A Work in Progress
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GTA III
So I bought the Grand Theft Auto Double Pack for Xbox, partly
to find out what all the fuss was about and partly because I've
heard/read that it's a pretty good game, even though the PS2 version of GTA3 only got
6/10 in Edge. The bottom line is that it IS a good game, and would
have been worth the money even if it was only GTA III. I've yet
to bite into Vice City as I'm trying to maximize the fun and hours
of gameplay per game.
Of course there are not only a few bugs
in it. The first I saw was corrupted and disappearing textures. Not too
severe, but then I discovered more serious stuff like the freeze/crash stuff.
It has a tendency to freeze up at seemingly random places. I've had it happen
just when I was about to save and when I paused the game while driving a car.
The most recent bug I've discovered is an issue where the controls stop
responding, often when coming back from saving the game after playing for a
while. The combat system is absolutely atrocious, lacking a lock-on system
for hand-to-hand combat, meaning you can accidentally start another fight
while already in combat. The aiming system for weapons does have a lock-on
system, but that's completely random, which means you will most probably
start firing at an old lady when there's a thug with a shotgun about to put a
hole the size of a baseball in your head.
On the plus side, there's a lot of
fun stuff to do. "Fun" being all those things you actually shouldn't do in
real life, like beating old ladies with a bat, jacking cars and driving full
speed through the citys busiest intersection. The missions are varied, some
slightly tedious and some very exciting (like a mission that seems straight
out of "Gone in 60 seconds"). The missions are challenging, some very
frustrating, but curiously you seem to always learn something from your
failures. If there's a car that rams into you just when you're about to take
the car with the dead body in the trunk to the car crusher, you know the
position of the enemy car and can simply park another car in front of it,
giving you valuable seconds to get away...
What GTA III does best is the
driving. It's a pleasure to get a fast car and just drive around the city;
weaving in and out of oncoming traffic can give you a nice adrenaline rush as
you just make it between two cars that have stopped for a red light. The driving
is such a pure joy that it's almost an idiotic move by the developers to put
rival gangs firing at you even when you're not on a mission, especially when you
face bigger guns that can trash your car. This annoyance also inhibits the
exploration, something you'll need to do a lot of if you're going to find all
the hidden places in the big city. You'll often find yourself wondering how they
actually know it's you driving the car they're firing at. I know it's a gameplay
decision, and I can see the reasoning as to why they put them there, but why in
the world would you include a gameplay mechanism that discourages the player from
exploring?!
It's difficult to judge GTA III. I love it for the gameplay, yet I
hate it when it crashes after I've spent much time finishing a mission. This is
one of those things that shouldn't be allowed to happen: a console game that
desperately needs a patch.
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