I guess nobody in their right mind could ignore the ingenuity that is Rockstar Games. They are known for creating worlds that are unbelievably rich and atmospheric (I'll stop sounding like a paid advertiser in a minute, I swear), offer incredible freedom in exploration and having incredible and top-class writing to boot.
Which leads me to my actual question: What was your favourite Rockstar moment? That time when you knew this game you were playing was not like any other you ever did?
Post them here (and feel free to discuss Rockstar more!)
There was one pivotal moment in Max Payne 3 that made me realize just how great Rockstar as a studio really is.
You arrive in a run down hotel- the shabbiest and dirtiest place you have ever seen. You know there's something wrong with this place. Your partner in the Brazilian police told you people are brought in in hordes, yet none ever leave.
You still go in through the cellar window, unprepared for the horrors contained within this hell on earth.
You approach a corner, hiding, as you hear two goons converse. The room appears to be the old boiler room, used when the hotel was still in its prime. Yet the gigantic boiler appears to have been repurposed.
The guards seem busy. Why would they be down here?
A gurney stands in front of the boiler, which has been turned on at the highest temperature. Lying on the gurney, you see plastic bags, the contents of which seem... well you don't want to know, as the guards proceed to dump the bags right in the boiler. This is an oven. Hell on earth. The comparison to Auschwitz is surprisingly accurate. Now you know how those poor souls left the "hotel".
Up until that point I had seen Max Payne as a very very gritty shooter that didn't try to sugar-coat its brutality. Yet this was something more. I could not continue playing for a week.
I was devastated. Which was exactly what Rockstar wanted.
I could start telling you all I know about human organ trafficking. I could tell you that people are abducted daily, sometimes even by corrupt police forces, gutted until their bodies have nothing remaining, and then discarded like trash. I would not have struck a chord in you.
Yet this scene, in front of the oven, presented in an eerily quiet tone, captured in an almost objective, documentary-style fashion, did. This is what's so exciting about video games as a new medium, the possibilities of story-telling are not limited to production, money, location, or any other, but are purely limited to artistic choice. And that is what I love so much about Rockstar. They are not afraid to tell stories, however dark and however controversial. In my opinion, they currently are the masters of video-game storytelling.
Less snarky edit: Which was a fun game, if you were cheating and messing around, just neither compelling nor fun otherwise.
They're very good at making me feel as worn and tired of it all as their often awful/sort-of-awful-people protagonists. That sounds like a gripe but I promise it's not, I enjoy that feeling in the context of a storytelling experience. By the time either of the first two Max Payne games were wrapping up, for example, I was feeling..well, Max Payne-y. A little loopy and soul-sick on behalf of my hero.
Red Dead Redemption and Grand Theft Auto 4 do a decent job of that, though I never get *very* far. Stuff leading up to killing Mikhail, the act, and the fallout are pretty good.
L.A. Noire was pretty sweet for the most part, and I did play the hell out of that. And took special sweet time and pleasure in avenging myself on the corrupt law enforcement officers as much as possible.
I have always felt Vice City was/is easily the best GTA game. It just felt right.
I never actually beat Vice City, I played all the way until maybe the third to last mission and couldn't get it to start, and then years later I found out why.You were supposed to lure two cops into your garage to get their uniforms, apparently, and you just were supposed to get them to come into the garage. The problem? I'd kill one as soon as they were in there, then go out and lure another one in...and the first cop had disappeared. I tried this for weeks, because the cinematic before hand said something like "we lure the cops in, kill them, and take their uniforms", so it pissed me off quite a bit that doing so didn't work.
When you're talking to Sonny immediately after the bust, he's sitting there with money and cocaine on his table. This was the family's first time getting into drugs, which is why Tommy was doing it, but unless I misread it, they tell you in the beginning of the game that Sonny fucked you over.
The cinematic execution of Luca Silvestri...one of the guys you worked with to pick up stolen diamonds (in the garbage truck) who decided to keep them instead.
My problem was that for most of the game the execution mechanic had been used either in a kill/spare choice system or when it was really dramatic (Vladimir, Mikhail, etc.). Those were powerful moments with characters we'd established ties to. Hell even the one where you murder the old guy you break out of that prison convey was kind of rough to me, due to the circumstances of going from savior to killer as his hope builds and then shatters.
But Luca's death was a poor choice. Little rapport built beforehand, obvious betrayal on his part, and then nothing new or interesting in what came after. Just a chase into a bathroom.
I wasn't 100% trying to at the time, but I finished the mission, saved, and never played again.
No, I didn't think of that, and honestly I found it more fun this way.
Oh, my first playthrough, I did everything standard, although I may have used the tunnel to my advantage while driving. Future playthroughs would have me pretty much take taxis everywhere and try to find new ways to beat a level. For example, the level with the lawyer:You have to kill him and then shoot your way out. The second playthrough I used a shotgun...and inadvertently shot out the window behind him. I jumped out and drove away with just a two-star instead of a three, because I hadn't killed any cops and didn't have to. In a later playthrough, I stabbed him, and then...he died, and nothing happened. I picked up the file, put away my knife and walked out the front door. Nobody tried to stop me, and nobody discovered the body while I was there. I got into a car, and drove to meet the deputy commissioner with not a single warning star. Although strangely dressing like a doctor got you into the room, but they noticed that you'd turned off his life support before you even made it to the lobby and immediately opened fire in that other mission. Oh well. Oh, and I agree re: Luca, but I don't think I noticed because I probably didn't bother switching to the pistol to kill him.
jumping out of the window is a valid thing, though it sounds like you glitched into it.
Pretty sure I just happened to angle it that some of the pellets hit the lawyer's head and some of them hit the window behind him. I haven't tried recreating it, though, since every time since I just stab the guy and calmly walk out, and the last time I even did that or played at all was probably a couple years or more ago. Makes Niko seem more professional than shooting him and running. (Of course, there'd still be mountains of evidence, but in the GTA-verses, no witness [or witness plus initial escape] equals no crime).