Seriously though, I thought GTA's tone was feeling a decade out of date even in 2013. It just stinks of the late 90s and early 2000s, specifically of early South Park
You could say it's unnecessary, but Gay bars at the time of release, and to an extent even to this day have this shit written on them, often as a reclamation of the term. Same goes for f*g - queer is now just part of the lingo, when it was a slur before. It's 'in your face', it's provocative, and I've seen people of such groups take pictures with those exact signs as a 'haha, that's us, we're f-gs/tr-nnies, fuck what ya heard' sort of thing.
Of course, there are different flavours of queer bar, some are much softer and strive for more of a safe space feel, but there are certainly a lot that lean more into being sleazy, punky, and even intimidating.
Perhaps I'm being too generous. I could accept that I am.
This is the franchise whose FedEx parody is called PostOp
Siri, generate what a cishet person would design when forced to create an inclusive queer bar.
GTA is the South Park of video games. It is the peak liberal "caring about things is cringe" video game.
Theres an ad in GTA SA or 4 about how the only way to change the world is by voting, and it mocks people who refuse to vote in the US. Really fucking cringe lib mindset.
I think 4 had a better story than all other GTAs, it sucks that Niko's gay friend is a steriotypical 2000's gay man, but kinda cool that Niko and Roman defends him bc they are friends, but there are no more interactions beside him being there at Roman's wedding.
The whole vibe of Niko's story felt at odds with the goofy GTA world he was in
https://youtu.be/zXkftCxKf3k
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
All of the ads in GTA games are absurd parodies so I dont see the issue
yeah the story and characters in 5 pale in comparison to 4
That's the vibe I got when I tried it
It's especially clear if you listen to the in-game radio stations, it's just like South Park.
It used to be just "ironic" music if I remember correctly, like opera.
Yeah it does, it also has current-year hits, classics etc., but it also has in-universe advertisements and like, fake talkshow type things. It is very on the nose when it comes to these two things.
IIRC for GTA5 it was all satire aimed at mid 2000s Fox, both the trashy reality TV side of it and Fox News. I'm not gonna say it doesn't revel too much in the spectacle of just taking something that's already awful and dialing it up a bit, but it's more in the style of the Onion where most of the bits are taking the mask off an institution or trend and having it honestly portray itself as what it is (like the Fox News expy literally having the tagline "confirming your prejudices" or an American Idol expy literally just being assholes reveling in cruelty) than South Park style nihilism - it has a point to make and that's that American culture is reactionary and repulsively self-centered and consumerist, even as it is itself reveling in being trashy slop.
You've got to remember, everything after GTA3 was written in the context of the Bush era and none of it was written after gamergate: it has the sort of incoherent dirtbag quasi-left contemporary counter culture stance of recognizing the US as bloodthirsty, pointlessly cruel, and deeply unserious but also not having any sort of framework for understanding or addressing that and being entirely too libertine and chauvinist on top of that. It's kind of alien to anything we have now, because that whole counter culture basically got wiped out by gamergate crystalizing the chauvinist libertines into open fascists baying for blood and forcing everyone else to stop tacitly tolerating them.
“ironic” music if I remember correctly, like opera.
Hey, I actually liked listening to opera/classics more than any other music while driving on my car/vehicle in these games. >:T /nm
chuddier friends-of-friends at social gatherings running people over while letting out empty chuckles for HOURS.
I never understood the "fun" of running
peopleharmless pedestrians over in games with vehicles on them and laughing about it. Are these people kids or smth?Running over bad guys in Halo is very fun, and it's ludonarratively appropriate since they're either genocidal aliens or red/blue bad guys that are also trying to run you over in multiplayer
that's true, but i was talking about running over civilians/pedestrians that are minding their own business in games like GTA. i just don't get what's so fun about that.
maybe i should've clarified this.
Ah. Yeah, that never appealed to me either. I'm the kind of dork that tries to obey all the traffic laws in GTA like games though. At least in LA Noire driving like an asshole is appropriate since you play as a
I’m the kind of dork that tries to obey all the traffic laws in GTA like games though.
I remember trying to do that in good 'ol Vice City, only for pedestrian-driving vehicles/cars to ignore them and speed on through (sometimes even hitting my vehicle/car in the process). The funniest part is I didn't even aggravate them or had cheats on, yet they still did it anyway. :^)
I'm pretty sure one out of every 1000 cars randomly (maybe more likely than that) in gta 5 is specifically coded to drive like a complete maniac. I've seen them do a lot of wacky shit. Wouldn't surprise me if that was a feature all the way back
Ragdoll physics. Euphoria is a great physics engine. It's morbidly silly, and feels taboo.
GTA's solution to make regularly recreating those ISIS truck attacks on busy sidewalks feel less morbid is making sure every NPC comes across as incredibly vapid, stupid and repulsive
All the stuff the NPCs blurt out makes them sound like awful, shallow people
It all gets a bit tiring after a while
After a while of that, my headcanon became that it's actually hell, with the player and all the npcs there to punish each other, where nothing ever changes
In GTA 2 theres a mission for the Russian Mob (who are mostly a parody of Slav and Soviet stuff, they even have a place called Crimea lol) that you kidnap random people and watch them get shot only to be served as hot dog.
Which makes no fucking sense even for a non-sense game like GTA 2. In the PS1 port they changed so you attack rival gang members instead of random civilians.
Play Red Dead Redemption 2. It abandons the edgy satire and what Grimbeard would call "smelly boy humour" that Rockstar made their calling card previously
Even Red Dead Redemption 1 still leans into that GTA tone
These games have always sucked. I don't know in what possible world I would possibly want to play a videogame and listen and watch fake ads. Not to mention what terribly uninterested these games are in the cities they are actually set in besides their bare physical construction.
The only reason to ever play these games is to drive around on a motorcycle, which is arguably pretty damn fun.
I just remembered the game Driver. GTA is pretty garbage in comparison considering Driver has more actual grand theft auto in it.
Getting out of the garage was one of the hardest video game challenges that I have ever attempted.
Driver is great but you are coping hard if you think GTA doesn't do everything driver does an more (apart from car 'shifting'). I've probably put more hours into Driver than GTA overall but that's just because it has split screen so I could play it with my friends as a kid as a GTA replacement.
If Atari didn't fuck Driver 3 (driv3r) we could have had more really great open games for the PS2/Xbox and the PS3/360.
Driver 2 you could drive and walk in both Havana and Rio de Janeiro (i think they use european portuguese VAs which is pretty funny). I remember there being a blog online that compared the game cities to RL version. Really cool.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
GTA has always been total shit and anyone who likes it is simply wrong. Play a different game GTA players there's a world of actual decent games out there
![[CW: Transphobic Slur] If GTA VI goes WOKE every square inch of the entire game world isn't going to plastered in amazing jokes like these anymore](https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/2fc50ec4-f768-432e-88f0-30a17ffdd8fd.jpeg){kind=link}