Friday, February 24, 2006

Grand Theft Auto: Addict

I finally get it.
by AC - permalink


So I ran by the local Walmart on my way home from work this morning to pick up Halo PC. I intentionally left home with only 25 bucks in my wallet because I missed a couple days work this week with chronic migrains and I didn't want to tempt myself with the $40 Call of Duty 2 (see the comments to this post). But there were no more Halo's. Walmart was Halo-less. I wavered for a while, tempted to buy the United Offensive expansion pack for Call of Duty, but I've been dealing with some visual anomalies with Quake 3 Engine games lately, and I just didn't want to deal with that. So I picked up GTA: Vice City for ten bucks.

First things first. I stand by my stance that the GTA games look like shit on the consoles. I will never back off that point. On the PC, however, the visuals get upgraded to "mediocre." At 1280x1024x32, even the max draw distance is way too short, models are blocky, and buildings are all blurry and rectangular. But force AA to 6 and AF to 16, and things look up somewhat. The framerate stays at 60-plus on my box (AMD64 3500+, 1GB 3200 DDR, ATI X800 XL 256MB), gameplay is still tight and fluid. There are a lot of little things that annoy me about GTR, but I'm fucked if it still isn't pretty damned addictive. For the first couple hours I honestly didn't know what was going on or what, exactly, I was supposed to be doing, but it was still way too much fun.

I'm still planning on posting complete rundowns of how I've optimized performance for all those newer games on this midrange rig. I might save it for when that new Google pages web service goes live, because it should allow for about a hundred megs of free webspace for screenshots, etc.

Oh, and I picked up Troy used on DVD the other day. Not bad, but not great. Still worth owning for great scenes from Peter O'Toole. Also, General Veers is in it. Look for him, he's in there.

1 comment:

Australian internet service provider said...

Based on records, GTA updates are one of the most searched games in the internet.