Zero Punctuation: Grand Theft Auto 5

[Epicspoon]

There is only one thing I ask for that GTA just refuses to do. Storing as many fucking cars as I want and being able to access all of them from any garage. Or at the very least the ability to store a non infinite but still arbitrarily high number of cars. Is that too much to ask? I don't care if it's not realistic, it's a fucking sandbox. It's one thing if you want a game to keep a serious tone but it's another to let that get in the way of game design.

 

[Necrofudge]

I liked the game. It's entertaining in a sort of mindless way.

And it definitely eats up time pretty well.

It's not as fun as San Andreas was for me (last game I played), but maybe I'm just too old to have fun anymore.

Also, I'm really annoyed that they made it impossible to flip a car over in that game. Even if you get the car completely upside down, you can just roll side to side like a turtle on its shell until you're right side up again.

 

[RedDeadFred]

Yeah, I knew you were going to hate it. Further justification for me to not buy it! Plus I still need to get Saints Row 4.

I can tell you firsthand that Saints Row 4 is absolute garbage and not even accidentally good. It's not even a matter of opinion. It's glitchy, boring, has absolutely no sense of pacing, most of the content is literally copy-pasted from Saints Row 3, the missions are insultingly easy, and the superpowers simply break the game.

Edit: Please disregard my previous quote. I hadn't read through the thread yet. I apologize for that, I obviously should have. It seems that several people have already addressed this part of your post and it basically all comes down to differing opinions on what makes a game "good" and some other minor things that are based on personal opinion. No point in starting the same debate so I will simply say good night sir and happy interneting.

OT: After seeing how more and more people were agreeing with Greg and seeing a few scenes from the game, I decided just to borrow it from my friend before deciding to buy it. I'm glad. I don't think I would play through it again. There wasn't anything really wrong with it, it just seemed bland. Doing any one thing in the game got boring quickly. It feels like they spread themselves a little too thin. I honestly liked how GTA IV was more focused. Ya, going from the story to random mass murderer on the street for no reason made little sense, but fooling around in that game got old quickly for me so I didn't do it that much anyway. GTA IV felt like it clearly wanted to tell a story. I thoroughly enjoyed that story and even played through it again. I sold it after that because I'd had my fill. The story for me in GTA V isn't nearly up to the caliber of IV. I get that they made Trevor to give players an actual reason for why they might go out of a mission and suddenly go on a rampage but for me, it just wasn't necessary. I would have preferred a more focused story. I'm sure the game has plenty of appeal for others but I'm definitely glad that I borrowed it first since I do not plan on getting it now.

 

[pearcinator]

GTAV had an awesome mission that started out sooooo bad...doing a stupid Yoga minigame.

Then it went crazy! I had so much fun with that mission.

 

[Razorback0z]

Pretty much agreed with it, except I actually find Trevor likeable and pretty well written, but I really think GTAV feels like a game that was largely setup for mission packs. I have been playing it really thoroughly and am only 60% through the story despite putting in over 50 hours so far. I think Im going to start again tonight because I can already see how I can improve my position, so that suggests some flexibility anyway.

Right now I still think I enjoyed RDR more but I will reserve my final judgement for when I finish the story.

As for the review, not his best work, Id say Yahtzee's performance is about the equivalent of Rockstar's, good but nothing to write home about.

 

[Proverbial Jon]

There is only one thing I ask for that GTA just refuses to do. Storing as many fucking cars as I want and being able to access all of them from any garage. Or at the very least the ability to store a non infinite but still arbitrarily high number of cars. Is that too much to ask? I don't care if it's not realistic, it's a fucking sandbox. It's one thing if you want a game to keep a serious tone but it's another to let that get in the way of game design.

The closest thing I've seen to this is a property in GTA V called Grove Street Garage which you can purchase. It stores up to 4 cars that you have obtained either from the game world or have bought from the in-game "internet."

It's an odd limitation considering the fact that you can have many more aircraft and be able to cycle through them from a menu at a helipad or aircraft hangar. I mean that's not realistic.

GTAV had an awesome mission that started out sooooo bad...doing a stupid Yoga minigame.

Then it went crazy! I had so much fun with that mission.

I think that's the point of the mission. It shows how mundane and stilted Michael's life has become, surrounded by self-help gurus and general idiots just fleecing him for cash. Then he breaks free from that and he realises what he's been missing most in life.

 

[Strazdas]

wow reading this thread made me doublecheck whether im on R&P board. long posts trying to say a lot tiptoeing around insulting eachother and trying not to give significant impressions of thier own opinions.

Also i wish they woudl advertise ANY game here. you wont see a videogame advertisement here unless in a media thats pecifically aimed at gamers.

 

[Terramax]

And queue people who probably haven't even played the game vehemently defending it.

All two of them?

 

[Terramax]

One of the GTAV missions has you mopping the floor.

At first I thought "Wow, the combat must be easy if you're mopping the floor with your opposition", but then I realized that you meant actually mopping a floor. And I thought "Wait, we already have a game for that [http://www.runestorm.com/viscera]."

That put a grin on my face.

I always wondered who cleaned up after the gamer went on a murder spree in FPS games.

 

[Petromir]

The helicopeter controls are ppossibly the worst I've come across.

THe plane controls are a lot better, it was rare I felt I wasn't in control unlike the damn copters (which featured in the missions several time requring pinpoint precision compared to anything i was have bee asked to do in the planes so far (just had all 3 charechters restored to me sa it were)).

As for the charecters, I thought as game charecters were well fleshed out. Even Trev had a suprising amount of depth to his madness for a charecter that as far as I can tell is a complete parody of the average GTA players actions in many of their games. There was a fairly well crafted completely twisted logic to him. Almost uniquely for a gaming charecter I never felt his axtions were out of charecter, as the way he was written made you beleive that he would elieve even his craziest internal and external justifications for the things he did.

The other two had to make bigger leaps of justification merely becasue they didnt have the batshit crazy exscuse, but in general I could believe that they knew they were doign it and didnt beleive it themselves really.

 

[webby]

I can see what you mean but at the same time, it's nice to hear at least one person who has some big problems with the game. Seems to me like no game should be averaging 98 on Metacritic (I actually just checked it and it's down to 97 but still) so it's nice to hear someone who isn't giving it an overwhelmingly positive review. I don't think I've ever heard of a movie or book getting the kind of near-unanimous praise that GTA 4 and 5 have gotten, video games seem to be the only medium where so much of the press can get sucked into the hype this much.

I can understand looking for balance in reviews, that isn't really what's going on here though. It feels more like people looking for smug validation that they made the right decision to not play a popular game so they focus on the negative reviews and ignore the positive ones. It's confirmation bias, plain and simple and it's pretty weird.

People aren't happy because someone gave a balanced review of the game, Yahtzee discusses very little at the end of the day, they're happy that he criticised it. It's effectively fanboyism of a different kind. Instead of saying something is good with limited/no evidence and getting mad when people say it isn't we have people saying it's bad with little/no evidence and being smug/condescending when a review agrees with them because they think it shows that they're clever and smart whilst everyone who bought the game is silly sheeple buying into the hype.

Obviously that isn't everyone but an actual discussion about the game hasn't managed to take off because because there's too much "flame shield up" type bullshit from the crowd that I mentioned.

e: Just to quickly add a bit more in here, look at the people comparing SR4 favourably to GTA5. SR4 is the weakest game I've played in the SR series, it's bland, repetitive, glitchy, self referential to an obnoxious degree, set in a location I've already thoroughly explored and the superpowers make guns pointless. People are still comparing it favourably to GTA5 though despite it blowing all the predecessors out of the water.

 

[Banzaiman]

I could argue the point that it somewhat achieves setting a new benchmark because Los Santos in and of itself is a technical marvel that seem to have required a bit of a juggling act in order to cram it onto this console generation, but that's kind of subjective and I'm sure people will probably hate LS for the same reasons that I enjoy it.

Perhaps it'd be subjective to say that Los Santos is a great city filled with fun stuff to do, but I think you can let yourself say that it is, in its own right, a technical marvel. Whether or not people think the game is any good at all, the sheer size of the sandbox map is impressive without taking into account the fact that this is with the updated graphics from GTA IV, the number of npcs milling about, and the fact you can drive through it all. I mean, whether it's fun or not is completely subjective, but Rockstar's maps definitely deserve some kind of commendation.

 

[Sebastian Al Hares]

Seriously surprised he didn't like GTA V. I hated GTA IV and love V. I like the characters, the missions, the gameplay as a hole. Remembering Bens review of IV I could have sworn he'd have like V for the same reasons I do. I mean, sure, he and I are still different people, so he doesn't have to like something just because I like it, obviously, but still, I find this review to be a bit confusing.

 

[kenu12345]

Yahtzee is probably the most retarded reviewer to ever be born. Screw Yahtzee and his bullshit program.

You you are joking right? Please tell me that you like saw the comments and just said that for the lols or something because it honestly is just silly.

 

[sageoftruth]

Finally. After hearing nothing but incessant glowing praise for a game no one had even tried yet at the time, I finally get to see Yahtzee tear it a new one. Thanks Yahtzee, you made my night. Really, I don't mind that it's popular. It's just that everyone's going "This'll be the best game ever made!!" and I'm thinking, "Why?" What makes this more promising than any other game that's coming out this month?

Because the game had a huge budget, talented people in charge, a solid track record, time to refine the game to their satisfaction etc. I'm not saying it IS the best game ever made but the reason it gets more hype and expectation than any games released around it is because it has all the components required to be a high water mark kinda game.

I could argue the point that it somewhat achieves setting a new benchmark because Los Santos in and of itself is a technical marvel that seem to have required a bit of a juggling act in order to cram it onto this console generation, but that's kind of subjective and I'm sure people will probably hate LS for the same reasons that I enjoy it.

Also, it never ceases to strike me as odd when people seem to hope that something they have yet to try (or have no intention of trying) is bad. It's an unusually obnoxious attitude to take when you think about it.

Sorry. It's true. That's not a very constructive way to go about it. Basically, after a number of disappointments, like Duke Nukem Forever, Aliens: Colonial Marines, and Final Fantasy XIII, and a bunch of others, I started to retreat into my shell and it led me to perceive all this hype as a warning of history repeating itself. The only reason I can think of for getting such joy from Yahtzee's review is that I was getting tired of hearing about the game on the net and was happy to see a sudden change of pace.

 

[mike1921]

So basically the impression I got from this was this did not deserve that billion dollars in sales it got and was basically just GTA IV minus the escort missions.

Yeah....I'll just stick to Saint's Row from now on. GTA has lost me as a franchise.

That's not even close to anything the video was stating.

Yes, please stick to saints row. Starting to see why people don't appreciate the work that went into that game either.

Honestly, who cares how much work went into it? You're not buying the labor, you're buying the results of that labor.

People that don't work ask "who cares how much work went into this"

I care how much work went into it when the quality of the product is pretty good. People dug into the use of symbolism and themes in Spec Ops the line only because that game made it very obvious, it doesn't mean that games like GTA and SR didn't put hidden symbolic meaning into portions of the game or the entire game itself.

The results of that labor is a quality game in the case of SR and GTA so I don't really get what your comment was supposed to mean here.

If you don't like the game, that's fine, but people acting like one game is objectively more "fun" because it has a dildo in it is just kind of sad to see here. SR is a lot of fun, but they didn't make "fun" a higher priority than Rockstar did with GTA. If SR was made to be nothing but arcadey stupid fun then they wouldn't have given it a story in the first place.

I misunderstood you as saying GTA should have a larger following because more labor went into it.

It's fun to do silly shit. Dildo bats are silly.

Playing SR3, I'm pretty sure that I'm not supposed to be taking its story seriously. I'm pretty sure I'm allowed to make my protagonist into a British Joker clone because that's a fun idea.. I don't see why a story can't add to the stupid fun of the gameplay. I mean, a character who speaks entirely in autotune, a wrestler who makes you drive tigers around, Burt Reynolds is the mayor and your character is his fanboy? The story is obviously meant to be cheesy silly fun just like the rest of the game. Can a cheesy silly game be hiding intelligent symbolism in it somewhere? Sure, easily, but it's probably not the main point of the game.

I have a hard time thinking GTA is putting fun at the same level as SR2 and SR3 when GTA has so much more of a grounding in reality. That's not really a problem, Breaking Bad doesn't prioritize fun as highly as Pacific Rim does, doesn't make Breaking Bad worse. Fun isn't the only form of engagement. Seems pretty obvious to me GTA has story telling at a higher priority.

 

[Evonisia]

Well that was disappointing. Plenty of significant problems with the game and he didn't even touch on them, like psychic cops and properties being worthless (in terms of money and constantly texting with annoying missions).

There's also the terrible shooting which can't decide whether it's auto-lock on or not (even on the same character).

 

[webby]

There's also the terrible shooting which can't decide whether it's auto-lock on or not (even on the same character).

You can change the targeting in the options menu between free aim, soft lock like RDR and a hard lock like previous GTA games. If you're having issues with one you could try switching to another.

I think my main gripe with GTA5 is that there's never really any value in taking a lower ability person on heists with you. Sure, you might be able to save a bit of cash in a later heist whilst still having competent people due to "training" them but they're equally likely to screw the pooch and cost you time/money. Someone suggested taking them to rob stores to boost their stats which would be a nice reward for doing a bit of messing around in the sandbox. Since it's the first game to implement heists though I will give it the benefit of the doubt since overall it's a good idea, it just needs some refining.

 

[Evonisia]

There's also the terrible shooting which can't decide whether it's auto-lock on or not (even on the same character).

You can change the targeting in the options menu between free aim, soft lock like RDR and a hard lock like previous GTA games. If you're having issues with one you could try switching to another.

Then I will loosely repeat what Yahtzee said about The Conduit, why is the crap option the default one?