What video games have you played lately?

Drury · Post by **Drury** » 29 Apr 2015 19:40

Every time I see screenshots of San Andreas I can't believe how badly the graphics aged.

Redirect Left · Post by **Redirect Left** » 29 Apr 2015 20:14

Drury wrote:Every time I see screenshots of San Andreas I can't believe how badly the graphics aged.

I play GTA: SA nearly every day, of sorts. I still play San Andreas Multiplayer, and maintain a server on there. At time of typing there are 30K users online, and on weekends it still peaks at over 65K

vear · Post by **vear** » 29 Apr 2015 22:23

Drury wrote:Every time I see screenshots of San Andreas I can't believe how badly the graphics aged.

Neither can I. Still, I can't help thinking Vice City has always looked better than San Andreas.
As for GTA IV, I've just completed The Ballad of Gay Tony (leaving me free to reach GTA V now), although I find both the original and the DLCs ultimately tedious. Every time a cutscene played, I caught myself tapping something on my smartphone to have myself occupied as the action was so dowdy, which in turn had never applied to GTA 3/VC/SA. The actual gameplay proved better, yet I still get an impression I yawned way too many times during the whole playthrough.

Redirect Left · Post by **Redirect Left** » 29 Apr 2015 22:36

I found the ending to The Lost & Damned to be quite poop, just seemed to end randomly. Much preferred BoGT.

I've lately been playing copious amounts of Counter Strike: Global Offensive, still incredibly poop at it.

YouTube · Post by **kamnet** » 30 Apr 2015 01:01

Personally, I always thought the original Grand Theft Auto was the best game in the franchise. Especially once you could hack it and create your own vehicles. Back in the day there used to be a little website called "San Andreas Garage" where people would share their graphics. I miss that a lot.

Post by **Chrill** » 30 Apr 2015 06:02

Drury wrote:Every time I see screenshots of San Andreas I can't believe how badly the graphics aged.

I have to disagree. At the time, the graphcis weren't great. I loved it and I still do. It's the best GTA out there.

Redirect Left wrote:
Drury wrote:Every time I see screenshots of San Andreas I can't believe how badly the graphics aged.
I play GTA: SA nearly every day, of sorts. I still play San Andreas Multiplayer, and maintain a server on there. At time of typing there are 30K users online, and on weekends it still peaks at over 65K

You still host a server? I haven't heard about that in a long while.

Redirect Left · Post by **Redirect Left** » 30 Apr 2015 14:33

Chrill wrote: You still host a server? I haven't heard about that in a long while.

Yes, but I don't do roleplay anymore. It's a generic demolition derby server i do now.
Current stats (for SA:MP, not my server ol) Players Online: 42233 Servers Online: 4538

Still beating a lot of common even AAA titles that were released at the same time as GTA:SA & SA:MP

Post by **Dave** » 01 May 2015 09:41

The GTA:SA detailed graphics were pretty poor. Lots of clipping and glitches. The game was also pretty buggy (as were 3 and VC). People's faces looked constantly disfigured!

But that's the price you pay for an awesome open world. San Andreas is genuinely one of the best entertainment sources I've ever used. The level of detail it went into was truly epic. And the landscaping - despite the poor detailing - was gorgeous. The rural part of the map was excellent.

Seriously - I gush about it.

I just hope one day they find a way (although they've said they won't, haven't they?) of doing a GTA on the scale of SA with the graphics of this generation. That would cause me to buy a console.

Redirect Left · Post by **Redirect Left** » 01 May 2015 10:18

Dave wrote:The game was also pretty buggy.

There is a rumour (whether gaming legend or facts, I do not know) that most of the R* QA team received their P45s over SAs sometimes blatantly obvious flaws.

I find a lot of the bugs quite amusing, the desert is full of glitches in the mesh, causing minor dips or holes. There is a Pay & Spray in North East Las Venturas, near the pyramid casino where the majority of the floor is non-solid, causing you to fall through it. This was 'fixed' in the PC version. They nulled the code that opened the P&S door, essentially rending it a normal building. The minimap still refers to it as a Pay & Spray, the building also retains its Pay & Spray logoing even though its disabled. The initial bug also still exists, if you walk right up to the door, you can still find yourself falling or almost falling into blue hell. There are also a lot of objects that are placed slightly above ground level, including some telegraph poles and lamposts that are to an almost magic floating degree. Another odd glitch in SA is that some areas (Ganton, Idlewood & Willowfield seem the worst affected) are simply too saturated with objects, causing drastic FPS drops in those areas, even on completely modern hardware. Not sure how that was missed during QA and the objects optimized or thinned out.

But as you said, when you make something so large, the time it'd take to check everything entirely would be stupendously high.

Pyoro · Post by **Pyoro** » 01 May 2015 10:19

What about GTA5?

Left GTA5, right GTA SA ...

Post by **Dave** » 01 May 2015 10:29

Okay, I stand corrected - I thought because they'd returned to a "one city" model that it wouldn't have the detail.

Do I have to buy it now?

Post by **Chrill** » 01 May 2015 11:33

Dave wrote:Okay, I stand corrected - I thought because they'd returned to a "one city" model that it wouldn't have the detail.

Do I have to buy it now?

Well, yes. But I find that GTA:SA feels bigger. Driving a "lap" around GTA V does take quite some time, but it doesn't appear to be that much larger.

Pyoro · Post by **Pyoro** » 01 May 2015 11:52

When's the last time you played GTA SA though? I also remembered it as insanely huge, but out of curiosity I fired it up not long before GTA5 and it's definitely nooooowhere near the same amount of map. And GTA5 has much more details.

SA might have a bit more random gameplay things though, not sure. That whole gang war concept and such. On the other hand, GTA5 has that online mode...

Post by **Chrill** » 01 May 2015 13:39

Pyoro wrote:When's the last time you played GTA SA though?

Last week

Pyoro wrote:SA might have a bit more random gameplay things though, not sure. That whole gang war concept and such. On the other hand, GTA5 has that online mode...

We've already touched on SA:MP above, Redirect Left spoke of it. SA:MP is much better than GTA Online, which is still very buggy despite being released well over a year ago.

Pyoro · Post by **Pyoro** » 01 May 2015 13:45

Yes, but it's a mod. That doesn't make it worse or anything, but it's not something R* had to put money and time into.
dunno how buggy GTA5 is online, I haven't played it yet. Waiting for my new GPU ^^; At least R* still seems to be patching things ...

Transportman · Post by **Transportman** » 03 May 2015 07:32

Chrill wrote:
Dave wrote:Okay, I stand corrected - I thought because they'd returned to a "one city" model that it wouldn't have the detail.

Do I have to buy it now?
Well, yes. But I find that GTA:SA feels bigger. Driving a "lap" around GTA V does take quite some time, but it doesn't appear to be that much larger.

It's not just the size of the map that matters, but also how it is filled and how you can get around on that map.

You can have a huge map, but if it is filled with copies of a bunch of buildings in every town you find, with only a small number of missions to do, it starts feeling kind of empty (Just Cause 2 anyone?). On the other hand, if you have missions that start on one corner of the map and expect you to go to another corner and the next mission is again in that first corner you came from, I want to be able to get there quickly, which is not always possible (GTA SA with its missions involving trains that need you to go from town to town/middle of nowhere).

Also, on the topic of recently played games:
Skyrim, got it in the Steam sale recently, nice to pick up for one or two hours and then go do something else.

Born Acorn · Post by **Born Acorn** » 03 May 2015 16:18

Beware those SA/V map overlays. They give wildly different sizes.

Anyway, Remember that GTA:SA was made in less than two years - and with a smaller budget. GTA:V cost a bomb at $170 million, over five years. I'm surprised that San Andreas was as polished as it was, bugs and all.

I found the original 3D trilogy did suffer from design issues though in the map - large areas of San Fierro and Las Venturas were totally useless and not really used, not even as a through route. Same with Vice City - the eastern side of the east island seemed to mostly be walled off behind impassable buildings and be left alone. I get the impression that time or money was an issue in a lot of the older games - even the low LOD version of the VC map has extra airport bits.

Pyoro wrote:Yes, but it's a mod. That doesn't make it worse or anything, but it's not something R* had to put money and time into.
dunno how buggy GTA5 is online, I haven't played it yet. Waiting for my new GPU ^^; At least R* still seems to be patching things ...

I'm at level 104 I think, transferred over from PS3 where I played with some work guys over the past two years.

On PC I've played like, two-three hours of online. I haven't ran into any hackers yet, but I've not looked in the past week. Other than that, it's pretty good.

Drury · Post by **Drury** » 05 Jun 2015 13:17

Skullgirls was (is?) free, downloaded, bought.

My only complaint is that the game is too hard to be played with one hand. Also I'm not sure if I'll ever feel my thumb again.

rbos86 · Post by **rbos86** » 22 Jun 2015 19:36

I recently rediscovered Ricochet. Still addictive and a useful waste of time. Great!

EXTspotter · Post by **EXTspotter** » 22 Jun 2015 20:16

Europa Universalis IV; because there's nothing quite as fun as megalomania!

Started as Tuscany, quickly allied with France, Austria, Milan and Savoy. Slowly started spreading my grey blob across northern Italy. I have recently formed Italy and am now crushing the last of the papal state from the heel of Italy. Eventually my allies became wary and I had to annex them and make friends further away - France, Poland and Great Britain. Hopefully this will be sufficient to smack France back before they set their sights on me!

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