But yeah in all seriousness I think soundtrack choice is probably the only other thing Rockstar games have been good at. I wonder if the guy who was picking tracks for Smuggler’s Run (all house music) and the first Midnight Club is still there
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Sam Houser worked for BMG before starting Rockstar and he’s been the main guy picking the music for their games from the start.
There is always something in the games music-wise that lands for me. Usually the indie rock stations but after V and Red Dead 2 I think they should have fully scored soundtracks for their games and focus less on the licensed music. Though they have turned me on to some artists that I might not have been exposed to otherwise so I’m kind of torn on it.
But it’s also a double edged sword. There are a lot of tracks from the PS2 games that got pulled in the last decade. The only way to hear Billie Jean in Vice City now is with mods or using the original disc or a cracked .exe, you can’t hear that song anymore in any of the official versions currently for sale because the license expired.
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if you’re playing a version of vice city where Billie Jean isn’t playing when you get into a car for the first time God has left your copy
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Cum on Feel the Noize is gone too. Also One Thing Leads to Another and Video Killed the Radio Star. Those were defining parts of the 2002 Vice City experience. It’s legit not the same game anymore.
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I expect to enjoy GTA VI a lot since the entire series has always been deeply compelling to me: I get the most advanced city simulation there is, an unusually interactive metropolis consisting almost purely of vistas from half-remembered scenes from great movies, I hunt for all those small possible interactions with NPCs and vehicles and environment while listening to some of the best curated soundtracks in the medium, I search for the limits of the cutting edge simulacrum and discover new types of melancholy whenever I do.
GTAV was mostly a failure storywise (Online got even worse over time somehow) and I can’t say I share its uhh sense of humor, but it’s basically playable Los Angeles Plays Itself tie-in, and its environments are deeply evocative to me for the same reason I love the Hollywood movies I love. RDR2 felt exhausting to me with its repeated rhythms of “just trust the plan”, there was a moment I had to drop it because of this, but it’s the only AAA story in recent memory I think is accomplished and captivating, it manages to say something about the cult-like nature of its own development and because of this, it manages to say something about the West itself that resonates with me.
I treat the antiquated mission design like lavish guided tours across these worlds, I deeply appreciate the attention to physics and ragdolls that gives the games friction that is missing from most AAA games, I love their environments and expressive lighting, I love how their voice performances stand out in the crowd. I can’t stress enough how cool it was for the biggest release of 2018 to be like, here’s our western movie soundtrack, it’s nothing but Colin Stenson, Senyawa, Arca, D’Angelo, and so on. Makes the rest of the blockbuster sector look embarrassing. They consistently manage to exemplify the best and the worst parts of big budget videogames, and I hope they’ll continue to do so. I wouldn’t be happy having to pay 90 bucks for it but it’s probably the only thing left in the AAA space where I’d be too intrigued to know what it is to pass on it.
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I don’t think anybody would be able to identify the one Arca song in rdr2 unless they looked it up…
They also need to stop making the ragdolls worse. the ones in GTA 4 and RDR are noticeably more reactive than GTA 5 or RDR2.
Following on from the discussion already going on in the news thread here’s the new trailer and 70+ screenshots.
New artwork:
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“will i see a billboard that makes my soul collapse?” I ask before getting my answer.
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leaps and bounds in the science of rendering topless male bodies
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Body hair too. Finally next gen has arrived.
FLORIDA DOESNT HAVE MOUNTAINS
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The cowards answer is that it’s the state of Leonida so that they can have mountains but the brave heroic galaxy brain answer is that the mountains are there on purpose to cinematically simulate a movie being filmed in LA or Vancouver.
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i can’t wait to see how much money rockstar games owes city girls with the rapper lady duo
I do understand the appeal on a certain level but at the same time find it kind of funny that the flagship franchise in a medium where technology allows us to create interactive worlds beyond our wildest imaginations is basically about a worse version of America but you’re allowed to kill people in it
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It’s a better version of america because you can still overcome and escape law enforcement
the houser brothers always had the genuine outlaw spark in them, even if they were composed of too much edgelord base material and all the money wrecked their brains
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part of why gta 5 is so bad is because they just abandoned this pretense and decided the main characters should regularly and enthusiastically be tools of the state
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Georgia does. The Mount Kalaga National Park screens look a lot like Providence Canyon National Park in Georgia. Plus another shot has a car license plate that looks similar to a Georgia plate and has the name Gloriana for the state.
So it appears some portion of the northern part of the map is based on Georgia.
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I want to say gta5 is maybe more interesting paired with rdr2 and looking at them both as about rockstar. and the everybody is friends again and teams up to fight all their enemies ending is total nonsense, does not fit that game at all, better if you pick one of the other ones. still weaker than 4 on almost every metric but it being the heist focused one I can’t not attempt to make it work somehow in my head.
they’re small glimpses but these trailers have all seemed almost absurdly personalityless for rockstar games. the dialogue is so generic and could be from any sony prestige game. and the guys voice is not really helping in that regard either
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it’s funny one of my problems with gta 5 is that they kind of hook you with the heist shit and then it ends up feeling like such a minor part of the game compared to everything else and the regular GTA stuff that I was doing that I never felt like I got to enjoy planning and robbing shit. Even in gta online my main memories of the heists are being frustrated at not having enough people, finding random people and having them fuck it up or making the setup phase missions take absurdly long. That and the time I was doing the series a setup where you have to steal weed from the sawmill and a guy on our crew from tumblr was having a mental breakdown shouting about how he was going to stick his head in the oven like Sylvia Plath to kill himself as all real artists do as we were stealing the shit which seemed weirdly true to life. So there’s that I guess. Maybe I talked myself out of it and the heists were cool after all, because Rockstar just seems to bring that mental instability dog out in others
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I like a lot of the framing choices they’ve made in VI (the bonnie and clyde romance thing, the fact that Florida is increasingly a magical realist landscape that a significant portion of the game’s audience has no interest in visiting in real life) but I have also never liked a mainline GTA game and didn’t like RDR2 much compared with the first one so I think I’m a very weird and not representative audience
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