Be Excellent To Each Other

GTA 4 isn't exactly 'optimised' for PC, though.

You're not wrong

It makes sense though, both of the current-gen consoles use components and architecture that has an awful lot in common with a normal PC, which is in stark contrast to the 360 and PS3.

So whereas GTA4 ran like crap on PC hardware which, on paper, should have had no problem with it whatsoever (in the end you just had brute-force your way to acceptable performance two or three years down the line when the PC to run it properly actually existed), GTA5 will do a lot better with more of a straight port.

That 650ti graphics card for example won't be a million miles away in terms of raw power from the GPU in the XBox One.

Grim... is now Level 45.

He has no guns, stats, cars, apartments of any heist progress, but he's definitely level 45.

Stupid game lost my character.

Oh noes!

It's still reading as level 45 like Riles said, but it's got baby stats and no property or anything. I kept the money I had (£300k or so) and, oddly, got a £500k bump when the game started up.

I'm going to get in touch with their support folk and see if there's anything they can do.

Point and laugh?

I wonder if my character is still there.

I blew up a police helicopter with a mid-air sticky bomb lobbed out of a car window. I think I like this game. Though it does keep making my hat fall off.

You should use a sticky bomb to stick your hat to your head

Turns out there was. Yakuza Grim... is back in business!

Fuck me, that was some funny Vroom Pewing tonight.

After everyone else had left, Craster and I went dogging.






Selfie!



And here's some I took of my cars:





But the bus. The bus was the funniest thing.

The bus!

Craster looks just like him.

I have pics of the bus. What's the least annoying way to get pictures off the PS4?

I think Ali was only a matter of seconds away from calling an ambulance when we arrived at the laptop on the bus.

I'm still laughing at the bus.

Social media was the easiest for me - link it to your facebook page - set it to 'private' - and then upload to there - you can then just grab pictures / video directly from facebook

Do you have a hover car?

That's Grim... And Craster on the scooter isn't it?

Me and Cras on the scooter, which due to its top speed of somewhere between a stroll and a jog was the ideal vehicle to arrive at the fighting after all the other players had killed the Bad Men.

The hovering car was some sort of weird glitch.

We took a bus into a drive-by.

I'm still laughing.

No, we all took sensible cars. Mid crashing a drug deal APoD just arrived in a bus, running over two bad guys. The surprise was the greatest part!

Joans is having this for his birthday. I can't wait!

Anyone up for moar Gta tonight?

I'm out at the dogs and don't know when I'll be back, but it's so damned freezing out that it may not be late

Yes.

If I'm around, chuck an invite if you please.

I'm out

Spoilers!

Surely by now it's not a spoiler that you have a birthday?

I an Dave.

I'd forgotten when it was.

Yesterday. Your party was quite good fun.

For no particular reason me and the chaps picked this up again a few weeks ago and have worked through all the heists, we did most of them ages ago but we've got a new Saturday night regular - (he's separated from his wife so now has LOADS of time to play videogames, has already got a new girlfriend on the go but she has her own place, he's never seemed happier, to be honest) - so we decided to start from scratch again, and work all the way through to the main Pacific Bank Heist over several Saturday night sessions.

The Pacific Bank Heist was last night and that's a hell of an adventure, five setup missions and then the heist itself. Took us from 9pm to 1am to complete although three of our number were getting increasingly well-oiled which arguably didn't help (I'm on call this week so was drinking nothing more potent than orangeade, so watching their progressively more drunken, ahem, 'sub-optimal play' was highly amusing).

Overall GTAV remains an absolutely stunning game, its ability to create emergent gameplay is absolutely unparalleled IMO, even just the time when you're back in an open session between heist stages tends to chuck up all sorts of crazy stuff because there'll often be game modes active on the shard and suchlike. (Or we try to kill each other, much to the chagrin of our heist leader who just wanted to get the next stage started.)

As for the heists themselves, whilst some of it is necessarily prescriptive, a lot of the time it just gives you a series of goals and leaves you to work out the best way to do it, which we love.

We've also had a look at the new Cunning Stunts DLC, which is a bit like Trackmania in GTAV-world, and is really good fun, albeit a massive change of pace from the main game.

Oh yes one of the heists has Trevor as its ringleader, which is as amusing (and psychotic) as you might imagine....

After the payoff from the heist I'm sat on $1.75m in cash, (our payoff was nowhere near what it could have been as so much of the take from the bank was destroyed by our own ineptitude), although I only have two cars. Once you've got a Karuma Armored there's really no need to have anything else, and I already have a nice apartment, I may however take a look at the new CEO stuff which requires you to have an office complex, the cheapest one was about $1.4m I think.

The number of attempts it took us to do the escape on the bikes on the last heist was ludicrous.

I have 24 vehicles.

Riles, myself and a non-forumer spent most of our CEO time playing a version of Tron on the office games console.

Meta!

Yes we took a fair few attempts at that as well, although I'd say 50% or more of the failures were simply down to outright fuck-uppery, including but not limited to someone failing to find the correct button for his parachute and therefore just falling off the side of a mountain to his death, and one of the chaps attempting to find such a novel route to the destination that by the time he died from cop he was further away from it than when we'd started on the bikes.

Even when we completed it one of the guys became detached from his bike somewhere up on the mountain so never got to parachute, and therefore had to run all the way down to the creek, as we navigated up the creek (and up waterfalls ) on the boat to meet him.

It's a really challenging game in many ways, but it's always so incredibly good fun at the same time. The checkpointing on the heists is just about right too IMO, so you never have to go back further than the start of the current 'chunk'.

@Grim... So does the CEO thingy open up any sizeable amount of new 'stuff', like decent missions or anything on the scale of a heist? Or is it just bragging rights with the office?

I need to get back into this now I can't baseball anymore.

We worked out that if you blow up the bikes, it removes the checkpoints and you can just drive straight to the boat

Obviously every attempt was on 'hard mode' because we shot the hostages.

Apart from the very, very first attempt. No idea how we achieved that.

The dream team were on crowd control

Just like the lab chopper setup. That redefined the phrase "dream team"

Putting the bad guys in the ground while Joans slowly drowned.

"I don't know why I can't make it through the pipe"

"You are pressing X to use the rebreather, right?"

"Oh"

I became the CEO of a company this evening.

So what is there to do in there?

I'm the only member of our heist team who has enough cash to buy a CEO headquarters (the others keep spending all their cash on cars and apartments and incredibly expensive trainers), but I'm not fussed about the headquarters if it doesn't open up any new interesting multiplayer stuff for us.

Are there any multiplayer missions or heists or generally just things to do with your mates that come out of the CEO headquarters?

According to the activity wall on my PS4, Cras has spent $335k on clothes and $9m on cars. Most of the car money went on the worst paint jobs you can imagine.

I have spent so much on paint.