Comments on Tuesday 14 October 2003:
Grand Theft Auto: Vice City is a little disappointing. Not because it's a bad game - it's not, it's an excellent game - but because I had heard lots of good things about it, and it really just feels pretty much the same as Grand Theft Auto 3 plus motorbikes, and with different missions. The motorbikes are a lot of fun, but they seem more like they were rudely omitted from GTA3 rather than having been added to Vice City.
That said, I don't really know what I was expecting in the way of improvement - it was a great game before and it's a great game now. The only 'improvement' that springs to mind, one which I'm glad they didn't do, is more realism. That's a mistake many game creators make, and it's a stab-worthy one. The unreality is where the fun comes from.
There are a few other small additions which, like the motorbikes, feel mostly like things that should have been there before. The police use those roll-out sheets of nails now, and, correspondingly, you can shoot car tyres to knacker their handling. You can now shoot the driver of a car without destroying the car. You can jump out of moving vehicles, now, which is definitely an improvement. But mostly, it's just Grand Theft Auto 3 again. Which is probably for the best - I'd doubtless have worse things to say about it if it were otherwise. [14:00]
It's GTA3 with motorbikes *and fantastic music*. The music (and, to an extent, the setting) takes it to another level of greatness for me. Until the missions get too hard for me to enjoyable repeat over and over again, I presume.
...and you haven't lived until you've seen the police start a gunfight with mall security, in the middle-of-the-night mall.
i couldn't agree w/you more! I don't rilly pay attention to the missions, i suck at them, but it is fun to steal cars and get hookers (I'm not 'crooked' like that, I just find it hilarious to watch the car go up and down and when the bitch gets out, shoot her and get your god damned money back!) but yeah, that's just me. I'm not rilly into video games, unless it's devil may cry or something...
Kanada Ten
"The unreality is where the fun comes from."
The <religious> implications are staggering. I think this line would fit well as a motto or catch phrase for a video game company.
Hmm, just surfin round. Far as the game, I still like the strategy games. I'm waiting for them to come out with age of empires or starcraft for the xbox....
Everything Nik said plus it's a little less buggy than plain GTA3. The whole thing seems to flow better, in one way or another.
I was irked to find, last night, that one fairly-difficult early-on mission is *much* easier with surround and widescreen turned off, on the PS2 version - failed twice with them on, succeeded first time with them off. Poor testing, that.
Unreality is not exactly the goal overall- some types of reality enhance the experience. Realistic physics engines, for example: good. It's tedious realism, any realism that has no positive affect on gameplay, that need not be represented. No one wants to fail a mission because their character had to run for a bathroom.
Meh, realistic physics isn't particularly good - *consistent* physics is good.
Compare and contrast: Elite, and Elite 2. The main difference is that the latter had realistic physics. The secondary difference is that the latter was a boring bag of crap in comparison to the former.
There's a diffrence between realism and realistic-seeming. Physics wise, GTA VC has the latter. In fact, not just physics wise. It has cartoonish realism in all aspects, so it has consistensy, and like Raven said; that's good.
What would be the point in Mario Cart if everything in it drove like a Ferrari? It would be as equally useless as Mario Cart with just one car handling like a Ferrari.
The good game developer realises that the makings of a quality game lie in the handling, and the feeling of interacting with the enviroment.
The whole stealing cars and beating people up thing makes up about 10% of the enjoyment of playing GTA 3/VC.
(Antispam) What is 9 + 35?