The Singaporean Gamer

Image source: http://www.gamespot.com/users/Nicholai69/show_blog_entry.php?topic_id=m-100-25574435

First off, let me start by saying I have only played up til the 3rd safe house. I am, by no means, anywhere near completion. This is because of the huge time constraint in my life. Having a regular job and a fiancée does not bode well for playing such huge games (not that I’m complaining, of course).

Hence, this will not be a very good review, if you can call it that. I would rather much prefer “impressions” or “take”. Because, let’s face it, I’m not much of a writer, nor am I that good a reviewer. Attempting to give my opinion on a game of this magnitude is very overwhelming for a stooge like me.

Anyway, during the course of writing this review, which took me about a week, I realised that I may have been too verbose. I am definitely not willing to backspace all the nonsense I have spouted thus far, so I’m splitting this up into 2 parts.

(Wow! My first ever 2-part review!)

1) DRM

Image source: http://torrentfreak.com/anti-drm-t-shirt-design-contest-the-winners-are/

In order to play GTA 4, you will need to, at the very least, perform an online activation, sign up for a Games For Windows Live account and have the disc in the drive. Also, there is this Rockstar Games Social Club program which has to be pre-installed, ie. you must install it before installing the game. It acts as a launcher-cum-news-grabber-cum-multiplayer-thingmajig. It will lie in the background, doing God-knows-what, and is by default set to automatically run when Windows starts. I wonder which executive IDIOT came up with all these!?

Of course, you will need to sign up for this more-useless-than-useful service. If you choose not to, the game will nag and nag at you until in your exasperation, you will. Yes, it actually nags in-game. For me, I got tired of the nagging, so I set everything to automatic sign-in and my disc is permanently in the drive. Right now, I’m researching for ways on ripping it and mounting it on a
virtual drive. I should save up and get myself Daemon Tools Pro Advanced with the vIDE drive.

2) System Requirements

Take a look at the minimum, recommended and other requirements from the Rockstar GTA 4 PC support page. For the purposes of saving space and words, I am not going to quote them here.

I have absolutely no idea why Internet Explorer or Adobe Flash in required. The minimum specs seem to already be the recommended specs, or even exceed them, for a lot of the current crop of games. And forgive my ignorance, but this is the first time I am seeing a quad-core CPU making its appearance on the recommended specs. The amount of hard drive space needed is really asinine. I think only 1% of the people in the world can actually play this. Which is dumb from a marketing standpoint. Is it really impossible to make a game with nice graphics on a playable setting which runs on mainstream graphics cards?

3) Performance

The game is a mighty resource hog. My graphical settings are set quite low so I could run it properly on my gaming rig, which I consider to be semi-powerful: an Intel E6750, 4GB ram, ATI Radeon 4850 512MB and Vista 64 SP1. However, starting the game is still a slow and frustrating process, enough for me to fire up Bejeweled on my iPhone, so that I can be entertained while waiting for my game to actually load. On those specs, I am running the game semi-comfortably on these settings:

To me, these are fairly low graphical settings. Even then, while making quick turns, or if I jerk the mouse too much, the game screen will blank out parts in white, supposedly because it is unable to draw them on the screen. GTA 4 is obviously not optimized for the PC. The lame excuse that RockStar gave was that it was for “future-proofing”. Yup, this is a game that is so unbelievably advanced that no current generation hardware can run it at maximum settings. Which makes no business sense whatsoever to me. But hey, I’m no businessman. I don’t have an MBA or wear a suit to the office. So what do I know?

With such settings, I get a paltry 20-25 fps while driving. I may need to scale it down some more, since it does give me a bit of a headache sometimes when the screen stutters too much.

The Games For Windows Live client is built in directly into the game. I feel that it is quite amazingly done. The way it can be brought up and hidden away is very seamless. And because of it, I am curious. Did RockStar commit a lot of time and developers into doing that, so much so that the performance issues got sidelined? It wouldn’t surprise me, since I am working in the software industry. Managers and executives always love to see more features into their product, and some issues will certainly be moved into the backlog, almost certainly never to see the light of day again. In this case, I could really envision the GFWL client being a top priority for the executive management at RockStar. It has community features, allows RockStar to monitor their player habits, bring RockStar in bed with Microsoft and act as another copy-protection system. The opportunity cost? Getting the game to actually work on normal PC hardware.

Ok, maybe this first part is a tad depressing to read. Hopefully, the second part will perk you up a notch.

Tags: GTA 4, review

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 27th, 2008 at 5:31 pm and is filed under Gaming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.