A while ago some idiot hacked the site and posted some ill-informed rant about how I wasn’t fussed about getting GTA IV. What an idiot. Tut. If they actually played it they would realise it is, in fact, quite good. I picked a copy up from GAME when I found a gift card in my wallet with £28 on it – resulting in a brand new game for a bargain £2. Eagerly (read pessimistically) I popped it into my disk drive expecting a plethora of problems with Rockstar Social Club and Games For Windows Live. None happened – it all just worked.
I’ve been quite addicted to GTA since getting my mitts on it, so much so that if I had played it last year it would definitely be in the top 5 of 2008. A day after buying it I actually had a dream about it – sad but true. I’ve also been playing around with the much hailed video editor resulting in…
OK, so I’m no Martin Scorsese and there is stuff that I wanted to do with it that I couldn’t get the editor to do, but hey, for ease of production in relation to the finished product I think it’s pretty good going. I’ve not even had any youtube comments hailing me as a noob yet so I must of done something right.
The main problem with the whole GTA experience though is that it runs like crap and is constantly crashing. It feels like a bit of a shoddy port that puts a ridiculous amount of emphasis on the amount of memory on your graphics card and amount of processor cores in your, umm, processor. That means that us lot with an around 18 month old PC donning the ever popular 8800gts 320MB edition and E6600 dual core processor (I know this was a really popular option at the time) are going to struggle. It’s not terrible but definitely under performs on what is common and decent (fair enough a little aged) hardware.
Anyway, thats all boring. You stop caring about some textures being a bit rubbish, shadows looking crappy and trees popping up out of nowhere, when you are plowing around a city being chased by a SWAT team as you fire out of your window at the driver. Then you crash into a lamp post, get hurled through the windscreen, pick yourself up, steal a moped, and make some pathetic attempt at an escape at 27mph. Niggles just stop mattering when you are having that much fun, and it’s fun you just can’t get with the likes of the mind fuck that is Supreme Commander or heavy plot driven “mature” games like Bioshock. Yeah, they are undeniably brilliant, but they don’t do chaos, and sometimes you want a little chaos.
To end and drastically change topic in one foul swoop; I thought I’d better to bring it to everyones attention that this is the 100th Gaming Daily post. This may mean less to you than it does to me, but it means I have actually stuck with something! So, thanks to everyone for reading (both of you) and I hope you stick around for the next 100. WooYay!
wooooohooooo 100 posts!!! good on ya man! you didnt give in and you got an invite to a top game preview! so much to celebrate..
Ho ho! What’s all this then??! I’ve been working my way backwards through the posts i’ve missed. “Its logical to me dammit.”
GTA4 I still think is a vastly underrated game, just due to the fact that San Andreas did so well. It wasn’t as “fun” as a lot of people expected, but R* weren’t trying to go down that route and they needed to take that risk to create a gritty looking and believable story/background for Niko, Johnny, Roman, Brucie and the gang.
Fair point on the PC specs though, the main testing rigs we have are monsters…
As you probably know, I hated San Andreas. It was a mess of a game as far as I’m concerned and too many elements of it just weren’t fun.
IV is an excellent game, by far the best in the series, but is so let down by the shoddy port and the fact that it needs the wholly unnecessary social club to run. If it was optimized for PC better I’d be happier hailing it as a brilliant PC game, but as it stands its just a brilliant game that was lazily shoved over onto the PC.
I know I wont be the first person to have said all this, and why it still hasn’t been patched properly is beyond me. It basically leaves me in a love/hate relationship with R*.
Edit:
Oh, and feel free to ask your marketing department to send me a new graphics card so I can play the game properly and do a nice review about it ;)