GTA V

[youmeyou]

Errant Signal delivers again (also supports my take on the weird marketing for the game)

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=7_tdztHiyiE

 

Granted, it's an argument that we've heard before, but I think it does a good job at looking broadly at all the back and forth critical/audience reactions that went down during the weeks surrounding release.

[Irishjohn]

Really enjoyed this. Wasn't aware of this programme.

[Tundra]

Me neither, thanks YouMeYou

[clyde]

I enjoyed that. I think the speaker would experience less frustration if he realized that gamers who claim that people should take games seriously are not necessarily the same gamers who say that games are apolitical, but he makes a great argument afterwards.

[youmeyou]

There's a lot more overlap than you might think.

[Irishjohn]

I think the issue here is that he's talking about quite a broad group of people, but those people do reflect the bedrock of video game culture, at the very least to those looking in from the outside.

 

Honestly, GTA V is an excellent game but I have become increasingly uncomfortable playing it and I'm not that far in (just past the torture scene). It feels like I'm being trolled, and I take exception to it. If Rockstar are mocking the empty-headedness of a "typical" GTA player, I'm a little miffed that I paid $60 for the privilege of having to put up with it. I intend to finish the game, and there are a lot of things I like about it, but this game is flat out ugly at times and I don't accept it as satire because the quality of that satire is astonishingly low and reminds me more of sophomoric teenage male rebellion than anything else. So yes, I'll keep playing (and no, that doesn't invalidate my issues) but I'm not sure I'll play another GTA game. I feel like a big opportunity has been missed here. GTA IV at least had an interesting story and Red Dead Redemption was fantastic. GTA V feels like a retrograde step.

 

Case in point: when I get a cab now the camera just follows the cab as if I was driving it. I miss Liberty City.

[BadHat]

I miss Liberty City.

 

I can't help feeling this way the more I play V. That's not to diminish all the things V does incredibly well, and all the things which are almost inarguably improved over IV, but I felt like IV had a character to it that's all but missing from this one. Case in point: I can't stand the radio most of the time. It'd be bad enough if this was just down to the lack of variety (I miss you so bad, Fusion FM), but the juvenile humour in the ads is so often intolerably bad or just downright lazy that I find myself switching stations or just turning it off to save myself listening to it. I don't normally find it easy to become personally offended by shock humour that fails to hit the mark, but there's a point where it goes beyond good natured satire and just becomes grating and Rockstar flies so far past that mark they don't seem to be able to even acknowledge it ever existed any more. The constant, unending gags about vapid, money-grubbing, only-good-for-sex women just make me want to feed the game into a fucking wood chipper.

[toblix]

Having never looked at the stats before, I just discovered this:

 

I guess that means their three-character design works pretty well.

[Frenetic Pony]

I can't help feeling this way the more I play V. That's not to diminish all the things V does incredibly well, and all the things which are almost inarguably improved over IV, but I felt like IV had a character to it that's all but missing from this one. Case in point: I can't stand the radio most of the time. It'd be bad enough if this was just down to the lack of variety (I miss you so bad, Fusion FM), but the juvenile humour in the ads is so often intolerably bad or just downright lazy that I find myself switching stations or just turning it off to save myself listening to it. I don't normally find it easy to become personally offended by shock humour that fails to hit the mark, but there's a point where it goes beyond good natured satire and just becomes grating and Rockstar flies so far past that mark they don't seem to be able to even acknowledge it ever existed any more. The constant, unending gags about vapid, money-grubbing, only-good-for-sex women just make me want to feed the game into a fucking wood chipper.

 

Maybe it's because I like juvenile humor and thought GTA4 was missing the mark a lot of the time, and/or because I actually live in California, but I thought the humor was great. I have, however, gotten bored of the world. Because franky LA is boring in real life as well, it's nothing but hundreds of miles of endless freeways and sidestreets with concrete boxes all built in the last seventy years.

 

To top it off I really don't think they did very well on the rest of the world. The bay small town is an utter disappointment compared to the real small waterside towns in California, the mountains and "State Wilderness" and etc. are mostly quite barren and bereft of detail or interest. It's like that spent two thirds of the money making a thousand and one unique buildings for Los Santos itself, which is only a third of the map, and the resulting two thirds of the rest got a fourth the funding, relatively.

[clyde]

I was just on a mission during which I saw a pedestrian performing CPR on someone who had collapsed. Being a good citizen, I approached them to see if I could be of some assistance.

-MISSION FAILED-

This game is broken.

[toblix]

Finished this. After watching the credits (in which there was an annoying camera pan through a bush,) instead of doing what I did in GTA IV – spending hours finishing up side quests and getting achievements – I turned off the PS3. Though I did spend a lot of time doing worthless OCD quests like finding all the sub parts and radioactive waste things, I am happy to find that I'm now able to play a game without my achievement madness forcing me to desecrate my sweet memories of the game.

 

I'm pretty sure the proliferation of achievements across all platforms has contributed to my lessened interest in them.

[melmer]

So I buckled (waiting for neXt Gen) and started this today on PS3, and.... Meh. Just feels like a GTA game. And I've never really been the biggest fan

The frame rate hurts my eyes. If they ever pull their finger out of their ass I'll play the campaign on my PS4 as I can't play it like this.

Its crippled by 7 year old hardware

The only way I think I could have fun with this is if I went completely off piste, I'm just going to jump into the online and screw around

[Roderick]

After the initial 'wow GTA is coming!' buzz, I feel less and less interested in getting this game at this point. I think the only thing that would make me buy it on PC is Thumbs multiplayer. But when I briefly played it a few weeks ago, my feeling was 'oh, it's just another GTA game', which already got old in 4.

[Frenetic Pony]

I think you guys are looking at this game wrong. It's perfectly true that mucking about in the sandbox isn't the same as say, Vice City. But there's way more than enough reason to play the story. I wouldn't call it brilliant, gameplay wise or writing wise. But there was enough there, and it was damned long enough, and somehow I just enjoyed it.

 

If that doesn't convince you to just do the story maybe this will:

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIeqhNw1LXM

[melmer]

I take back my previous statement, this game is really good. WHO KNEW?

Need to get a few hours into it really before the magic starts happening though, likewise with GTA Online

[shammack]

What changed your mind? I didn't really feel like the first few hours were significantly different from any other point in the game.

[melmer]

I suppose half of it was my own mindset, I fully intended to hold out for a next gen version. So I was slightly underwhelmed with the visuals and the first missions and ghetto location just felt like I had been here and done that.

I did a car race mission and I kept smashing into a solid wooden post on the last corner if the last lap. Had to redo the race like 4 or 5 times which was super frustrating.

I suppose the tipping point came when I was having a bicycle race along the sea front, it wasn't until I slowed down that is started to appreciate it.

Oh and this paparazzi mission that wasn't even sign posted on the map (just a blue dot popped up) where I escorted a film star on the back of my bike in a mad chase to lose the camera man. Awesome.

But yeah, shitty ghetto missions in a shitty ugly ghetto aren't fun. And it's not that I dislike franklin as a character (or am racist ) as I'm really enjoying him being a fish out if water in vinewood. (Although I suppose narratively you need to see where he has come from for it to be effective)

And online...I honestly thought five minutes into GTA Online I'd be partaking in a 12 player jet ski race around a beautiful sunny lagon.... Instead I'm holding up a dingy petrol station alone :/

Yeah the first few hours aren't its best, on and offline, and those fucking annoying tutorials constantly popping up in the left corner

[Roderick]

In a few years, there's bound to be weekly Thumbs GTA5 evenings, so it'll pay off.to own it. Unless it doesn't happen on the PS4 but on any of the other five systems >_>

[melmer]

I assume they'll be doing single player DLC episodes. And I assume they'll have the game out on the other platforms before or at the same time as the DLC, so probably end of next summer?

Done some wikipediaing.

Lost and the damned came out 10 months after the release of GTA4

GTA4 came out on the PC 7-8 months after the console release

[Roderick]

That seems like a safe guess.

[clyde]

There is a GTA 5 landscape photography Facebook group.
http://www.flickr.com/groups/landscapesoflossantos/pool/with/10336526203/

[Zeusthecat]

I started this the other night and so far I am really impressed by it and am having a blast. The attention to detail is astounding and the traffic and pedestrian AI seems really solid (especially compared to Saint's Row 2 which I just finished). The controls are a little weird at first but I'm starting to get used to them so I don't think it'll bother me too much. The fact that I just keep wandering off to check out random stuff and stopping my car in the middle of traffic to just watch what is going on around me is a testament to how believable they made this world.

 

There are, however, a couple things that bother me just a little bit. One is that there are no street signs showing the name of each street. Maybe it's because they would be too hard to read with the given resolution or maybe it would have been too much work to name every single street in the city but I was really hoping I would be able to just drive around and find my destination by learning the street names and knowing what street I would be approaching. The other issue I have is the way the traffic signals work; and this is probably only because I work on traffic management software. It could be that the way signals cycle in LA is different than other cities but it kind of bothered me that they didn't have coordinated phases (i.e. NB and SB through lanes being green at the same time). I waited at a light for awhile and watched each lane of travel get it's own individual green before finally coming around to the lane of travel I was in. I would be curious to know if they did any research on how traffic signals operate in the real world or if their implementation was based purely on assumption or observation.

[Thrik]

Well, I ordered this on Sunday and despite Amazon telling me it'd be delivered on Wednesday I am yet to hear of its delivery. I'm optimistic it'll still be delivered today, however my plans to celebrate finishing work for the year today with a hot session of sexy GTA have been dashed by being invited out by friends for the evening.

 

 

 

If it hasn't actually arrived then I'm literally going straight out into town tomorrow morning and buying it. Amazon can kiss my bum.

[clyde]

I was in a low-capital industrial part of town and after appreciating a red vinyl banner that said "MUFFLERS" but was draped at the end because it didn't have a long enough eave to hang from, I looked around. I saw a marquee that had no translucent sign to illuminate and crossed the street to check out why the taco-stand had a line. Before I got there, I saw a truck-trailer behind a chain-link fence whose sides had been insufficiently white-washed to cover up the graffiti on them that was still readable. I jumped the fence to get a closer look. I love that Rockstar has put so much effort into the textures that I can just wander around and examine them for entertainment. Behind the trailer, between it and a wall was a large red stenciled graffiti piece of a zero with a grenade-pin attached to the top; what struck me about that one was that the trailer obscured it. I started to leave through the entrance and saw a security guard at a booth. "You aren't supposed to be here!" he commanded. I was like "Maybe he'll say something else." He began talking about how I wasn't going to kill him and he chased me with a baton. Apparently he called the cops too. So I ran away on foot past, the taco-stand crowd (embarrassing) and ended up on a long foot-chase. After trying to hide behind a cement pillar in a junk-yard under an over-pass, I was seen. No where to run, I had to defend myself as cops shot at me for trespassing and resisting arrest. They took me down.
I like how GTA V expresses our urban culture of territory. When I'm walking through a parking-lot by the water-way, I get the sense that this parking-lot has an owner who has little else besides this parking-lot. He doesn't want people walking through his parking-lot even though it looks like it isn't really used for anything; breaches in the chain-link border, maybe a dumpster but no cars. The graffiti looks like it is done territorially and covertly in response to the lack of commons. The security guard whose job is to make sure no one messes with two trailers parked under an over-pass takes his job way too seriously; it's his job.

[Roderick]

For the longest while I didn't know if the events you transcribed were real or took place within GTA5. Beyond that, the formatting of the post made me expectant of a spam link at the end leading to, perhaps, a dietary supplement.