Games

[ViewtifulZFO]

I have to ask icy, but did you start making "friends" in the game? The pot smoking arms dealer, for example, gives you lower prices on weapons if you take him out to play pool or something to that effect.

Honestly, once I made two or three friends, they basically force you to hang out with them, because if you don't, you do not get any bonuses from their services (especially the weapons dealer). I am trying to have fun sniping people on the street, and I get a call, and anytime you are not doing a mission, you are getting a call. Honestly, if they gave me the option to shut my phone off in this game, I would.

I honestly don't get the praise anyone gave to this game. It tries to be everything, but fails at everything by the same notion.

The gunplay tries to be cover-based like Gears of War; however, the aiming is terrible. There's a reason why they have auto-aiming in this game, and it's to make up for their decision to make taking cover a total pain - will Niko attach himself to the wall before he gets wasted in a hail of gunfire? Or will he glitch up and kill me?

The driving is "more realistic", but there's no skill to it. It just makes the car harder to handle during chases and the like.

It also tries to be a dating/friendship simulator, and (as I said above), it's more an annoyance than something I actually want to do.

Honestly, they are taking a "realistic" turn in these open world games, but I don't think it adds much to the experience. If I wanted a gritty crime world, I'll watch a movie or read a novel, not a game. Half the time, I'm sitting and watching cutscenes rather than playing the game - I'd consider that a problem in a "video game".

[Mathis]

There's no way you're watching cutscenes "half the time", unless you're watching too much TV in-game.

Honestly, if they gave me the option to shut my phone off in this game, I would.

You can with sleep mode. Plus, you just have to press circle or B immediately when the phone rings, and Niko will ignore the call.

The gunplay tries to be cover-based like Gears of War; however, the aiming is terrible. There's a reason why they have auto-aiming in this game, and it's to make up for their decision to make taking cover a total pain - will Niko attach himself to the wall before he gets wasted in a hail of gunfire? Or will he glitch up and kill me?

Man, I thought I was the only one. It seemed like everyone else I talked to had other problems with GTA IV or none at all. I can't tell you how many times that cover mechanic fucked me over. I wouldn't say the manual aiming is terrible, though; just the cover mechanic in this case.

The driving is "more realistic", but there's no skill to it. It just makes the car harder to handle during chases and the like.

Are you saying the changes Rockstar made to the driving mechanics caused the driving to require no skill? Anyway, both that and the statement that the driving is harder to handle during chases but requires no skill reek of bullshit.

[icycalm]

Honestly, they are taking a "realistic" turn in these open world games, but I don't think it adds much to the experience.

The classic mistake of the inexperienced reviewer. This is how they think: Just because a bunch of features were misused or abused in a specific game, it follows that the features are useless and that no other game could take them and use them to good effect.

[icycalm]

There's no way you're watching cutscenes "half the time", unless you're watching too much TV in-game.

Perhaps his comment may not be technically accurate, but it certainly FEELS like I am watching cutscenes half the time. It certainly FEELS like I am driving around in order to watch these massive cutscenes, and then spend five fucking minutes on some dumbass simple mission which I complete on my first, or at best second go, in order to go back to driving and watching cutscenes.

I started playing this game more or less at the same time with Raiden IV, and though I am now playing a good three hours a day of Raiden, and I am totally hooked, I haven't bothered playing this at all in days. I doubt I will ever touch it again, except if I decide to review it at length, at which point I might play a few more hours just for the sake of producing a more accurate review.

The upshot is that this game has increased my apetite for going back to Vice City and San Andreas. Because whatever their other failings, at least the missions in those games were far more elaborate and difficult.

I still would like to see what happens to Niko! I just don't have the patience to do so. Perhaps they'll make a movie one day. Or release a disc like the one from Shenmue, which pastes together all the cutscenes. That would be neat since much of the humor in this game is hilarious. It's really a shame to waste it on such a mediocre game.

[Choking]

How far into the game are you, icy?

I'm very early in the game, but almost every mission so far has been a boring car chase. At the very least, are there more variations in the missions later on? If not, I'll probably stop playing the game very soon.

[icycalm]

I am at around 15%. And yeah, we need someone who has finished it to tell us (with no spoilering) whether the missions pick up later on.

[Bradford]

At the risk of unnecessarily repeating myself from earlier in the thread (albeit over a year ago), although I didn't finish it, I played what seems like 50 or so missions and at least 20 hours, and didn't encounter any significant variety in mission structure. Again, at least up to that point it was all go to point A, kill that guy, repeat ad nauseum. If it gets better at hour 21, it wasn't worth it to get there.

Also, I should have answered Icy sooner: I asked whether he was playing on console or PC because 1.) I heard the PC version was extremely buggy and I don't know if they've fixed it yet, and 2.) I played it on the 360, and wanted to know to what extent I would be able to compare descriptions of Icy's experiences to my own.

Edit: Some quick follow-up research via a walthrough reveals that I completed more like 75+ main story missions, plus at least half of the drug courier, car theft, vigilante, and most wanted missions.

[Mathis]

I have completed the game, and, if I had to do it all over again, I would quit after the mission that opens up the rest of Liberty City. That mission made me want to finish the rest of the game to see what lay ahead, but in the end it really only generated unmet hopes. The mid-to-late missions are better and more varied than the early ones, but not enough to warrant the amount of time you're going to be putting into the game, and after all that build-up the last mission left me disappointed and irritated. I actually looked up a guide for the game just to see what particular missions I had to do in order for the story to progress. If it hadn't been for that, I wouldn't have completed it. The game drags on too long.

[icycalm]

Off-topic comment, but I figured I'd post it here since this guy's last post is situated at the top of this page.

I find Kierkegaard (this one, not Soren) to be a terrible human being all around, but at the very least his articles are food for thought.

http://www.neo-geo.com/forums/showthrea ... ost2840430

Apart from lolling at his thought process ("the very least", lol -- the fundamental quality of the thinker, the only one on which he should be evaluated, is now reduced to "the very least"), I am also banning him, because I do not want to extend posting privileges on my site to anyone who finds me to be a "terrible human being", let alone to have conversations with them and take time out of my day to answer their questions. Because that's how we terrible human beings operate: we take time out of our day to answer the questions of complete strangers -- this baffling, incomprehensible quality of ours is also part of our terribleness.

[Magnum Apex]

And yeah, we need someone who has finished it to tell us (with no spoilering) whether the missions pick up later on.

GTAIV missions are inconsistent as far as their difficulty and depth throughout the entire game, though the rate of elaborate missions fortunately increases in their later set. There will be an interesting mission with an elaborate gunfight against multiple enemies across different areas, ending with a getaway sequence; then the next mission could be as simple and dumb as sniping a stationary target with a clear shot, followed by a mission with another elaborate gunfight with an added vehicle element (chase someone/ be chased/ follow someone without being seen). There will still be missions later in the game that seem way too easy and simple to be placed so late, and these seem to be there solely to show character development (from a cutscene, or typically through conversations between characters over long drives). The last mission of the game is appropriately the most difficult and elaborate one, though in the end not all that different from previous missions besides a greater number of cutscenes and vehicle swapping.

The problem with the first several missions is that the developers seem to dedicate entire missions for the purpose of teaching and/or introducing a new rule to the player, and even some of these are mechanics you would never use again, like picking up and throwing an object. As a result, many of these missions are simplified to just highlight the new mechanic.

Additionally, you'll be disappointed to know that every mission in GTAIV is easier than most of the missions in GTAIII, and to an extent those of GTA: Vice City. I remember having a tougher time beating those games, though I'll have to go and replay those to find out why. Certainly, the new cover system in GTAIV makes enemies a lot easier to kill, especially since the AI will predictably poke its head regularly out of cover for easy headshots. If enemies were slightly smarter to account for the new advantage of the cover system, GTAIV may have been a more challenging game. It also seems that during some of the chase sequences the enemy getaway car waits for you if you fall behind, thus giving you a greater chance of success even you make a few wrong turns, or crash a few times. Essentially, GTAIV is a more forgiving game than its predecessors.

[Choking]

James Edward's Action Button review has been archived:

http://web.archive.org/web/20080511023837/www.actionbutton.net/?p=353#more-353

[icycalm]

Awesome, thank you! I am going to copy-paste it here for easier reference.

score: *** (out of four)

Bottom line: grand theft auto iv is “heavily garnished”

So, gaming paradigms, eh? If you’re like me, you’ll probably keep some kind of mental list of the times you saw them shatter before your very eyes. Sonic The Hedgehog was my first real experience with multi-tiered, vivid game worlds after a four year start on linear Amstrad 464 platformers. Super Mario 64 flagged up the third dimension as the future: a world inside the screen full of joy, improvisation and exploration without any kind of cost to coherence or design. Finally, Grand Theft Auto III made true on that promise, tapping into the Mario 64 vein of 3D joy and expanding it to a whole world full of toys, back alleys and accidental adventures.

The appeal of the game can be said to be encapsulated by the transition from Mafia goon to Yakuza goon: straight after your boss attempts to betray you, you take a boat ride to a massive new area, then return to your old stomping ground to dispose of him in a loosely-sketched mission that emphasises personal improvisation, luck, and sheer chaos. Killing Salvatore Leone is the apex of GTA III, the moment where it all comes together.

Grand Theft Auto IV has absolutely nothing like this, and is a poorer game for it.

It’s got strengths, that’s for sure. Every inch of the game is loaded with impressively believable physics and procedural animation (the two indivisible in form and function) that turn each and every gunfight and joyride into a fresh experience. Shooting someone in the leg at the top of a staircase now usually results in a satisfyingly hapless death, the engine applying damage logically to the hapless mook. Bike crashes hurl you down the street like a human barrel roll of agony. The Rage engine that powers GTA IV has absolutely everything a game needs for epically emergent shit hitting the fan.

Absolutely none of the missions exploit this. It’s criminal. Rockstar have been so busy packing every inch of the city with mess and clutter (resulting in some truly disorienting sensory overbleed) that the missions – previously the delightful, flavoursome core of GTA – will almost invariably amount to the following:

1) Crazy Taxi rip-offs (without the crazy, but with twice the taxi)
2) Shooting some guys
3) Driving someone someplace, then you shoot some guys
4) Chases (these are actually fucking incredible, thanks to the new system that lets you free-aim while driving)

Padding out these staples is Rockstar’s big new thing: you can charm the shit out of certain contacts to unlock tasty support abilities like ordering guns, car bombs or helicopters. Unfortunately, the wining and dining process is boring, chore-like shit – go to a stripclub full of antisexy women-like polygon things, play a boring game of pool, or get drunk. Drunken physics are hilarious, as is the effect on your driving ability, but the repetition and lack of imagination inherent in the process reduces it to a grind. Games should not be like work, and that’s especially true of single player action titles.

It’s still a great game. On-foot combat is excellent, a logical step-up from the system introduced in GTA: San Andreas and fortified with an excellent cover mechanic. Going to war with the cops will never get old. Explosions are actual shit-flipping happenings, not just splash damage with cosmetics.

Unfortunately, the spine of the thing – the characters, the missions, the water-cooler discussion wizard that GTA used to be – is drabber, grittier and less inspired. GTA’s Judge Dredd-esque satire used to be unassailable, but this is a Liberty City where jokes fall flat. Very few of the characters so much as hold a candle to previous creations like Donald Love or Love Fist, with the notable exception of Brucie, the genetically different man-steroid.

I’ll be dipping my dick into multiplayer tomorrow, where I fully expect the sense of anarchic chaos I love GTA for to reassert itself, and the superbly detailed engine to realise its true potential for punching me in the face with an event-fist made of things I didn’t expect.

Grand Theft Auto IV is simply an excellent sandbox hamstrung uninspired missions. Rockstar would be well advised to use the download content dropping in six months or so to rectify this.

And now that I've played the game I might as well comment on his review:

The Rage engine that powers GTA IV has absolutely everything a game needs for epically emergent shit hitting the fan.

lol

It’s still a great game.

No, it's not. "Decent" is the word you are looking for.

On-foot combat is excellent

"Passable" is the word you are looking for.

and fortified with an excellent cover mechanic.

"Barely usable" is the phrase you are looking for.

Unfortunately, the spine of the thing – the characters, the missions, the water-cooler discussion wizard that GTA used to be – is drabber, grittier and less inspired. GTA’s Judge Dredd-esque satire used to be unassailable, but this is a Liberty City where jokes fall flat. Very few of the characters so much as hold a candle to previous creations like Donald Love or Love Fist, with the notable exception of Brucie, the genetically different man-steroid.

Not that this matters very much, but I wouldn't say that the satire in this game is worse than in that of the first Liberty City title. In some ways it's better (the internet, for example), in others worse (Lazlow's show, while still decent, is not as good as it used to be).

But yeah, details aside, his review is essentially correct. I would also give the game three stars -- but out of five, not four.

And we still need some kind of report of what the multiplayer is like...

[icycalm]

Let me assist your memory using mine
Which of course selects the extremes. Note that virtually every exceptionally bad mission could have been salvaged with even a basic checkpoint system, which goes back to my point that sandbox games can fuck a lot of things up with me until I become convinced that I am wasting time on the hamster wheel of their arrogance. That plus GTA4's reluctance to allow me to apply any of my possible tools in most required missions make the game unplayable for me.


Missions of Note
In a good way:
-Three leaf clover and most McReary activites apart from the stupid girlfriend, and I liked Derrick's missions as well.
-Some of the little Jacob stuff, which down to the helicopter RPG duel was about on par with SR2 for cartoonish absurdity
-Some of the Dwayne/Playboy missions, which again were about on par with the average shenanigans in SR2
-The Gambetti family mission to kill Kim, where despite being slathered in stereotypes they made sure it mattered whether I did my job well and got to him before he got to his vehicle (this one's fresh on my memory because I happened to do it the other day when I tried the game again just to be sure I hated it. Phil Bell was again the end of that visit).

In a bad way:
-Two motorcycle invulnerability chase
-One car invulnerability chase
-Any other chase with invulnerable segments
-Chick in the trunk
-Any mission which began with multiple driving segments that you had to repeat if you failed
-and on that note, Phil Bell and his suicidal run into the warehouse which was based around the worst infiltration plan in the universe
-Any mission which concluded with a bullshit kill him or let him live choice (many)
-Any mission which required you to conduct an absolutely ridiculous betrayal/act of scumbaggery that was not only a bad thing to do generally, it was the opposite of -pragmatism and common sense (many).
-Ray Boccino and his sidekick Johnny, the worst diamond thieves
-Bernie Crane, which by the way set a great precedent for the upcoming Gay Tony dlc
-Everything I've seen about the ending, which sounds like a Galactica Season 4 level travesty.

Mediocre: everything else


Side Activities
Good side activities:
Hitman
-Manhunt (because the combat set pieces were mostly decent, and the missions were relatively open in how you approached them)

Passable Side activities:
-Car theft (dinged for silly AI countermeasures to theft, delivery place having no easily accessible taxi hotspot nearby)

Bad side activities:
-Stunt Jumps: normally I have a little fun with these, but the irritating way the game handled healing, death, reloading as well as the vague criteria for success at times made me very risk averse.
-Everything else. Dating, bowling, QUBED, paramedics whatever. I don't do them in games I mostly like, such as SR2 either. But they really clashed with the "realism" twist they tried to add this time, and I thought the phone call based rewards were bullshit. Let me tell you what I really want is to bust out my cell phone when I need something right away.

Core mechanics
Good:
-The original idea for the setting and protagonist had a lot of interesting dimensions. They pissed away all of that good will, but I'll still count it as the game gave a great first impression.
-Combat on foot mostly felt great
-Driving without combat was solid
-multiplayer was ok for an afterthought
-The commie radio station
-drunk driving, although I wish it was more than just a gimmick

Bad:
-Ally AI was terrible. Do not attach mission failure to it at every turn.
-In game rewards were appallingly bad. Safehouses, clothes, dates for lame abilities, whatever. Just terrible.
-Dating and date activities
-Craplist and fake internet generally. .hack did a more credible job, and that was not a good game or one that games in this genre should emulate.
-Money was worthless, despite being your character's supposed motivation. Hey Roman, how many millions should I accrue before I can stop being a bag man? Many -open world games, particularly those with Bad Guy main characters, confront this eventually, and while some try to compromise between the thuggery on display and your status, GTA4 boldy chooses to completely ignore any attempt to reconcile it
-Driving while shooting was garbage. With no coop and no allies who could shoot worth a damn, this was significant
-No value to cars or reason to get anything nicer than whatever's driving by. Garage mechanic was shit, I especially liked it when I'd take a taxi home and he'd pull up into the rear of my sportscar.
-Healing. Fuck calling 911, and fuck the hospital
-Equipment and respawning.
-NO CHECKPOINTS.
-Toll Booths. Seems small, reflects the way that the selective realism of the devs was wrongheaded from the ground up


What I'm getting at here is not that I want you to agree that GTA4 sucks. That's fine, and I can see where someone would prioritize the stuff I put under "good" and not mind the rest so much. But I never will, and Fortinbras can eat a dick if he thinks his act is going to convince anyone of anything other than his need for that dick. What I would like to avoid is an endless cycle where I explain to you my reasoning and you reply with NO TASTE FOR CRAFTSMANSHIP or chapter 3452 in your passionate feud with Creexuls.

http://www.caltrops.com/pointy.php?acti ... pid=105727

Note the multiplayer comment:

-multiplayer was ok for an afterthought

Since the rest of his analysis is mostly spot-on, there is a good chance this comment is too.

His is a much better commentary than James Edwards', by the way.

[icycalm]

http://insomnia.ac/reviews/xbox360/grandtheftautoiv/

[hyac]

LOL this review was really hilarious, particularly the first couple of paragraphs!

I'm also curious regarding the "awesome new direction" Crackdown took with the GTA structure, as I never played that game.

[MjFrancis]

Crackdown took the GTA formula and added a superhuman protagonist. The superpowers start out small and are leveled up throughout the game. You start out tossing around mailboxes and jumping on low-level awnings to throwing cars a full city block away and sprinting from skyscraper to skyscraper. If felt like playing GTA with the cheats on at times, but the game compensates with increased difficulty.

The review was solid. Much of the improvements in GTA IV were impressive but superfluous, and the game mechanics were watered down.

[icycalm]

The GTAIV review has now been expanded to roughly twice the length, and I strongly urge everyone who read the first version to also read this new version in its entirety. It is now the most sophisticated game review I've yet read (and written, lol), and links up with several upcoming theory articles, so it's a good idea for everyone to read it -- even those who don't give a shit about GTA or even 3D action games in general.

The reason for the revision is a bit complicated. Basically, the new review template does not really work with really long reviews, and since I wanted to use it for GTAIV, I was working under a word limit. But I felt unsatisfied by the end result because I had only said about half of what I had to say -- so I copy-pasted the text to the old template and kept writing. The review might not look so good now -- but really who gives a fuck. The point is to understand, neh?

The first version is archived here, for curious late-comers:

http://insomnia.ac/reviews/xbox360/gran ... _draft.php

I might be able to make a two-page version of the new template later on, and transfer the final version of the review onto it, but then I'd need many more screenshots, etc. We'll see.

[El Chaos]

Yeah, that'd be a great idea, I can really understand all of your comments on the game's graphics and change in style by looking at the screenshots next to them. Also, try not to compress them too much the next time, the JPEG artifacts are quite notorious in the first version's screenshots.

As for the review, it looks like there's a typo in the tenth paragraph, third sentence: "Even your character respons sluggishly (...)"

Otherwise, great job.

[icycalm]

Fixed the typo, thanks.

As for the screens, I did not compress anything. I simply found them on Google Image Search from various sites and downscaled them with MS Paint. That is all I have right now since I am using internet cafes.