Watched the Giant Bomb Let’s play.
Man, this game is the tippy-top of what this old console hardware can do. Yeah, it’s blurry and aliased to hell, but it’s STILL impressive. I hear they even stream content from both your hard drive AND your disc in order to be able to get the textures in quickly enough.
The lighting looks really nice, and the animations look great as well.
Has hell frozen over? 
How shocking! Clearly a morally bankrupt game. I’ll just go and play some Skyrim instead, and eat people with my werewolf.
A lot of my coworkers are out sick today with GTAVitis.
Give me the PC version already, dammit.
Play watch dogs on PC in the meantime, if you haven’t. It’s the game that got me hyped for GTA V and open world games again. Looks amazing on PC and the gameplay is stellar (just don’t use guns).
It’s relatively short compared to many open world games, but I played Sleeping Dogs on the PC (snagged it cheap during the Steam Summer Sale) and very much enjoyed it. Very entertaining melee combat and driving stunts.
Loving it so far, just unlocked Trevor.
Word to the wise, on the heists it seems to be worth plumping for the higher cut crew. I chose to go in quiet on the jewellery store job, knock everyone out so went cheap with the muscle since I didn’t really need it. The stupid bastard crashed his bike on the escape and lost me 1.5mil, damn it.
How in the hell do you open Gruppe 6 (hyuk hyuk) cash vans? I managed to nick one and lose the cops, but could I open the back doors? Could I bollocks. Reversed it into a poll then jacked a truck to ram into it, but it just blew up and killed me.
Also; poor Johnny! I liked The Lost & The Damned and Johnny was a decent protagonist, he didn’t deserve that. Hope they don’t kill off Luis or Niko (who has apparently “gone quiet”. Nice to have callbacks to IV, though.
I meant sleeping dogs 
But yeah, play watchdogs too, when that comes out, looks good
One of my employees called in sick today, after sepnding the whole day talking about how he was going to play GTA as soon as he got home. Did he really think I wouldn’t know?
The only appropriate response is to find out his handle, wait till GTA Online launches, and put out a hit on him.
It should just work; when you next load the game it should automatically load your latest save. One thing that threw me off is even if you go to your bed and save, when you run GTA5 again you will be wearing a different outfit and be in a different place. In other words, even when you’re not playing the game apparently your character wanders.
If you want to be sure hit Start to go to the menu, find the Load Game option, and make sure the date and time make sense as to when you last saved or it last autosaved.
I was off work sick yesterday, but haven’t bought the game yet - I was tempted to pop out and buy it, as some at work will have assumed I was skiving for that reason…
Criminals can’t all be masterminds.
I played 5 hours or so last night. It’s a great game, although there is a lot of the old GTA there for better or worse. I generally like the new police system, the map flashes red when you’re visible to police, if you get out of sight you start seeing police icons on the map along with their cone of vision showing the direction they are heading while searching for you. Stay out of their vision long enough by driving away fast or hiding in alleys and you’ve escaped.
The graphics range between excellent and fairly good, sometimes things look jaggy. The view distances and pop-in haven’t been noticeable to me. I think the generally good textures (until you’re close-up) and great lighting help make things look good. Like most GTA games there is plenty of detail and little touches, like nice shiny streams of water running across the pavement away from a car wash.
In older GTAs when you drove a particular car you’d see a lot of that type of car on the road, I haven’t noticed that much in 5. The car handling is different that GTA IV although I’m not sure I’d say better. Many of the cars in IV would oversteer and wallow, in 5 they seem to understeer, and although I think the X button on the PS3 controller is the parking brake it doesn’t seem to help rotate the rear end to take sharp corners. The vehicles themselves look great, and although they don’t use actual makes and models you can pretty easily tell what type of vehicle every GTA 5 car is supposed to be.
I robbed a convenience store which was pretty thrilling but ultimately pretty simple. However after I got away with that I decided to rob another one only to find that the store interior was not enterable, the windows just had pictures of the interior on them. So yeah, it would still be terrific to have every building enterable.
At this point I’ve opened up a second character so I can choose which one I want to play at any given point. Each have their own lives, friends, stats, and missions. When you aren’t playing a character or even when you aren’t playing the game, the characters will wander and do their own thing. I was very surprised when I ran GTA5 again and my character was wearing different clothes and standing on some random street somewhere I had never been. Not entirely sure I like that because I always like the feeling of being able to freeze and restore time by saving and loading a game.
I’ve only just started learning the city and I’m sure there are still literally hundreds of things to do and see. At one point I met a random guy and that led to fighting off a bunch of drug-induced alien hallucinations. That was unexpected.
The early missions to me feel a lot like GTA IV missions, not a lot of innovation. They took the mission scoring system from the GTA IV expansions, so if you are a perfectionist you can replay missions until you do them “just right.” I expect later missions when 2 or 3 of the main characters start interacting will be more interesting.
But for now I’m trying to balance exploring the city and playing some missions.
Yep, I ran into that one last night. Hilarious!
So far, I think it’s fantastic. Morally depraved, bloody, gorgeous, hilarious mayhem. In other words, Grand Theft Auto. Par for the franchise.
The scale of the world, as everyone has said, really is mind-boggling. I played GTA 4 to death and know I didn’t uncover everything, by any means. I’m not sure what kind of time-commitment GTA V would require for anything close to 100% completion. So what you have is a gigantic sandbox, where you can roam and explore and wreak havoc to your heart’s content.
There’s stuff happening everywhere. Just like in Red Dead Redemption, there are occurrences where you can get involved as you like. I had Franklin run down (literally, of course) a purse-snatcher. I then had the option of returning the goods, for a small reward, or keeping it for myself to get a lot more $. Franklin I have decided to play as “good” as possible, so he returned it. Anyway, one gets the impression that this stuff is happening all the time all over the place.
No way you’re getting bored in this game.
I’m sympathetic to suggestions that the game is too misogynistic, even for gangsters. No reason there couldn’t be some compelling female characters, which even GTA 4 had. But complaining about misogyny in the midst of illicit sex, prostitution, theft, murder, arson, torture, extortion, etc., is a bit … well … let’s just say if you think video games should adhere too proper moral conduct and ethics, GTA V is not your game.
I like the new wanted system, makes it feel more real. I find myself behaving better than I did in GTA 4 because escaping the wanted stars takes more effort.
A very worthy addition to the franchise! I almost was sick today; just barely I pulled myself together to go to work. Sadness.
Democracy only works if smart people are allowed to do whatever they want!
Either you mean Sleeping Dogs or I am very envious.
I know, but she is somewhat reassured by what she’s seen sitting there. The volume us down low enough with music on so that swearing pedestrians aren’t an issue, and st worst if she bumps a cop and gets a star she just hands me the controller to run away for her. She hasn’t wandered into a strip club or anything - when she plays, liberty city ifs Mr.Rogers neighborhood.
I used to let my daughter drive around, if she hit a pedestrian it was my turn to play, we traded off. It’s a perfectly neat little city simulator sandbox like that.
The swearing pedestrians are an issue, I wish there was a way to temporarily turn that off.
Yeah the ads are hilarious as always. Although the two times I’ve tried to watch TV there were only 2 channels, both with cartoons. The commercial for Extreme Cougars was great though.