Caltrops - Gamerasutra





	[quote name="Fortinbras"][quote name="Lizard_King"]How is having the option to capture a safehouse which offers a number of useful features not automatically superior to the option to chase pigeons in return for jack shit? You don't "need" all one million of either, but the difference is JC gives you something for every attempt you make. GTA4 invested its time in making TV shows I couldn't care less about and NPCs to aggravate me. Neither of those is mandatory either, but there very presence when there could have been actual things to do in the game pushes them beyond merely not being a feature and makes them aggressively irritating. [/quote] I remember getting to insta-travel to a safehouse in Just Cause. There was never any incentive to switch weapons, your pistols or an assault rifle looted off a dead mexican did just fine. And I can't ever remember a safehouse in Just Cause giving me a useful vehicle other than a fucking commercial helicopter, and I only had to unlock one safehouse for that. Everything else I stole on site, after an aggravating 15 minute helicopter ride that couldn't be skipped. GTA IV could skip the tedious ride across town! [quote] GTA4 is very similar to what someone here said about Slumdog Millionaire: it's a game for people who don't actually like sandbox games, they just want a hint of it while some shit that wouldn't have made it off the cutting room floor of a bad Shield season (all of them) is strung together around them. It's a complete betrayal of all of the gameplay advances that Rockstar has made up until this point. All of the games I listed range from low mediocre to very good, but they do not compromise the small margin of player freedom that this genre is supposed to encourage in the service of the bloated ego trip of their occasionally interrupted cutscene. [/quote] Did you ever stop to think that maybe this devotion to some Platonic ideal of a sandbox game is what makes the ones you listed so thoroughly unenjoyable to other people? In your mind if a game sets out to make itself a sandbox game and succeeds, well it doesn't matter whether it's an exercise in tedium like Just Cause or thoroughly uninspiring like Saints Row II, it succeeded! GTAIV broke the covenant! Or maybe your idea of a sandbox game is just stupid. I went to Just Cause looking for the same thing you were and didn't see it. I saw a shitty compromise between GTA and Mercenaries that fucking failed at both. [/quote]