pure conflict.

    But I probably have a misinformed idea of dramatic structure.

  14. Posted

    Thanks for indulging my fan mail about a hypothetical gritty military FPS DOTA-likes, Thumb powers-that-be. It strange that I offered this suggestion since I myself am not in love with even FPS shooters. But the occasional multiplayer thingy has drawn me in, like MNC or BF3.

     

    BF3 has a weird balance between the arcade goofiness of upgrading your kit of COD but with the traipsing around the bush realism of Arma. And it's a nice way to conference call with my brothers while they curse at the enemy.

     

    I can see the dis-taste for expendable creeps being why Portal 2 made their multiplayer personas robots, or why MNC uses robots. Watching the AI controlled representation of a living creature inevitably lead to its repeated death is trying. But when it's a player controlled representation of a living creature having their skills put to the test, it's drama.

  15. Posted

    I still adore Gta4's vibrant city, its prolific signage, its unique districts, its weird shoe-horning-in of NYC landmarks.  

     

    But I guess NYC is a much uglier source material than LA. Like in "Annie Hall," Allen's character Alvy visits LA, and they talk about how dirty NY is, so Alvy remarks, "I'm into garbage. It's my thing." 

     

    (and

    )
     

    /Kneejerk apologist for GTA4's "ugly" environment

  24. Posted

    Some multiplayer examples I recall easily,

    Team Fortress Classic had escort maps where one team escorted a VIP from the start of the level to the other, while the other team targeted him. It relied heavily on the VIP player not being foolish. But I recall it being a good time. Payload is basically TF2 super simplified variation of this.

    GTA4 has the Cops N Crooks All for One variation, where "one team is made up of Crooks and a Boss, and the other team is made up of Cops. The Cops are trying to hunt down and kill the Boss while the Crooks are trying to protect him. The Cops win by killing the Boss and the Crooks win by getting the Boss safely to the getaway vehicle and escaping." via. I only played it once or twice, and recall the mob boss getting away pretty easily, but I'm probably piss pour at it.

    non multiplayer,

    Earthworm Jim had the "For Pete's Sake" level where you escort a puppy equivilant of Dr Jekyl across some terrain, if he falls he becomes a bulldog Mr Hyde and chews some life off of you. Frustrating but OK.