Grand Theft Auto IIIII - HDD City Stories

Been replaying 4 and San Andreas over the past week in anticipation of the new title. Its an interesting experience. In some ways, playing San Andreas after so long and playing 4 along side it has given me a new appreciation for some of the quality of life improvements and under the hood improvements 4 went through. I've come to the conclusion that I look back at San Andreas and Vice City with a certain degree of rose tinted glasses that I think in retrospect probably made GTA 4 feel like a worst game than it actually was. It wasn't perfect, and a lot of things left out from SA to 4 would have been nice to see iterated upon, like the stats and physical training stuff, but at the same time, the sandbox aspects of 4, like driving, shooting, fighting, they're all so much better. So so much better.

For instance, keeping your guns after you die, while a causalization of the game in a way, is really fucking nice. There's a ridiculous amount of downtime if you fail a mission in San Andreas where you have to run back to buy new weapons or acquire new weapons before heading back to the mission, in 4 you keep your guns, and can immediately call a cab to take you right back to the mission. This cuts a shit load of superificial running around doing jack and shit out and is a huge quality of life improvement on the old mechanics.

Where I used to think 4 fell apart the most, the story, I really have changed my opinion as well. San Andreas has a better overarching story line, this is without doubt. CJ's story is fun, because its couched in a somewhat interesting time period and place in American history that's relevant to most people in their 20s to 30s (the age range that primarily the game was targetted towards) so it catches you and doesn't really let go. However, the actual mission storylines, and dialogues, are, for large part, better in 4 than San Andreas. Nico is a more likable character, you sympathize with him and his plight. Michelle really feels like a back stabbing bitch, Roman really comes across as an annoying family member, etc. Brucie is probably the most ridiculous character, and he isn't too outrageous. Whereas in San Andreas, 90% of the dialogue from Ryder Big Smoke et all is just "C'mon CJ, why's yous a busta!" for the first like 10 plus hours of the game. Its pretty stupid in retrospect.

Anyway, I guess my point is that 4 is not as bad in my mind as some people have made it out to be, and with Red Dead and Max Payne 3 both being relatively excellent games (some might disagree on MP3 but I thought it was a fantastic game personally) I'm pretty excited to see how 5 pans out. If I'm still able to play SA and 4 this many years later I expect 5 will give us a very solid title to play for years to come.

Eomer_sl said:

Anyone have any tips on getting San Andreas to work with Steam/Win7?

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It runs for me but I have to go into the task manager when I first start up the game and set affinity to one core only or the mouse will randomly stop responding at different times in the game. Also the newest patch simply won't let you do 1920x1080, have to revert back a build to enable it for some reason, Rockstar has never bothered to fix it.

Try setting compatibility for XP before starting the game, there's also some ideas out there on Steam forums and the like, but nothing seems to work 100% for everyone, so its more something you have to google around and troubleshoot.

There is one or two .dll files for directx (not sure of the names) that if your Win 7 are missing might make the game crash on startup. Win7 and SA are weird, some people have no problems, some have only minor ones, others like yourself can't get it to run and can't figure out why. Its weird.

The problem is Rockstar is selling the game on Steam but won't support it with any new patches, despite the fact that you know that shit sells during steam sales enough to warrant it.