Review: GTA V (PC)

It's safe to say that Grand Theft Auto V is one of those games that just keeps on giving. And two years after its initial release on consoles, GTA V has reached its most potent form on PC. Besides an extensive single-player story that stretches across an expansive world, the game packs in a full suite of video editing tools to create exportable films, a complete multiplayer mode that's heavy on action, and another awesome soundtrack that features just about every genre of music one can recall.

Feature: GTA V Comments (Part IV) - Stunt Island

Barnstorming circa 1992

In 1992 game developer Assembly Line and publisher Disney Interactive unleashed Stunt Island on an unsuspecting public.

Before buying Stunt Island I hadn't read anything about it and YouTube had zero videos of the game (owing to the fact it didn't exist yet). My decision to buy the game was based entirely on the information on the back of the box and how heavy it was in my hands. The manual was thick with instructions and it "thumped" into the sides of the box when I shook it. In 1992, I often considered a PC game's worth by the weight of the box and the sound of all the "extras" sliding around inside, so basing a purchase on this criteria wasn't unusual.

Feature: GTA V Comments (Part III) - Canadian

Okay, think of Canada.

What was the first stereotypical image that jumped into your head? Did it include bacon, hockey, maple syrup, moose, Mounties, poutine, donuts? A beaver galloping through the Rocky Mountains? Some kind of weird amalgam of all of those things on a poster shaped like a toque being sold by Bob and Doug McKenzie on kijiji?

I'll bet the character below never entered your thoughts:

Trevor Phillips, Lord of Chaos

Feature: Comments on GTA V (Part II) - Climate Change

Why don't more GTA V citizens ride bikes?

At first I couldn't put my finger on why littering in GTA V sparked in me a mixture of irritation, a high level of anger, and sadness. At first I thought it might be due to the casualness of the littering. Michael finishes coffee with an FIB agent, and Michael leaves his coffee cup on the patio table, the agent throws his on the ground. I switched to Franklin at one point as he finished off a can of Sprunk. He then tossed it to the sidewalk.

In real life, littering does irritate me, especially when the item being tossed is recyclable. Is your life so damn busy you can't hold on to that empty can for bit to drop it into a recycling bin? Or hand it over to a can collector? After some deep thinking, I think the reason it grates on me so much because Los Santos/Blaine County is a closed system. For all we know, it could be a biodome on Mars or trapped in a snow globe on the desk of Tobias Funke. Either way, the boundaries of the world in GTA V are clearly defined and there's a definite "Here be Dragons!" hard edges to the map. (Other countries and nationalities are name-checked but we never see those places.) So the fact that all the characters in GTA V seem to treat littering like it's no big deal is incongruous with what daily life should entail, which is a lot of the three R's: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.

Feature: Comments on GTA V (Part I) - "Realism"

The simple warning logo for airbags (see above) found on most vehicles sold in North America today (exceptions include motorcycles and Hoverounds), demonstrates why Grand Theft Auto V (GTA V) is about as realistic as betting your rent and your insulin on winning the lottery and expecting everything to work out a-okay. As "real" as some people like to think the GTA series is there are these great big holes in "reality" that we all seem to willfully ignore.

Feature: Time Capsule - Grand Theft Auto

GTA III

With Grand Theft Auto V gripping the conciousness of the gaming world -- have you read the "14,633 Small Touches of GTA V That You May Have Missed" click-bait feature yet? -- I thought it might be a good time to jump on the bandwagon by beating open a time capsule then running it over to see what The Armchair Empire was saying about past Grand Theft Auto games.

Review: Grand Theft Auto III (PC)
More than a decade old at this point, GTA III was released on PC in 2002 to the kind of acclaim that greeted the Playstation 2 version in 2001. Nevermind that this game kickstarted the oft-repeated phrase, "Have sex with a prostitute then kill her to get your money back," GTA III may not have been the first open-world game but it did it with enough style and content to allow it to hold up today. The review is notable for this line: "[Online play] was never promised, and was likely always a pipe dream, but it would be infinitely cool to wonder around the world of GTA3 with, say, 32 real people scattered amongst the computer AI crowd."

Review: Max Payne 3 (PC)

Max Payne isn't a broken man.

Hooked on pain killers, a stumbling alcoholic, and plagued by guilt, loneliness, and rage, Max Payne is a shattered man who continually screws up his job as personal security for a rich family in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

Ultimately, he tries to pull himself together as an act of some kind of redemption, if not forever then at least long enough to "fix" things. It offers a simple contrast to the disassembly and dysfunction that drives the entirety of the plot, which plays out in extensive cutscenes and flashbacks to explain how Max wound up in Brazil.

Review: Max Payne 3 (360)

Addicted to painkillers and a raging alcoholic. Emotionally and mentally tortured by the murder of his wife and child. His law enforcement career completely done. The New Jersey mob has a vendetta contract out on him. Zero self-respect for himself. And people around him have a penchant for dying in horrific and painful ways. Yeah, Max Payne's not exactly the life of the party in his return to gaming with Max Payne 3 on the Xbox 360. But while Payne himself is figuratively in the gutter of life, the game itself is Park Avenue great, with the trademark Rockstar solid storytelling in the long-lasting single-player mode along with a surprisingly robust multiplayer mode.