Rockstar Makes Amazing Worlds, But Do The Games Inside Live Up To Them? (Late to the Party: Grand Theft Auto V)

As of this writing my save file says I’m maybe halfway through the main story in Grand Theft Auto V but I’ve decided to go ahead and make this week’s post about it and my other recent experiences with Rockstar games since Red Dead Redemption 2 is about to drop. From those experiences and the reviews of RDR2 going out right now I’ve figured out that Rockstar’s main strong suit has been its lovingly-crafted virtual landscapes, I just don’t know about everything else in these games.

I only owned a GameCube when Grand Theft Auto III, Grand Theft Auto Vice City, and Grand Theft Auto San Andreas came out so I was pretty late to the franchise and Rockstar games in general. I understood they popularized sandbox games but that was about all I understood of their appeal. When I finally tried San Andreas around 2006 or something I marveled at the setting and characters but found the controls unbearable, as  I wrote when I came back to finish the game last year. I’m having a much easier time enjoying GTAV because its controls are more serviceable, but I can’t help but compare its mission design to other similar games.

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Late to the Party: Star Wars Dark Forces

Next up on my list of classic shooters after finishing Hexen was the first Star Wars: Dark Forces game. I went in knowing very little about it, pretty much expecting a Star Wars-flavored Doom clone. What I got was a shooter oddly ahead of its time, incorporating aspects of different eras of first person shooters that would follow it.

Late to the Party: Heretic and Hexen 1

I’ve been on these games for the last few months but I recently finished the first two parts of Raven Software’s “Serpent Riders” series, Heretic and Hexen: Beyond Heretic. In my journey through old first person shooters, these two feel like an interesting milestone in FPS design.

Late to the Party: Kingdom Come Deliverance

This past week I finished the main story of Kingdom Come Deliverance from Warhorse studios and found it pretty absorbing, but I also think it absolutely isn’t a game for everyone. It’s structurally very similar to Skyrim but Warhorse didn’t make it for anywhere close as mainstream an audience.

Probably the most important distinction which does the most to set Kingdom Come apart and might be a main reason I enjoyed it so much is that, well… it’s a detective adventure game.

Late To The Party: Forza Motorsport

I never got the chance or never got around to playing any of Microsoft and Turn 10’s Forza Motorsport games until they started releasing them on Windows. And by “releasing them on Windows,” I mean making free versions of them available for me to try out — the free-to-play Forza 6 Apex and the recently released demo for Forza Horizon 3.

LTTP Call of Duty: Black Ops III Campaign

And with the campaign of Black Ops III, I’m finally as caught up on Call of Duty as I care to be. A copy of the game actually came with my PS4, and I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with it. If I do keep it around the campaign will probably be the least of the reason. I’m not saying that to put the game down, but it seems like Treyarch’s style of COD has developed in a direction completely different form what made me enjoy the franchise back in the days of Call of Duty 2 and Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.

Late to the Party: Call of Duty Advanced Warfare

My re-acquaintance with Call of Duty took me through the singleplayer campaign of Advanced Warfare this weekend after finishing Ghosts and rather enjoying it despite what a lot of people think about Infinity Ward these days. Seeing as Sledgehammer Games worked with IW on Modern Warfare 3, I guess I should have expected Advanced Warfare — Sledgehammer’s first lead project, to mostly glean from IW’s design playbook.

LTTP Call Of Duty Ghosts: In Defense Of Infinity Ward

With a PS4 I can start renting current games again, so I decided to take a look at the last few Call of Duty campaigns which I’d missed, starting with Ghosts. All I’d heard was that some people had panned it, but they’d also panned Modern Warfare 3 from the same team, which I actually liked a lot. It’s sort of an ongoing disagreement I seem to have with a lot of fans and critics of the franchise.

Basically, I think the games from Infinity Ward after Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare get a lot of undue criticism. I get why Black Ops became so popular, but there are things about the Infinity Ward games I feel a lot of people ignore, and Ghosts is no exception.

Late To The Party: Quake

This one is quite late for Quake’s 20th anniversary, but some things happened, and here we are. I tried to pitch a “first-time Quake player” anniversary article and couldn’t really sell an angle on it, so I guess I’m just gonna put down some of my general thoughts on the game here.

I’ve been trying to do my classic first-person-shooter odyssey more or less in release order to get a good sense of the technological progress that occurred. I had to skip a few planned games (to which I plan to return) when the Quake anniversary came up. Nonetheless I was still interested in seeing why this game seemed to be revered as one of the top FPSs ever made.

Late To The Party: Rise of the Triad

I’ve actually been playing the original Rise of the Triad on and off for weeks but never really got around to writing about it until now. Of all the old school first person shooters I’ve tried on this journey through the genre, this has got to be the goofiest.