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because the 90's paled in comparison to this...

I’m not a game by any means, and in any year I’d play only a handful of new titles.  Most of the time if I bother to sit down and play a game it’ll be an old favourite like Counterstrike Source or Quake III, but occasionally a game comes along that will hold my attention for many, many hours of joyful life-stealing pleasure.  To name a few:

• Civilisation 2
• Final Fantasy VII & VIII
• Transport Tycoon Deluxe and more recently OpenTTD
• All of the Grant Theft Auto series, but most recently GTA: San Andreas

On December 3rd, Grand Theft Auto IV came out for the PeeCee, and having refrained from trying it on the Playstation3 or Xbox 360 I gleefully got my hands on a copy and waited out the almost 40 minute install.  I should have known pre-install that there wasn’t a hope in hell it was going to play nicely on the laptop, especially not at a great quality/resolution.  After all, it more than meets the requirement for the minimum required system (from Rockstar Site), and meets most of the requirement for recommended system (the video card is the big let down here).

I can play at the amazing resolution of 800×600 with all higher graphic settings disabled due to low specification of system.  I have to wonder who came up with the idea of limiting the quality settings for lower spec cards, it should be the users choice to wind up the settings and make the game unplayable if they so wish.

Back to the game, as you’d probably guess, the performance on my system leaves a lot to be desired but is still playable, and even explosions don’t seem to slow it down too far, but I’m always left wanting more, especially seeing some of the screenshots of people running it at 1920×1200 on monster machines.

I’m left wondering though, is it worth me spending +£1000 on a desktop machine that can play this correctly or giving up and going back to minesweeper.  I’m not sure i could warrant the price given that this is probably the one title I’ll acutally play this year (as well as in 2009), but considering I got months and months of play out of GTA:SA who knows.  It’s an investment in time I guess, and heck, I’d have spent a lot more having fun on booze in the process.

The game itself is fantastic though, I can forsee in the next few years having a map of London (or New York, or perhaps Tehran) with every building, feature, person manipulatable , almost like a GTA in that corny old VR world of the 80′s that everyone was dreaming about.  I could get coffee in the store I go to every morning at work and then go to work on the office front door with a baseball bat, just for the point of it…

Then I’d escape down the tube to my batcave, or home maybe.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 10th, 2008 at 2:53 am and is filed under Development, Online, Other. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.