[BE88] The Strategist

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I'm moving there. I feel that Blogger is not keeping up with the times, and that its functionality is very limited.

Updates stopped for this blog. Last post 20 August 2013.

Saturday, January 23, 2010

Geez I hate needing to think of good and proper titles now that they can be see easily.

Anyway, I’ve recently completed GTA4, and sad to say, its the first PC version of GTA that I’ve completed while going through and understanding the whole story. I’d also like to boast about how many GTA titles I’ve actually completed. Lets take a look (in chronological order):

Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (PC)
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (PC)
Grand Theft Auto III (PC)
Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories (PSP)
Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories (PSP)
Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars (PSP)
Grand Theft Auto IV (PC)

Yep, I’ve played and completed every single one of those. However, only in the last 4 did I really bother going through the stories in detail.

When you’re young and just want to have fun, you play games just for the heck of it. “Who cares about the story, I just want to blow some things up.” However, there comes a point where blowing things up starts to get a little dry, so the story and character development starts to become the main priority of your game. The challenge of the game also starts to become pointless, so you start to play everything at easy difficulty so that you can get the story and game completed as soon as possible. I guess that’s what 10 years of gaming does to you. In fact, I tried looking for some sort of cheat in Dragon Age: Origins to make my character walk faster. I was getting annoyed.

Well I guess I should be talking about GTA here, and not about general gaming. I don’t think I’ll be doing a review on this, so I’ll say what I want to say here. You start off as a European guy who has traveled to Liberty City in hope of making some money and living the life of a king. Your cousin picks you up, and you’re off to your life. Your cousin has lots of problems that you end up fixing for him, and you start to end up working for a bunch of other people in order to earn money. In fact, earning money becomes one of your main reasons why you work for others. You’re also looking for two people who survived the war with you, one of them a person who betrayed you and the army.

Rockstar (GTA’s developer) has also significantly improved the graphics and physics of the game. There’s ragdoll physics, so seeing your character fly through the air and tumbling across the ground is rather amusing, since all the limbs and joints can twist and turn independently. You also get to control the headlights of the car, and crashing the car will cause dents and damage specific to where you hit the car. I really love how cars explode now. Instead of the usual circular boom of fire in the previous versions, you get to see a boom of fire, coupled with smoke and flaming debris flying through the sky, leaving a trail of smoke following it. What’s left of the explosion is the metallic husk of the vehicle, with remnant bits of fire here and there. I’m sorry if I’m a little obsessed with the graphics, I’ve been playing games with a crappy graphics card for a few years now, and honestly speaking, I’ve never seen such good stuff.

Oh, and I really love it when a rocket from a rocket launcher flies past you, because it sounds awesome.

You can also form relationships with other people now, adding them to your phonebook (yeah you get a phone), calling them up to have dates and to do activities together. You can go bowling, play darts, pool, go drinking, have a meal, and go to the strip club. You get to play and control the bowling, darts and pool too, and I must say, the way pool is played here is pretty good. There’s lots of control in it. They should have added a casino in the game though. That would have been interesting.

posted @ 11:24 am
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