Very cool. Lots of detail. They seem to be doing a distance blur thing, I'm guessing to keep the level of detail down enough for a reasonable frame rate, which seems to be in the 20-30 fps range, though I've seen it dip lower on occasion. Burnout Paradise spoiled me with its rock-steady 60 fps and sharp visuals to the horizon, but I understand that there's a hell of a lot more happening here. (For one thing, BP has no human beings at all, only vehicles. No building interiors either.) The world is very much alive. Good job on that, and on keeping it all in motion. I've seen absolutely no streaming freezes so far. Details will pop into view now and then, but the flow is never interrupted. So the visual tech is covered nicely. Audio is what it should be, and that's really not hard to do anymore. SFX are good. Speech is good, both for important scenes and the random street chatter. Voice acting is good. Vibration is very sparse, tough, at least during driving. Again, I have to compare to BP, with its terrific road feel through the rumble feature. That's completely absent here. In fact, the only vibration I clearly felt was during thunderclaps in a rainstorm. This aspect feels oddly incomplete.
Car handling is very manageable. Analog throttle and brake, properly placed on the triggers. Brakes are much more realistic than usual in a game, and they behave very differently between the POS you drive first and a BMW clone. Steering response is spot-on, though all cars I've driven so far will understeer heavily after they start to skid. The only good performance-driving view is the hood one. All others are too detached from the car. Unfortunately, the hood view has too much vertical bob, and it will drive your eyes batty after a while. So I end up switching to a close behind view for cruising, and back to the hood for chases.
I've spent much less time on foot. I always end up driving a lot in GTA games, and so far this is no exception. The walking/running control feels like it has too much inertia. Changing direction takes more effort than I'm accustomed to in 3rd-person game with dual-stick control. I need much more practice. I failed a mission once and almost failed it again, because I fell off the same ledge twice while chasing someone on foot. Niko would not make the turn as quickly as I expected. Also, in order to run, you have to press A, which means you can't use the right stick to help you steer. A shoulder button would have made more sense. Some speed control on the left stick also would have made better sense. (There's none.)
So far I've played 3 games, bowling, pool and this 3D block arcade game (which is sort of fun--high score so far 8950). Nicely done as extra activities, but Nintendo doesn't have to worry about bowling stealing away Wii Sports players.
What else? There's waypoints and GPS, including a synthetic voice to tell you when to turn. Saves work the same as San Andreas, where you go to your safe house and sleep for 6 hours. There's a night/day cycle. You eat fast food to regain health, but so far I haven't seen health decrease because of no eating. Oh, and the music/radio is once again very nicely done, with good stuff to listen to, and enough options to avoid the few stinkers. Good humor in the commercials and "news", which has been carried over to a couple of TV channels in the house.
So far, I'm loving it, nitpicking aside. I'm taking a break now, and will dive back in later tonight.
