More on GTAV - Review

I got stuck into GTA5 last night, and on some levels I was impressed, but on others wholly unhappy.

The controls, in my opinion, are far too twitchy, the AI traffic getting in your way is more annoying than ever, especially when you see the run through and you go to do it and ludicrously your car slows, or their car accelerates totally out of place for the situation.

I also hate the aiming mechanics, the aiming dot on my TV is so tiny as to disappear in the background most all the time, also the set pieces of missions, some of them are so annoying, I was in a car chasing my boat being towed; for example; and the car would literally slow just to give time for the dialogue to be played... and then when one character had to leap from the car onto the towed boat, I was behind the trailer, pressed against the boat for like 2 minutes... No jump, I finally move, so there's no boat to jump onto... the AI character leaps forward and under my wheels for the big fat "Mission Failed".

It just feels so glitchy, I'm going to let the game update tonight, by attaching to the internet with the console at last, but I've purposefully played the game away from updates to see how they let it be released, and you know what, it's not as impressive as the news coverage would have suggested.

There are bugs... Like you get a visual crash with static and then the system resolves this and recovers, but its very jarring.  You have floating and moonwalking animations, you have really rather poor facial animation of the characters going on.  Some of the mouths don't sync at all, especially on prominent supporting characters, like Michaels wife Amanda.

And then there are problems with the character switching mechanics, like I was Michael, I was told to change to be Franklin, so I did... The game changed me back to Michael and informed me to change to Franklin again... because it was mid-tutorial... in the mean time... "Mission Failed"...

The wife was sat there watching "Mission Failed"... "Mission Failed"... and my frustration showing, and she was saying... "just turn left"... on the motorbike.. yeah, sure it don't turn it just pirouettes, no finesse.

Then the map in the bottom left, yes its showing me where to go, but its 21 inches from the view point I'm looking at to the map on the bottom left, at least on my screen... And you can't take in the map without actually staring at it, the reason... its slightly transparent, so you can see textures through it... Road textures especially look like static on the mini-map, it looks like the sat nav is having a hard day with static... and that distracts from being able to take in the mini-map's information.  Also the oblique angle its at (isometric) is not as easy to read as perhaps a 2D top down mini-map would have been, especially with fast moving car chases...

And that's the big appeal, the big world in this game, but until you get to know the place - and its a big place! - you're going to have to use the mini-map, and its too short sighted, too small a heads  up of what's coming in the early game to plan where you're going.

So to be fair the game's good, but not as spectacular as everyone would think.

The other problem I have is the jaggies, I've watched the YouTube, I've checked out how it should look, on both PS3 and Xbox360 before buying the console just for this game, and it looked ace.

I've had it, seen it, checked my display settings are good... all to no dice, it looks so jaggy in places on this PS3... I dunno, maybe I'm spoilt by my PC which easily out performs this PS3 by 3 or 4 fold, but right now GTAV on the PS3 does not look like any of the footage I've seen recorded... And this isn't to start a flame war.  I'm just saying is all.

GTV5

I got a PS3... No, not one of the refurbs, though I got a refurb online the blue rays were all duff so I got a nice new PS3 slim for Christmas... It came Tuesday.

Now, after making the wife suffer the hugely long GTA5 install period she went to bed, but this was lucky as the first thing - after initial missions - that I ended up doing was going to a lap dance and pulling the dancer whom the character took home and he bedded... receiving a morning text saying "I can hardly walk"... lol

Not quite the same as GTA3 - the last game in the series I played - where the hookers would get in the car with you, but you'd only get a comic bouncing of the car springs... GTA5 has "evolved" and so I had full pixelated titties jiggling across the screen.... much to my own chagrin.

PS3 Strip

So, the PS3's are here.  One is powering on but just black screen, I reckon its either a broken Blue-Ray or a bust HDD.  The other, three beeps and red flashing light.

So, I started with the £14 machine, this is a 60GB version, with the lift up flap expansion ports available, and it just powers on and sits there, having entered recovery mode it reports it can't access the HDD inside, so I swapped the HDD with the other machine, no dice.

I plan to test the drives for both and strip out an old HDD I have in a 2.5" caddy to replace into that one machine and give it another whirl.

Anyway, I set that machine a side.

Now, I'm sorry for no pictures here, I really need to get a camera in here, or sort something out because I used to take pictures all the time - check out my silent fan review and fitting series!

Anyway, I set that machine aside and set about the other... This was the first one I bid on, because it sounded like it needs the classic reseat of the CPU & GPU and new thermal paste job.  I stripped the machine down, and there was lots of dust inside, many dust bunnies and even a spider had made a home in one end.

This machine was a cheaper model.  A 60GB one to be precise without the front panel connectors.

With it stripped down I cleaned everything up, I've actually run out of isopropyl alcohol doing this... now the thermal paste inside was crusted to hell, it was just lumps all out the side of the chips and over the top of the CPU it was just an oily film with patchy coverage - so I'm pretty happy that this may just be the problem, and I need to reset everything.

I have cleaned it up, and put my order for some decent thermal paste in.

I'll get some more iso back from the father-in-law tomorrow and finish cleaning her up and then get the heat going on her.

The Great £21 PS3 Risk

I'm not usually a risk taker, and I don't normally buy second hand kit, much preferring a known starting point the manual and all the cables which come with a new bought item...

So its totally out of character for me to have invested the heady sum of £21 on a PS3 console, which is in the Yellow LED of Death (YLOD) state.

My plan is to strip it open, clean it up and see if the GPU needs reballing, reflowing & reseating, or whether it just needs the old refresh of the thermal compound on the chipset.

It could be anything else, the worst case is the re-balling, which I'd not like to do by hand, but with some time, lots of alcohol and plenty of patience I maybe able to clean it up and resurrect it.