GTA IV

Ok, I've been playing this game for the past 2 days off and on, and unless the version that leaked and has now been copied and distributed all over china is somehow an early build, the game does not live up to the hype, even partially. I guess another possibility is it is just a really slow builder, I may try to play it some more to give it more of a chance. Anyway, here's how why it sucks so far:

1) it's exactly like every other GTA, just with more graphical enhancements, and fewer garish on-screen icons (the big "you go here" arrows and circles on the ground have now been replaced with more subdued indicators). This means that if you're like me - have played all the other GTAs, several of them all the way through - you will start feeling "been there, done that" within the first 15 minutes, if not by the end of the opening credits. Once you get off the boat, you are introduced to things the same way you were in every other gta - a short tutorial drive with your cousin/best friend/whatever, going to your dingy apartment, dating your first girl...It all feels very much like GTA by-the-books.

2) graphics: good, but the draw distance was sacrificed for normal maps and lighting effects, so everything looks out of focus/vaseline-y too soon. This is especially noticeable at speed. There is quite a bit of noticeable LOD pop-in. Also, and this probably won't bother you but it did me, a little - the uniform lighting makes every car sort of look the same, it just seems to drop a curtain of "meh" over the slightly hyper-real coloration of past GTAs. Also, I found the shadows way too dark, and there are a lot of them. I had to turn the brightness and contrast sliders all the way up to play in daytime.

3) performance: the control "tighteness" - or lack thereof has always been a problem with GTA, but is more inexcusable in this day and age, I think. I used to play GTA on the PC, so maybe it's just the switch to console, but apart from the targeting reticle, which does seem to have been upgraded, all the player and vehicle controls feel as sloppy as ever. I still have to wait a half second after jamming the "hijack car" button before my character starts the "pull the guy from the car" animation (sometimes my guy still does a little "run-in-a-half-circle-while-locking-onto-the-door" dance). I expect buttery smooth and responsive performance these days. There are some other nagging issues that still continue to plague GTA and make it less fun - like vehicles getting stuck in geometry, which seems to happen on a regular basis. And frame rate *is* an issue - as stated, in order to get things running smoothly there's a lot of blurring and pop-in and general "fuzziness" that goes on, and you can feel this.

4) not polished: unless this game is not the final retail version, I was depressed to find that many things still seem to lack polish. Apart from the aforementioned control sloppiness, vehicles getting stuck in geo, etc, there are other annoyances. Minigames do not work well, and are therefore more of a chore than a pleasure (trying to bowl annoyed the hell out of my friend, and he is an ace at wii bowling). Fistfighting has been upgraded a bit, with the better targeting, and some combo punches available, but "block" doesn't seem to work, or only sporadically. And there are still things that will make you say "this is some stupid shit" in frustration. For example, one of the early missions involves you beating up a few guys, then a long vehicle chase, and a final fight against a loan shark armed with a knife. I went through everything, failing a couple of times, before getting to the final battle. In the battle, it's clear they make it very easy for you to push the guy out the window, for cinematic effect. But the thing is, it's also easy for you to fall out after him, as they have foolishly not given your character *any* hesitation when standing on the edge of something. So if you push slightly too hard, instead of your guy going into a wobble/totter animation to indicate you will fall if you push harder, you will simply fall off. No problem, I thought, as unlike my opponent I didn't die when I hit the ground. I noticed my next objective was "drive your cousin home." I was going to do this, but after falling off the ledge, I fell into the water, and it took me maybe 3 minutes to find a way out. Well guess what, that was too long - I got a message saying my cousin's car had been lost, or something. So I had to restart the mission! The exact same thing happened to my friend. This is just bad game design - you do not allow a player to succeed at a difficult task, and then punish them afterwards for failing something tedious and menial.

5) additions that are retarded/add very little to the game. So in this GTA, you can hail cabs as a passenger. This allows you to experience the wonderful "cab sim" in all it's glory, which basically involves looking over the driver's shoulder as he slowly drives you to your destination in real-time. You can tell him to "step on it", which makes things go marginally faster. Want to skip ahead to your destination? Fine, but you will have to *pay extra*. Now whoever green-lit this decision should get fired on the spot. Paying extra to skip the boring parts? What are they thinking?

All this said, there are a few redeeming qualities. The GTA humor seems intact, no lols but a few chuckles, especially when surfing the TV in your apartment, which was a cool addition. There are a number of improvements to vehicle stealing/driving. When you steal a parked car, you now have to break the window and hotwire it. When you crash into people or other cars, your vehicle damage looks much more convincing; you even get blood splatters all over your car. You can fly through the front windshield if you crash at speed, which looks great. They have separated "going to the hospital" from "going to the police station", and you can now break free if an officer is trying to arrest you.

But overall, I challenge you not be bored by this game, within the first half hour. I turned it off and put in Turok, which even thought it is just another Unreal-using "me-too" FPS with a terrible purple-green color palette, was vastly more interesting than GTA 4. Hell, Crackdown was 10 times better than GTA 4. At least it was fun! This makes me wish I had played Saint's Row, just to see if that franchise is indeed better than GTA, as I have heard some people say.

8/10, and that's being charitable.

  lumpenprol said:

2) graphics: good, but the draw distance was sacrificed for normal maps and lighting effects, so everything looks out of focus/vaseline-y too soon. This is especially noticeable at speed. There is quite a bit of noticeable LOD pop-in.

that's what you get for 512mb shared memory i guess (or did you upgrade yours ?)

  eugene said:

  lumpenprol said:

2) graphics: good, but the draw distance was sacrificed for normal maps and lighting effects, so everything looks out of focus/vaseline-y too soon. This is especially noticeable at speed. There is quite a bit of noticeable LOD pop-in.

 

that's what you get for 512mb shared memory i guess (or did you upgrade yours ?)

modded xbox 360. Didn't know you could upgrade.

oh i don't know myself either..512mb seems a bit low for current games though

I like shooters that have heavy RPG elements, and I think everything is headed that way, eventually. Which is why I have little patience with games like GTA. They could have taken a smaller play area, say Manhattan, and just pimped it out to every last detail, with a huge variety of characters, factions, side quests, branching storylines, and all sorts of sorts of stores and homes to break into. Or how about adding stealth elements? Drug dealing? Pimping hoes? Instead what you get is a game that is basically one long linear fed-ex quest, requiring that you drive everywhere. You are periodically rewarded with a scripted cutscene. Not my idea of fun, even if they let me buy a mansion at some point.

  thechintzyschpincter said:

all those streams i posted before have been removed but you can still watch here

 

http://www.justin.tv/jimmy_the_bum

I'm now addicted to watching this guy play.

This game is AMAZING!

all i have to say is if you like past gta games, this will be right up your ally.

and i have no idea how anyone could get bored of this game, let alone within an hour and a half.

i fucked around for about 3 hours before i did this first mission and while it does start off slow, its one of those games that makes you want to see what happens next, and not put the game down till tommorow.

to each his own though. i thought turok was the biggest piece of shit since i dont know when. but whatever floats your boat.

Gametrailers Review

Overall: 9.8

  thechintzyschpincter said:

to each his own though. i thought turok was the biggest piece of shit since i dont know when. but whatever floats your boat.

Turok. LOL. that game is assless chaps.

I really hope this game is as good as the reviews everyone is giving it and its not just all hype.

I'm really hoping the addition of the new cover system will make shoot outs a lot more fair then in previous GTA games where its basically a giant lock on war, and you are pretty much useless on the missions where the whole damn army comes after you.

  acid1 said:

I really hope this game is as good as the reviews everyone is giving it and its not just all hype.

 

I'm really hoping the addition of the new cover system will make shoot outs a lot more fair then in previous GTA games where its basically a giant lock on war, and you are pretty much useless on the missions where the whole damn army comes after you.

It's possible to use both the lock-on system and the free aim, and I hope that in Multiplayer you'll be able to switch the lock-on system off, so all players will have to actually do aim to kill.

By the way...

The drunk driving gameplay looks amazing!

http://www.gametrailers.com/player/33325.html

  thechintzyschpincter said:

to each his own though. i thought turok was the biggest piece of shit since i dont know when. but whatever floats your boat.

That was kind of my point. At least Turok had some nice weapon models, and some cool looking and well animated dinosaurs.

Like you say, to each his own. I played again last night for a few hours, and keep finding small things to like - the drunken gameplay got a chuckle, and when I stole one guy's car he held on to the door handle and I dragged him around through traffic. Still, I find myself doing bad/stupid things - killing random people, stealing cars in front of cops so they will pursue me, jumping off high places or into traffic - not because it's so much fun, but because I'm bored. You are right that it is true-to-the-formula GTA game, which means it has the strengths and weaknesses that have defined the series from early on. I'm curious what others will think of it.

From a technical point of view: the drunken walking movie is making me cum. That ain't no walk cycle, that's drunken behaviour and physics. Havoc just got pwned.

  acid1 said:

I really hope this game is as good as the reviews everyone is giving it and its not just all hype.

 

I'm really hoping the addition of the new cover system will make shoot outs a lot more fair then in previous GTA games where its basically a giant lock on war, and you are pretty much useless on the missions where the whole damn army comes after you.

it looks like that Kane & Lynch game had been made completely obsolete by just a few of the side missions in this game. so glad i didn't waste my money on that after i played the ass demo.

  Rubin Farr said:

  acid1 said:

I really hope this game is as good as the reviews everyone is giving it and its not just all hype.

 

I'm really hoping the addition of the new cover system will make shoot outs a lot more fair then in previous GTA games where its basically a giant lock on war, and you are pretty much useless on the missions where the whole damn army comes after you.

it looks like that Kane & Lynch game had been made completely obsolete by just a few of the side missions in this game. so glad i didn't waste my money on that after i played the ass demo.

I played that demo for Kane an Lynch on Saturday, holy shit! What a fucking joke! I used to think IO Interactive were the shit, could do no wrong, but that game... Oh man.

yea ive got kane and lynch its shite, gameplay is as boring as slow as my nan giving a hand job

My copy of GTAIV has just been shipped.

OHOY!

This means I'll probably receive it on wednesday or thursday, and what's even more perfect is that I've got thursday and friday off.

get a decent game supplier, my mates arrived at 9 this morning.

im goin down for a blast in a few mins.

  pcock said:

get a decent game supplier, my mates arrived at 9 this morning.

 

im goin down for a blast in a few mins.

I ordered it from Zavvi (Virgin Megastore's online store) because they had a great preorder deal which included 3 months of free Xbox Live Gold which I couldn't resist. Plus, I wouldn't have any spare time to play it anyways, so I don't mind not receiving until thursday or so...

eurogamer review up - 100%. never saw a 100% from them..

they are the most trustworthy and critical of all the popular ones i think.

http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=134493

I'll be waiting on Yahtzee's review.

Agreed, Eurogamer is my primary review source too. Was very glad to see they approved as well.

not to let anyone hope's down but the game definitely is not deserving of a perfect score, it was primarily judged on cutscenes, dont get me wrong the game is a spectacular refinement of the GTA 3d-series but nothing groundbreaking, once you get passed the graphics, physics improvements and cutscenes it's basically the same game. still fun as hell but definitely not perfect. the framerate drops too, it chops up just like the old GTAs did, no improvement there.

all the perfect scoring is just seizing on the perfect opportunity to fully capitalize on all the hype both negative and positive the game has receivied, people just want to get paid.