[Part I: Introductory blithering]
[Part II: Personal history and adventure games]
[Part III: Single player FPSs and why Valve is so awesome]
This is, again, late; I’m thinking that my originally intended schedule of one of these a week may have been overly ambitious, especially with the semester starting soon. Regardless, here’s this week’s installment: having covered the kind of game that I think is best placed to tell stories well, I want to talk about a kind of game that I think is both extremely well and extremely awkwardly placed for storytelling. And I want to focus on a particular company that has a particularly ambitious way of going after this.
I still remember the summer of Vice City. Or maybe it was spring. Or possibly it was winter. I can’t honestly remember that part. What I do remember: I was in college, I was new to Grand Theft Auto, and Vice City devoured my brain.
I had paid Grand Theft Auto III some moderate attention when it came out; like most people at the time I found it impressively ambitious (and in fact ‘ambitious’ is the first and primary descriptor I would use for all other Rockstar games since, whatever other descriptors I might choose), but for one reason or another it didn’t quite grab me. But then I got Vice City and everything changed. Continue reading
