Be Excellent To Each Other

LA Noire isn't really a sandbox game, it's a very linear game that does a very shallow impression of a sandbox game.

I can't think of any other sandbox game that's come close to the majesty of GTAIV, and like you I did play it through again fairly recently.

Just Cause 2 certainly wasn't a contender.



The consoles couldn't run GTAIV properly, they just couldn't.

It's only when you've experienced it running on a capable PC that you start to appreciate how much Rockstar had to cripple it to get it running on the consoles. I'm not just talking about 'more pretties', I'm talking about a fundamentally better game.

This is why I'm really quite alarmed at the prospect of GTAV being released on this generation of consoles as opposed to waiting for some new hardware.

Either Rockstar have done some incredible work with engine optimisation since GTAIV (LA Noire and Red Dead would suggest not), or GTAV is gonna be a bit shonky on the consoles.

This isn't me console-bashing, I'd much prefer to play games like GTA on a console, but there are limits to how much of a broken game I can accept it return for big telly/5:1 sound/comfy sofa/friends activity/cheevos style gaming.

Change the record AE, please, for the love of god, please.

We may collectively agree the following:

1) The PC version looked better than the console version and was smoother.
2) The console version was playable and bloody good fun to boot.
3) You are very tedious when you to be, with a steadfast need to compare console and PC gaming no matter what topic you're in. Which needs to stop.
4) That being said, if you ever get rid of a PC for a reasonable price so I can join in the future of gaming, let me know.

Red Dead was significantly better performance-wise than GTAIV on consoles. Regardless, the reason most people didn't think GTAIV was amazing was the grey miserable bastard personality it had and nothing to do with the frame rate.

In all fairness Ian I'm responding to the equally tedious and repetitive wrongness expressed by folks like metal, you know, stuff like:



I'm just pointing out that this was a limitation of the console hardware, not how Rockstar actually wanted the game to be.

That's an important distinction.

It was the same with BF3, the game was getting ripped a new one here at BEEX, time and time again, and it was almost all stuff that was unique to the console versions because DICE had to gimp it so much.

This is NOT just about nicer graphics, it's about fundamental differences in the actual GAME across different versions.

Sorry if you think I'm banging on about it, I guess I am, but if people are just going to carry on making totally wrong-headed statements about a game I'm going to say my piece as well.

But GTAIV had some stunningly good humour in it?

The story arc of Nico was necessarily quite grim in a lot of regards, you can't really criticise the game for that, it'd be like complaining that Star Wars has too much science fiction in it.

It had Ricky Gervais in it. That's the very opposite of stunningly good humour.

It also had the amazing drunken girlfriends in it, I can't remember which one it was, but when you got her pissed she came out with some of the funniest stuff I've ever heard in a game - genuine LOL material.

And the in-game internet and emails, and Brucey, and the sheer insane joy of setting about a blocked bridge full of traffic with grenades and a rocket launcher. Or getting the helicopter and simply flying around the city.

GTAIV soared to heights of great humour and delirious good fun.

No.

I can't remember the PC version having more missions or a larger story but then again, y'know.

As you've admitted that both parts of the debate are tedious, why not be the bigger man and refuse to partake?

I just found GTAIV boring. And hated a particular mission where you had to shoot someone's car from in your own car, while driving, and if you parked a decent car in a convenient spot to help you, it magically vanished once the mission started.

Also, I wanted to shoot people and loot stuff, and it kept on making me go on dates and take some asshole to the pub to play darts.

It was a game of two halves, I'll give you that.

The 'go psychotically mad in the sandbox world' aspect of GTA didn't sit well with what was essentially a pretty sombre main storyline arc that often placed fairly strict boundaries on your behaviour - but it was entirely possible to keep the two things separate.

What I'd often do after a gruelling mission or session is save my game, then have a total fuckabout for a while, but then when I carried on playing 'properly', go back to the save, so I hadn't wasted a load of good weapons or fucked friends off by ignoring them and suchlike.

Sometimes I'd just load up the game, go to my most recent save, and do nothing except have a fuckabout for a while, and not save at the end of it, so I'd made no 'progress' as such, but had still been able to enjoy the mad sandbox side of the game - at the end of the day Nico always does what you tell him to, so it's not like the game was limited in that regard.

I don't really see any other way Rockstar could have handled it, short of go down the Saint's Row route and basically handle the entire thing as a big pisstake.

Now don't get me wrong, I really enjoyed Saints Row and Saints Row 2, but in a different way to GTAIV - and in the final analysis I'd say GTAIV has stuck with me as the better game. Certainly I've never felt inclined to replay either of the Saints Rows in the way I did GTAIV.

Finally, the story worked for me in GTAIV, I cared about Nico and even Roman, even though he was an annoying bastard a lot of the time. That gave me the drive to see it out to the end, even though the missions did grind a little bit at times.

It had its flaws, but for me it was very much a highlight of the entire 360 era.

SR2 was a bug-ridden mess, but it's one of my greatest games of all time and certainly the only one I've played through three times.

By not having people constantly call you up requesting to go and see bowling. Or Ricky Sodding Gervais. Or at least not having them throw a massive strop if you say no.

Indeed. Also see Sleeping Dogs for an example of girlfriend missions done well.

You just had to accept and then ring them straight back to cancel, then you didn't lose any rep with them. It took about 20 seconds.

GTAIV was a massively ambitious game, it managed to get far more right than it got wrong.

He certainly was the piece of shit within the shit. Did he mention how many awards he'd got? I can't remember because I left the room every time I heard His Fucking Voice.

GTA IV was an incredibly boring experience. I struggle to remember anything at all about the story. Gay Tony on the other hand was fun with characters you could actually care about.

Hmm. Just zoned out a bit after posting that. I saw a world where your GTA character has Michael McIntyre's face and Fucking Voice. It was horrible.

Each to their own innit.

Minecraft (for example) just didn't click with me at all, even though I gave it a good crack of the whip I could never get past 'What's the fucking point?'

I think GTAIV is the best story/character driven game I've ever played. It's flawed and it has faults, for sure, but by christ it reached high and it mostly got there.

Minecraft is a box of Lego! If you don't get it, you've probably forgotten what it was like to be a kid and you ought to fix that immediately.

GTAIV is a step back from all of the things that made the previous ones truly exceptional. It was a good game, maybe even a great game, but it wasn't as good as Vice City or San Andreas because it took itself too seriously for the most part. Hmm. Maybe not took itself too seriously, but something along those lines. It just didn't quite live up to expectations for me.

Didn't you win the key to Liberty City, Dimmers? That was a big enough achievement anyway - I didn't realise you didn't like the game either

That seems to be over-simplifying it. I never really got into Minecraft either - there was a lot of things to do, but little explanation of how to do it.

GTA IV didn't grab me either. Played it for 30 minutes, going pretty much where the game wanted me to go, had no fun so turned it off and never went back.

I didn't like single player Minecraft, but the god-mode Lego-fest on Gaywood and DavPaz's servers is ace fun.

I don't want to speak for the lad, but I think he liked it, it just isn't anywhere near as good as the previous GTAs.

I liked it more than the previous 3D GTAs.

Bas Rutten was on GTA IV. That fact was a very good thing.

I think the whole angle of criticism for GTAIV being 'too serious' or 'miserable' or whatever is a bit specious. Rockstar telegraphed very clearly before the game was released that they were taking the game in a fairly dark, story-driven direction, I mean FFS, all the trailers made that very clear as well.

Rockstar delivered what they said they were going to, they didn't have to make it like all the other GTAs on principle or anything.

And let's not get too rose-tinted glasses about the earlier GTAs. GTA3 in particular had some horrendous problems with structure and pacing, as did Vice City.

Well, no-one's complaining that there was any false advertising or anything like that. Doesn't change the fact that it was a po-faced game packed with tedious characters

FTFY!

That's not what I got from GTAIV, sure Roman was annoying but I couldn't help but like him as the game went on, and I thought Brucey was hilarious.

Little Jacob was a great character too.

The baddies were sufficiently bad for it to be very satisfying to kill the fuckers as well.

I did. While playing I wouldn't have said it was bad, just un-engaging. It was only after playing Gay Tony that I realised what the main story could have been. Lost & The Damned by rights I should've lapped up. Added death metal with Max Cavalera as a DJ? Man, I should be all over that. Unfortunately they populated it with horrible, utter scrotes of characters that I couldn't relate to.

Is that a real key then? I thought it was an in game thing when it was mentioned up there.

How did you win that then?

100%ed the game in 7 days.

Piece in the gdiauan about it. It seems epic in scale. Bigger than Red Dead, with three (count 'em) protagonists that you can switch between at will. Wow.

ERMEHGERDYERPGHERNKS claims "five times bigger than Red Dead" making it "more expansive than Red Dead, GTAIV and GTA:SanAnd put together".

The piece is all a bit gushing and fawning praise, with not much in the way of facts and information.

It reads to me like 'I had a nice day at Rockstar's offices and I'm going to say lots of nice things about them.'

Also, those clearly aren't ingame screenshots, I'd like to see some proper screenshots or some actual footage of it in action.

on the PC or Xbox360?

I don't think they're ingame screenshots at all, off any version!

Or if they are, they're from some kind of 'hyper-mode' running on some kind of insane development PC - nothing off the likes any of us would ever be able to see.

At 0.5FPS.

Yeah, almost more like a 'render' mode than a 'game mode', basically.

Trailer 2!

This looks like it will force me to buy a new pc

At least you'll be ready for Sim City!

Not played that since owning an Amiga!

Do you still own one now, and that's a trick statement?

Yeah, that could have been worded better.

Wow. They've captured the feeling of LA quite well once again.