Friday, January 7, 2011

The Most Irritating Flaws in the GTA series.


The Grand Theft Auto series, published and developed by Rockstar has always been one of the most famous video game series ever. Having played almost all of the games in the series, even I can say that the GTA games are fabulous and can keep you glued to your screen for hours at a stretch. These games have become a cult classic with it's different open world or Sandbox style approach. These games have often also generated controversies for extreme violence , immoral activities you need to carry out in the games, crude references to a particular race ie racism, and also for including sexual content. However, the most astonishing fact was that almost all the games in the series shipped with some major bugs and glitches. Rockstar later fixed many of them in later versions but still, I don't know why the games were not tested well enough. Well some glitches in the games proved to be beneficial to the gamer since the gamer could take advantage of these to get into an area which would usually be unlocked until you complete a certain mission.. For example, in Vice City, you can use your high bike jumps or can use a boat beneath a water bridge ( the entrance to the bridge is blocked because you are not supposed to get to the other side of Vice City before a particular mission) to actually get to the other side of the bridge and thus the other side of the city before the game would allow you to . The developers must not have thought of this. However, bugs and glitches of course have their problems. Sometimes you tend to fail a mission for no fault of your's. In Vice City, when you do the ambulance mission where you have to move about the city to pick up patients and bring them back to the hospital within a limited time period, you normally fail the mission if you don't get the patients to the hospital on time or if you accidently kill a patient by crushing him under the ambulance while stopping near him to pick him up. However, it happened with me TWICE that I stopped near the patient, but another car which seemed to have lost control ran over and killed the patient before it could get to the ambulance. And I failed the mission. That is extremely irritating. Apart from that, there is a glitch in GTA3 during the mission called Uzi Money where in order to fulfill the mission you need to drive around a particular area and shoot and destroy a particular number of Purple Nines ( A particular car model) but sometimes a glitch does not allow any Purple Nines to spawn in that area. You get simply stuck in that mission . Of course there are ways to get around the glitch like loading an old save game or a glitch fix can be got too. Apart from that, in GTA Vice City there is an extremely funny and amusing bug which a close friend of mine encountered while we were playing Vice City together. It happens when you mount a Sanchez and instead of riding the bike, you run while on it, taking the bike with you. See for yourself. You won't get this one if you don't see it.

There are lots of other bugs and glitches throughout the whole series. In most of the GTA games, you often see sights like pedestrians running into a wall to and froth (dashing into the wall, falling back and then again running into the wall again repeatedly). There are bridges and walls through which you can see your bike wheels go through. This happened a lot of times with me. In GTA San Andreas, there is a bridge in the area called Los Flores. The sides of the bridge actually can easily be driven through. Thus the bridge appears not to be solid. Add to all this the unreal ism as in if you commit a crime like running someone over in front of a cop, the cops will be after you but if another car does the same right under the nose of a cop, they don't even look twice.
Let me narrate another extremely irritating experience of mine while playing GTA4. There is this mission (Escuela of the streets) where you are supposed to trail a car without the driver noticing that you are. And you can't even get too close, or else he gets spooked up and you fail the mission. You need a maintain a distance between your car and his car. It so happened that there was some sort of a traffic jam or something, the car I was trailing got blocked by another car which didn't move at all. I waited for more than 20 minutes but nothing budged. I tried to move forward and as soon as I came a little close, I failed the mission. I started from the previous savegame and AGAIN it was the same thing. The car got stuck, I couldn't trail the car anymore and I was stranded. I had to load from a different savegame to get around this problem. These sort of things are in PLENTY in the entire GTA series. I just pointed out the ones I encountered, there are many more you can find if you surf the web. I wonder why Rockstar doesn't test the games well. Perhaps it's because they know that they have already created quite a brand with GTA and their games will sell no matter what. But a game without such flaws would be better all the same.

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