Sunday, June 25, 2006

GTA:SA: Assets

Gave the Roboi's Food Mart delivery mission a shot last night. First three are pretty easily doable, but I flubbed the fourth. Half-way through, however, while pedaling slow-a-ly up a hill, I started thinking to myself that GTA's developers can't possibly be so dense as not to have added a "pedal harder, fool" command to the otherwise pretty neat bike controls. My first guess was to Track & Field the "go forward" button. Success; CJ was Lancing it up the hill.

Did I miss that in the initial on-screen directions?

In other news, I finished up Burning Desire. Couldn't throw those cocktails worth a crud, though. Ended up tossing them nearly pointblank and running to the Cluckin' Chicken twice. Pretty sorry, but it worked. Figured out a trajectory that worked for the last two, and it was a breeze.

Saving Denise was another matter. All that fire & smoke pretty much brought my Radeon Xpress integrated graphics to a crawl. Feeeuhn times.

Also did the Doberman mission. A fairly enjoyable addition to GTA that makes it much more Civ or RTS like, almost Sim City-esque. Getting the asset dollars is better than a kick in the face too. Might have to go roll up on another block later, yo.

I did notice when I started playing recently that I (as CJ) was a bit bored and wondered what there was to pick between to do. On the way out of the Ganton house, I remember thinking to myself as I glanced at the TV, "Man, I don't want to play those dumb video games. Maybe I can jack a car and go run some robbery missions or drop off some more Roboi packages." Unf. a somewhat sick feeling when those are your conditioned "recreational" responses.

I also noticed that the Roboi deliveries are, sadly, pretty true to life. I used to work downtown in a relatively urban area, and remember seeing from the second floor window a number of bike runs from the local convenience store down the just as convenient one-way streets (advantageous as cops only come from one direction, and come slowly. Makes the lookouts' jobs easier). For the bikers, on the way out there was usually a brown bag in the drink holder; on the way back, nothing. The bike made a number of runs each morning. Lots of, um, thirsty people willing to pay for the delivery of their coke, ur, Coke there. Kinda scary.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Man, I love biking in that game. The freedom of movement once you have high enough stamina and bike stats is really nice. Its like a whole new world since you can jump over obsticals and climb any nonvertical surface. I swear I could bike forever if there were a way to get a walkman or something, so you could listen to the radio.

ruffin said...

I'm relatively partial to biking in town. Jumping over semi tractors is a fun trick, even if so unbelivable as to shatter the game's otherwise impressive [relative] realism.

Still, on the freeway, fast *anything* is much better. Not real sure why so many game mags thought big was better. It's neat, but I'm tired of driving all over the Badlands.