GTA V: No one does open world quite like Rockstar

Image belongs to Rockstar

This review has been a long time coming, but what with Simul-Tober (the month of post swapping with UWG contributors I took part in), I didn’t really get a chance to slip this one in. So here it is! The GTA V review that you probably haven’t been waiting for, because a) you’ve probably already played it and b) you’ve probably already read a thousand and one reviews of it already. Hopefully though, I can still keep this interesting for you. So. I’ve confessed this before and I’ll confess it again. I never really played much GTA at all. I did get somewhat into GTA IV and then sort of just got distracted and never finished it. I didn’t really have anything against it, it just never really hooked me in. Perhaps I just never really gave it a chance. With all the hype surrounding GTA V before it came out, I decided to really give it a shot this time to see what all the fuss is about. What I found is that GTA V is exactly what I want out of an open world game. It’s massive in size and scope and actually has activities to match it. It’s not just empty space to traverse with the occasional repetitive side mission or activity to keep you occupied for a bit. Los Santos is rich and detailed and feels as real as any game city has ever felt. That’s not to say the game didn’t have its flaws, but it’s still one of the games I’ve enjoyed most this year and that’s really saying something considering this year’s slew of awesome games. I obviously can’t really compare GTA V with any of the previous games, but I can tell you that on its own, it certainly knocked my metaphorical socks off.

The Infamous GameSpot GTA V Review or How the Sh*t Hit The Fan

So I’m late to the game again. Big surprise right? Actually I wasn’t  really planning to write on this topic at all and this week was going to be a purely GTA V themed piece (not a review because I’m not even CLOSE to finishing the main story yet), but I realised that I really had to say something about this topic. And as you can see from the title, the topic in question is the furor that resulted from GameSpot reviewer Carolyn Petit’s review of GTA V  and whether that was fair, but it’s also more generally about the nature of reviews.  In case you haven’t heard about the controversy surrounding the review, she basically gave the game a 9/10 and mentioned that she felt that brilliant though the game was, it was also ‘politically muddled and profoundly misogynistic’. The ensuing shit storm was greater than anyone could have expected. People were really really angry. Some even felt betrayed and disillusioned. There are a number of issues here and a few perspectives were expressed on the dissenting side with, I think, varying degrees of validity. Now, I don’t entirely agree with her opinion, but that’s pretty much unnecessary in the equation. The question is whether she was wrong to have expressed that particular opinion at all. I think is important to discuss because to me, this incident is indicative of a wider problem with the community, like the excessive outrage that happened over the Xbox One or death threats to COD developers for changing a minor aspect of the game were. It’s both an exciting and a sad time to be a gamer. We’re not all like that of course, but enough of us are for the rest of us to be cast in their shadow.

GameSpot internship and blog update!

As you might have noticed, there was no Minecraft video up yesterday and unfortunately, I won’t be putting up my regular post today either, because this cheeese toastie has been super busy as of late and I’m trying to give myself a little downtime this week. The good news though, is that I will hopefully be putting up that Minecraft video later today (or tomorrow morning for those of you in the UK) and the video that’s supposed to be going up tomorrow should be going up as usual! As for the blog post, that should be out this weekend when I’ve got a bit more time to write it. So basically my schedule for posting will be a little scattered this week, but it’ll all get there! Next week, everything should return to normal.