Be Excellent To Each Other

Well that's the torture mission out of the way, it wasn't as bad as I was expecting but it still wasn't exactly joyous. It'd be nice if there were options other than resorting to torture, but it's a pretty linear experience.

To cheer myself up afterwards I just dicked around looking for stunt jumps as Michael, and enjoyed the company of a prostitute. (It's a GTA game, you've got to do the prostitutes.)

I also died a few times after getting into various altercations, so kept going back to the last save instead of paying $5000 at the hospital, and every time I reloaded Michael was in a different place, in a different situation, with different monologue/dialogue - it's touches like that which really set the game apart.

There are still massive chunks of the map I haven't explored yet, with 18 hours playtime already on record.

@Bamba - Cheers for making some very reasonable comments.

Until this week I can't even remember the last time I visited here, or posted here. I would say at least two years, possibly more. There may have been a moment or two that I decided to come back but to be honest I really just don't remember.

Grim is right, I was never banned. I forgot the password on my JC account. This happens to me, a lot. I tried to reset it once or twice but realised it was tied to my old Tiscali account from 2008. That must have been when I first joined, invited here by a couple of online chums that I knew from 2000. It was an escape from the spiteful trolls who decided that their main mission in life was to make me unhappy. They failed.

So I joined here as JC. The last time I remember actually posting here and taking this place seriously was a long time ago now. At that stage I was being medicated for the problems I have and it wasn't working. At all. Hallucinations, delusions.. I wasn't very well. However, I do remember trying to point this out yet there were a few people here who decided to make my life miserable and jump on every word I posted, desperate to prove it wrong and make me look bad. I remember. Even when my head is fucked up the most I still remember. I decided in the end to just fuck off. What's the fucking point in trying to fit into a community that has already decided on its members.

Well the other day I was talking to one of my old chums and he mentioned this place. I figure "What the fuck, now that I'm quite stable and well I may try posting there because above and beyond there were some thoroughly decent people there and I actually missed a good few of them".

So here I am.

I'm fully aware of who does and doesn't like me on here because they've made it clear. As for me posting off topic? fuck off that's bollocks. As has been pointed out this thread was once the GTAV console thread but that shit happened ages ago and now we're onto the PC version. With that comes talk of performance, FPS and so on.

Sadly as I look around I can see just how many members have gone. This is a shame. A real shame.

If you want to take this forum private then do so. If you're happy with the member base and don't feel you want any one else around then just make it private and ban any one you don't want here.

What I am utterly gobsmacked at is how long people hold onto spite. Seriously, TWO FUCKING YEARS and people are kicking off already. Have a fucking word with yourselves. It's just some guy on the internet.

Glad you're better in yourself, JC. Must have been those soothing LEDs

I'm glad to see you're back JC. Pleased to read that you're feeling better too.

I was a bit drunk last night so, while I stand by what I said, that was hardly the most constructive way of phrasing any of it so big apologies to Grimm there for the attitude. Sorry dude; I'm a tit.

I'll let Grimm know.

(It took me three tries to type that name. Stupid fingers)

I don't know why I do that sometimes, I really don't.

My collection of poems remembering the innocence of Razzles scattered across the hedgerows, now lost to the information age.

Great stocking filler!

There's a Beex crew for this, right? Who's in charge of it?

"HeroOfTheUSSR".

http://socialclub.rockstargames.com/crew/be_excellent

[edit]It's Myp.

Grim... and I can now approve memberships to the crew, so all the new players should sign up.

Yay I got past the bit with the shed ton of bikers! I was almost at the point of giving up. This game seems to be awfully shooty. I much prefer the other missions like the tow truck etc. They should have made the shooty bits more like Max Payne 3.

I got a nice boost in FPS by disabling MSAA and switching to FXAA only (or was it TXAA? So many I can't remember). Sadly every time the game gets updated I lose another 5 FPS or so so I'm in the mid 30s now which is annoying.

Mind you with Gsync running it's still very smooth.

I honestly can't remember the biker gang being too taxing on the 360. Can't PC spods shoot straight or something?

With the shooting bits I've found the key is to use the special ability and use it often (slow down time as Michael and reduced damage taken/increased damage dealt as Trevor).

I've bound it to my fourth mouse button so it's really easy to toggle it on and off as required with my thumb - makes even fairly hectic shootouts relatively trivial.

Keeping in cover doesn't go amiss either.

I tried the Trevor biker shootout with the pad a couple of times and was absolutely horrible at it, but with the K+M it was fine.

On the PS4 the auto-aim function makes a lot of the shootouts trivial. If you just un-aim then aim again while looking in the vague direction of an enemy it'll pretty much centre right onto them so you can bang off a couple of shots and murder them.

I didn't even realise the characters had a special ability until last night. Even then it's very cumbersome with the pad (so is shooting whilst you're driving, I had to do hand yoga on that bit). Problem was it tries to tell you things when you're very busy. I will look into a combo for the KBM and see how I get on, but I prefer sitting back in my Herman Miller and just playing with the pad. I know in Mafia 2 it was vital to use the KBM for shooting sections but in the end I just used the KBM for everything, ditching the pad.

I'm on that dream part where you have to shoot a load of incoming bodies (this time it's rednecks) so I am sure the special ability would help out.

Shooting and driving at the same time is a giant fucking pain in the ass. I ended up getting okay at it because there's a mission where it's pretty much required but it's a really terrible implementation no doubt.

I think either you go the Far Cry 4 route (with auto-drive) or it just has to be hard. After all, your character is juggling car controls and a gun - why can't the player?

I don't mind something being difficult to carry out per se, but when the player actually has to change their grip on the controller in order to hit the button/stick combination required I think you've screwed up your interface.

I agree it's hard - how could it be better, do you think?

Driving and shooting at the same time with the pad I've found to be alright if you switch to cockpit view, from the external views it's horrible, then I switched to cockpit view and was like, 'Yay, this is easy!'

Plus you can see what track is playing on the radio on the car's head unit, if it has one, which is a nice touch.

In all fairness to the controls though, they've been uniformly pretty shit in GTA games since GTA3, and I'd argue they're better now than they have been in the past.

There are so many different ways to interact with the world/characters/vehicles/whatever, it's understandable it tends towards the clunky.

In multiplayer, you can't adjust the radio if you're sitting in the back seat.

I'm not sure to be fair. I think it was easier in Far Cry 4, even without using auto-drive, but it was a function I rarely used so I can't remember for sure what they did for comparison. Did they move the 'fire' function onto a different button or something? I seem to remember you had to use a shoulder button to fire while driving rather than the trigger as you would when on foot. Although I changed the driving controls back to the FC3 style so that could also have had an impact.

Of course the other argument is that if you can't come up with a sensible control scheme for a particular set of actions then those actions shouldn't be in your game at all...

Wasn't accelerate/brake on the triggers, left/right on the left stick, camera on the right stick and shoot on the left bumper?

It makes sense shoot being on the opposite side of the accelerator as you're holding that down accelerate pretty much the whole time.

It's finicky, for sure, and requires you to operate four different buttons/sticks at a time, but I can't see another way around it outside of giving control of the player vehicle to AI.

Couldn't they do it with the right stick, like Robotron. But in a car. You'd need to activate "Drive By Mode!!" (with R3 or somesuch) so the right stick's no longer controlling the camera.

That feels like it would work. Though I don't have a controller with me and my colleague's looking at me funny like I'm trying to communicate with space people as I try and work it out with my hands.

That is what they do, isn't it? You've just got to hold down L1 to set it off.

Ha, is it? Rockstar, if you want to hire someone who can offer nothing but more of the same, PM me.

"I can totally back up your ideas!"

Oh god I actually blew a fuse and resorted to expletives !

So I got to the mission where you have to shoot a load of people (honestly it's actually getting rather boring now) and then take off in a plane. Yay, I thought, something different. Then I had to try and land said plane on a fucking strip of dirt. I tried four times to land the plane and finally got it landed. Sadly the plane seemed to have no landing gear and so every time I tried taxi-ing it the propellers span and hit the ground, mission failed.

What was annoying was that the game automatically assumes you know how to land a plane and have worked out all of the distances ETC. Obviously you haven't, so every time you try and land for the first couple of times you crash. Then it puts you back to the start of that section and thus very annoyingly you have to fly for three to four minutes before you even get another go at landing. My plane didn't seem to have any landing gear and thus the mission was impossible.

Thank him above for the option to skip bits if you fail more than three times. I also skipped the redneck shoot out at the meth lab simply because it's getting so boring.

Might try this in multi at some point. Few of the chaps on another PC forum I post on are having much laughs.

The game itself though? well it's much better than any previous GTA title I've played. Normally the missions all felt like poorly made little mini games. At least in this one the story is OK, ish.

Yeah, I skipped this exact mission as well (indeed it was the only one I skipped) because, while I don't mind practising landing to get better at it, I'm not sitting through five minutes of meaningless flying before every attempt. Fuck that noise. Although I will point out that there's a button to put down your landing gear which the game does point out to you during that section.

That would have been where I was going wrong then. What assholes.

There are many things in this game that are not made clear. They stick messages at the top left of the screen which in 4k resolution are pretty small. What they should do is auto pause the game and give you time to read it. Usually though? I'm tucked in behind a wall with enemies coming in from every direction so I don't have time to read their bloody tips !!

Nice to see you back JC!

Cheers Nick. Hope you've had a smooth couple of years mate

Hang on a fucking minute!

On a Monday night? Hardcore.

Mondays are the new oh I don't fucking know.

A recently separated mate of mine tends to have his kids at the weekends now so seems to have designated Monday as a regular pub night. It's doing me no good whatsoever.

I've Googled stuff like 'How to do a stealth takedown from behind in GTAV' on several occasions already.....

It's like, they show you something once when you're about 47 minutes into the game, and then expect you to remember it fifteen hours of playtime later.....

I return to my previous point though, every GTA game from GTA3 onwards has had various problems with clunky controls and general user interface shittery, so it's absolutely nothing new, and I think that GTAV is certainly the best so far - especially when you factor in totally seamless transitioning between the pad and K+M.

(I know you can have auto-aim for the shooting bits with the pad, and in all fairness it's probably required, but it does feel a bit too much like cheating for my tastes.)

Yeah I'll definitely give them some credit for the missions. Every other GTA game just hasn't drawn me in and made me want to do anything but steal cars and have free roaming fun.

I remember once trying to get into San Andreas and one of the missions was a BMX race. It reminded me of that old racing game where you had a top down view of the entire track and a steering wheel that span a full 360'. Atari Sprint? Something like that any way..

It just felt very clunky and dated as an actual game.

I'm not overly enamoured by Trevor or the location of his story. I much preferred the city and the missions there. I did my first heist peacefully by bunging the gas into the air conditioning and I must say I really preferred that play style.

Trevor's missions are just shooting which IMO doesn't work terribly well in this game. The enemies come from all around but the best idea is to hide behind a wall. Sadly when some one comes up behind you it's clunky and clumsy and I keep getting killed before I can turn around. Linear, that's the word I'm looking for.

I'm hoping if I take on the slog the game will get better. I noticed that it was very quick to point out that I'd pulled off my first heist so hopefully there will be more of that game style. If I want to mindlessly shoot things I have games like Crysis 3.

I dunno. I still think this game is somewhat lacking in intelligence somewhere but at least they got some of it right

Brain dump incoming:

Excellent vroom vroom pew pew with The Egg (and his amazing T-shirt) last night. Neither he nor I were interested in doing actual jobs, so we just got in a car to see what would happen.

What did happen is that another player shot me in the face with a sniper rifle, so The Egg and I teamed up to take him down - it only took us about six deaths each to achieve it. Then we stole a car and drove around a bit to get rid of five-oh, and Egg remarked that he wanted some money so we stole a nice car each and took them down to the custom shop to sell them. Sadly both the cars were too nice for the custom shop to want, so he went off to steal another one while I simply stole a car from their own carpark to sell back to them (although The Egg's was worth more, to be fair).

At some point we ended up on the golf course and I took a photo of Egg trying to do the stunt jump (I'll upload it at some point), and we had a shootout with a police helicopter on top of a mountain, and we went cruising for bitches on the beach in a convertible. None of them were interested in getting in the car, so we beat them up and stole their money instead (they can hide a lot of cash in those bikinis), and then we had a fight with the police on the beach.

Then Egg left and I realised that you could hold up shops if you pointed your gun at the cashier (and, excellently, shout at him down your mic to make him fill the bag faster) so I did that for a bit.

TL:DR - I fucking love this game.

This is in the SP, too. The shouting into the mic is an especially nice touch.

I was trying to create my own 'moments' in single player last night, and decided upon creating a mega-chain explosion of vehicles.

To this end I hijacked a coach and parked it across three lanes of the 'freeway', to create a nice big backlog of traffic behind it.

Unfortunately, just as I was about to blow up the first car stuck behind it, the driver of the coach appeared on the scene (having run about half a mile down the freeway in pursuit), and proceeded to smack the fuck out of me.

Obviously I had to defend myself with lethal force at which point people starting running from their cars and the police were alerted, in the general confusion I managed to not blow up a car (the fleeing public knocked me over a few times), and as the police approached, instead found myself barrelling down an empty freeway at speeds of around 120mph on a stolen motorbike with several police cars in pursuit.

One of the vicious bastards rammed me from behind, launched me about fifty feet in the air, and my subsequent impact back on the concrete and rolling down the road was enough to kill me, I found the whole thing highly amusing.

I ended up playing for over an hour and a half and made literally zero progress with any missions, not even creating a new save file, in fact.

Marvellous stuff.

Yep, that's the stuff.

Yeah see now that's how I used to play the game. It was a sand box for me to create my own stories and fun

Sadly JC's rig is not very well so I might have to resort to using the pocket rocket in which case I'm praying I can transfer my save game over as it doesn't store in the Social Club, only locally.

Fingers crossed!

Highlights from last night....

Michael's ketamine trip courtesy of his dickhead son, the ketamine trip was cool though. (It's a shame he's fallen out so badly with his missus as she's fairly tidy.)

Riding the cable car from ground level to the top of the mountain, and then riding all the way back down on a trail bike using the bike trails on the other side of the mountain.

Improving Franklin's shooting skills at the shooting range, I found this surprisingly good fun.

I need to investigate making some money by playing the stock market or perhaps investing in some businesses, I have enough money to buy some of the cheaper ones but the returns look rather paltry.

I also spent a lot of time just gawping in wonder at the game, taking a long taxi ride to allow for an effective 'spectator mode' works very well in this regard.

Oh shit yes and that crazy Ursula woman, she just pops up on the map as one of those blue dots, so I picked her up thinking, 'A-ha, a woman! Franklin may charm her and get some action!'

Unfortunately (and perhaps inevitably) she turns out to be a total lunatic, ranting about feet and shoes and shoes that look like feet and bird soup and how other people who've picked her up get sick and fall off cliffs, and how lonely she's been since momma died.

Upon dropping her off she professed her love for me, gave me her phone number, and now I have her as a contact.

So yeah, I'll probably follow up on that one to see what happens......

I love just driving around looking for the random blue dot encounters.

Woo I managed to rescue my save game all I need to do now is reinstall it and copy the save game over.

Relief !

Trevor is a very bad man, going off the state of poor Mr Raspberry Jam's violated eyehole. He also complimented a stripper loads and loads, until she wanted to take him back to her house for sex shenanigans, which I'm sure is how it works in real life.

Getting things in place for the second heist now, would have done it last night but one has to be responsible abount bedtimes on school nights.

Maybe.

Craster?

You strip for Craster?

It is not.