Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas

I'm sad to announce I have to sell my PS3, and everything (except the blurays) today.  I have some financial trouble and my only way out of it is to sell my beloved system.  I will miss all the wonderful times I have had with my PS3 for the two and a half years of it being with me.  So many long gaming nights, and plenty of people coming over to play Rock Band (The White Stripes style because I never bought a USB splitter).  Now no matter how sad I am to get rid of it after a job comes, and I have some money, a new one will take it's place full of more wonderful gaming memories to be made.  Now untill that time comes it isn't like I can just stop playing game all together.  I will now have to go to my good ol' PS2.  While I'm at this stage, I might as well embrace it and catch up on some PS2 titles.
 
I'm gonna start off by finally playing ALL the way through GTA: SA, the only GTA game I never beat.  The only reason I never beat San Andreas is I got my PS3 the week after I bought it and it just got left behind.  After I play through it I will give my opinion on it, spoiler it's fucking great.  
 
Saying good bye is never easy, hopefully I can replace the emptiness with a replacement soon!

I just finished GTA3 with 100% completion. I know, it came out nine years ago. Still, it feels good to have it really mastered. What a help it was to do the ambulance up to level 12 so I had infinite run. Plus, it was helpful to do the import/export garage missions on Portland and Shoreside Vale so I had access to any car I needed. I even took the advice of a long ago walkthrough and went to my hideout after escaping Catalina's mansion on the last level. Having access to the rocket launcher and plenty of shells helped the mission immensely. 
 
It's a great game. I think I could play it over again trying for 100%. But it's time to move on to Vice City and San Andreas.

THE GRAND THEFT AUTO 4 LOVE/HATE RELATIONSHIP!  

Some of you might know of my love/hate relationship with Grand Theft Auto 4, I believe I've touched on the subject quite a few times in past blogs. But I felt it was only right that I discuss the issue futher considering I had recently restarted playing the Xbox 360 version. Now it took me quite a long time to adjust to the changes found within this latest entry of the much adored franchise, and I shan't bore you with the exact reasons for my hatred. But I shall say that unlike most recent GTA games, I found myself questioning the overall new direction being taken by Rockstar Games.  
 
To be fair GTA4 came off the heels of the simply stunning Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, which in my own personal opinion was the best the series as seen. While I was over the moon to be returning to Liberty City and experiencing the joys of virtual city life, the actual story and characters within offered me few thrills. I'm sure some of you reading this might think me slightly strange, afterall wasn't the whole of gaming media calling GTA4 protagonist Niko Bellic the ultimate videogame character upon release. Don't get me wrong, I can see why some might say such a thing. But I never felt comfortable with Niko and still don't.  
 
Which is frustrating because that is half of the joy of such games, I've always loved Rockstar's ability to create such believable characters and though Niko is very believable, he is also one of the less enjoyable main protagonists in a while. Maybe part of me is looking at Niko in the wrong sort of way, but part of the reason I was so fond of the past few GTA games was mostly due to the main proganist. So I didn't exactly get along with Niko Bellic, I did though fall in love with Liberty City again. Yes it's quite different from it's legendary GTA3 roots, but Rockstar created a city which is as much a character as the actual main story characters. I recall spending so many hours messing around in the original Liberty City and could still drive around with my eyes closed. So returning was an absolute delight.   
 
Since my early rough experiences with Grand Theft Auto 4, I've come to appreciate it as a overall experience. It does feature some great GTA moments and stays true to the overall image of the franchise. But I honestly don't think I'll ever look upon this game with as much praise as many of my fellow gamers and the gaming media did, opinions are opinions and I know I'm not the only one who wasn't blown away with GTA4. But I do greatly respect it, with a slight wish that it offered some of the 'FUN' features of say San Andreas. For me, Grand Theft Auto 4 often took itself a little to seriously. But to travel on a little, I'm also rather excited about the Xbox 360 exclusive downloadable content that's been released. 
 
This is potentially where I could fall in love with GTA4, as the concept of episodic content in a Grand Theft Auto game as me rather excited. When it was first announced I showed little interest, but if it provides me with another angle of Liberty City, then how am I to complain. I love the idea of experiencing the city from a different individuals perspective and story, that alone made me purchase The Lost and Damned. Now I'm nearing the end of the actual story for Niko Bellic and can't wait to check out the first of two episodic content expansions confirmed for the Xbox 360, with The Ballad of Gay Tony set for release in November of this year. Maybe I'll actually discuss the expansion in a little more detail when I get around to playing it.  
 
Will I ever truly have that San Andreas experience with GTA4, probably not and maybe that's not such a bad thing. But for me personally, the actual city is the star of the game and the main reason for me to return for more episodic content. While I do believe that a good main protagonist can make or break a GTA game, I can't help but feel that my overall feelings towards the character of Niko Bellic as affected my overall views on Grand Theft Auto 4. I usually don't let that happen to me, but with such a celebrated gaming franchise, it's hard not to judge the game without letting your personal love for past titles make an appearance. I'm sure you could provide me with a list of a thousand reasons why Niko Bellic is the ultimate main protagonist, I just simply don't like him and wonder if he is the source of both my love and hate of Grand Theft Auto 4.  
 
Would you like to see Rockstar continue episodic downloadable episodes for GTA 4 after The Ballad of Gay Tony? 
and 
Who is your prefered main protagonist? Niko or Johnny? 
 
Thanks for Reading! 
Follow me on Twitter (JosephBayliss). 
           

(Predecessor spelled wrong due to character cap!) 
 
First blog techincally, but in reality the only difference I see in blog posts and forum topics is it says (blog post) in the title. Here goes. 
 
I've been thinkin about what next-gen games (PS3, Wii, 360) sequels haven't been on par with their last-gen predecessor. My choices are below, feel free to post yours. I think Guitar Hero 2 is considered last-gen right? Whatever.
 
Guitar Hero 2 - Guitar Hero 3 - Harmonix left and it just... wasn't pretty. Songs weren't as great and the note charting was kindof a joke. 

Resident Evil 4 - Resident Evil 5 - I don't consider this a bad game, but really, it wasn't even close to how much I loved Reisdent Evil 4. RE4 is definitely one of my favorite games of all time, and RE5 was just pushed to the side after I finished it, but RE4 is just memorable as hell and I continue to play it today. I won't be playing RE5 in 4 years. 

Grand Theft Auto San Andreas - Grand Theft Auto 4 - Really the same thing as above, it's not bad, but the standards given by it's previous installments were just too high, and I guess I just didn't like the realism to it. Most of the stuff they decided to throw away from the old games was because, as they claim atleast, they wanted it to be realistic, which I guess I didn't like.I probably played San Andreas for around 250 hours. Beat it, oh, 4 or 5 times. I only beat GTA 4 once. I didn't like it enough to play through it again when it got the trophy patch.  
  
Mega Man X6 (PS1)- Mega Man X7 (PS2) - Mega Man may be my favorite game series of all time, and I'm not like most people, I won't let the terrible Mega Man games make the really good ones turn bad all the sudden, you know, like all the Star Wars fans say "4-6 suck because of 1-3!!". Yeah, whatever. I still love Mega Man 1-6 and X6, and while I'm not a fan of 7 and 8, but X7 was terrible. Switching characters and pseudo 3-D just didn't work for me, also the soundtrack wasn't even in the world of the old games. I never beat the last level of the game, but I'm not to concerned about that. Most will probably say it went down the crapper after X3, but I still enjoy all of the PS1 Mega Man games, even though MMX6 was on the border line of good and frustrating as fuck.      

I'm looking at my shelf of games and I can't think of any more. I pray that God of War 3 won't be on that list next year. My expectations for that game are so ridiculously high it ain't even funny. I heard Mercernaries 1 was great compared to Merc 2, but I can't say I played Merc 1 so I'll exclude that.

Hidden Packages, Blast Shards, Orbs, Treasures, call them what you will. There curse has spread its way over gaming in ways that I never thought would happen.

My first experience with this was during Grand Theft Auto 3, it was the first truly open world game that I had ever played and collecting the hidden packages was actually kind of fun. The reward of being able to pick up free weapons and power ups from outside of your house was greatly appealing and really helped to make the end of the game pretty easy.

I’m not sure if this was the first game to include such an idea, but as with most things in Grand Theft Auto 3 it was certainly one of the things that caught on in a big way, not just in future Grand Theft Auto games, but also in other sand box games and eventually it even spread into more traditional games.

As the generational shift of games consoles happened this became more apparent than ever, and now with trophies and achievements it’s gone from being something optional for in game benefits to something that is usually required to complete if you want to truly finish a game to 1000 gamer points, or to unlock that platinum trophy. This in turn has made it incredibly frustrating, why does every single sandbox game need these? Why do they have to be so obscure? And why do I always have to always have one missing by the end?

This problem has come into effect for me in a massive way recently, and when I say recently I mean within the last 24 hours. Don’t get me wrong I’ve had a problem with these damn things since Crackdown but within the last 24 hours I have collected all 179 treasures on Tomb Raider Underworld (twice, as one of them glitched towards the end of my first play through) all 350 Blast Shards in Infamous and all of the 1001 light seeds from the Prince of Persia.

Other than for purely extending the play time of their games, I can’t understand why developers continue to include them in their products. I personally believe they can actually ruin the game by making you very aware you are playing a game. That first moment when you find number 1 of however many is a moment I dread as I then have to make the decision. Do I collect them all as I see them, and hope they are in an easy enough place that I can collect them all by the end of the game, without missing any? Or do I avoid them like all holy hell so that when I do finish the game I can use the only method I find to be truly effective and to systematically check every single location using some kind of map, checking off each location as I find it.

In my experience I haven’t found a single person who doesn’t dread the “hidden package experience” as I call it, so why do they keep this stuff in games? As games shift and change into the modern versions we see today, how is it that this incredibly archaic way of doing things has managed to survive so long?

I have full respect for which ever open world game takes the plunge, and is the first to omit this dark side of gaming forever.

Thanks for reading.

There are good and bad sides to everything. As an example, let's take my exam situation. I'm currently taking my end-of-year exams, having spent the last year at the University of Essex studying English Language & Literature - the first year of a three-year course. On the positive side, I have one exam left. It's a Literature exam and I'm reasonably comfortable with the texts I've been studying, so I'm feeling pretty confident about it. I've already sat three of these three-hour exams in the last two weeks, and I found them alright too, so that thought is helping to keep me calm as well. As soon as this one's out of the way, I'm free (well, at least until October when I start my study for the second year). On the negative side, however, that last exam is tomorrow. On a Saturday. As in, the weekend. And not first thing in the morning, either. My final exam starts at 2pm on a Saturday afternoon, and doesn't finish until 5pm. Talk about eating into a guy's game time!

But anyway, that's not the main reason I came here to blog. Yesterday, I received a disc storage wallet from Amazon in the post after ordering a couple for next year. The flat that my girlfriend and I have decided to rent is pretty small and isn't exactly loaded with shelf space for my games and her DVDs. Thus, I decided that it might be a good idea to invest in a couple of these storage wallets to keep all our discs in without sacrificing too much of what little shelf space we have. Like I said, the first one arrived yesterday and I spent a good hour or so moving all my game discs out of their cases and into the wallet. As I was doing so, I couldn't help but notice that some of these discs (particularly the older ones) have some really awesome designs on. These days, discs are often just printed with a cropped version of the box art, so I'd almost forgotten how nice-looking and truly original some of these discs are. Naturally, these thoughts soon gave way to the urge to write, so I thought I'd share some of my personal favourite disc art with you guys here at Giant Bomb. After a worried couple of hours debating whether or not it was wise to put my discs into my scanner, and a number of test runs with lesser-liked games (here's looking at you, Unlimited SaGa), these are the results:





I think my personal favourites are the Final Fantasy IX discs, featuring some beautiful concept art of the game's characters drawn by series stalwart Yoshitaka Amano. Although you probably can't quite make it out from the pictures on display, the level of detail in those drawings is incredible and really makes those discs something to admire. I also like the disc art for Shadow of the Colossus and ICO, as it complements the minimalist themes present in both games. I like the Vagrant Story disc art because it's simple, but effective. Unfortunately, I picked that up second-hand back when GAME used to mark their preowned stock with permanent markers, so there's a bit of black writing on the disc surface. It's a shame we don't often see this level of thought being put into most modern disc art. I included Lost Odyssey as a more recent example of interesting disc art, but for the most part I couldn't really choose anything from my Xbox 360 collection because all the art on the discs was identical to that on the game's box. I have a few other gems back at home, notably the Metal Gear Solid discs, but I don't currently have access to those so I can't scan them for your viewing pleasure.

Before I wrap things up, I guess I'd better let you all know what I've been playing since my last blog. First up is Final Fantasy V. I decided to play through this on the advice of Disgaeamad, as a means of dragging myself up out of the JRPG blues. While it was a little slow to start, the game has gradually become something very special in my eyes. The plot, which didn't really amount to much at first, has slowly turned itself around and improved to the point where it rivals some of my favourite Final Fantasy games. The characters are charming and really help to spur the player on at points when the story falters. I'm also a really big fan of the Job system; having loved it in Final Fantasy X-2 and the Final Fantasy Tactics games, it's nice to see where it really started becoming the infinitely flexible system it's known as. I've also played through Shadow of the Colossus for a second time, and started a third play-through of ICO. This is entirely down to a request from my increasingly game-intrigued girlfriend, who'd heard about Shadow of the Colossus and wanted to see it played. After playing through it, I let her know that ICO was developed by the same team and we started on that. Both games are incredible feats of design with some truly unique gameplay on offer. Playing both of Team ICO's previous games has also got me super-hyped for Project TRICO, even though I don't currently own a PS3.

Anyway, I think that about does it. Thanks for reading guys, see you around.


DanK

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Currently playing - Final Fantasy V (PS1)