Retroplay, Grand Theft Auto Vice City (Level 3)

Introduction

Welcome to Retroplay! This is a new permanent addition to the Levelling Up that focuses on timeless classic games. What qualify as a timeless classic? A timeless classic is not only a great game when it was first released but it must be enjoyable and fun even by today's standards.  While there plenty of good new releases every year, classic games still have its charm and possess a certain flair that the modern high budgeted titles do not have.

In this Retroplay, I will be bringing back memories from the orange skies and sandy white beaches of Grand Theft Auto Vice City.

The game is not as mild as the pink colour suggested.

Gameplay

Even though the game is 11 years old now, the core mechanics of the game is still very familiar to those who only played the newer entry to the series. It involves a protagonist that is entangled in the world of crime syndicates and has to complete missions that is set in an open world, typically the size of a metropolitan. There will be side missions that can be completed for bonuses when you are not engaged in the main storyline.

What primarily set GTA Vice City apart from any other game in the series is its setting. It is set in the titular city which is inspired by Miami in the 1980s. This is a far cry from the uninspired and generic theme that many contemporary games features. From the first moped ride with Michael Jackson's Billie Jean blaring on the stereo to the A-Team inspired missions and characters, the game oozes atmosphere. The radio stations in the game also vastly contributed to the entire feel of the game. Memorable hits from Hall & Oates, Laura Branigan and Aneka makes the driving between missions highly enjoyable while faux talk shows and advertisements will sure to give you a chuckle every single time.

I drowned right after I screenshot this.

The characters in the game are well written and memorable. Unlike Claude from GTA 3 or Niko Bellic from GTA 4, the protagonist of Vice City, Tommy Vercetti is not just a mindless pawn. He got anger and trust issues. His various emotions are expertly portrayed with the use of clever dialogues and great voice over. Meticulous details are similarly applied to all other characters, friends or foes like the always panicking lawyer, Ken Rosenberg to the temperamental and crazy druglord, Cortez. The dialogues are vulgar, funny but never feel forced or corny.

Missions in GTA Vice City are some of the best thought out in the series. It does not feel repetitive and always come with a good little backstory to it. The missions are slowly trickles down to you from a myriad of characters in order to keep it fresh. It ranges from the usual fanfare like murders and drive-by to the bizarre like chauffeuring rock band and erecting a signal light for a porn star (no pun intended). Outside the main mission, there's plenty to do. Steal an ambulance, police car or even a fire truck and you have the option to do a variety of side missions that will reward you with hefty bonuses upon completion.

The game is not without flaws though. Between Tommy's inability to swim to the clunky combat, it may sometimes makes you throw your controller away. When you got thrown off your bike into the water for an instant death during the last leg of a mission, it can be pretty frustrating. Besides that, there is no difficulty settings in the game, thus it can be quite difficult at times due to the above reasons.

Technical Details

The game looks very dated but the colourful and picturesque settings do soften up the blow. It will pretty much run effortlessly on any desktop bought within the last 8 years or so, even the entry level ones. For laptop, if you got any sort of discrete graphics card or Intel HD 2000/3000/4000 series integrated graphics with 128MB of RAM, you're pretty much golden. In order to run a smooth 60 frames per second without screen tearing, you have to disable the V-Sync function in the game itself and enable it at your graphics driver. Also, despite providing a widescreen function in the game, disable it as it will distort the aiming because the HUD is not properly aligned in the widescreen mode. 

Car manufacturers are continuously baffled by the vast petitions for car locks from customers in Vice City.

For those with problems making the mouse to work, enter the game and Alt-Tab, open up your Task Manager and set the game to run with only a single core to fix it.

Additional Details

The game is currently available at Steam for USD 9.99 or USD 19.99 when bundled with GTA 3 and GTA San Andreas. My advice is to wait for the upcoming sales within a couple of weeks to grab it with potential up to 75% discount.

Don't let the minor flaws and the dated graphics deter you from revisiting one of the best virtual city in gaming. With GTA 5 set to be released in November, this game is the perfect filler until it comes along. Time to don that flower printed shirt and ride the moped.

Crossroad Of Upgrading, Desktop (Level 2)

Part and parcel of being a PC gamer is the perpetual war with the system requirements of new and upcoming games. Every year, there will be a slew of new titles that promises a higher level of photorealism and gameplay physics. This however comes at a heavy price of needing to have the hardware to catch up with it. Contrary to popular believe, you don't have to get the latest and greatest from the market every single year to experience the full enjoyment of the game. A well timed upgrade can last up to 3 years without having to turn off many of the new features that may be introduced in the newer titles.

Earlier this month, Nvidia has launched their new line of graphics card, the Geforce GTX 700 series while Intel made their Core i5/i7 4000 series processors (a.k.a. Haswell) available to the market. Does all these new pixel pushers essential for you to enjoy the upcoming new titles for the rest of the year and beyond? Well, this largely depends on several important factors.

First of all, what do you expect from your games? Are you content with smooth, medium details settings on a 1920x1080 resolution or you want the highest possible graphics fidelity turned on? If you want the latest and greatest, you probably have the budget to go with it and this guide is pretty much meaningless to you. However, if you are looking forward to play next generation titles with reasonable frame rates without having to make everything looks like someone smeared Vaseline on your monitor, it's not that hard if you know what to buy and when to buy it. 

Besides that, what is the budget you have in your hand for the upgrade? Combine that with your budget for the upgrade, we will analyze what is the best possible course of action for you in the context of the 3 primary component in a gaming PC, namely the processor (CPU), graphics card (GPU) and RAM.

PC gaming is a love hate relationship.

Processor (CPU)

While most retailers will focus on the specification of the processor in their brochure, it is not the most important component in the gaming PC's component hierarchy. While a largely outdated processor can cripple the most powerful graphics card, a midrange processor will be able to sustain one or two more graphics card upgrade in the course of its lifetime without incurring too great of a bottleneck to the system. 

Those sporting the 1-2 year old Intel Core i5/i7 2000/3000 series or AMD's FX series, there is no reason for you to upgrade at all. The newer processors launched last year and this year are essentially in the same level of performance save for better energy efficiency and integrated graphics performance. For example, Intel Core i5 2500K that was introduced in 2011, when compared to the latest Intel Core i5 4670K, the performance difference is only a few frames in games.

Even if your system is running on the first generation of Intel Core i5/i7 600 to 900 series, Core 2 Quad or AMD's Phenom II X4/X6, A6/A8/A10 series, there is still enough grunts in them run today's game reasonably well. Save the cash now for other parts of the system or play the waiting game for another year to get the best deal.

While you are spotting a dual core processors like the Intel's Core 2 Duo E series and AMD's Athlon X2 or Phenom II X2 series or older, its really showing its age now, especially in RTS and RPG games. Even overclocking it will not yield desireable result as it is becoming increasingly common for games to utilize up to 4 processor cores. Not only that, newer technologies like USB 3.0, PCI Express 3.0 and SATA 6.0 Gbps are not available on the motherboards that they ran on.

Now the question is to invest on Intel or AMD's processor? While in gaming benchmarks, currently Intel's i5/i7 are still the king of the hill but that might all change in advent of next generation console's port. Both PS4 and Xbox One run on 2 AMD's A10 quad core processors with a GPU equivalent of AMD Radeon HD7870 and AMD Radeon HD7770 respectively. This might give an edge to PC running AMD processors in the upcoming games due to better optimization. However, this is just a speculation. Personally, I would go Intel's processor as next generation titles will still take at least another year or so to really realize its potential and gain momentum. 

Intel i5 4570 is available for about RM550 is a great value as its shares most of the features of the more expensive processor while performing very similarly in games and couple that with a H87 motherboard, you will have the latest desktop platform that is ready for upgrades a few years down the road.

Graphics Card (GPU)

There are millions of pixel fairies inside that paint your games as you play it.

The usual rule of thumb of upgrade expenditure is to aim for the GPU first and only spend the remaining funds on other parts as it is the single most important component in your PC when gaming. A GPU can accounts for up to half of a PC's budget as it's the primary bottleneck in most situations. In majority of the situation, merely by upgrading the graphics card alone can exponentially improve your gaming experience.

Upgrading graphics card is also determined by what resolution you are playing at. If you are still running 1280x720 to 1600x900, cards like AMD Radeon HD4850/HD6770 or Nvidia Geforce GTX 450/460 still capable of producing playable frame rates at medium settings.

If you are playing at resolution at 1920x1080, those cards will start to struggle. With high resolution texture being a norm, 1GB memory on those graphics card will not be enough to render the game at 1080p, resulting in a stuttering gameplay. It's worth to spend about RM700 into AMD Radeon HD7870XT or Nvidia Geforce GTX 660. You will see performance gains of 80% or so on average. This is the current sweet spot as spending more than this and you will start to see diminishing returns. Bare in mind, switching on anti-aliasing or maximum graphics fidelity settings will still bring these cards to its knee. If you have bigger budget and other components of your PC are fairly up to date, Nvidia Geforce GTX 770 or AMD Radeon 7970 Ghz Edition is a great choice. These will cost about RM1300 for 30% more performance than the two cards above.

The choice between AMD and Nvidia cards will be determined by what games you are planning to play. Games with the tag "AMD Evolved" will obviously favor AMD GPU and likewise, "The Way It's Meant To Be Played" titles will give Nvidia cards the advantage. For the same reason with the processor, AMD cards may have an advantage in titles port from PS4 and Xbox One but at the cost of slightly higher heat output and power requirement.

RAM

Don't be deceived by high performance RAM's fancy looks, spend your money on something else.

When you are looking at RAM, there are 3 criteria you have to take into consideration which are the amount, the speed and latency. 4GB is the minimum a gaming PC should have nowadays. Speed is the core clock the RAM is running at. DDR2 will have up to 800mhz, typically and DDR3 will commonly spot 1333mhz and 1600mhz. DDR2 costs twice as much as DDR3 now despite being the slower of the two. Unless you are upgrading from 2GB to 4GB, it's not worth investing more to DDR2 RAM as it's an obsolete technology. 8GB is a good amount and anything more will be wasted on running games. Latency is the rating which how fast your RAM responses. Usually this is not a huge performance indicator and much reserved for high performance memory. Unless you are relying on integrated graphics card or overclocking your processor, high performance RAM will only bring you very marginal increased in performance.

Example Cases

Case 1:

Intel i7 870

4GB DDR2 RAM

AMD Radeon HD5850

This is an example of a high end machine from 2010. The processor is still holding its own on the current titles. Adding another 4GB RAM and upgrading to AMD Radeon HD7870XT will be enough to keep this PC going another 2 years of great gaming experience.

Case 2:

AMD Phenom X4 9850BE

4GB DDR2 RAM

Nvidia Geforce GTX 560Ti

While it performs similarly to the above case, upgrading the graphics card is not a wise decision as the processor is nearing the end of it's lifespan. Upgrading to a new processor and hold out the graphics card for another year is a better choice.

Case 3:

Intel Core 2 Duo E6500

4GB DDR2 RAM

Nvidia Geforce 8800GTS

It's not worth upgrading at all in this scenario as all 3 components are barely qualify for minimum requirements of the more demanding games today. Just save up and buy a brand new system.

Case 4:

AMD Phenom II X4 955BE
8GB DDR3 RAM
AMD Radeon HD7770

This is the classic scenario of being in a limbo. While there is enough RAM, the processor is not terribly slow but not fast enough to benefit greatly from a GPU upgrade. Changing the processor will only gain a little bit more performance. The best you can do is get another identical GPU to Crossfire it if your motherboard allows. This will net the best bang for the buck you paying.

Conclusion

While there is no definite guide to upgrading, I hope this article will give you a rough idea of what can you do with your current system. Gaming on laptops will be covered in the future.

GRID 2 Review (Level 1)

Racing games are always a tricky genre for developers to tackle. The 2 camps of fans want very polar opposite features in their game. The realistic racing simulator fans would want unforgiving physics, accurate track details and in-depth mechanical tweaks. They praise games like GTR2 and rFactor and scorn Need For Speed. The casual racing fan usually likes uncomplicated controls, great graphics and extensive superficial personalisation. Seldom developers would try to balance both as it would ends up shunned by both sides. In the past, Codemaster had a good track record for archiving this though. Their F1 series as well as Dirt series are great balance between technical details and accessibility. 

This got me excited because GRID 2 do have a great premise to work with. It is about a man's effort to create a racing series named World Racing Series that would combine drivers from GT, Nascar, Formula series and D1 GP to compete against each another. It all sounds great until you played few hours into the game.

Gameplay

4 hours into the game, I am still trying hard to find the things that it promised to do. The game progresses by gaining fans through races which would unlock even more races, special events and next stage of the series. You get to choose a car from 2 to 3 choices after every few events but the choice is pretty much an illusion. What is the point a choice when you are given the same type of cars? It would be either 2 American muscle cars or 2 JDM cars or 3 European hot hatches. The entire premise of different styles of driving compete in the same race is a bloody farce. You can only drive what they want you to drive. I have 10-12 cars unlocked but every event I played, I can only pick from 2 out of the lot. Most of the events feature American muscle cars and the game constantly refers the other racers are "the European GT racers and Japanese "touge" racers" This is pretty much racing stereotyping. It's annoying and shallow. Not to mention, the different cars in the same category hardly feel any different with exception of speed. 

Not only that, the game is trying so hard to be stylish and hip. The event menu is like a more or less a YouTube page with occasional message from other "drivers" saying things like "dude" and "you ain't got nothing on me, bro." It feels immature and brash. The game is full of intermission after each race that can't be skipped, it's frustrating and waste of time. It breaks the flow of the game. Also, when your game's cut scenes are unskippable, that game automatically scores 80% and below in my books. We shouldn't put up with these issues nowadays.

Tracks can be pretty in the intro, but quite barren when it's racing.

The customization reflects that as well. You can only change the decals and rim styles. There are no body kits, no spoilers or any mechanical tweaks. On the decals side of things, you get a huge list of patterns, which is pretty ugly in my opinion. Then, you have the sponsors stickers. You get to put sponsors' stickers on your car and each comes with a certain objective. Complete that, you get bonus fans. It feels like you are blackmailed into plastering your car with as much advertising as possible. This is a full retail game, not a free to play online game, mind you. Thus, I find the product placement a bit distasteful. Yes, other games have sponsor decals and company logos in the game too, but in GRID 2, it's right smack in your face. This brings me to the core of the game, the actual race.

The cars are extremely tail happy. The game wants to make every player able to execute cool looking drift around the corner at the flick of a directional key and pressing of the brake. However, it put so much emphasis on it, using cars that is "drift" type, every corner must be taken with your car pointing in the wrong direction or you will be much slower. Don't get me wrong, it is fun to pull off a 3 corners continuous drift. However, things start to get pear shape when cars with "balanced" characteristic also needs a fair amount of drifting. And "grip" cars? It's laughable. Trying to clip the apex of the corner with those cars are a chore and unsatisfying. You will end up using cars with drift properties as it is faster. It doesn't even make sense. Due to this drifting characteristic in the game, corners are wide and long to accommodate it, racing line hardly matters. It's very much designed around the gamepad and meant to play in the chasing cam instead of bumper view. Trying to play the game in bumper view will really test your mettle. Since you are drifting for most part, you can't see where you are going, you need to use chasing game to gauge when your car is going to give into a spin out. Thus, the product placement, once again, come full force into your game. You will be staring at Greddy or NOS at your car's bumper for the entire time.

4 hours into the game, I am only exposed to about 3 tracks. There's like at least 30 races between those tracks. The progression is slow and boring. Working towards the goal of enough fans to unlock the next stage is unrewarding. There are these promotional events that let you earn huge amount of fans. There is a mini game of sorts where you have to overtake 4x4s without hitting anything. The more you can do it in a row, the more points you rake in. Hit something, your combo goes back to naught and doing it too slow, will decay your points. There will be another rival car that runs it concurrently with you. In the normal race, the tracks are wide, suddenly, in the mode, the tracks are barely enough for 2 cars to corners side by side and it's not helping that those 4x4 are big as an elephant on wheels. They usually stays around the middle and move from left to right and back when they corner. It's more frustrating than fun. The only viable option is to overtake them in straight line and tailgate them on the corner. Isn't that totally missing the point of an overtaking event? The time period for each decaying points is so fast that if you are not accelerating all the time, your points will trickle down back to zero again. Its worth to mention, the event is catered to a specific brand each time.

The advertising is totally inconspicuous and not overbearing at all. Nope.

Then, here comes the narcissistic feature of the game. Nowadays, everyone loves to upload shit onto YouTube, especially "accomplishments". The game comes with built in YouTube integration. There is nothing wrong with that, except when the game is in replay mode, the camera angle is horrible. Using the "cinematic" camera view, most of the time, it fails to capture anything but a real close up of your car. Manage to pull off that impressive drift around the difficult corner? Nope, it won't show that. WHAT IS THE POINT?!

Technical Details

GRID 2 is a pretty optimized game. It looks quite pretty on all settings but not as impressive or next gen as the screenshots may have suggested. Intel HD3000/4000 users will be able to play it on medium at 720p quite comfortably and anyone with AMD HD6770 or Nvidia 9800GTX, you are good to go on 1080p. Those with Intel Haswell, there are 2 exclusive graphics settings that will make smoke and transparency looks better. There is however a serious aliasing problem with the game. Playing it without anti-aliasing turned on, the jagged lines can be quite noticeable especially in the main menu. Cranking it up to 4x MSAA or even 8x MSAA do solve the problem to a certain extend but not completely devoid of aliasing. The built in benchmark will help you get the best settings. I would recommend turning off the crowd completely as it is not that great looking and gain a few frames in the process. Also, the global illumination feature is quite a taxing setting, leave that out until you have switched everything on. Basically, you can just follow the settings you have in Dirt 3.

DRM is by the way of Steam and it support achievements.

The details on those advertisement is quite amazing, really.

Verdict

You get a decently fun and forgiving arcade racer dressed in an almost unbearable American TV dramatic flair. The entire article may suggest the game is not worth paying for, well, at least not for the full price of 50 USD. If it got discounted to 10 USD, it is worth a shot. That said, the good thing about racing games is that, the older games will not be outdated. Why not just boot up Codemasters' other efforts that are better than this, namely Dirt 3, F1 2011 or even the first GRID. Fans of realistic racing simulator? Steer clear of this, this is as realistic as Pamela Anderson's boobs. If you have a Xbox, go play Forza. Everyone else? Boot up Need For Speed Shift 2 and lower the realism level and you'll get the game you are looking for.

65% - Spun out.