#she really is the only one without a personalised area which is so weird

[foxx-queen]

minthara is the only one without a personalized bed area in the elfsong tavern because she shares tav's bed every night in this essay i will -

[easy-win-games-blog]

STILL GOOD? — GRAND THEFT AUTO III

This is ‘Still Good?’, an editorial series in which I look back at both favourites games of mine and classics that I somehow missed, working out how these titles stack up today and whether or not they’re worth going back to.

tl;dr — has <insert game> aged well?

That said, let’s dig into Grand Theft Auto III.

Originally released in 2001 for the PS2 GTA 3 was hailed by critics and fans as a landmark in video game design. Its core gameplay mechanics — driving, shooting and navigating an open world — had all been seen before, but this marked the first instance of these mechanics being put together in a seamless and (for lack of a better word) good way. Mix this with elements of The Sopranos and the popular gangster movies of the time and you’ve got one spicy meat-a-ball.

Upon its release it received fantastic reviews across the board, sitting on an aggregate score of 97% (Metacritic) for the PS2 version. It was called, "a luscious, sprawling epic,” a, "technological marvel ... that captures the essence of gritty city life in amazing detail,” and "on a scale that's truly epic” (quotes lifted from Wikipedia). From here on out, aided by various other releases of the time, the gaming landscape was irreversibly shifted towards a focus on cinematic storytelling and open-world settings. It’s become difficult to not find traces of GTA 3’s DNA floating around a most modern releases.

It’s also very easy to get ahold of today. A mobile version was released for its 10th anniversary, but if you prefer something more solid it’s also available on the desktop App Store for Mac, Steam and on Xbox 360 through backwards compatibility if you can find a hard copy.

This sure is a celebrated classic, but it really hasn’t aged well.

If you’ve gone ahead and put in the work by reading my About page you’ll know I go hardcore with the GTA series. GTA 3 especially introduced me to mature video games in a way that I’ll never forget, but unlike other classics of the medium like the 2D Mario games it’s really tough to go back. I finished the game in high school on a MacBook using a trackpad, and recently bought it and Vice City on eBay for Xbox (these versions received various graphical improvements over the PS2 version) and have played maybe half of 3 so far since then.

But it’s hard, man. I love GTA but I’m honestly struggling to continue. It’s a weird case because I can look past its dated graphics and the driving is fine, but nearly everything else is just frustrating. My major gripe with playing this game now is that the controls are absolutely shitted. Locking on to enemies is vague, both in the sense that it only sometimes works with certain weapons and that the lock on rectangle is very transparent. Combat lacks any kind of possible finesse and relies upon a lot of dumb luck and blind button mashing, and moving Claude around feels like I’m controlling a marionette puppet.

And the camera…

There’s a strange feature I’ve found both in GTA 3 and Vice City on Xbox, and I’m not exactly sure if it was apparent on PC or PS2 (but I’m probably wrong). The option to rotate the camera around your player, whether you want to focus on enemies or check out the scenery, is gone. Completely. Instead, when you move the right stick, the camera jumps into a first-person perspective from which you can’t actually do anything. No walking, no combat. Its only really purpose is to change what direction you’re looking (duh), which is just slow and painful. Especially in combat because you have to stop, change the camera, and then move or perform some kind of action to go back out to third-person.

Imagine, if you will…

A mission tells you to go into Chinatown.

Easy, you get there.

But uh oh, you’ve been ambushed by gun and baseball bat-wielding Triads!

You pull out your Uzi and pump a clip into one guy at your 12 o’clock, but three more guys on your 6 you have opened fire!

You act fast, and duck into first person mode.

Five seconds later you’ve turned to face your foes, and have lost half of your health in that time. Now, to lock on.

In a daring move, you lock onto Triad #1 on your right, shoot two rounds and wait for another three seconds while you automatically reload (something that can’t be done manually).

BLAM! BLAM! BLAM!

You got him! Well done! You’ve also got next to no health.

Time to aim at the next pistol-packing Triad.

But uh oh again, you’ve locked onto someone with a baseball bat instead. You can’t switch your target on the fly, silly, and now you have six guys in total all around you shooting and beating you to death.

You’re dead, good luck next time.

As 2K18 gamer bro, this is frustrating as hell. And this happens constantly. A lot of combat scenarios, in my case at least, came down to me trying over and over again and succeeding only by shepherding the AI into a tight pack and using up the five molotov cocktails I’d scrounged to burn them all alive like a pack of zombies.

I was too young to be involved in the original hype of this game, but I imagine there was a big emphasis on strategy and player freedom in the marketing leading up to the game’s release. I get that, and GTA 3 sure is revolutionary on that front, but by today’s standards it just isn’t good. When the game at hand has a focus on combat and action it’s not a good thing when success comes from manipulating the infrastructure of the game itself. I don’t feel like I’m playing it the way it was meant to be played, but I don’t see any other option.

To make my point clearer, take the example of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. There are a lot of points in this game where you’re surrounded by enemies, who mostly all have guns. There’s no cover-based shooting or anything of that sort in San Andreas, but the fluidity and freedom of the movement with the ability to crouch, walk while crouched, jump and vault over obstacles, strafe, free aim and lock onto and attack enemies without having them in your immediate line of sight really make the difference. Just the ability to freely rotate the camera around CJ and switch lock-on targets make combat scenarios infinitely more strategic and playable than GTA 3.

Sure, San Andreas only exists because of 3’s legacy, but in three short years so much of the Grand Theft Auto formula was refined by intuitive but glaringly obvious improvements for San Andreas, making it now so much easier to go back to than 3. I would put San Andreas, a now 14 year old game, in front of any gamer in 2018, tell them to play it and be confident they would have fun and play with a full sense of control.

The other area where GTA 3 really lacks is in its narrative elements.

In the game you play as Claude, a mute blank slate of a man who wasn’t actually given a name until a one-off skippable phone call in San Andreas. At the beginning of the game we find Claude robbing a bank with his girlfriend, Catalina, who betrays him as they make their getaway with the line, "Sorry babe. I'm an ambitious girl, and you're just small time.”

Immediately, there’s confusion. Stylistically, it’s cool for sure. There’s shotguns and convertibles and action, but who is this lady? Why do her ambitions stop her from robbing banks with her lover (something they have been doing together for around nine years)? She must just be psycho or something, because she jumps in a sports car with some other guy, so to her it’s more beneficial to share the money with the getaway driver than with your long-term boyfriend. What’s more, Claude can’t explain any of this because he can’t talk, so these questions linger for the whole game and never get answered.

You can see here by making Claude the blank slate that he is that it’s likely the intention from Rockstar was to let the player use the mute as a vessel through which they could project themselves, personifying the game with their own personal flavour. Only, there are numerous and very definitive displays of Claude’s character throughout the game that the player might not agree with.

Character defining moments for a character who isn’t meant to have character.

For Christ’s sake, it’s implied he shoots a woman point blank at the end of the game because she talks too much.

It’s a weird half measure. It feels like Rockstar were trying to toe the line between an open world RPG packed with player personalisation and a fully scripted cinematic experience like Goodfellas. They’ve learned since, and their campaigns have been largely compelling ever since, but this feels like a big misstep.

Also, a minor issue I have; the cutscenes and cinematic moments of this game look like dog shit. The direction, cinematography and pacing of nearly every cutscene is awful. Claude will walk to someone’s door and knock, only to be answered an instant later by immediate talk as if this other character intuitively knew he was there. The shots will cut out parts of character’s faces, sometimes ending at their forehead or mouth, and as the cutscenes conclude it isn’t uncommon for Claude to start heading for the exit as the mission boss is still mid-sentence, as if he also intuitively knows the conversation is about to end. Even if the mission parameters haven’t been outlined yet. It’s almost as if the residents of Liberty City have been endowed with psychic abilities (but only in 2001 because Liberty City Stories is much more aligned with the rest of the series in this regard [maybe it’s something in the water]).

Coming from later GTA games, this just doesn’t feel like GTA.

The story overall is also just bland. It’s the most generic revenge plot you could imagine, with some out-of-nowhere betrayals such as that of Salvatore Leone — the local Mob boss.

After completing a number of tasks, both extremely dangerous and tedious, the Don congratulates you on your achievements and your loyalty to the Leone family. This feels pretty good, especially since the missions immediately preceding this moment are a hellish cluster fuck full of shoddy AI and stupid mission design. And you know what? He’s right. You have been loyal to him. You’ve done literally everything he’s told you to do and more. As this happens, he asks you to collect a car parked somewhere Downtown. So, like the good little Mafia errand boy you are, you skip down the hill to get it, only to be sent a page from Salvatore’s girlfriend of all people that the car is a trap and that you’re about to be murdered. Surely enough, the car is rigged with explosives, so your only option is to actually betray Salvatore and flee the first island with his girlfriend as you plot your (second) revenge.

It’s simply not good writing. There’s no cause and effect, no setting up of any kind. You are blank man. You work for blank Mafia man. But blank Mafia man turns on you, because he is bad Mafia man after all. You get blank revenge. It’s high school shit.

Just like Catalina. Take that blank man example, but substitute ‘black Mafia man’ with ‘blank girl’. It’s bad writing.

When it comes to games and movies it becomes hard to define what is good, especially in cases where legacy and nostalgia are involved. Super Mario Bros. 3 or World or whatever might be a better game than OG Super Mario Bros., but you might see OG Super Mario Bros. as the better game because it gave birth to what came after it. In my opinion that’s a really weird viewpoint to have, especially since gaming culture is so focussed on iteration and improvement. Some see it as sacrilege to say an old classic just doesn’t play well, but that’s the case because games as a medium inherently get better as we improve the craft and polish the development process.

With this in mind, and everything else I’ve already said, Grand Theft Auto III is not a good game in 2018. It’s not fun and it doesn’t control well. The story is bad and the moment-to-moment writing is no better. From a historical stance, I think it’s definitely worth playing, but if GTA V was your first introduction to the series and you want to explore its past GTA 3 is not the place to start.

STILL GOOD?

Not really, no

Am I completely wrong? Is my subjective opinion too subjective? Did I forget to mention how much San Andreas fleshes out both Salvatore Leone and Catalina and their character arcs in this game? Shoot (pew) me a message up top through the Ask Me Anything link OR hit me up on Twitter @easy_win_games.

Illustration left-to-right: Catalina, Maria, Asuka, Kenji, Donald Love, Toni, Luigi, 8-Ball, Salvatore Leone. Claude in the foreground.

- Editorial & illustration brewed in-house -

[abandntravels]

Walmart visit 15/6/2017

We had no particular plans for the day, other than it was a run day. Well map my run doesn't work where there is no cell coverage so I had to cope with the run for 30minutes and hope that I could keep up a steady pace to get my 5kms in but I suspect I was under due to us being a trails rather than road. Was a nice run through the trees and if you kept going the bugs didn't land and bite. I have taken to wearing a head scarf/bandana to stop the bugs biting my head, yes my hair is that thin/fine the bastards see my scalp as fair game. Breakfast was porridge and tea, it's a bit weird eating all these carbs, everyday, again after being on reduced intake of them for the last 4-5 months but it does make it easier to eat when camping. Not that nut granola is cheap when you make it yourself, it isn't cheap pre-made and yoghurt or milk just doesn't keep in the heat, as for dinner cauliflower rice isn't really an option on the camping stove. Fingers crossed the regular exercise and extra walking will balance it all out. If it doesn't I don't really care, I'm feeling stress reduced for the first time in ages and I am going to keep enjoying it. Guess this is when I should say that deconstructed s'more are better than actual s'mores: I just can't eat that much sugar in one go (I know shock horror!!), but hey enjoyed the experience of having a fire in the fire pit and cooking marshmallows on sticks. Watching Nick build a fire was fun, pity the wood wasn't drier as it did take quite a bit of effort to get it going but you see we managed it in the end. Anyway I have gotten ahead of myself, after breakfast and I managed to loose my drivers license (I always take it with me when running, just in case I get eaten by a bear and they need to identify my remains (other option is Nick claims I am a mad woman chasing him in the woods and gets me committed but having ID means he can't get away with it (I have a slightly odd imagination))). The worse of it is I didn't notice that I had lost my license, until a woman came into the shower area asking if I was a 'kiwi' having an answered in the positive, she advised me my license had been found (without my body, so not helpful in either of my imaginary scenarios) outside camp site number 37 and the lady at camp site number 33 had it. I am very grateful that those camping in state parks seem to be happy, helpful and thoughtful. The lovely lady from camp site 37 had lived in NZ, Auckland but won't hold that against her, and they had a personalised number plate NWZLND, which is why the person from campsite number 33 went to them first, it's a small world cos a lady who served us at the deli in Walmart had lived in Auckland for 6mths in 1996, guessing we have an accent as people keep asking us where we are from. So I was reunited with my license, thank God as the car is rented in my name. Wow, can't believe I have written this much and I'm only just out of the shower (took two button pushes today as I washed my running clothes in there with me, Nick needed 5 button pushes, I really do wonder what he does in the shower). Oh you poor people reading my blog, I blame the glass/mug of red wine. So we headed into Manitowoc, for a look around, it is a city of 33,000 people and even had high rise buildings. Now while I have mentioned that I am stress reduced, driving does cause some stress but so does navigating, largely as I seem to get left and right even more confused here. So I opted to drive and I found a park, parking should never be a problem for a Wellingtonion in the US as the parks are made for those huge trucks, so it's like driving into three parking spaces at home. We had a lovely wander around, saw some interesting sites and visited the public convenience, thank you Rae for all those squat like exercises at the gym, and then had lunch at a diner where they just keep filling your coffee cup :-) After lunch we headed to Walmart, okay so I know it is probably a bit like our Warehouse but it just seems so much bigger and you can get everything there ammo, carrots, socks, DVDs, fishing rods, bikes, guns, whipped cream and the list just goes on. We got what we went in there for more rice meals, gas cylinder and so much more socks, exercise clothes, chilli powder, new cutlery (I broke one of the sporks), baby wipes (you can use them to clean just about anything), cheese and chocolate covered raisins. During our time in Walmart we used the free wifi to sort our next camp site, check on the status of Mum and Steve's cat and ensure that at least some of you are reading the blog :-) So back to the camp site, another walk in the bush (no thunder storms today) and then it was fire lighting time. So either the fire, the citronella candle, the bug repellent or a combination of all three means we haven't been eaten to death while we made the s'mores, read books and cooked dinner, so a very pleasant evening so far.