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[miles]

Well, gee, thanks for noticing.

I played Grand Theft Auto: Vice City for many hours straight.  Many many hours.  That would explain how it got stuck in my mind.

I never thought "Cum on Feel the Noise" would someday spawn a .sig quote.

Wild wild wild.

[jough]

I played it for far too many hours.  I hadn't played any video games at ALL in about five years, and then got a new PC and remembered hearing about GTA, and lo' and behold GTA3 came with an external soundcard that I'd bought, so I played that, loved it, and got Vice City, which just raised the bar to the sublime.

I can't imagine there being a better game ever.  I liked how it was basically a Miami Vice game where you were the bad guy, and how they used all of that real 80s music and voiced your character by getting Ray Liota in the studio.

I've seen screenshots for the next GTA where you play a gang-banger, but it doesn't look as fun to me, despite the technological advances.

Like, for instance, they've added a thing where your guy has to eat food or he'll die, but if he eats too much he'll have health problems and die.

Now, I'm all for realism, but games should be as simple as possible.  Having to eat is just a pain in the ass unfun thing to keep track of.  I already do that shit in real life, I don't need my games to do it too.

I want to play that game to steal cars, drive around really fast listening to loud music, getting in trouble with the law, flipping that car over, exiting really quickly before it explodes, and having  a shootout with the cops where I get to blow some heads off.

Is that too much to ask?  The only way they could improve upon Vice City is to make it higher-res, a bigger world, and more missions that aren't tedious.  I'd like to see some higher level puzzle solving and stuff too.

That's it.  Ain't nobody asked for an eating player-character.

[CortJstr]

a lot about GTA and eating in games

I totally agree. There are a bunch of RPG's out there where you have to eat and sleep and it's just completely tedious and annoying. You end up at points where you're like, "gee, I can only have enough room to pick up that Sword of Godly Might or the sack of apples. And I'm out of food. Fuck I need the apples."

Plus the game time runs at 20x so you need to eat every 7 minutes practically.

I'm waiting for GTA 5 where you actually have to stop at gas stations to piss while fleeing from the police.

[Ben-San]

Food requirements work for some games. Angband and Nethack are built with resource-management in mind pretty much from the start, for example, so making sure you have enough food is just another part of the game. The problem is that for Grand Theft Auto, food requirements are not a natural extension of the gameplay or something that has hurt by its absence. What might fit better with Grand Theft Auto's style of gaming would be fast-food joints where you can recover health at the cost of money (which is somewhat redundant as you can already recover health in numerous ways), do minor missions to gain money (already implemented as the pizza missions in Vice City), or gain minor improvements to player abilities in some way such as increased running speed, boosted fist damage, and so on (which is a little too River City Ransom for me to want to see it in GTA.)
Of course, there's always the option to have restaurants just be a place where you meet with mobsters and then have a thrilling gunfight when someone kicks down the door and starts spraying lead. That seems like the best way for GTA to handle food, to me.

[V-Adore]

Food requirements work for some games. Angband and Nethack are built with resource-management in mind pretty much from the start, for example, so making sure you have enough food is just another part of the game. The problem is that for Grand Theft Auto, food requirements are not a natural extension of the gameplay or something that has hurt by its absence. What might fit better with Grand Theft Auto's style of gaming would be fast-food joints where you can recover health at the cost of money (which is somewhat redundant as you can already recover health in numerous ways), do minor missions to gain money (already implemented as the pizza missions in Vice City), or gain minor improvements to player abilities in some way such as increased running speed, boosted fist damage, and so on (which is a little too River City Ransom for me to want to see it in GTA.)
Of course, there's always the option to have restaurants just be a place where you meet with mobsters and then have a thrilling gunfight when someone kicks down the door and starts spraying lead. That seems like the best way for GTA to handle food, to me.

All excellent ideas.

The "resource management" point is a particularly good one, IMHO. Food and hunger work well in games like Angband which are very resources-focused, albeit most *bands and roguelikes in general have made food management primarily an early-game concern. (Of course, part of the appeal and challenge of the game is the changing face of resource management -- from "how do I balance my needs for food, light, scrolls, and loot?" to "how do I optimize my kit and my storage?") Although it's too early to tell, it sounds as if in GTA it'll remain a concern for the entire length of the game, which totally ignores the reason why it's mostly an earlygame concern in *bands -- because, even for a resource-management game, there comes a time when management of food becomes tedious and bigger concerns have to take the fore. Keeping piddly things like food management an issue for the entire game would be a pacing problem even in a *band; for a GTA game it's even dumber.

That said, I'm splitting this posthaste. TO SPORTS AND LEISURE WITH YOU, INTERESTING DIGRESSION!

[CortJstr]

I hadn't thought of that. RPG's, unlike real life, usually have foods of increasing efficieny as one progresses. So by end-game you've moved on from apples/bread which satiate for a few turns to lembas wafers and royal jelly which is nutrisious enough to last for a day of game time.

If they did include it into GTA I think instead of health food should effect something like fatigue. So you'd run/shoot a little slower if you hadn't eaten in a while but not actually die. Or perhaps not eating would just lower the max-level of your fatigue bar meaning you could run as fast but over shorter distances.

I always thought a neat twist was in Wizardry 8 where alcohol would boost strength (especially in bezerk-capable characters) at the expense of agility or intelligence. Different brews would affect other stats but it was always an even trade.

[V-Adore]

I hadn't thought of that. RPG's, unlike real life, usually have foods of increasing efficieny as one progresses. So by end-game you've moved on from apples/bread which satiate for a few turns to lembas wafers and royal jelly which is nutrisious enough to last for a day of game time.

Well, in *bands not only do you get more nourishing food but you also start getting things like Slow Digestion status, spells or artifacts that satisfy hunger, and other things that mean that, for most classes, hunger becomes a nonissue by the midgame. A few classes have trouble with it all along, but hey, game balance.

[jough]

do minor missions to gain money (already implemented as the pizza missions in Vice City), or gain minor improvements to player abilities in some way such as increased running speed, boosted fist damage, and so on (which is a little too River City Ransom for me to want to see it in GTA.)

Actually, Vice City has enhancement exercises, like if you complete 10 ambulance levels you can run all the time without getting tired, or if you do the target practise your aim improves and you can kill with fewer shots, and vigilante missions give you more armor, something else gives you greater health points, etc.

But those things are *optional* and only enhance game play - you can still win the game without them.

My only beef with Vice City is that it's a little small.  Sure, it's about twice the size of the GTA3 world (well, maybe not quite twice), but it's still small.

The new GTA: San Andreas is supposed to be taking place in the STATE of "San Andreas" and will have three cities, each of which are supposed to be twice as big as Vice City, plus there's the countryside in-between.

Don't get me wrong - the game sounds really cool - your goal is to work your way up from a small-time drug-dealing gang-bander to owning a casino in a Vegas-like city - and there's suppose to be more indoor stuff, so you can explore the casino, gamble (a good opportunity for games-within-a-game - if they do it right, it could be a lot of fun to play poker, blackjack, and craps to earn extra money).

I've played a few other games that were supposed to be of the same genre (Max Payne, etc.) but none of them were nearly as fun, because they were too linear.  The beauty of GTA is its open-ended gameplay - if you just feel like driving around looking at the pretty scenery you *can*.  You can choose one mission over another.  I think they need to expand on that, to make even more possibilities, and make it so you can complete the game without completing even half of the missions - and there should be a lot more choices and missions to choose from.

One other new feature I've read about is that in the new game you'll be able to hire your own gang and have employees carrying out tedious tasks for you - that could also be very cool if done well.

They're spending a movie budget on development, so the next GTA (5? or 4, since Vice City was really like GTA3.1 - like the difference between Windows 2000 and Windows XP) should really be something special.  I just hope they do it right, because too many people have too much free time on their hands.

P.S. Has anyone tried "Driv3r" yet?  Is it any good?

[slink]

Driv3r I am awaiting and may pick up. The first one was quite good, made by a team 60 miles south of me. As opposed to GTA 60 miles to the north. And I think this country sucks!?
Anyhow, it fails ont he running around town shit, but apparently that only accounts for 20% of the game. The majority of driver games is just driving great car chases. That's pretty much it, but it is more linear in mission terms than GTA. You can however usually carry out the missions in any way you wish. And I may be being unfair on the linearity front. We'll see.
Previews are around online of it, and it comes out in a few days.
The physics tend to be very good for well, driving Dodge Chargers and things around cities...

GTA:SA I am eagerly awaiting. Yea, you've pointed out some of the things I am not so eagerly awaiting, but so far they have constantly shown how talented they are at creating games that can last phenomenally well.
I have enjoyed and spent more time on Vice City (Liberty City less so) than any other game probably, now. It just has so much you can go back and do. You can even make up your own games, and then compete at them with friends.
I could go on for months about all the great little things I have heard about , or things I hope are in it.
It all just makes me so fucknig annoyed they didn't hire me! I mean, come. on!

[Ben-San]

It always annoys me when people talk about GTA's open-ended gameplay, because it is not, in fact, open-ended.

The story is almost entirely linear. You cannot choose to sell out the Mafia and offer your services to the Colombian cartel; you must go on the path the game sets until Don Leone backstabs you. No matter how many businesses you acquire in Vice City, the storyline remains the same. For a game to be open-ended, you must be able to affect how it ends. GTA does not allow this.

What GTA does allow is digressions. You can wander briefly away from the linear plot, but it will have no effect; once you come to the end of a branch, you must return to the trunk to progress further. You can take as long as you want to cruise the city, watch the sunsets, and so on, but you cannot choose the path down which you will progress. You only choose how long you choose to hang around at each stop on that path.

This is arguably necessary for it to remain a "playable crime-movie" as GTA3 and Vice City aspire to be, and it certainly doesn't make either of them a bad game. I do wish that the idiotic contrivances of the islands and wrecked bridges would just be entirely discarded, but I don't hold out much hope for that.