Picked up the PC version of GTA:VC this week. I played it on the PS2 when it was released, but it was only a tenner and I was curious to see how it would look and play compared to the playstation version, and because I’ve been a huge GTA fan ever since the first game on PC.
While the graphics are a lot crisper, and the controls are much, much tighter with mouselook/WSAD (e.g. I did the RC Plane race and won it on the first attempt), I was very disappointed to see some of the annoyances from the PS2 version not only present on the PC, but actually worse.
I’m talking specifically about NPC car spawning. On the PS2, memory constraints limited the number and type of AI vehicles that could exist on screen at once, and they used various workarounds to cope with it, such as clearing out cars that move out of your field of view, and a preponderance to spawn new cars of the same type the player is using. Cars that you’ve used get a certain amount of persistence, so you can get out of one and come back to it and it’ll still be there, but all the others seem to have a shorter lifetime in memory than a mayfly.
On the PC version, you can spin your viewpoint around 360 degrees a few times, and see entirely new sets of cars appearing in the roads. It’s very disconcerting. Additionally, the code that chooses new cars to spawn seems very out of balance, or inclined to get itself in a knot. I jacked an Infernus (Lamborghini) and drove up to the North Point Mall car park to do the RC plane race. Every car on the way up, and every car in the multi-storey car park was an Infernus. That’s screwed up. With all the system resources available to the PC, especially in comparison to the PS2, they could have at least improved these behaviours to be more realistic rather than less. What are they doing with all the extra memory? This is on an Athlon 2800XP / 1gb RAM / 9800pro system.
So. Sloppy with no napkin. I’m half expecting to have the game reformat my C: drive if I try to save in the Ice Cream depot. I’m also a bit worried about GTA: San Andreas now. If they’ve added all this extra stuff into the game like they’ve said, we can expect to see cars spawning and disappearing right in front of us.
So. Sloppy with no napkin. I’m half expecting to have the game reformat my C: drive if I try to save in the Ice Cream depot.
You’re crazy - Vice City is a dream port. You couldn’t possibly be overstating your 10 dollar gripe more (leaving the PS2 car algorithm intact on the PC version is the same as your computer being destroyed) unless you claimed that your PC then grew cybernetic spider legs and arachno-raped your wife. Gimme a break.
Yeah thats the most annoying thing with VC, for some reason it didn’t bother me in GTA 3 PC. Lets hope for the next one they make the car “spawn in” distance at least equal to looking forward so you don’t have that car disappearing just cause you turned your back to it.
Also I wish they would include a slider for traffic density on the pc version, like the old Midtown Madness games.
But since they are porting from a PS2 version it would need to be the same. Lets hope in the GTA after San Andreas they develop it for the Xbox or something with better hardware.
For the record, the car thing bothered me too, if only because sometimes you’d see some amazing car that you just had to have pass you by in the other direction, you do a yooey at 90 mph to speed after it, only to discover it is gone or (worse yet) now passing you again in the opposite direction. That’s about the only bad thing I can think of in the entire port, though.
Err, that bit was a joke with a touch of hyperbole, but feel free to run away with your imagination. Perhaps throw in a complaint that comparing the two is like “apples and oranges”.
Much of the port is good - the graphics are vastly improved as you’d expect, especially the view distance, but the car algorithm sucks. And I’m not sure it was ported intact. I ran the PC and PS2 versions side by side for a while (no, not a scientific test), and the PS2 version seems to have a greater persistence for cars than the PC does. Given that it’s central to the gameplay, it’s hardly a small problem. A “dream port” would improve these behaviours, not exaggerate their flaws.
And I’m not complaining about the money either - I said quite clearly that I’d had my fun with the PS2 version, and I only bought it for PC out of curiosity and because it was cheap.
So even though the graphics are better, the controls are better, and everything else is exactly the same except for the car problem it’s suddenly a ‘crappy port’? :roll: Good Job.
