:roll:
this one’s mind isn’t even worth devouring…
Sheesh. That’s three guys I’ve noticed lately who lack sunshine. What’s the deal?
It’s just games. No need to get snippy and defensive.
Was I the only one to experience severe translucency problems in the game? I mean around the edges of trees and fences and whatnot I can see through everything behind those trees and fences. That was at least as annoying the car management to me. GTA III had a similar problem, but it was much, much less pronounced than it was in VC. I can’t wait to find out what sacrifices they have to make in Andreas to make room for all of the new stuff. :(
Same can be said for Halo. A direct port of console code with ZERO bugfixes is a crappy port. Whee, it takes advatage of a keyboard and higher resolutions! How that speaks of massive efforts!
Cough [size=2]no co-op[/size] cough [size=2]pixel shader performance problems[/size]
[edit] Cough I’m incapable of detecting sarcasm. Oops.
I disagree, but that’s only because I think people are talking about whether the actual translation to a different platform is good, versus the game itself being good.
The Ur-Quan Masters is a great port because it takes great pain to accurately reproduce the experience one would have on the PC that one does on the 3D0, having the same strengths and weaknesses as the original.
A good port is one that recreates the performance and experience of the original on another platform, and in this sense GTA:VC is a good port. Halo is a crappy port because the performance is worse than on the original even on superior hardware.
My thoughts on why Halo was a crappy port were more along the lines of how The PC version completely failed to take advantage of the PC hardware. Xbox Halo was made with the Xbox’s different video pipeline (or whatever) in mind, while the PC version obviously ignored that difference. GTA3 and Vice City make that kind of mistake also. It doesn’t have to run worse on superior hardware to be a crappy port, it just has to not run better.
There are things like the frame limiter that had to be on in order for the game to load areas properly or even load a saved game at all, and the unfixed bugs that were well known on the PS2 version. Much like Halo, it was a PS2 game shoehorned into the PC format that needlessly suffered from its cousin’s console limitations. With the frame limiter, you can see that they made a really half-assed effort by including it but doing nothing to fix the problems that arose from it. They had hardware that was greater than the PS2 with the PC port, but failed to take advantage of it (disappearing cars). They had a format that allowed for the fixing of bugs, but didn’t (Hilary’s car falling through the street).
PC Halo takes advantage of the PC. For Heaven’s sake people, it’s still the only way to play Halo online without having to fake out your Xbox with software on your PC.
–Dave
I know, I know, in the accepted form of internet flaming I should’ve just questioned his intelligence and\or breeding and thrown in one of those idiotic roll eyes emoticons.
I’ll do better next time, just for you. ;)
Back on topic, I liked the game, I’ve played far worse ports, and I enjoyed Sam Jones entertaining litttle write up of some of it’s drawbacks.
They also had a generous lead time between the PS2 and the PC releases that should have been used to deal with these issues. Does the Xbox version suffer from the same bugs? I’m guessing yes.
Yeah I love the stupid disappearing cars in the Xbox, used to drive me nuts on the autotheft missions.