I realized there were a couple of things I forgot to mention in my review,
\nfor completeness’s sake.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Like I said, I played the PC version, so the quality of the port<\/b> is
\nworth discussing. GTA4 was originally a console game and later ported to
\nthe PC. Overall they did a decent job, with a few quirky instances of its
\nconsole roots showing through. At first I thought the bizarre
\nshadow-rendering was part of that but from what I hear, the shadows looked
\nstrange on the 360 too. The other graphical oddity I’ve seen is quick
\ncamera spins can create a stray texture that obscures the ground at about
\nchest level and then it slowly dissolves away to once again reveal the
\nroad and ground, etc. I have no idea if that happened on the 360 or not.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
PC controls are okay. They let you remap most keys, but the problems
\narise when it comes to interacting with nonstandard things. Like the cell
\nphone, which was designed to be accessible with a gamepad. On the PC you
\nhave to hit a lot of keys to use it and a lot of keys to get rid of it (if
\nyou’re not in a vehicle, having your phone out is a royal pain because you
\ncan’t run or use a weapon). When trying to enter a phone number manually,
\nyou can’t use the keyboard keys to simply type it in. You have to use
\narrows keys to highlight each number on the phone keypad individually
\n(ugh). This is similar to entering your initials into the QUB3D arcade
\ngame, you can’t type them, you have to use the arrow keys to scroll
\nthrough the alphabet. The game’s menus are generally okay, with something
\njust off about them.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
There’s no ability to take a screenshot!<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Like so many games ported from a console, the save system is poor. The
\nonly place you can perform a manual save is in one of your safehouses and
\ndoing so advances the game clock by 8 hours, because you sleep as part of
\nthe save. There are a number of save slots available, which is good.
\nThere’s an auto-save performed at the end of each mission and many of the
\nsandbox activities, which is also good. Of course, if you load one of
\nthose auto-saves, you will not<\/b> find yourself in the same place
\nwhere you saved. Instead, you’ll be located in the nearest safehouse and
\nthe clock will be advanced by 8 hours, as if you slept to do a manual
\nsave. And of course, everything in the city will be reset. In a word:
\nLAZY!<\/b><\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Screw up a mission and you’re given the option to restart. Sometimes
\nthis is the same as loading from your last save though, except without
\nall the ammo you expended during the attempt. There’s no mid-point
\nmilestone saves, so if a mission is particularly involved and long, you
\nmight screw up at the end and have to repeat the beginning part over and
\nover again until you get it all right. The very last mission of the
\ngame had this problem. I had to do the same gun battle about a dozen
\ntimes because the finicky part after it was giving me trouble.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The mouse-controlled driving camera works well except that it annoyingly
\nkeeps trying to return back to the chosen camera location after about 2
\nseconds. And the available camera defaults are all too low for my tastes.
\nSo I swing the camera back up and I have to keep compensating for the fact
\nthat the stupid game wants to return my camera placement back down. Yeah,
\nthat shit might be helpful on a console; not on a mouse-driven PC. And
\nthen there the occasions that pointlessly lock the camera into a fixed
\nposition: some (not all) carjackings and driving up to pick-up a friend.
\nI can understand the stunt jumps trying to be move cinematic. The other
\nones make no sense.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Like San Andreas, GTA4 has shops and clothes and accessories<\/b>. But
\nthe selection is bafflingly small. You start near a “Russian” shop which
\nhas a small array of frumpy and utilitarian apparel. Once you get to
\nManhatten, you can access three more store, though 2 of them are the same
\nchain for some reason. One is a hipster shop, with clothes meant to be
\nchic and modern. The other is a formal-wear shop with expensive suits and
\ndress shoes. That’s it. You can buy sunglasses and regular glasses,
\nthough you have to squint to tell the difference because the sunglasses
\nare so lightly tinted. You can buy a furry hat or a ballcap… or go
\nhatless. Once you’ve made your purchases and you’re trying on your
\nwardrobe back in a safehouse, you encounter the other problem with outfits
\nin GTA4: the interface for changing clothes is atrocious. Use the arrow
\nkeys to cycle through clothing for chest, face, head, legs, and feet.
\nIt’s terribly slow because of the fade-out and fade-in involved with every
\nsingle change. There’s no way to filter what kind of outfits you want to
\ntry on. It doesn’t tell you the name of the current piece. You can’t
\npick pieces by name, only cycle through them all. It just leaves me
\nwondering why they went through the hassle of putting this stuff in the
\ngame and then did a half-ass job of it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I realized there were a couple of things I forgot to mention in my review,
\nfor completeness’s sake.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7095","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-games","category-review"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rps.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7095","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rps.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rps.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rps.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rps.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7095"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rps.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7095\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7486,"href":"https:\/\/www.rps.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7095\/revisions\/7486"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rps.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7095"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rps.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7095"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rps.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7095"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}