After playing through The Puerto Rican Connection and Snow Storm, I have to ask...
WHY THE HELL AREN'T THERE CHECKPOINTS IN THIS GAME? I don't like driving all the way across the damn city every time I restart a mission...
Really, GTA IV gets so many things right, but then it has a few of these extremely irritating oversights...
Lack of checkpoints is probably the biggest mistake in the game. It's frustrated me, but I've watched others play and have it frustrate them far beyond that. Hell, even Niko unleashes anger when mission's are failed. It should really give you the option of completely restarting the mission or starting from the last checkpoint. I can understand if you reached a checkpoint and completely blew there health bar, you don't want to start from there everytime. But it's not an excuse not to have checkpoints. I really don't understand the decision.
Biggest flaw so far - The only people I feel NIko has an emotional connection to are Roman and Little Jacob. The rest, nothing. Yep, at some points in the story I've made emotional decisions, but
Dwayne ruins that by being a whiny bitch every time you hang out
.
Now, it seems I've done things out of sequence to how the game wants me to do them, so I'm sitting waiting for the final Pegorino mission, but have basically done none of the older McReary's missions; so in order to finish the game I have to
do all the older McReary bros. missions so I get to choose one of the brothers to kill which will trigger the funeral mission where a cut scene with Kate will presumably attempt to deepen my emotional relationship to her so I can feel even more guilty (yeah, right, why is Niko supposed to be interested in her again?) when she dies if I choose the revenge plot (which I will as there's no way I'm letting Roman die).
That is, to put it mildly, really fucking contrived.
R*'s insistance on scripted events over freedom has seriously let this game down, Tommy Vercetti's story was still the best of the series, and San Andreas had involving interactions without extreme contrivances. They've lost the comic irony even from GTAIII where you go therough the whole game basically to save Maria only to hear that gunshot at the end of the last cutscene where she won't shut up.
SO yeah, great concepts, fantastic world (more shops / clubs / hangouts inthe next one please!) but get rid of the scripted stuff and let the player go back to interacting with the characters how they want to, not how the designers want us to.
i'll chime in on the no checkpoint bitch fest as well. i decided to complete the game today and i'm at the finale (i'm pretty sure there wont be anything else after this) and i'll be damned if i havent played through this drawn out segment 4 times already to fail at the end.
i am not good at flying the pain in the ass helicopter
. i almsot dont care at this point, as far as i'm concerned the story is already wrapped up.
peligrino did me a favor by offing that annoying bitch. niko can do better
I can't believe all this bitching about no checkpoints. As far as I remember, GTA never had any mid mission checkpoints. The checkpoint is completing the mission. I haven't had to retry the same mission more than 3 times and think you all are complaining for the sake of complaining or are just terrible at the game.
I remember a time when there were no checkpoints at all ;-)
I can't believe all this bitching about no checkpoints. As far as I remember, GTA never had any mid mission checkpoints. The checkpoint is completing the mission. I haven't had to retry the same mission more than 3 times and think you all are complaining for the sake of complaining or are just terrible at the game.
I remember a time when there were no checkpoints at all ;-)
well even 3 times for these long missions SUCKS BALLS. who cares if the series has never had mid-mission checkpoints? it was a flaw in those too as far as i'm concerned
If there were checkpoints, you guys would be complaining that the game is too easy. I think the difficulty is perfectly fine like it is, without checkpoints.
The only mission that I had to restart more than twice was the last one, which is fine.
I can't believe all this bitching about no checkpoints. As far as I remember, GTA never had any mid mission checkpoints. The checkpoint is completing the mission. I haven't had to retry the same mission more than 3 times and think you all are complaining for the sake of complaining or are just terrible at the game.
I remember a time when there were no checkpoints at all ;-)
The other games were purer sandbox/free roam games. They gave you an objective and asked you to complete it. It can be done as quickly and effeciently as you make it. This one makes you go through so many scripted sequences it's insane not to have a checkpoint. I have to drive around after this guy, weaving through whatever loops they give me, nailing a guy on a motorcycle to no avail. And fail, then have to do the uneccesary, long, bullshit again. Real fun. It's like watching a cutscene over and over that you can't skip, except you can't put the controller down or you fail the mission.
While the lack of checkpoints is annoying, I can kind of appreciate them in that it makes the actual missions feel more intense, since you know you can't afford to screw up.
Totally agree. It's especially lame when the awkward control fucks you and you have to start over. Like when you're about to toss a grenade from cover and there's a slender pole in front of you, so you take excruciating care to aim the reticule away from the pole to make DAMN sure you don't hit the pole and then you toss it, and .... Niko throws the grenade RIGHT AT THE FUCKING POLE and you're dead.
Hey, does anyone know where the Pit of Doom is? I heard there's a construction area with a pit you can push pedestrians into and they can't get out, then you can drop in grenades for extra hilarity.
Kill playboy dude. Truuuuuust me. He turns out to be a major douche.
More specifically:
Remember. He's the one that called the hit first, Dwayne was only reacting.
Here's why you should choose to kill Playboy:
- Kill Playboy, and Dwayne is totally anguished about it, feels really bad. But he sticks by you, because you stuck by him.
- Kill Dwayne, and PBX tells you you're douche and never talks to you again and pretends like he didn't fucking ask you to kill his best friend, which, c'mon, he totally did.
Dwayne also has a really awesome perk, and if you kill PBX, you get his apartment.
Whereas if you do the reverse, you get practically nothing, only a little money.
Be aware that some only appear at certain times of the day, after you have finished certain main storyline missions, or after you have already done certain other random character missions.
Sho Nuff said:
Hey, does anyone know where the Pit of Doom is? I heard there's a construction area with a pit you can push pedestrians into and they can't get out, then you can drop in grenades for extra hilarity.
Has anyone with the xbox 360 version experienced freezing?
It's the first time I've seen it after 50 hours of playing. It's only a momentary freeze though - it'll freeze(music still going) for 10 seconds and then let me play for a bit and then freeze for 10 seconds and so on and so on. It's super annoying.
The Social Club hates me. A month after I got to 100% and I'm still seeing "Access Denied - 0%" for the 100% Club. Yet it allows me into the Story Gang and shows me my completion time. I sent an email, but I doubt anything will come of it. Bye bye collectible key to city .
I picked up the Special Edition today from BB (it's on sale for $69.99). The safety deposit box is sturdy, the soundtrack CD is being ripped to my computer as we speak, the duffel bag is decent and the art book is very nice. Though mine was bound upside down lol.
Throw me on the 'why no fucking checkpoints?!?' bandwagon. After losing on my third shot at Three Leaf Clover because of shitty AI and just being annoyed at game mechanics it's SOOO FUCKING ANNOYING to have go through all the shit again to get to where I was (essentially running from the cops).
I am not going to bother with the next GTA if this isn't changed.
That's the one that involves a cross-island bike chase right? I managed to beat that mission on my first try, which means i thought it was pretty awesome.
Finally beat the main story. Took me 60 hours. I went with
revenge & killed Dimitri
It was an alright ending. Nothing special, but the last mission was a lot of fun.
Kate dying on the other hand was completely laughable. Her character was severely underdeveloped. I didn't care at all that she died. It actually amused me quite a bit
My biggest complaint is that the main story sucked. Seriously, there was absolutely no main story progression from the 10 hour mark until just before the end(about the 58 hour mark for me). This was a looooooong time to go without anything interesting happening. Of course I wasn't constantly working on the story for 60 hours, but that's mainly because nothing exciting was happening to motivate me to actually do the missions.
I was really excited about the main story for the first 10 hours.
The whole killing Vlad story arch and Dimitri's betrayal and learning of Niko's past was excellent!
So much potential. But then they do absolutely nothing with it!
That person that you're looking for the the ENTIRE GAME? Oh, he just becomes another random guy that you get to kill. How dissapointing.
I suppose there was some story development, such as
Finding out Florian wasn't the guy and whatnot. But that was so laughable and cheesy that it just didn't seem to fit with the serious tone of the main story.
I can't say Rockstar has ever been great storytellers, but I was expecting something at least on par with Vice City(my favorite story in the series). Man, I just hate to see so much potential go to waste. A damn shame.
Aside from the main story, I really did enjoy the game a lot. Most of the characters were likable and I felt a real connection with a few of them, such as Packie and Little Jacob. My favorite part of the game is simply exploring the city. Rockstar did a fantastic job of getting the look and feel of a city down. I absolutely love moving around the city and just taking in the atmosphere. Incredible. There might not be a whole lot to do in the city, but that doesn't really matter to me when it looks this good.
I plan on going for 100% now. I won't know how it ranks up with the other GTA games until I'm done with that.
When you save inside your safehouse, you obviously restart inside that safehouse. But as far as I can tell, if your last save was an autosave, you will start at the nearest safehouse to where the autosave took place.
So when your last autosave took place, if you were closer to the Bohan safehouse than to the
A patch is up for both the PS3 and Xbox 360. It deals mostly with multiplayer issues. Fixes and changes:
1. Fixed an issue where players were unable to enter or exit vehicles in GTA Race.
2. Fixed an issue where scripted vehicles were causing games to unexpectedly crash.
3. Improved reliability and frequency of PS3 online leaderboard updates.
4. Fixed a rare hang some players encountered when moving from a Race or GTA Race lobby into gameplay.
5. Fixed a hang that would occur when players were switching teams during the countdown in the lobby.
6. Fixed an issue where players were able to get ridiculously high scores from Cops 'n Crooks matches.
7. Changed GTA Race and Race so that the last player remaining always receives a reward of $250.
8. Fixed an issue where spectating players would prevent the game from finishing.
9. Fixed an issue where players were unable to spectate in Round 2 of Cops 'n Crooks games.
10. Changed countdown timer in lobby so that it no longer resets when new players join a game.
11. Changed the kick option so that kicked players are no longer brought back to single player.
Some of us don't have PS3s with which to enjoy MGS4's awesomeness But, yeah, I haven't played much GTAIV in the last month. Maybe 2 hours total. Compared that to 4 hours of MGS2 (yes 2) yesterday. I can't stop until I get the stealth suit and beat the Tanker chapter on European Extreme lol.
It's amazing how feverish everyone was over this game..and then it came out and there was a huge back lash..and then everyone became burnt out.
It's like watching an amazing porn, climaxing and then sitting there, expended, wondering why the hell you were so excited in the first place and then falling asleep.
I still love the game and am glad I bought it. But I really wanted to play online. Reading about the online modes before the game was released convinced me that I just had to have the game. But... I took too long in the single player. (Wanted to beat it first.) Now it seems like the online community has died, and basically all the people who want to play it for funsies have quit thanks to the bad design choices and the assholes on Live. \:
That and my pigeons are glitched. Fuck those pigeons. Fuck them to hell and back. ):<
Just when I thought I was sick of this game, I popped it back in due to sheer boredom and ended up getting into huge firefights with cops and cruising around Algonquin for like...5 hours. It really still is fun even after playing it for 70 hours.
I still love the game and am glad I bought it. But I really wanted to play online. Reading about the online modes before the game was released convinced me that I just had to have the game. But... I took too long in the single player. (Wanted to beat it first.) Now it seems like the online community has died, and basically all the people who want to play it for funsies have quit thanks to the bad design choices and the assholes on Live. \:
That and my pigeons are glitched. Fuck those pigeons. Fuck them to hell and back. ):<
This. I got up to the 50th pigeon only to find it wasn't their. It was in a totally out of the way place, so I know I didn't kill it before. It just wasn't there.
Maybe people are getting sick of the post GTA story dick-around routine. I personally still play online once or twice a week in team deathmatch and free mode, anyone who wants to have some late night firefights on Live should send me a voicemail.
Selling out to those fucks Pegerino and Dimitri, getting betrayed again, and Roman being killed...just seems wrong. Getting bloody revenge on Dimitri instead, with that badass shoot-out on the boat, seems a lot more satisfying.
Holy shit, I was playing online 2 days ago. Cops 'n Crooks to be specific and JUST before I got killed by an ambush of 3 cops, I managed to take one guy's life and I got the "Kill a Rockstar employee in an online match" achievement! I thought I'd never see the day..
EDIT: Well, I guess it's not that hard after all.. Found this on google:
An achievement which I always thought in a way was hilarious in that only a mere fraction of total players who play the Xbox 360 version of GTA IV will only be able to get it is the "Let Sleeping Rockstars Lie" one. Per the instructions, to get this achievement, you need to kill a Rockstar Games developer during a ranked multiplayer match.
I recently started playing the Xbox 360 version GTA IV, and during my second online match (Team Deathmatch), I killed a player, and to my surprise, I got the achievement at hand. I had heard before that this achievement is actually viral, in that if you kill anyone with this achievement, you as well will get it.
.