Lets see...

Dweller_Benthos · January 21, 2016, 06:09:24 AM

Yeah, there were a few missions I could surely have done without, the yoga was not one of them though, I had no trouble that I recall doing that with mouse & keyboard. Maybe failed one move at first until I got the hang of it, but I thought it was a bit weird considering the context of the game. It also sets up the chase to get the instructor and show him what for. Same with the tennis and golf minigames, I tried both and well, maybe not the golf now that I think of it, but it was just something extra to do, so I did.

But if you're still using mouse and keyboard to drive vehicles, I suggest getting an Xbox controller and using that to drive with, makes it much easier with the analog controls, as Art mentioned. You can hot swap between the two, and even use the controller in one hand and the mouse in the other at the same time, to drive and shoot. It's a bit tricky to do, but manageable. I don't like how the controller stick makes looking around so mushy, and aiming with it is just impossible, I don't care what those console kiddies are doing, auto-aim probably.

I bought an Xbox controller specifically for this game, so that shows how much it's really useful.

fragger · January 21, 2016, 06:31:25 AM

The driving is actually the least thing I have trouble with controlling in the game, even using m&k. I fly around at full tilt through the city splitting lanes and running reds like a crazy man :-() I love sometimes jumping on a sports bike and going like the clappers, just to see how long I last. It's a great reflex test and adrenaline serve ???

Art Blade · January 21, 2016, 06:38:32 AM

:-D

fragger, I only spent like 400 hours in SP, the remaining 2,600 hours are MP. And there, a lot of my time went into casually driving and flying around, doing nothing specific, just enjoying myself or the company of friends. Of course, I played the MP (co-op) bits like heists & co to make money in order to buy gear and sports cars and houses (hey, MP currently allows you to buy 5 residences with garages so you can store a maximum of 5x10 cars and bikes) And those vehicles stay. And you've got a mechanic you can call from your mobie so he delivers any one of your vehicles to wherever you are. Oh, you can buy insurances so if the vehicles get destroyed you will be able to reclaim them for a reasonable fee :-D And.. and.. and.. :-()

Binnatics · January 21, 2016, 08:50:15 AM

...and most missions in co-op will give you much more freedom of approach than the story missions. They are all standalone little tasks you do for contacts you learn to know. Like Lester, Lamar, Simeon and more.
The goal will be simple; wreck or steal back cars, kill people, steal a plane, or steal something out of a safe... it usually consists of a heavily guarded area where something of interest is held. You can approach it any way you like; by air, ground or under water (if there's water nearby) and you can choose between stealth of full blow. A lot of planning and testing can be done. The only downside, in the whole game actually, is that stealth doesn't really w@&k. Usually when you perform a stealth kill, in 90% of the cases, all other enemies are instantly allerted. Some missions are designed as stealth missions, but even there it is a bit clumsy.

Anyway, the online missions can be done alone. At least many of them. Maybe there's a total of 100 contact missions, and something like 60% or even more can be done alone. The ones where a minimum of 2 players is requiered will usually be a bit more demanding, and more complex. Still great fun to do together. Some have a minimum of 4. They are tough and are cool to do with a group of friends.

The time difference will make it complicated to connect, but not impossible. I played a lot recently with another friend who comes from downunder too. I was playing a heist with him and others around 2 pm (my time) when he suddenly says; "I gotta go to bed guys, see ya tomorrow" He has 10 hours of difference :-() (later than here).
I usually meet him when I play in the afternoon or occacionally in the morning. And sometimes late at night he pops up when the next morning (for him) started already ^-^

PZ · January 21, 2016, 10:41:12 AM

Quote from: Binnatics on January 21, 2016, 08:50:15 AM
...The only downside, in the whole game actually, is that stealth doesn't really w@&k. Usually when you perform a stealth kill, in 90% of the cases, all other enemies are instantly allerted.

Man, that sounds familiar... ???

Art Blade · January 21, 2016, 11:42:46 AM

"did you hear that?"
"Nah, probably nothing"
"Maybe we should check it out?"
"Stay on your posts! Let the others check it out when they come back."

:-D

OWGKID · January 21, 2016, 11:57:02 AM

"Who the hell are those guys?"
"I think it's only one!"
"OH s#!t, STAY BACK!"
"KILL HIM!"
"Careful, I heard he's psychotic!"

:-D

fragger · January 21, 2016, 02:40:05 PM

There's a lot of funny dialogue and humour in the game. I liked a line of Dave's, the FIB agent: "We're corrupt, but in a good way" :-D

Trevor has the best lines. The actor doing his voice (Stephen Ogg) recorded all his lines in his underwear to help him get into character ^-^ He's a warped SOB but he's memorable, he cracks me up a lot.

Some of the stuff on television and in advertising is a hoot :-D :-X

Quote from: Art Blade on January 21, 2016, 06:38:32 AM
...And those vehicles stay...

Uh-huh, I think I almost learned the hard way that bought vehicles can disappear if you're not careful. I bought a $200,000 car for Michael and took it for a spin on the freeway outside of town. Some idiot slightly sideswiped me at one point, so I pulled in to the parking lot of a hotel or something to check the damage. While I was doing that, I heard a bunch of crashing noises and looked around to see that some fool had managed to get his car stuck sideways between two parked ones and was bashing the daylights out of them trying to get it out. Worried that he might push one of the cars into mine, I dragged him out of his car, jumped in, got it out and drove it a few car lengths away. When I got out and looked back, I noticed that my beautiful new car had vanished, even though I'd only driven the other car a few feet away.

It hadn't reappeared in the garage I bought either when I got back to town and checked, but fortunately I hadn't done a save since I got the car so I could reload the game and get it back. Otherwise I may have pissed that $200,000 into the wind.

I seem to remember reading about this somewhere in the topics, but there's zillions of GTA V posts now and I can't be bothered going through them all to find out. All I know is that I nearly wasted $200,000 dollars.

So the online world does sounds like a lot more fun, but I'll get through the SP game first before I give that a look (I'm about 40% through the story at present).

Binnatics · January 21, 2016, 02:48:58 PM

^-^

Trevor is by far my favourite. He is such a personality :) Have you tried the rampages already? They are really fun 8) Looks like an orange skull on your map ;)

Art Blade · January 21, 2016, 05:18:11 PM

fragger, don't buy cars and don't tune them unless you have a licence to print money (your stock brokering option had already gone out the window) instead, stick to your personal cars (every character has got one and Franklin also gets/got a motorcycle. Those vehicles will respawn and keep the upgrades.

Online is strange when you first see it. Less crowded, less varied regarding vehicles on the streets (you'll see perhaps 5-8 different brands for some time and then the brands change so generally speaking you'll see lots of one type for some time while in SP you get to see everything and loads of them all the time) but you can buy apartments with garages and so on. And there are no lethal animals :) There is more comfort in online gaming and definitely a lot more options. Once you get used to the online world you'll start to fear to go back to SP because.. there are no insurances, no mechanic, a LOT of stuff is not available to you that makes life so much easier in online gaming.. hehe, just stick to SP until you're done and then change to online. :)

fragger · January 21, 2016, 10:07:10 PM

I realise that the characters' personal cars respawn so I assumed that any purchased ones would do likewise, if left abandoned somewhere. I have noticed that if a vehicle is damaged, you can either: do a save and an immediate reload, or put the damaged car in your garage, take another one out, then return. Either way, the damaged car will be repaired.

I've already decided that one playthrough of the story will be plenty for me (there'll also be an awful lot of lengthy cutscenes to get through again, which I'm not looking forward to) so I'll be looking at going online after that just to check it out.

I must admit, the stock market part of the game is wasted on me because anything to do with stocks and investments bores the socks off me in reality. I'm one of those people who have no interest whatsoever in monitoring the movements of money, in fact I wouldn't have anything to do with it at all if I didn't have to. For me, playing the part of a stock broker in a game is on a par with learning a foreign language - less like play and more like w@&k. I tried getting to grips with it in the game but as soon as I started looking at the websites it was like being confronted with a wall of hieroglyphics - my brain just went into GIGO mode and returned with "Forget it, buster - go for a drive instead. We both know that's fun!"

I tried reading through Art's GTA V stock market topic but my eyes began to glaze over before I got very far. The fact that I did almost no responding in that topic is probably indicative of my feeling towards the game's stock market component, and to financial stuff in general :-()

Since there are no money cheats in GTA V that I know of (and because of my aversion to the stock market, I've checked) I think my interest will probably run out as quickly as my money does - unless I do a LOT of robberies, armoured car heists, etc. That too would get old pretty quickly, so I can probably forget about having garages full of exotic cars and private yachts in this game :-D Some other decent money-making options for those of us who find stock market trading about as appealing as wart removal would have been nice, but there you go.

Apparently the decision to not include a money cheat in GTA V was because online players could really screw up the stock market for other non-cheating online players, and that's fair enough. I don't see why they couldn't have made one for SP though. Just another example of the poor old single player getting the second-class citizen treatment.

fragger · January 22, 2016, 01:09:38 AM

Maybe I should balance out the general negativity of my last post with something more positive, because I'm hardly down on the game :-() I hope I didn't come across as whiny, I was just voicing my very subjective take on an aspect of the game that I'm not crazy about. I should have said that even though the stock market part of the game doesn't interest me per se, I actually do think it's a brilliant innovation and very rewarding for those that do like to get into it. I just wish that there was something else for those that don't, but I think I've pretty well covered that in the last post. I won't go there again!

There are things that I really do love about this title. The design of it is amazing and there's so much fun to be had in and around the environment. One of my favourite things is to go into maniac mode on the roads in a muscle car or on a superbike and see how far I get before I come unstuck :-() The missions may be linear but outside of those there is still tons of scope for all kinds of improvised tomfoolery, from racing around mountain trails on dirt bikes to picking fights with inner-city hoodrats, from buzzing skyscrapers in helicopters to picking fist-fights with rednecks in bumpkin bars. Hand-to-hand fights can be pretty funny actually >:D I like how there are no complicated fighting moves, basically one key (or button) is all that's needed for a good biff match.

I found out that I'm pretty good at playing in-game darts 8)

I had a pleasant surprise. I was traipsing around in the headland just north of Paleto Bay when I heard voices and a couple of red dots popped up nearby indicating the presence of bad guys. Going to investigate, I found two hoods digging a shallow grave where they were obviously going to kill and bury this girl they had tied up. So I took out the thugs, untied the girl and took her back to near the city where someone was waiting to pick her up. Turns out she was the daughter of a major Mafioso type, and soon after I'd dropped her off, a $60,000 reward found it's way into my bank balance. Nice :-X

Anyway, here's a few more screenshots:

This hedge maze looks like a good place to hide from the cops, should they be looking for me around here. Trouble is, I might get lost in there...

[smg id=8463 align=center width=600]

Four-wheeling it in the back country at sunset. There's a surprising amount of back roads in the game, some of them very scenic.

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I love some of the places you can come across, like this vineyard estate. You can't get inside it of course, but you can get all around it, and it just looks so cool.

[smg id=8466 align=center width=600]

Trevor finds another way to get high.

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[smg id=8468 align=center width=600]

A couple of alternate modes of transport.

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A real dog of a machine.

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A couple of places in town. GTA V has to be one of the most fully detailed games ever, superb w@&k and attention.

[smg id=8472 align=center width=600]
[smg id=8473 align=center width=600]

Like this balcony. I had to climb over and around a maze of rooftops and ledges to get to this spot which 99% of gamers will probably never see, and yet it's still fully textured even though the details (such as the floor and plant pots) aren't even visible from street level. And there are thousands of places like this throughout the game world. Thousands. Every rooftop, every wall, every yard, every alley - nothing is unfinished. I'm gobsmacked.

[smg id=8474 align=center width=600]

Dweller_Benthos · January 22, 2016, 08:00:09 AM

Nice shots fragger, I don't think I've ever seen that hedge maze, pretty cool.

If you buy a car and it disappears, it's usually been impounded, I think. I always had a vehicle or two in the impound for each character. You go to the impound marker on the map and pay to get it back. But special cars in the SP game you're better off just leaving in the garage, or else it's real easy to lose them.

As for the stock market, I pretty much ignored it mostly. I did try Art's tricks a couple times, and made some money, but mostly it's best to wait for the assassination missions from Lester when he tells you what to invest in, so there's no question. As Art mentioned, if you leave as many of these missions until after the main story is done, you'll have a lot more money to use in the stock market to get the maximum profits. There are guides that tell you pretty much exactly what to invest in, when to do it, and how much profit to expect. I think each of the characters in my game ended up with 300-400 million at the end of the game.

Art Blade · January 22, 2016, 09:59:40 AM

I think fragger that you were under the impression that stock market trading was part of the online gaming but it isn't. Online, you make money doing heists and other stuff.

In SP, you will still get several million dollars by the end of the game even if you don't use the stock market at all. However, I made more than a billion per character. :-()

Nice pics, fragger :) Yep, a detailed world, no matter where you look. :-X

fragger · January 22, 2016, 03:49:20 PM

Thanks for setting me straight fellas :-D I was thinking surely that can't be the only way to make money.

I did two Lester missions already before I knew about leaving them, so I'll leave the rest till the end.

D_B, that maze is in the Kortz Center in Pacific Bluffs, just NW of the city I'll get a screenie of the map location next time I'm in-game.

I just did the last of Franklin's missions for Beverly, the paparazzi sleazebag (I'm assuming it's the last, judging by the way they part company). That last act of Franklin's felt really satisfying >:D

fragger · January 24, 2016, 01:25:18 AM

One thing that really impresses me is the way the characters develop during the course of the game, and the way their relationship to one another changes. That's really well done :-X Good dialogue, whoever wrote it, and very well acted.

That Trevor :-D I loved this moment:

! No longer available

For some reason Trevor really makes me think of Jack Nicholson. His character is a lot like someone Nicholson would play, and he has much the same sort of voice.

Art Blade · January 24, 2016, 03:27:57 AM

agree to all points :-X :-D

I just literally stumbled upon one of those guys and thought I'd post it for the love of details in this game.

[smg id=8475 type=preview align=center caption="backstreet boys 01"]
[smg id=8476 type=preview align=center caption="backstreet boys 02"]
[smg id=8477 type=preview align=center caption="backstreet boys 03"]

Binnatics · January 24, 2016, 04:50:23 AM

@ backstreet boys :-()

Good thing we don't count many middle aged women amongst us :-D

fragger · January 25, 2016, 03:28:16 AM

:-D

Dunno if you guys have ever noticed this - if so, I don't think anybody's mentioned it here. Whichever of the three guys you're currently playing as, if you position them someplace where there are a number of women standing and wandering around (such as in the CBD), choose any of the 3rd person views, then don't touch any controls for about half a minute, your guy will automatically start checking out every woman nearby. If he runs out of women to perv on, he'll start looking at any flashy cars driving past, until more women show up :-()

I left Franklin standing on a street corner in town while I went to the toilet, and when I came back I found him getting an eyeful :-D

Art Blade · January 25, 2016, 04:43:37 AM

I never noticed because I used to keep them on a very short leash. :-D Nice find fragger :)

fragger · January 25, 2016, 04:55:24 AM

Cheers :) Wow, when I posted I thought "I bet Art has noticed this already somewhere among those 3000+ hours of playing time" :-D But then I only noticed it because I went to the loo without pausing the game like I usually do. I came back and wondered if I was missing a cutscene when I saw what was happening.

EDIT: I forgot to mention that when your character starts ogling the ladies, the view switches to first person - so you can see just exactly who he's checking out, and how :-()

Dweller_Benthos · January 25, 2016, 07:56:38 AM

That's pretty funny, I might have to try that and see.

PZ · January 25, 2016, 08:32:10 AM

That is a funny one :-D

Binnatics · January 25, 2016, 10:03:04 AM

Nice find Fragger!!! ^-^ :-X

+1 for your eye for detail :-()

fragger · January 25, 2016, 11:22:51 AM

Thanks Binn :)

I'm not 100% sure, but I think Trevor might have fleetingly checked out a couple of the men as well :-() It may have been a line of sight thing as Trevor was outside a club and there was quite a crowd of people in close proximity to each other on the sidewalk, but who knows - this is Trevor we're talking about...