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Thursday 21 February, 2008
GAMELOG ENTRY #2
GAMEPLAY
The game is interesting to play because of the exploration that the player can do. With each successive GTA game the world gets larger and has more depth, so it's no surprise that by the fifth iteration it's nothing short of massive. The majority of the buildings can't be entered, and huge chunks of the game have horrible textures, but despite these shortcomings they maintain a very distinctive artistic style, and a number of easter eggs that make the player want to keep exploring. For Example, on San Fierro, the island that represents San Francisco there is a section of the city called "Hashbury" that represents the real life Haight-Ashbury. The visual style of Hasbury differs greatly from the rest of the city, most of the vehicles are beat up vans, the pedestrians are hippies, and the streets are lined with rainbow posters. It's this kind of attention to detail that makes the game interesting to play.
I played this game with two of my friends watching. The results were troubling. They're backseat gamers, so when I started playing they gave me suggestions as to where to drive, and alerted me to the presence of hidden packages I had driven past. But as I progressed their demands became more outrageous: "Run that guy over!" I watched as the horror that is Grand Theft Auto slowly devoured my good natured friends. Their violent hedonism climaxed when my friend Jon shouted, and I quote: "Hit that old lady with a bat!" That's when we decided it was probably time to take a short break.
DESIGN
The RPG elements of the game are aggravating, and generally distract from the overall gameplay and story. They're mostly comprised of mindless, time-consuming tasks. For example, in order to level up the swimming skill you have to go out into the ocean and hold the analog stick in any direction, for eternity. Actually it's more like 30 minutes, but if you're just trying to sit down and play through a mission and then stop it's aggravating to have the game tell you that you need to go swim before you can progress. In addition to the swimming, the game also requires that the player eat. If you don't get food approximately once in a gameworld day they player starts to lose fat and eventually health. This wouldn't be unreasonable if Grand Theft Auto were a simulator, but it seems completely out of sync with the world that I can drive a semi up the side of a mountain, parachute off of it, and then steal an attack helicopter uscathed, but if I don't fit in time for a salad in there at some point I die. It's inconsistent with the gameworld.
The game provides a number of different challenges. The two main challenges however are avoiding being arrested by the police, and avoiding death. The player can be arrested if a cop knocks them to the ground and is in range of shooting, or if they are pulled out of their vehicle by a cop. Once arrested, the player loses all progress they had on the current mission, and all of the guns they had collected. The player dies if their health bar reaches zero, this can be a result of combat, or falling from a great height. There is also challenge in the form of resource management. The player has to effectively balance spending their money on houses, food, guns, and cars. There is also gambling available at betting shops and casinos in which the player can wager their money on games of chance. The system can easily be exploited if the player saves, bets all of their money, and then loads if they lose it. It's a rather seizable flaw that makes an important part of the gameplay effectively meaningless.
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