I can understand where you’re coming from. The driving mechanics in GTA4 are much less forgiving than in previous games in the series but they’re not insurmountable. I’ve always been a pretty good driver in GTA games but the first couple of days with IV, I had loads of trouble.
What you need to do though is ignore the story for a day or two. Get yourself a car and just drive around for a few hours. See the sights. Get some police attention and try to get away. Get on one of the bridges and practice threading the needle by driving between the two lanes of traffic.
Eventually, you get a feel for it and can use the handbrake to start a slide and then feather the throttle to control the car neatly around corners.
Edit: Also try just driving in a straight line as fast as possible and then using the handbrake to execute a 180. It makes for good practice too.
I’ll second this. I sucked big time at the driving on there because I kept trying to do missions and crashing etc… I decided to just run around town and drive cars for a while and it made a big difference. I can get through the missions now but I’m still not very good.
If you don’t like the driving now wait until you get to the motorcycles…they are 10x worse.
One of the SNES Mortal Kombat sequels required that I get a controller capable of putting the game into slo-mo because it’s way to fast for me otherwise.
I tried GTA 3 and found the controls got in the way of being able to play the game, especially shooting. By the time I had laboriously aimed at a target using a joystick, the target was long gone. I like using the arrow keys to travel and walk, and the mouse to point and shoot. Bioshock, as an example, was a joy to play and I can’t wait for the sequel.
My suggestion: get a SO who is better at it (or more patient/has more free time) than you are.
GTA “classic” (the original!) was the first “modern” videogame I ever played, over at a friend’s house, and I loved it. So I bought my PS2 and the game, but I could not complete even one mission. I would break into fits of giggles because every frickin’ time I turned a corner I smashed into a light pole. Seriously. Every corner. Every time. I never got better, and eventually I got tired of just running into stuff. I wasn’t even good enough for the cops to chase me or anything. Yes, indeed, I could not get arrested in GTA!
Not long after, I met my SO and he moved in. I just watched him play it to get my story fix.
This may sound condescending but I’m totally serious - how about kids’ games? After I got frustrated with GTA I got hooked on Katamari Damacy, Lego Star Wars and later Guitar Hero. It still took me a looooooong time to get good at any of them (I’ve never finished KD and I can’t get past the easy level of GH) but I at least got a sense of progression and if you choose wisely you can find some that are just as fun as the “grownup” games.
Damn straight! I do like Katamari Damacy and Guitar Hero/Rock Band, though. And Viva Pinata. I had to kind of stop playing Bioshock not because it was hard but because I couldn’t play it at night alone 'cause I was too ascairt. Oh, and I loved Portal. Half Life is too hard, though. People keep shooting me.
I, too, often suck at the games I want to play. Mostly, it’s lack of patience and the right reflexes. When I was little, I started with sidescrolling games like Super Mario Bros and then shooters like Duke Nukem. Then when I hit my teens suddenly first person was everywhere. It was unavoidable and the interface freaked me out a bit. (I couldn’t play Daggerfall, really. The dungeons scared me. Walk around a corner and suddenly there’s this harpy screaching at you and your health is going down and you can’t stop and think which of the 8000 weapons or spells you have at your disposal should be used? Eek! Yeah, I’m a wimp.) So I retreated to adventure games and lost my taste for action centered ones. It’s only lately that I’ve started to get back into faster paced games. Lots of games now have slower paced combat and mechanics that let you stop and think. (Action RPGs aren’t bad–Mass Effect’s combat was my ideal. I kicked ass at it, while my husband kept dying. He didn’t bother with diverse attacks because he’d been used to faster paced combat.)
For me, it’s the hair trigger controls, and maybe that’s your problem too? (I know the GTA 4 controls annoy the crap out of me.) For example, when I started playing Halo online, I was truly, truly horrible. After playing the multiplayer on Halo 3 with some friends, I’m starting to get into the stage where I’m not sucking. It used to bring my brother-in-law great joy to jump around me in a circle shooting me in the back of the head, because I overcompensated and couldn’t find him. Now he doesn’t do that, because I whack him with my rocket launcher. Practice, practice.
I suggest multiplayer games with friends who have a vested interest in helping you get better (a new playmate). You will eventually reach that delightful moment when you completely destroy an opponent and they say “Wait…who was that…that was YOU? Nice.”
God, I have the same embarrassing problem. It isn’t so bad to admit to being scared of a really atmospheric game like Bioshock, but in college I couldn’t sleep because Tomb Raider made me too tense. I mean, things pop out at you from behind corners and stuff! Eek! I can’t stand games where suddenly, arrrgh, there they are! Bioshock was actually better - if you listened you could hear them coming, and their movements made sense. It was just too spooky, though.
I started playing through Bioshock again last night for the third time. That is my favourite game ever, but it scared the crap out of me the first time, and I don’t like being scared. By now I think I have all the scarry parts and splicers who pretend to be dead memorized (oh how I love sending a swarm of bees on the fakers and watching them twitch). I can easily beat the big daddies on hard as I know how to use the turrets, hacked cameras and hiding spots.
My ex had very little patience for video games she couldn’t do well in right away. She loves playing things like Mario Kart, Soul Calibur, and Mario Party because she’s good at all of them. But I tried to get her to play Wii Sports and WarioWare: Smooth Moves and she gave up after a few attempts because she couldn’t get the motion sensitivity right. I don’t really know her opinions on single-player games but I don’t think she really plays them much. She looks at video games as a group/party medium, if she wants an engaging story she prefers movies or books.
I was patient with her though because women who take serious interest in video games are awesome and deserve patience.
You know, say the word and I can hook you up with a crew of older people that play video games. We try to keep the kids out and make custom games so we don’t have to hear them.
I tend to restrict my purchases to strategy RPGs and puzzle games, and leave the “trying out new things” part to rentals. That way I don’t feel nearly as cheated when I play a game and find that it wasn’t fun for me or I suck at it.
I played the Tomb Raider series at my brother’s house. He would do the shooting and jumping, while I would tell him the puzzle solution to try. My coordination still sucks and his ability to figure out the puzzles sucked in the past. I really enjoyed the one where my Greek mythology knowledge got a workout.
Find somebody that plays the game and make a night out of watching them play if you can. We did about 4 hour nights until the games were through.
To play with people on my level would mean nobody got fragged because everybody was stuck in a corner or falling off a cliff.
The first-person driving perspective really helps! Turns come up faster this way, though. My pedestrian body count has gotten quite a bit lower, although I still have trouble making those really tight turns.
I must be the only person in the world who plays Grand Theft Auto and accidentally had sex with somebody, though. I thought we were really going upstairs for coffee and then my controller started vibrating at me! (Does that mean I’m too old for this game?)
I’m getting really attached to the protagonist and I don’t want to let him down. Dude’s just looking for a better life in America, like my great grandfather and yours.
(Oh, and I’ve done the boyfriend thing before - I just could not get some of those sniper missions in Bully, so I assigned them to him. I wish all games had a good co-op mode like Halo, though - that’s really the perfect thing.)
My biggest frustration with sucking at video games is that I used to be good at them! I’m four years older than my brother, and for a short period of time in the early 90s, I kicked ass and owned all video games - the original Mario, Spot Goes to Hollywood and Earthworm Jim on the Sega, PilotWings and Mario Cart and Space Station Silicon Valley on the N64 - I ruled the house in terms of video game domination. Then my brother got older and started choosing games of his own, and my era was over. Tony Hawk was my true downfall: we owned every game as it came out, and I was able to keep up in the original game, but as successive versions came out I was less and less able to remember the combinations for all (or, ok, any) of the tricks, and was reduced to pressing buttons at random. Then we got an older stepbrother who had spent all of his time playing video games, and I was left out in the cold, watching the boys play.
I still enjoy video games, mostly puzzles or RPGs, but playing is always a bittersweet experience for me: I remember the mastery that once was mine, and will never be again.
Oh, and I loved Portal. Half Life is too hard, though. People keep shooting me.
