GTA4: Little Things Done Well

Grand Theft Auto IV has me conflicted. After years of ogling the Xbox 360, and missing out on big game releases like Halo 2 and Gears of War (all the while righteously proclaiming that PC gaming was where it's at), I finally caved and got one when GTA4 was released back in April. I'd never played any of the GTA games -- never really had much interest in shooting hookers and running down pedestrians. But the mammoth hype machine sucked me in and I joined the consoling masses that I'd derided for oh so long.

The bottom line is, the hype was ... well, hype. GTA4 is not the game to end all games. Reviewers who probably put 10-15 hours into it before making their judgment were understandably wooed by the open-world freeform sprawl of Liberty City, the interesting and well-done main story propelled by believable characters and excellent voice acting, and, of course, the massive PR campaign.

Once you get past the newness of it all, though, you see that the gameplay is fundamentally very repetitive: drive here, shoot this guy, steal this money. Drive there, take this guy out, call this guy. To their credit, the devs do sometimes get creative with this GTA equivalent of the standard RPG FedEx quest (i.e. take X package to Y guy for Z reward). But in the end, when you step back from the details, there's really not much variety here.

Still, though, somehow this game has a way of sucking you in. From what I can tell, it's the sheer amount of 'little things' that come together to make Liberty City so compelling: traffic, while not the smartest, is everywhere; pedestrians are on every sidewalk, yell things when you honk at them, answer their cell phones, get angry at drivers that hit them, and have conversations among themselves. In 27 hours of game time, I think I have yet to hear a single repeated conversation or comment from any one of them. Ambulances come to the scene of big accidents; cops chase bad guys; food vendors hawk hot dogs on street corners. Day changes to night changes to morning. Sunny skies turn to downpours, soaking the streets, forcing pedestrians to open umbrellas or run for cover. In short, the city really does feel alive, and its sheer size is such that you can't help but feel like it dwarfs you and would just keep on going even after you stop playing.

Seven months after its release, I'm only 37% of the way through the game, according to the in-game stats tracker. I'm not in any particular hurry, and I don't play that often. I pick it up every now and then, maybe once every two weeks for an hour. Right now I'm stuck on a frustrating-as-hell mission called "Waste Not Want Knots". I'm supposed to go with Packie McRreary and his brothers to a waste management plant run by the mob to steal a stash of cash. We have to hop the fence, take out the bad guys standing around outside, get into the plant, fight the baddies inside, I have to run up the stairs to the office and grab the cash, then we have to fight our way outside to the rear of the plant, where a 'getaway boat' is waiting for us. I've tried this mission, oh, probably thirty times. There are just too many bad guys. Making it that much harder is that if any of your guys dies, the mission's a failure. I don't know what I'm doing wrong, but I just can't beat it.

Anyway, on the ride over to the waste management plant, Packie and his brothers have a conversation about the mob and about their own family. I was getting so, so tired of hearing this story every single time I had to drive them back over to the plant for one more try. Then, a few nights ago, on my 4th try of the night, I notice that Packie doesn't start talking - he's quiet. All I hear is the radio ... and then he says, "is it OK if we just listen to the radio on this one?" I couldn't believe it! The game knows I'm really damn tired of hearing this same stupid conversation and had some pity on me! Freakin' awesome!

So yeah, that seems to sum up the appeal of GTA4 for me. It does a lot of little things really well, and in combination, it adds up to a very well done game. The hype was way overblown, but it's a damn fun game.

Nitpicking Fallout 3

Whether gamers took Bethesda's advice to Prepare For The Future or not, the long-awaited Fallout 3 was released on October 28 to much fanfare, including midnight openings at hundreds of Best Buy and Gamestop stores around the country. Having never played the first two Fallout games, and being turned off by all the "it's just Oblivion - with guns" preview clamoring by game sites, I decided many months ago that I wouldn't buy it right when it came out, instead waiting until it'd gone on sale and I had no other new games to play. Besides, I was deep into STALKER: Clear Sky, and didn't see myself siphoning off much time for another game.

But, I'll admit it, the awesome ads plastered all over Metro Center for the game got me interested again, and I scooped it up on release day. Rushing home that night to install it and give it a try, I reflected on how much I hoped it wasn't just Oblivion with guns, because although I'd loved Morrowind (possibly due to its being the first real RPG I'd ever played), Oblivion just didn't "do it" for me: sure, it was gorgeous, and huge, and open-world-ish to the max, but there were enough annoyances and lack of originality that my enthusiasm for it eventually waned and made me stop playing (though admittedly only after many months).

Now that I'm five hours into Fallout 3, by my standards (i.e. bitching can be justified with even only a very minimal amount of actual relevant knowledge) I'm more than qualified to point out some criticisms that I have of the game. Here goes:

• Floating objects: this is not a bug, but rather a perpetual artifact of the Havok physics engine which also showed itself in Oblivion. All objects that should be touching, like a plate on a table, are in fact levitating a small distance apart. My guess is that the engine can't handle having two objects touching without forcing some reaction to occur between them; i.e. it is contact between objects that triggers the physics reactions to be applied. In most cases the devs have been careful to minimize this separation distance between objects, but there are times when it is blatantly noticeable and just looks ridiculous. Can it really be that in 2008 we can't design a physics engine to get around this problem?

• When the player's view is moved over a box, crate, desk, closet, or any other object which can be searched, if it is empty, the world "EMPTY" appears over it. Now, I too grew tired of clicking on searchable items in Morrowind and Oblivion only to find them empty, but couldn't the devs have come up with some sort of happy medium between wasting my time and leading me around by the nose only to items that aren't empty? I feel like this is a concession to short-attention-span consolers, which always bugs me.

• Immersion-breaking NPC behavior: for a game that relies so heavily on interactions with NPCs, it boggles my mind at how unrealistic they can behave. I've watched two NPCs stand face to face, trying to walk through each other, for more than 10 seconds before one gets pushed to the side and is able to walk around the other. I've also heard about occasions where a conversation with one NPC gets triggered by the player's proximity regardless of what the player is currently doing - including fighting another NPC, which gets put on hold while the crucially important conversation with the first NPC occurs. C'mon Bethesda - is it that difficult to prevent such immersion breakers?

• While I think the Pip-Boy UI is a cool approach to presenting the player's inventory, stats, and map, I cannot understand why the actual screen area is so small. Taking up the rest of the screen are all the non-functional graphical details of the Pip-Boy: the knobs, dials, and metal frame. As a result, a ton of scrolling through menu items must constantly be done, which gets old fast. Sure, the Pip-Boy looks cool, but how about letting me see more than a handful of items in the lists at a time? Hopefully some enterprising modders will get around this soon.

• Another leading-consolers-by-the-nose element: every NPC in your vicinity is indicated on your compass by a marker showing their orientation toward you: friendly or hostile. This takes some of the 'exploration' impetus out of the game, as you always know when a baddie is around the corner.

• I can't see my body when I look down! While probably a legacy limitation of the Oblivion engine, it's disappointing to not be able to see my torso, legs, and feet when I look down. Most games these days show the rest of your body, adding an element of embodiment of the player into the game, so not having a body noticeably detracts from the experience.

• Wonky animations: while switching to third-person view and zooming out is convenient for running around and exploring - when a wider field-of-view is preferable - the animations are so basic and untailored to the actual player movement that they become distracting. For example if you run forward and then additionally press sidestep, the animation doesn't change at all; rather, your player just slides diagonally. I know, sounds like a minor issue, but when your player's movement over the ground doesn't look right, you notice. Again, seems like an issue not that hard to fix - couldn't more animations simply have been created for the player?

• Having to scroll through dialogue options: again probably a console concession. When talking to an NPC, the possible player responses are listed, but if there's more than about 3, you have to scroll through them to see the rest, even though there's plenty of screen space (at higher resolutions, which most PC gamers would be playing at) to have extended the dialogue box in order to fit them all in. Again, hopefully modders will get around this one by either making the box bigger or the font smaller.

Whew! That's what I've come up with so far. Sure, none of them sound terribly serious, but when you come into the game hoping that none of Oblivion's shortcomings bled over into this one, you can't help but notice how they mostly did. That leads to a game experience that, for all intents and purposes, could conceivably be seen as nothing more than a high-quality total conversion for Oblivion, which for the most part, is a bit of a disappointment.

However, all that aside - and I fully admit this might sound contradictory - I'm really enjoying Fallout 3 so far! That's because, well, all faults aside, an Oblivion total conversion putting the player in a post-apocalyptic world set in and around Washington, DC would have been pretty frickin' cool - and it is. As I get more into it, I'm sure I'll have more to complain about, but this is only because I'm paying such close attention to the game and continue to have such high hopes for it.

Back in the days when I was a teen-ager ...

before I had status and before I had a pager
you could find The Abstract listening to hip-hop
my pops used to say it reminded him of be-bop
I said 'well daddy, don't you know that things go in cycles?'

So begins the opening track "Excursions" from A Tribe Called Quest's classic 1991 sophomore album The Low End Theory. I clearly remember listening to the cassette for the first time after getting it as part of BMG Music Club's 'buy 1, get 10 free' initial offer way back in 1992. At the time, I was heavily into hip-hop already, but with a very narrow focus on Ice-T, NWA, PE, X-Clan, Eazy-E and the like - the more 'confrontational' stuff. Aware that there was a whole 'nother world of hip-hop out of New York that I knew little about, I used the BMG 10-free deal to get up to speed on it - Brand Nubian, BDP, Tribe, Big Daddy Kane, etc.

I remember being blown away by The Low End Theory, in particular. It was unlike anything I'd heard: creative, positive, headnodic (yes that's a word), jazzy. I listened to it constantly for months, and it's been one of my favorite albums ever since that first listen.

Pondering recently the state of hip-hop (again), it occurred to me that my enthusiasm for new music has waned considerably these days. I look forward to new game releases much more so than hip-hop albums, whereas it used to be the opposite by a long shot. A big part of it is that I still haven't found a convenient way to keep up with and find new material (yup, still mourning the loss of college radio at WMUC since leaving College Park seven years ago). I try to catch The Soul Controllers on Decipher on Thursday nights, but since they moved from 11 to 10 PM, I haven't actually caught the show live in months. In the past few months I haven't been checking out local shows in DC either, for various reasons. And so my only source of information is various websites like Sandbox, which, while regularly updated, don't make it easy to actually listen to and discover new stuff.

Not that I haven't been finding anything new; in the past few months I've really enjoyed Atmosphere's When Life Gives You Lemons, J-Live's Then What Happened?, The Package's New Golden Era, and The Roots' Rising Down; and I did recently pick up People Under The Stairs' FUN DMC (nice as usual, although not quite as addictive as some earlier efforts) and The Mighty Underdogs' Droppin' Science Fiction (just today, and the first listen was pretty positive, although with Lateef and Gab how can you go wrong?). I've also ordered Panacea's new one, A Mind on a Ship Through Time, which is in the mail and is presumably just as good as everything else they've done.

But nothing's really amazed me in a long time. I feel like back in those 'golden era' years that was a regular occurrence. And so, feeling a little hip-hop malaise tonight, "Excursions" popped into my head and I just had to hear it ... but then I couldn't stop at Buggin' Out, then Rap Promoter, and before I knew it Scenario was ending; an hour had passed without my having even realised it, hip-hop nirvana having sucked me blissfully in.

*sigh*

Man, I miss those days.

Rebirth

Yup, this is it - the rebirth of GregP's Profundity. After an absence of almost 14 months, I'm back. Some things a few months ago actually stirred my interest in reviving the blog, but it didn't feel prudent at the time. Just today, though, it finally felt like it was time to do so. While there has been a few things of note to talk about from my absence, I'm going to skip it all for now to address the specific subject that made me post again, and that is ... The Low End Theory (see above).