![]() ![]() To drive through parts of Los Angeles listening to N.W.A., then Waylon Jennings, then The Cult, to catch a sunset to Queen's Radio Gaga, goof around to The Petshop Boys' West End Girls, stumble into the Latinx electronica of East Los FM or sink into the wavey, operatic, dream-big vibes of Small Faces's Ogden's Nut Gone Flake is to do something more than just role play or poke fun. GTA's radio stations are infamous for their pastiche of talk radio and news (albeit not without the odd direct hit one news broadcaster after I finished a particularly violent Franklin mission: "The police have called for calm, and responded by flying helicopters over poor neighbourhoods all night long in a show of community spirit.") But beyond that they're something human, sincere, true. #PIXEL 3 GRAND THEFT AUTO V IMAGE PC#Note that this is taken from the current PC version, not next-gen. More than eight years on and utterly unmatched in something more than just vibe. It's where its soundtrack goes beyond a collection of bangers and into something assembled, by a team of half a dozen people, with extraordinary craft. This is where GTA's world - all the more of a systemic marvel in the wake of the Cyberpunks and Watch Dogs that came since - steps out of its machine-like ruleset to feel genuinely alive. Their ability to see the world in a way that recognises little things and to focus on them, the incidental moments that scream humanity when you put them in a game - a game that, in GTA's case, is also viciously inhuman at the same time. This is where the people at Rockstar are masters. It's just a little touch, a human quirk of motion capture and animation, a step away from catch-all photorealism and into observation. It's barely there, not obvious enough to be a joke. He gets off that sunlounger and stumbles, just catching his back foot on it as he tries to climb across. Even the way Michael gets up from a sunlounger in one early cutscene stands out to me now, returning to the story. It's ingrown hairs on Michael's bare calf, interactions in the street, different police responses depending on where you are. It wants to draw your eye, to highlight and direct. ![]() Games like GTA give the impression of a developer that wants to include everything, to recapture the world exactly as it is, but GTA itself doesn't. This is Rockstar's approach and the approach of almost every other megabudget game in the years after GTA5, driven forwards by more powerful consoles, more efficient engines, exponentially more money in the system.īut GTA5's size is focused and deliberate, targeted detail over detail for its own sake. This way says the world feels more real because it just clearly looks and sounds more like the real thing. The other is the polar opposite: maximalism and literalist detail. One is that brushstroke, pixel-arty method of minimalism, impressionism, conceptualism - the games that give you just enough to subconsciously build the world yourself in your own head, and nothing more. ![]() There are really two ways games do the sense-of-place thing. Los Santos is conjured up through Rockstar's superlative attention and craft - craft that comes at an extraordinary human cost, lest we forget. Games are about places more than anything else, the complete ground-up construction of a universe and the magic of making you believe you're really in it, and GTA5 still has the greatest sense of place of anything I've played. Part of me wonders if video games should just accept that their satire will only get through to players if they give up and write it in giant letters on the wall. Yes, Grand Theft Auto 5 is misanthropic and cynical and tonally all over the place, but it's also much more than that. The temptation, basically, is to label it as misanthropic and move on - especially in the face of the kind of breathless, exceptionalist coverage Rockstar games can inspire (recall the rise-and-fall of the word "filmic"). after he discovers Nietzsche and responds to getting caught driving his parents' car with: "God is dead." The Joey Barton phase of existential philosophy). To start and stop with the way it chases Scorsese and misses The Sopranos (Michael's mid-life angst is clearly inspired by Tony S, but GTA5 itself often feels like Anthony Jnr. The temptation, justifiably, is to look at GTA5's dated, equal-opportunity-roasting approach to humour, the uniquely teenage smugness and simplicity of its worldview - the kind we all probably had at some point, where everyone but you's a fool or a sheep, especially your parents, your teachers, the politicians, the cops - and reduce the entire game to just that. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |