Video Games

PhoneLobster · Post by **PhoneLobster** » Sat May 02, 2015 12:46 pm

GTA 5 is pretty nice, but mostly just because it has a really nice map. Good roads, much hills, some country, some city, plenty of all, do like.

It also has a number of flaws.

My personal giant pet peeves are...

1) Fucking Chop
No really you stick a fucking stupid dog NPC thing in, it has potential (bullshit) function sorta some of the time, but MOSTLY its a fucking stupid link in with a fucking stupid phone game.

The PC game whines on at you about the fucking dog's fucking phone game. You need to play it to train your dog. You need to play it regularly to keep your fucking dog happy. You need to play it regularly JUST SO THE GAME STOPS TALKING ABOUT DOG SHIT ALL OVER YOUR YARD EVERY TIME YOU WALK WITHIN A MILE OF IT.

And as some shit icing on that actual shit cake? The PC versions released with the stupid fucking phone game NOT SUPPORTING THE PC VERSION OF THE GAME. That was like what? A fortnight later before there even WAS a way to stop the game TALKING ABOUT ALL THE FUCKING DOG SHIT YOU WEREN'T CLEANING UP BY PLAYING THE FUCKING STUPID PHONE GAME.

2) The three character thing
I wouldn't mind, but yeah, Micheal is a twat, Frankling is... ok but not inspiring, and its sorta clear they wanted to really do a Trevor game... but someone argued they should essentially clone the character from Vice City and someone else wanted to clone the character from San Andreas... and they had some pretty shitty second rate knock off clones made and "compromised" by just never culling it down to just one character.

The three character thing adds nothing to the game. Nothing. Just screen time for a guy that makes you regret he isn't the guy from San Andreas and a guy that makes you retroactively revile the guy from Vice City. The best the game gets is a fucking slimy red necked rampant psychopath who is at least marginally entertaining.

Then the game MAKES you fucking torture some guy nearly to death with him. On screen. "Interactively". You know. Just in case you were in danger of thinking there was even one character in the game that was even marginally fun.

It says something about how much everyone agrees GTA IV needs to fall into the memory hole that apparently no one at all wanted to squeeze a god damn Nicko Bellic clone into the cluster fuck.

3) Garage/Impound mechanic is fucking shit
In the single player story mode.

For me this is the big bullshit one.

You stick your cars in garages, the free ones, the bought ones, whatever.

They get "saved" (if you are lucky and it isn't bugging out as it apparently frequently does).

You take them back out to use them. But unless you return them to the garage they are FUCKING GONE.

There IS a car impounding function where the police kindly pick up your misplaced cars for you, and charge you a VERY modest fee at a marginally inconvenient single location to get them back.

But the fucking impound function DOESN'T FUCKING WORK. It NEVER has the fucking good cars in it, just the random complete shit car you jacked for five seconds during a mission.

This renders a huge range of game features FUCKING WORTHLESS.

Car customization and upgrading COSTS A FUCKING FORTUNE. Purchasing rare and special cars COSTS A FUCKING FORTUNE.

But if you ever DRIVE the fucking things THEY ARE GONE.

You CAN keep them if you get them back to garages, but otherwise... GONE. No, they DON'T have to just explode into fireballs of twisted metal. You just have to park them somewhere and wander off.

Worse still, this is a game where missions may require you to leave vehicles behind or drive specific other vehicles at a moments notice. (let alone the physical danger to vehicles in missions when it lets you drive your custom ones even if they are still available at the end of the mission).

Now SOMETIMES the missions conveniently spawn the last car you were driving prior to the mission nearby at the end... aaaaand sometimes they do not.

So the end result? Your kick ass custom cars are PURELY for fucking around in and you NEVER drive them anywhere that fucking matters.

Car customization? You ONLY use it as follows...

1) Franklin upgrades ONE sports car for race events only and always painstakingly drives it home to save it when he is done. He doesn't actually HAVE to since the races are piss easy with even marginally good stolen street stock, but hell, it's one of very few ways to milk ANYTHING of value out of fucking custom cars.

2) You can customize the "special character specific vehicles"
Each character gets one "special" personal vehicle that is "always" (read as unreliable sometimes) around when you switch to them, or at their home, or that missions force you to drive.

Upgrades and customizations to them are consistent and you don't need to park them in garages and save them. Only reports are even then upgrades AREN'T reliably persistent (because bugs) and yeah...

Also those three cars are really shitty cars.

And you don't get to just change them. At least in the earlier parts of the game which...

4) I'm starting over the game again because...
Well, a couple of things, a bunch of fucking wasted cash on fucking lost cars.... but also fucking Property upgrade missions.

They spawn like NEVER and some businesses (hen house I'm fucking glaring at you) can be bought by any player but REALLY need to be bought by fucking Franklin, because one of the main fucking property missions that spawns once in a full moon is just short of impossible with out him.

Yes, sufficiently so I just was all "screw it I'm starting again and getting Franklin to buy the fucking thing, and as a bonus also never buying that sweet custom motorbike I NEVER SAW AGAIN".

5) Fuck you on money farming by the way...
Oh yeah. And PS as a sort of weird elitist fuck you... you can replay missions but the ONLY benefits you are allowed to get is on "completion scores". No fucking cash, no second run and stupid stock market rigging, and no additional experience for alternative Heist crew members.

Yes. The game has a fucking gigantic permanent money hole in the form of potentially constantly lost vehicles, but you aren't actually allowed to farm an income.

About the only recurring income streams outside of one time mission advancement in story mode that I have an inkling of so far are stupid stock market investment (not the exciting mission related kind, just flat out boring investment kind) properties (which at least at first give piddling incomes and never seem to spawn their income upgrading missions), and finally random money trucks you can rob for a god damn pittance and a large star bounty in a rather fatal game with a death penalty price to pay.

You can earn money like that in maybe the low thousands... and lose money on cars worth tens or hundreds of thousands, hell, millions, just by parking recklessly or having an unexpected mission cut scene/objective.

God damn it.

RelentlessImp · Post by **RelentlessImp** » Sat May 02, 2015 2:37 pm

GTA Online, at least, does the car customization thing right, in that it does it like Saints Row - save a car to your garage, you get to keep it forever and ever. You can even call out a mechanic to deliver the car to you. If it gets destroyed, call the insurance company and pay 1/10th of the car's stock price to get it back. If another player destroys it they have to pay the insurance cost. Why you couldn't do this for the single player, I have no fucking idea.

On the stock market - you get a graph, and the results on the graph repeat. Continuously. Find a stock that crashes hard (or bilk the assassination missions post-game by spending that 30 million you've got and growing it through Lester's assassinations and predictable stock crashes/growths) and buy it up when it's low, sleep a few times and sell high, repeat. No, it's not good. It's pretty fucking terrible. But it's how you make money. Not even getting a pittance of cash for missions outside of Heists is fucked.

Personally, I like Niko's single player story more than I like the trifecta of Franklin, Michael and Trevor. And the torture thing was, in fact, completely fucking unnecessary. Beyond that, though... well, beyond that it's hard to say there's any saving graces to the single player story, but it is fun. At parts.

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Sat May 02, 2015 3:15 pm

Allegedly you can just skip the torture part.

maglag · Post by **maglag** » Sat May 02, 2015 5:38 pm

I see it funny and ironic that some people will complain that in a game where you play mister "steal/destroy all cars!", NPCs may steal/destroy your own pimped cars.

Isn't that kinda the whole basis of the game since the start of the series? Cars being expendable tools that last only some minutes before being discarded one way or the other?

If Grand Theft Auto rewarded you for building your own super car fleet that was plain superior to taking any car you want from the street, something would be wrong. Like if Call of Duty allowed you to talk out your opponents out of war.

DSMatticus · Post by **DSMatticus** » Sat May 02, 2015 6:22 pm

I'm not sure where to start with that one.

GTA III was the first GTA game to look anything like the modern incarnation and GTA III was a game "about" murdering mobsters in order to take over their businesses and it also had garages for storing vehicles (that sucked and were worthless). You're complaining that it would be "out of character" for a game about murdering your way through the ranks of organized crime to actually succeed in the thing it's been trying to do since it first existed and let the player collect a fleet of pimped out luxury monster cars.

Well, I guess it would technically be out of character for them to succeed. Clearly, they need to keep trying and failing.

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Sat May 02, 2015 6:44 pm

Oh, yes, the loading Screens . .
Fucking hate them to death x.x

Maxus · Post by **Maxus** » Sat May 02, 2015 6:48 pm

PhoneLobster is, as he sometimes does, talking some shit.

I'm with him on Chop. Just with less raging. They do something similar with the Social Club, but the social club at least gives you a pretty good, infinitely spawnable car (this is one area the 360 and PS3 versions have on the recent releases. A lot of the supercars/odd vehicles came in multiplayer expansions, and can be infinitely spawned in singleplayer garages, for free. Even damn six-wheeled SUVs and the crazy Italian supercar whose waxjob is buffed with the warm, full, soft-skinned breasts of nubile Italian nuns).

The characters? I like the characters. Hell, the characterization sold me on the singleplayer game, after I dicked in multiplayer a bit. Rockstar snuck in a bit on the whole "American dream" bullshit and you have three characters who define success differently. And riff on GTA protagonists. Michael's one who made it and retired. Franklin's just starting. Trevor LIVES as a rampaging player in GTA.

What gets me is Michael. On paper, he's made it. He has enough money he doesn't have to work. He can spend all day by his pool behind his multi-million dollar mansion, or play tennis with his wife, or watch old movies all day. He doesn't have to do anything he doesn't want to do. His family doesn't, either. But he hates the stagnation of their lives, even if he doesn't phrase it like that. Michael is a guy who comes alive when he's got problems to solve.

I was also not especially bothered by the torture mission. Then again, I wasn't bothered by that "Gabriel wakes up in the room with the family" bit in Lords of Shadow 2 (probably the best-done scene in that game). I don't condone torture. At the same time, the game doesn't either.

You're doing the torturing at the behest of a corrupt "We're Totes Not The CIA" agent, and it's Trevor who's doing it while CIA dude watches. He knows it's bullshit--even says to the dude afterwards that torture is for the torturer to get their jollies--but he's doing it anyway because it doesn't bother him--because Trevor is a psychopathic meth-head with severe emotional problems--and if he doesn't do it, the CIA dude will. You get to do as much lasting damage to the fellow as you want. So I tried to figure out what would leave the least crippling damage, and did the teeth, battery, and waterboarding. Seemed better than using a four-foot pipe wrench on him.

Anyway, Trevor is ordered to kill the man when the info is gotten, and he waits for the agent to leave, then packs the dude in the truck to drive him to the airport so he can go to a country of his choice. Not that Trevor's paying.

It's a brutal scene but also one that...well, it's not like Trevor goes all Zed and Maynard on the dude of his own initiative.

Where I definitely disagree is about the cars. Franklin drives a sports-car with okay performance. It's not a super car, but you can win the races handily if you go into car-bullet-time. Michael drives a sleeper--it looks like an Audi or something, but it's got really solid performance and speed. If's probably better than Franklin's car, just Michael doesn't have the GOD OF CARS thing going on.

Supercars aren't too uncommon to find. So are racing bikes, in this new fancy stuff. Those are mostly just...toys. Your starting cars can be better than most shit in the game, and escaping the police is often best done by finding a quiet parking lot behind a fence and waiting for the popo to go away. If you want options, there's ways to score free cars. Get Franklin up and do the stock car races. You'll win some stuff that's upper-middle tier, and the capstone is a monster truck (which has better performance than you'd think AND, incidentally, is so fucking big that the police can't do jack to you).

What IS bullshit is Franklin gets a motorcycle that he uses for a lot of his day-to-day stuff, and it doesn't show up on the minimap. So. Uh. Good thing it's bright green and stands out if you're looking for it.

What really surprised me is how much I like Trevor's truck. That thing is a tank, especially with the armor upgrades. The main faults are the acceleration and the open sides, so bullets can hit you enough. And you know what? Just about every performance upgrade in the shop is an acceleration upgrade. Acceleration is fixable, and for a reasonable amount of money.

Speaking of, yeah. Getting money is a problem in a game where the story partly revolves around the characters having to find ways to make big money. Franklin and Trevor have the easiest sources of cash--Franklin can win street races and Trevor can do gun-running missions. Michael's harder, but Michael has a sidequest series where he can make $2.1 million dollars by ripping off Not!Scientology. There's also a free $100k done by a bullshit random event. And if you've got access to multiplayer, there's more stockmarket options, but you needs a wiki and some multiple save files to really take advantage of that in-game.

Which, I'll allow, is bullshit.

maglag · Post by **maglag** » Sat May 02, 2015 7:15 pm

DSMatticus wrote:I'm not sure where to start with that one.

GTA III was the first GTA game to look anything like the modern incarnation and GTA III was a game "about" murdering mobsters in order to take over their businesses and it also had garages for storing vehicles (that sucked and were worthless). You're complaining that it would be "out of character" for a game about murdering your way through the ranks of organized crime to actually succeed in the thing it's been trying to do since it first existed and let the player collect a fleet of pimped out luxury monster cars.

Well, I guess it would technically be out of character for them to succeed. Clearly, they need to keep trying and failing.

I wasn't aware that becoming a criminal boss was all about honestly collecting, upgrading and taking care of expensive cars while trying to save money for charity. And I here thinking it was about commiting crimes like murder and grand theft auto until you have piles of cash and then blowing away said cash in hedonistic ways like wasting cars.

Wonder why the police have so many troubles with criminal bosses in the real world, they should just need to follow the expensive cars being bought, and then threaten to take said cars away unless they repent for their wicked ways.

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Sat May 02, 2015 10:52 pm

One thing i forgot to mention:
The In Game Music Selection is pretty damn good!
I don't even need to use the "Own Radio" Functionality (which more games should have damn it!), because many of my favourite songs are already in the game!

RelentlessImp · Post by **RelentlessImp** » Sat May 02, 2015 10:56 pm

The radio stations are great, yeah. Los Santos Rock Radio is the best - though I would have liked a second, or even a third, Queen song to have made it on.

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Sat May 02, 2015 11:25 pm

maglag wrote:I wasn't aware that becoming a criminal boss was all about honestly collecting, upgrading and taking care of expensive cars while trying to save money for charity. And I here thinking it was about commiting crimes like murder and grand theft auto until you have piles of cash and then blowing away said cash in hedonistic ways like wasting cars.

Wonder why the police have so many troubles with criminal bosses in the real world, they should just need to follow the expensive cars being bought, and then threaten to take said cars away unless they repent for their wicked ways.

So are you an idiot?

Like, you get that when people steal cars, they then sell the right? Or alternatively modify them, and make them their own.

GTA V lets you do literally neither of those things. That is a failing.

Saying "People who steal cars for a living are people who do so because when they want to get from A to B, they like stealing a car to get there" is fucking stupid.

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Sat May 02, 2015 11:42 pm

@RelentlessImp
True, the Rock-Station is the best one and one can not have too much Queen usually . .

Maxus · Post by **Maxus** » Sat May 02, 2015 11:57 pm

Stahlseele wrote:@RelentlessImp
True, the Rock-Station is the best one and one can not have too much Queen usually . .

Having played both previous-gen and current-gen, the absolute best addition was The Highwayman.

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Sun May 03, 2015 12:05 am

Oh hell, for a second there i thought you'd link to this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cnf1_14SFbA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLLyS88_DB8

RelentlessImp · Post by **RelentlessImp** » Sun May 03, 2015 12:38 am

At least it wasn't this:

PhoneLobster · Post by **PhoneLobster** » Sun May 03, 2015 1:26 am

Maxus wrote:Where I definitely disagree is about the cars.

You don't seem to disagree about the storage being shit or the upgrades being largely worthless outside of character specific cars.

You seem to only disagree because you, for some inexplicable reason, seem to like the character specific cars.

So lets just be very clear about the character specific cars.

1) ALL of them seem a little tougher than the standard car damage wise. I suspect this is one of the main reasons they exist, missions force you into them so you don't take something fragile and explode. Not that fragility and exploding is much of a thing in this version of GTA, but still...

2) NONE of them are stellar on performance. They are all ok on performance, but NOT ONE character has a car that actual performs as well as a random sports car you can jack in the good parts of town. Hell I'm not even sure if they outperform that one muscle car you can steal in the bad parts of town or almost any motorbike. For "super special character unique" cars... that isn't good enough "Your special SIGNATURE vehicle you MUST use a lot... isn't the best at anything much!" ... yay?

But again I marginally suspect this is one of the reasons they exist, they want to again, slow you down on specific missions, probably just for dialog and bullshit since their cheating/handycap race mechanic means actual speed on missions only ever matters if you have a timer on, but still, forcing you into a mere mid range performance vehicle during some missions is probably a large part of the "why" of these incredibly non-signature signature vehicles.

3) ALL OF THEM are lame looking. Trevor drives a stupid ugly box. There are kick ass little mini monster truck volkswagon things running around stock where he starts out, and he drives a fucking box on wheels. Regardless his car HAS THE MOST CHARACTER out of the unique "signature" vehicles. Because Franklin and Micheal drive fucking generic looking five door family cars. Yes... "Box on wheels" is actually the MOST exciting looking "signature" character specific car.

4) And that motorbike that is kinda a signature vehicle is the dorkiest looking motorbike in the game. Yes I know the [EDITED] is a thing, and it's not a real motorbike AND is less dorky looking that that saddle bagged monstrosity. (I haven't tried the garage on it yet to see if I can get the big ugly boxes off it or to see if mods to it are persistent or not).

Now. You can point out that you don't actually NEED the good performance cars and "mid range" is enough, especially with Franklin, but you cannot disagree with the basic fact that these are not high performance cars. I wouldn't mind so much myself but NONE of them are high performance, and NONE of them have ANY notable "signature" redeeming features of any fucking kind.

But, yes, you CAN disagree with how cool they are, I mean, if you LIKE driving generic bullshit cars with random civilians sitting around on the road in cooler rides than you laughing at your lame sensible family car ass...

Edit Hm, how about that that one vespa knock off from GTA gets censored with the [Edited] well, anyone who knows what I was talking about knows what I was talking about.

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Sun May 03, 2015 2:56 am

The thing I hate about GTA is online, they have the dumbest possible system of upgrades. You would think, because you need to spend tens of thousands of dollars to do anything at all, that upgrading would be a matter of getting money. You would be wrong.

Because first, in order to upgrade a car, you have to win 49 races with that class of car, then spend hundreds of thousands of dollars.

So ultimately, I will never upgrade a single car, because there is no fucking point in even doing one race ever. Much less winning 49, which would basically require a fixing arrangement.

Longes · Post by **Longes** » Sun May 03, 2015 4:07 pm

I wouldn't mind, but yeah, Micheal is a twat, Frankling is... ok but not inspiring, and its sorta clear they wanted to really do a Trevor game... but someone argued they should essentially clone the character from Vice City and someone else wanted to clone the character from San Andreas... and they had some pretty shitty second rate knock off clones made and "compromised" by just never culling it down to just one character.

Thank fuck they didn't make a Trevor game. He's enough of a scum for 1/3 of the game.

RelentlessImp · Post by **RelentlessImp** » Mon May 04, 2015 5:45 am

Kaelik wrote:The thing I hate about GTA is online, they have the dumbest possible system of upgrades. You would think, because you need to spend tens of thousands of dollars to do anything at all, that upgrading would be a matter of getting money. You would be wrong.

Because first, in order to upgrade a car, you have to win 49 races with that class of car, then spend hundreds of thousands of dollars.

So ultimately, I will never upgrade a single car, because there is no fucking point in even doing one race ever. Much less winning 49, which would basically require a fixing arrangement.

It's a little better than that. The races are arranged by Land, Sea and Air, and winning a Land race counts towards unlocks for all land vehicles, regardless of class of vehicle. But yeah, needing to win 50 races to unlock everything is goddamned fucked, and most people do just win-trade. There's posts on the gtav reddit of people just looking for that.

Also, on the costs, there's a popular rumor going around that says that in the latter stages of the production cycle, somehow the files for the costs of Online things and the costs of Story Mode things got swapped, and that fixing that would have meant everyone preloading would have to re-download 8GB worth of data. I'm not sure if that's true and it sounds bullshit, but given some of the bugs I've seen recently I would not put it past Rockstar to be true.

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Tue May 05, 2015 1:31 pm

They patched the Problem with Cars disappearing from the personal garrage.
But not from anywhere else as far as i can tell <.<
And now they forbid Mods with new terms of use . .

RelentlessImp · Post by **RelentlessImp** » Tue May 05, 2015 10:47 pm

Yeah, Rockstar North's kind of shooting themselves in the foot with their knee-jerk reaction to multiplayer mods. They're banning people for modding single player, something that doesn't affect anyone but their own game, for basically no reason whatsoever, while people modding online are also being banned but they're being banned for FOV mods, not cheats.

This reminds me a lot of Verant/Sony reacted to people creating "mods" for EverQuest. It was heavy-handed and over-reaching and overall, dumb. Rockstar needs to find their feet and stop making these missteps -.-

DSMatticus · Post by **DSMatticus** » Tue May 05, 2015 11:41 pm

Is multiplayer centralized such that once you're banned that's it? I know the actual hosting is P2P, but do you have to go through their servers for matchmaking/authentication?

I'm kind of a fucking cheap-o these days and basically never buy games at release, but "modding SP or increasing your FOV gets you banned from MP, forever, even dicking around with your friends," is a giant fucking deal-breaker.

RelentlessImp · Post by **RelentlessImp** » Tue May 05, 2015 11:53 pm

You log in via Rockstar Social Club. If you get banned from multiplayer, attempting to Go Online will return a "You are banned from Grand Theft Auto Online" and return you to story mode. I don't think they lock you out of single player, but due to the always-connected nature of GTA 5 they feel free to ban you for using FOV mods in single player.

It's just fucking draconian.

PhoneLobster · Post by **PhoneLobster** » Wed May 06, 2015 12:45 am

Me I waited for the PC game before getting the thing period, because fuck those guys I'm not going to let their fuck you strategy of keeping it on inferior console for artificially inflated YEARS make me buy an inferior version, or, their intention, buy it at least twice.

But apparently A LOT of gamers who did what Rockstar wanted and bought it at least twice ONLY bought the PC version... so they could mod it because apparently GTA modding for prior editions is a big deal, and I mean hey, we've all seen that whale video right? That took like 2 seconds to appear once the thing hit PC, and that's just one of the many reasons for the PC master race to feel as smug as we do.

But yeah, those guys? The ones that shelled out AGAIN for the PC verison for modding and an extended play experience that entails for possibly years more of play? The guys rewarding Rockstar's anti-consumer fuck you on PC release dates? Rockstar is happy to fuck them over. Again. This time however for no profitable reason.

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Wed May 06, 2015 7:00 am

The timing, to me, reeks like an attempt to make people buy GTA V AGAIN.
They waited several weeks to implement this ban via a change to the EULA.
So i guess it's:"OK, everybody who wanted it bought it for full price by now, now we can forbid them from doing the one thing that's most important on a PC and ban them and then make them buy the game again so they can play online again!"