No Game New Year part 3: GTA 5 and a new Blood Bowl Season!

Hi there! A couple of things to talk about this week:

GTA 5

OK so I've been playing Grand Theft Auto 5 again for most of this week. It is as huge game and, as predicted, it is taking me a while! I'm around 55% of the way through the main game, and I'm up to level 6 in GTA Online.

From my previous write-ups, you might have picked up on the fact that I'm in two minds about a lot of the missions; wondering whether or not they were any good given that a lot of them are based around storytelling rather than free choice of how they are handled. Having now played through a lot of the game, there is one other factor that occurs to me, and that is variety.

Even though there is often only one way to complete a mission, every mission is different in some way to the one that you played previously. In fact, sometimes they are substantially different. It is quite rare in a game that I find myself saying "well I really should go to bed now, but I want to see what this next mission is; I'll just do one more." The variety of activities on offer here really makes for a much better game and as most of them can be wrapped up in 5-20 minutes of game time, you never really feel like you're stuck in a long section doing the same thing over and over again with no opportunity to take a break. So well done to Rockstar for that.

The cut-scenes, as I have described previously, are well done and actually capable of conveying some quite raw emotion. Often it's things that are to do with Trevor, as some of what he gets himself in to really makes you think "Whoa, I shouldn't be doing this..."

*SPOILER ALERT*

*One part that really made me quite sad was the mission where Michael and Trevor have to kill a guy on a plane, and pick up some files from the plane. You have to use a gun in a van to shoot down the plane as Michael, and then follow the plane on it's way down across half of the map with Trevor on a dirt bike. The thing is, when you're following the plane, the game patches you in to the radio chatter between air traffic control and the pilot of the plane you've just shot down. For about a minute and a half, you're speeding across the desert on a dirt bike, listening to the pilot as he's desperately trying to land the plane. You get the initial shock of being shot and subsequent recovery, the professional desperation as he tries to guide the plane to a landing strip, and the resignation in his voice when he realises there's no way he's going to make it and has no choice but to attempt an emergency landing in a field. This done, you approach the plane, kill the guy you were supposed to kill then board the plane to find the files. It then cuts to a scene where Trevor searches the cockpit to find the pilot - modelled as an older guy at least in his late 40s - dead from the impact of the crash. In typical Trevor style, he doesn't give the pilot a second thought, and this adds to the feeling of "the poor guy!" It's a rare game that can make me feel something like that about, well, not even a minor character really, more of a 'bit player.'*

This, combined with some of the other scenes where there characters have to look at the consequences of their actions, makes for quite an immersive experience. This is certainly more the case than pretty much any RPG I've played on the Xbox360 has done so far. I think it suggests that if it is possible to bridge the gap between video games and movies, GTA 5 is coming close to doing so.

Another few points:

• Great to hear Queen on the soundtrack! This should happen far more often.
• Thank heavens for the 'Quick Save' feature on the phone; it would have been incompetence of the highest order had saving been restricted to visiting your safe house (which can often trigger a mission.)
• I would love to say the stock markets are a nice feature in the game, but honestly I'm really not sure what I'm supposed to be doing with it.

Blood Bowl

Blood Bowl is a game I've owned for a while now, and by the standards of the Xbox360, it is very poor indeed. The graphics resemble a PS2/Xbox game, the gameplay could (and in fact does) work every bit as well on a hand-held console, the coding is poor (not that I would know about such things; it's something I've heard TotalBiscuit say,) and the dice mechanics take a lot of the skill out of the game.

The above comments are the bare-bones elements of the game, and sadly for the most part, Cyanide seemed content to leave it at that. For those of you who don't know, Blood Bowl is a strategy-sports board game originally published by Games Workshop, loosely based on their Warhammer mythos. You buy the game which includes the board, dice and a couple of 'teams,' you paint them yourself and build them however you want by buying new models for them - or build a different team entirely. Or at least, that was the case, though GW have now discontinued the so-called 'specialist' product line. Given all that, you would expect to see some customisation in how your team appears, or at least some variation in the colours, but there isn't. Your team either plays in red or blue. That's it. You don't even choose which colour. There is an online mode, but the asinine way in which it was handled means that there is no longer an online community to play it. Apart from the obligatory ranking system, there were no tournaments, no leagues, nothing to give the players anything more than they would have got it they'd have found some friends, bought the game, painted all the models and sorted the tournaments out for themselves. I understand that later versions were released on the PC and are now doing a little better, but I don't play games on the PC. I am therefore stuck with the 360 version - which had 1 DLC pack to add Dark Elves to the line-up and that was it - which is a substandard game to the point where it barely feels complete.

And do you know what? I absolutely love it.

I've been a fan of Warhammer and 40K for over half of my life, and sadly Blood Bowl had been and gone by the time I got in to it. The video game was therefore the only opportunity I was ever going to get to play it, and while it took me a while to get my head around it, soon I was winning matches, picking abilities for my players and really having some good fun with it. The campaign mode is basically a selection of competitions that you can enter, which as far as I can see is always a round-robin league followed by a knockout tournament. You have to have a certain number of points before some of the competitions can be accessed, and you have to go through the smaller tournaments before you can access the bigger ones. What is interesting is the way your team develops along the way, gaining Star Player Points (basically experience points,) new abilities, and even better attributes. And while the dice are used for this as well, the fact that you never really know what you're going to get until you've got it forces you to work with what you've got, rather than deliberately building an unstoppable set of abilities. Your players can grow old and have to retire, be injured which can reduce their attributes or give some other penalty, or get killed during the match and need to be replaced! Even without the potential level of customisation that game could have had, the storytelling potential of this game far outweighs any of the core mechanics and it is for that reason that even though I have owned the game for a year and a half, somehow I always seem to find time to go back to it.

I've never got to the end of the campaign though. This is largely because there isn't an end, but if I set a goal of participating and winning all the tournaments, I haven't done that yet. So, in the spirit of No Game New Year, now seems a good time to give it a go. This is likely to be an ongoing thing - I'll probably not do all of this at once, as the game can get a bit 'samey' watching the same thing happen over and over again. I might play through a competition once every couple of weeks, and see how it develops from there.

For a start, I should probably explain the block dice: Blood Bowl uses, for the most part, 6-sided dice, and this includes the dice to show what happens when you block (i.e. tackle another player.) If you choose to block a player, in most cases you roll 1 block dice and get 1 of the following results:

• Attacker Down - your player goes down which also forces a turnover (your turn ends.)
• Both down - both your player and your opponent's player goes down unless the Block skill is used. If your player goes down, it also forces a turnover.
• Pushed - the defending player gets pushed back by the attacking player
• Defender Stumbles - The defending player goes down unless he uses the Dodge skill
• Defender Down - The defending player goes down. This is the one you're usually looking for.

Some of the effects I will be describing here require you to understand the effects of the block dice, so I'll probably re-post this part whenever I talk about Blood Bowl.

So, here we go:

The Team

For the team I picked Humans. I would normally choose Chaos, as I love the style of beating everybody up with the score being a secondary consideration, but I play Chaos pretty much every time so I decided to go for Humans instead. In honour of the Challenge, I named the team The No-Game Nihilists. They consist of the following players:

Linemen: Ardtrui the Boss-eyed, Enan the Applauder, Seragne the Storyteller, Griswold the Punisher, Jek the Anti, Hector the Weeper, Arwod the Beloved and Woros the Mad.

Catchers: Dagonet Huppert, Detlef Doolist

Throwers: Arne Rolf, Gawain Rosulver

Blitzers: Viscount Lutolf, Arnulf Ottman

Ogre: Dur Head-Wrencher

The Clean Cup

This is always the first competition you enter. It is between four teams. The teams do a round robin league (every team plays every other team once) and then all of the teams are entered into the knockout stages at the end. The four teams were:

• No-Game Nihilists (Human, and also my team, so yay)
• Da Severed 'Eads (Orc)
• Noxious Nibblers (Skaven)
• Friends of the Wood (Wood Elves)

Once I had bought my team, I had no money left so I negotiated a sponsorship deal of 80% victories, 2 rankings and increasing my team value to 1150 (from 1000) by the end of the competition, for a further 21,000gp. I used this to buy a cheerleader and a 'fan factor' point.

Here were the results:

• Game 1 vs Da Severed 'Eads (Orc): An early try from Dagonet Huppert gave me the lead, but after this, the first half turned into a fight with neither side gaining the upper hand. The second half looked much the same way but the Orcs broke through and scored a try. It would have ended as a draw, but for a late try from a plucky lineman Griswold the Punisher, breaking through the Orc lines! Win for the Nihilists, 2-1. However, Thrower Gawain Rosulver picked up a smashed knee in the carnage, which will add +1 to any future injury rolls. Also, Orge Dur Head-Wrencher of all people levelled up, which was surprising as I don't remember using him very much in the game. I gave him Guard as a new ability, which allows him to assist other player's blocks even if there is another player in his tackle zone.
• Game 2 vs Noxious Nibblers (Skaven) Viscount Lutolf scored early on, and again after a brutal fight, meaning the Nihilists were 2-0 up going into the half. However, the second half was a stalemate, and neither side managed to score. Win for the Nihilists, 2-0, and incidentally the only point during the competition where the team managed to keep a clean sheet. Viscount Lutolf levelled up, and I gave him Tackle as his new ability, which effectively shuts down Dodge. I also bought an Apothecary, lest I get any more injuries...
• Game 3 vs Friends of the Wood (Wood Elves) You'd think, with such a rubbish team name, that this team wouldn't be any good. I've played Blood Bowl far too often to take Wood Elves lightly, but that didn't prepare me for the absolute pounding I got here. They scored quickly in the first half, and early in the second, and the only way I had a hope of pulling it back was to get 2 trys in about 6 turns. However, thanks to some appalling passing from my own team, it wasn't to be, and a final try from the Wood Elves sealed the deal with their only win of the competition. Nihilists Lose 0-3.

Still, it was enough to qualify, so:

• Playoff: vs Noxious Nibblers: This one didn't get off to a good start, as bribery had reduced the Movement Allowance of 2 of my players by 1 (down to 5.) However, we soon fought back, and Hector the Weeper got the first try. In the second half we looked to capitalise on our lead, but in doing so left the defence wide open and the Skaven scored. The game ended a draw, but in this round, it needed a winner. In an overtime that actually lasted longer than either half, and after most of the Skaven players were brutalised out of the game, Jek the Anti scored the final try - and he was one of the players who'd got bribed! This meant the game carried on a little longer (overtime goes on for a number of turns in a multiple of 4, and Jek scored at the beginning of the 25th turn so it had to run on to 28 before the game could end) but the Nihilists Won: 2-1. Detlef Doolist levelled up, which was a strange thing to happen as I don't actually remember him playing in the match. I gave him +1 movement; an ability would have been nice but the opportunity to increase an attribute is very rare and should not be ignored lightly!
• Final vs Da Severed 'Eads: This one started off well with an early try from Detlef Doolist, but after a massive srap, the Orcs scored just before the half. They pulled another one through early in the second half, and it all looked like it was going to the Orcs. Then, right at the last moment, a very risky pass play gave a Lineman the chance they needed to break through and score a try, forcing overtime. In the dying moments of this, Detlef scored another try and won the game for us. Nihilists win the match, 3-2 and are the winners of the Clean Cup.

We finished in the top position of the competition and are now 47/64 in the rankings. A good result, but one that will need some management if it is to be repeated. As you can tell from the scores, my defence was appallingly leaky, and it would be worth investing in some blocking skills for my Blitzers and Throwers (as they would usually play in the backfield.) Even my Linemen could benefit from this, as they are usually what has to be challenged in order to break through. But none of them are even close to levelling up yet, so we'll have to see what happens...

No Game New Year Part 2: Grand Theft Auto 5. This is going to take me a while...

Hi there.

So No Game New Year is going well so far in the sense that I haven't given in to temptation and bought a new game. Early days, I know. But it's rare that we get this far in to new year and I haven't so much as set foot in a game store! In terms of my progress with GTA 5, I wasn't expecting to have much time to play this week due to work/band/Dungeons and Dragons/girlfriend commitments, but an unexpected day off work on Wednesday (I was sick with a cold) meant that I had some time between sleeping and eating to go through the game and I'm up to roughly 28% so far.

Two major things to mention today, and the first is character development. I'm actually really impressed with how this is working out. Michael, Franklin and Trevor (I've now found all three) are their own characters. There is evidence of crime movie tropes within them, but they all have there own different ways of dealing with things and people, and it makes them a lot more believable than characters in video games might otherwise be.

This is quite hard to explain without giving away spoilers, but I think I can say with some certainty that Michael is the character I can most relate to at the moment. In terms of the decisions I've made that have affected the course of my life, I haven't always got it right, and now that I'm 28 I have to live with the consequences of those decisions. And while my personal issues aren't on quite the same level as Michael's problems, it does make me empathise with him. He's well aware of his faults on being too quick to anger, but is desperately trying to make things work with his family, only to have it all blow up in his face because in reality, the damage was done a long time before... and he is forced to follow the only option left open to him.

Contrast this with Trevor... if you've played the game, you'll know what I mean when I say he is at the same time the most and least likeable character in the entire game. Yes, he is an absolute badass. But at the same time, playing as him, or watching his cut scenes, actually makes me feel very uneasy. You've got no idea when he's talking seriously about something or is about to lose it completely and violently murder somebody, or both. He is clearly a very dangerous man, fitting for a GTA game, but not a comfortable or enjoyable character to play. I'll tell you what he's like: He's like the 'hard' people I knew at school, the violent aggressive gang of bullies that prided themselves on nothing but their opinion that they could beat up anybody in the whole school. The only method I had of dealing with those people was to avoid them if at all possible, and if our paths ever did have occasion to cross, I had to keep my head down, my mouth shut, and utter a silent prayer to a God I didn't believe in that they wouldn't decide to mess with me today. That's what it was like when we were all 15. Trevor looks to be around 45, and it looks much, much worse.

And if you're wondering why I'm going in to such depth about the characters... well, that's how good this game is. It actually makes you care about the characters involved. So yeah, well done for that.

My second point regards the missions. If you read last week's blog you'll recall I talked about the missions that, while good in their own way, lacked variety in the ways you might approach them. This didn't change all that much to begin with. Again, the missions worked well as set-pieces, and the Heist missions (of which I have done one) give a choice when planning them of a gung-ho or stealthy approach which was nice, but once you actually get to playing the game, it does sometimes feel like an elaborate game of Simon Says.

This got better once Trevor came in to it. Once this happened, I noticed a lot more of, shall we say, 'classic' GTA missions where far from running and gunning, you actually have to think about how you're going to do it. For example, the mission where you have to destroy the O'Neil farm is an absolute beauty. While I'm sure it's possible to rush the whole farm with the right combination of weapons and armour, I actually prefer sniper rifles, even if I am appalling at using them. The game really did make you think about what group of enemies would be best to take out first, what weapon to use, and whether another option is available to you. In the end, I took out the middle rank of guards first with the sniper rifle, the front two using stealth, and by the time I got to the house, there were few enough left to make running and gunning an impossible task so I got to do a bit of that as well. Now, this might have been the optimal way to do this mission, I don't know. But the crucial point here is that the game let me figure it out. It didn't keep flashing pop-up messages at me saying "Take these guys out with the rifle" or "Stealth-kill these guys." That made for a much more enjoyable experience. I would like to see more of this as the game progresses. As I said before, I am aware that some of the missions were designed as set-pieces and have to play out in a certain way. But it's good to have a little bit of choice in the matter.

I also noticed the 'Skip' button, where if you fail a mission three times you can choose to skip it. I've never deployed this, but I'm assuming it means that the game will continue as though you had finished the mission, even though you hadn't.

I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand I can see why it has to exist. The storyline and character development have been by far the strongest point of the game so far and you wouldn't want to de-rail the whole thing because you got stuck. On the other hand it can take a lot of the challenge out of the game simply by giving you the chance to avoid it. And not in a clever, Metroid-Vania style 'cast-a-spell-that-turns-you-in-to-a-bat-and-allows-you-to-fly-over-the-fight-you-can't-do' way, because at least you have to find the spell that turns you in to a bat and you can give yourself a pat on the back for figuring out that particular strategy. No, this literally allows you to skip the bit you're on, like a level skip cheat on a Sega Megadrive/Genesis game, only this time you don't even need the cheat code.

Well, fair enough, if that's what it needs to keep the story going then that's what it needs. But I'm unlikely ever to use it myself. I'd be depriving myself of the immense satisfaction of either figuring out how to do a tricky mission, or getting past a tough part; that's where the game gets really good and I'm not going to throw it away!

A few additional points:

One of the things Rockstar don't really appreciate - and to be fair, they're not the only ones, I've seen quite a few games do this - is that not all of us have screens the size of classroom whiteboards. Mine is about 16 inches by 9, and due to the layout of my bedroom, this is not likely to change. While this rarely gives me a problem in playing the game, it does make the text a little difficult to read. Particularly in this game where messages come through the cell phone, I've really had to strain to read some of those text pieces. A bit bigger please, guys!

I've had a go with some of the mini-games as well, namely Tennis, Darts, and 'that' section of the strip club. They function well for what they are, but they are far too easy. Maybe it's because I've played Topspin on the old Xbox, which works in much the same way as the tennis game in GTA 5, but it was much too easy to beat the computer, and not that hard on Multiplayer either. Yeah I get it, they've made GTA 5, not a tennis game, but it takes some of the fun out of it knowing there's almost no challenge in there. Then again, maybe I'm just not playing the right people.

I also had a go with GTA Online and I'm liking that a lot better now that it's not just a free-for-all and there are actually some missions involved with it, as well as some more conventional multiplayer modes like death matches and team battles. I'm not awful at this, (I am in some other games) but I'm not great at it either. I think in some cases I have pissed off members of my team, not because I don't know what I am doing but simply that I'm not very good at doing it. But it's enjoyable enough, and probably as good as an online version of GTA is going to get.

We'll see how far next week takes us!

No Game New Year: Grand Theft Auto Five

Right, I wasn't expecting to come back to this blog quite so soon but something's come up and for some unknown reason I'm really excited about it:

No Game New Year.

This is an idea put forward by Brian Castleberry and Norman Caruso, the latter known on YouTube as The Gaming Historian. I suppose it all ties in to the New Year's Resolution we're all allegedly doing, but this is something that I can do and I'm actually really interested in doing it.

The idea is that we - that is to say, everybody who is doing it - will buy no new video games this year. Instead of that, we will play through the ever-increasing backlog of games we have. We play our old games, and if we like them, we keep them. If not, we get rid of them, either selling them, exchanging them, or just giving them away if we can't do that. There are more rules to this, just to clarify the ways you can get around not buying any new games, so here's a link to the Facebook page where you can see what's going on:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/256949654464181/

There are, of course, benefits to this. It will, for example, save me some money. Not much money - I rarely buy a game on release, after all - but some money, that could perhaps better be spent elsewhere. But the main benefit to me, as far as I can tell, is that I've got about sixty Xbox 360 games, some of which I've had for nearly two years and never played, and even more that I've started, got about a tenth of the way through and never picked up again. This is as good a time or reason as any to give them a go.

So why am I doing a blog about this? Well, part of the deal is that we're all supposed to be updating our progress on what games we're playing, whether we're enjoying them and whether we're making a decision on whether to keep the games or move them on. I could do this on YouTube of course, but to be perfectly honest I prefer to write. And the camera on my phone is rubbish.

This is supposed to be happening every week, however I think I can almost guarantee that there are weeks when I'm just not going to be able to make an update, for whatever reason. The two most likely are either:

• Personal circumstances meaning that I won't have time/internet access to write a blog, or even play the game. I'll usually know if this is the case and let you know in advance.
• Because some of the games are quite long, it might be the case that I've got almost nothing to say about it. I won't want to blog just for its own sake, and if this happens I might just make do with a post on the Facebook site if it's all the same to you.

However one thing I will say is that I'm unlikely to move any of my games on. I bought them all for a reason, even if it was only to make up a special offer, and I won't get rid of any of them if I still think I could potentially get something out of them (or while there are still achievement points to be milked!)

So that's the pre-amble. Now, on to the first game I'm going to be playing:

Grand Theft Auto Five

I had this game for Christmas last year. I'm taking a somewhat cautious approach to playing it. I've seen quite a lot of coverage on it so I had an idea what to expect, but of late, I've not been too impressed with the series. Let me give you some background on this:

I've played and owned all of the 'core' games in the series, from the first GTA game all the way up to this one. Not the expansions though, by which I mean not GTA London, not any of the PSP spinoffs from the GTA3 canon, and none of the DLC for GTA4. In that time, I've seen it grow and develop and constantly try new things, which is great, as nobody wants to play the same game twice. However, with a creative team as innovative as Rockstar and Rockstar North, there are going to be times when it doesn't go quite as well as they'd hoped, and personally, I think GTA San Andreas was as good as the series ever got. I didn't like GTA4 very much. I'm not saying it was a bad game, it wasn't a bad game. But it didn't engage me on the same level that San Andreas did. I wasn't rushing home from work in order to play GTA4, as I did with San Andreas.

The reason I'm saying all this is that a lot of the comments I'm going to be making on GTA5 will be in comparison to the relevant parts of the rest of series.

So, is GTA5 any good?

Well, yes it is. It's a GTA game, it was never going to be bad. The controls work well enough, the graphics are perhaps not quite what I was expecting for the time it was released but then again, I have it on the Xbox360 which is coming to the end of its iteration. The gameplay is good fun and I'm enjoying it so far. From having played what the game is telling me is 14% of it, here's what I'm getting out of it so far:

By far the best innovation that the game has made is the three characters. I say this even though I have only reached 2 of them so far (I haven't got Trevor as a regularly playable character yet,) and being able to switch between the three of them at almost any point is an absolutely genius idea for an open-world game. Lots of games want to tell a story. Rockstar have taken it a step further and decided to tell three different stories that interlink with one another. Well, good on them, because I'm liking it so far.

This innovation alone is good, but the characters themselves are very well designed, written and acted. Not necessarily likeable, but that's not the point. They are... compelling. I can think of no better way to describe it, except to add that it is a massive step up from the previous game. Let me go through the previous games and tell you what I mean:

• There really wasn't any personality from the first two GTA games; your character was there to play the game and that was about it.
• There wasn't much personality from Claude from GTA3 either. (While the lead character is never referred to by name during the game, he does appear briefly in San Andreas where Catalina calls him Claude.) However, this wasn't the point. At that time, a 3D Open World game was a relatively new concept and a VERY big deal, and the aim was to make that into a good game. Others had tried before, some got nearer the mark than others, but in terms of making a fun game to play, Rockstar took the mark and pissed all over it with GTA3. In the end, all that alluded to Claude's personality is how the player played the game, or more accurately how ruthlessly the player completely the missions, how indiscriminately they killed pedestrians, how often they forced a 6-star wanted-rating killing spree just for the fun of it. It was left to the overblown caricatures of the supporting cast to provide the personality of the game, and in terms of the way it was handled, for the time it was pretty good.
• Tommy Vercetti from GTA Vice City was much better. Having some discernible back-story, a background as a mobster and having the added bonus of being an absolute badass breathed some much-needed life into the player character, and we could be reasonably confident we weren't just playing the same game with a different setting and skin. Even though Vercetti was pretty much an anti-hero in every sense, the fact that he had something to offer meant that I actually cared about all those missions I found myself doing, and I wanted him to win in the end, even if it was not necessarily for the right reasons. Sadly I never played the game to the end so I referred to Wikipedia for the back story. Cheating, I know...
• Carl Johnson from GTA Vice City was probably one of the most compelling and well-done characters in any game that I have played. He tries to be, and probably at some point was, a really nice guy, and tries to uphold an honourable ideal, if not a very good one. However, he is desperate to win the approval of his gang and peers, desperate to clear his name of murder (which is kind of ironic, given how many murders he does through the game) and is prepared to go to any lengths in order to do it. Because the game pretty much for the first time gave you some control over how this played out, this struck a balance between the personality of the character, and the personality of the player. This is actually quite hard to do, especially in a video game where there can only ever be a finite number of options, and Rockstar did it quite well here.
• Then we had Nico Bellic from GTA4. And he was DULL. Not fighting for anything other than a new life, he somehow manages to get caught up in crime. He rarely gets angry at anything and seems content to do as he is told. Now fair enough, I didn't play much of GTA4 so maybe this improves later on. But as an opening statement, Nico let the side down quite badly.
• Now, in GTA5, we've got Michael and Franklin, (again I haven't found Trevor yet) who have their own set of ideals, and their own set of problems. They've got friends (sort of,) allies, patrons and their own quite unique ways of responding to them. Any of them on their own might make for more of an interactive movie than a game, but the ability to switch between them I think gives a well-rounded experience, and I'm looking forward to see where the game takes this.

That's a good part of the game. Now for a... sort of middle of the road part, neither good nor bad. And that is the missions: (this section contains some spoilers)

The missions themselves are actually quite good. They're well-designed as set pieces, set up pretty well though the use of flowing cut scenes (starting the dialogue for the cut scene as the character approaches the relevant trigger, and cutting to the scene with almost no load time, is a stroke of absolute genius and one I expect to see used far more in the future with the new console generation,) and have good cinematic points that fit the story. I've had some fun playing them.

The problem is that there's really not much scope for doing the missions that I've done so far in any way other than the way the game wants you to do it. For example: The mission where Michael and Franklin have to save Jimmy from the people who have kidnapped him in the boat he was trying to sell can only be done by driving close enough to the truck to allow Franklin to climb onto the boat, shooting the crooks on the boat and then driving underneath the boom arm to rescue Jimmy. There is no other way to do it. You can't, for example, switch to Franklin as he gets on the boat and get Jimmy off once you've killed everyone on it. You can't cut the truck up to stop it getting away. You can't use any gun other than the pistol Michael has in the glove box, and you can't allow Jimmy to die and get the boat back. (Obviously this last one probably wouldn't happen anyway since I have a feeling Jimmy will become more relevant to the story later on, but from the dialogue running up to the chase, Michael seems more than prepared to let that happen.)

This particular mission is designed as a set piece so there's pretty much only one way it can be done, but the other missions aren't much better. Whether driving, escaping from the cops, or corridor shooting, there's usually only one way to do it, the exception being when you have to escape attention from the police as that does at least give you the whole map to do it in. Now, I understand that if it's important to the story, certain missions have to play out in a certain way. But remember in GTA3 where you're ordered to kill somebody, and you could either nick a car and run him over, drive-by shoot him or go back to your hideout to pick up one of the many weapons you'd amassed there and gun him down? Hell, you could even do it as a fist fight, if you wanted to. None of that so far is in GTA5. There's usually only one way to complete the mission, and if the game thinks you need a new weapon or piece of equipment, it will give it to you in the mission pre-amble. For example: quite early on in the game, Franklin gets involved in a gang shootout. There are more enemies than can be reasonably handled with the pistol, but one of the guys you shoot early on rather conveniently drops a shotgun. There's still, therefore, a lot of hand-holding going on, where the game is almost telling you what to do. This is something that I think let GTA4 down quite badly, as it was still explaining game mechanics to me 6 hours in to it, and thankfully, it's not quite as bad with this game. But I still found myself thinking "no reason to go to Ammunation to get more ammo for my gun before I do this next mission; if the game thinks I need it, it will drop a new gun for me with enough ammo to complete the mission." I don't think that should be happening in this day and age.

I've also come across some of what I think is called "Jank," which I understand to mean: "An inconvenient necessity to make the game work," and I suspect I will come across it more and more as the game goes on. Where I noticed it was the mission where Michael discovers his wife's affair with her tennis coach. When the coach runs out of the house, jumps in his car and drives away, Michael follows him in a pickup truck that certainly wasn't there before, and for no reason explained in the cut-scene, Franklin is suddenly in the truck with him. Both are necessary to complete the mission, (you'll see,) but their sudden appearance is rather weak given the detail of the rest of the game.

That having been said, I think the scoring system for the missions is a good idea. You can now get Bronze, Silver and Gold rankings upon completion of each mission depending on how well you did and whether you did certain things in the mission, even if it's not always clear what you have to do to get the top score. It's more carrot than stick, because it rewards you for doing missions well rather than punishing you for barely scraping through with your life, let alone the mission objectives (the latter usually being how I end up doing most missions in any GTA game to be honest.) The reward in the game is, as far as I can see, rather abstract. You either get a gold medal or you don't, and if you don't it doesn't appear to have an affect on the progress of the game. But it's nice that, for the first time, the game is telling you: "You aced that, well done," or "Yes, you could have done that better, and here's how:" Competitive players and speed runners will love it. If I pay any more attention to it than I already have it will be to unlock an Achievement to increase my Gamerscore.

I do have a couple more things to say but I've rattled on far too much already and it's time for me to go to bed. However, a couple of points I'm going to be looking out for next week:

• So that I am not playing the game through like homework, I will interject my progress through the main game with the occasional foray into GTA online. I've had a go with it already and it looks pretty good so far, though I suspect I have been the victim of people farming kills off me which made it less enjoyable than it might have been. More on that next week.
• I'll be interested to see how the story plays out in terms of how you can influence the environment around you. The best game I've seen for this so far is San Andreas, where you could participate in a turf war that made, apart from anything else, some areas of the city safer to visit than others. I haven't seen it in GTA5 yet but that doesn't mean I won't...

See you all soon!