Hey- a gleaming review! I didn't expect that. Excellent stuff. I personally never thought it looked good- I wasn't particularly bothered about it. But I've got a review copy for Payday 2 coming in on release, hopefully. And looking on Metacritic- there's some pretty great reviews.

Hah, cool! Thanks for reading, man. Hope you enjoyed it. Tried any new games that were on it since? Imho stealth is the best gameplay mechanic there is, in any game. I've been meaning to write a heavily opinion-based piece on that.

I'm trying not to get too actually "hyped" about it, as I was burned very badly indeed by RDR. (Which I can still barely play for long stretches, considering how much more I expected from it.) What I am finding hard to contain is just how much there is to talk about.

I totally agree! I know you're not supposed to post your own articles/websites here, but I think you'll agree with me on this.

Definitely. Although it doesn't necessarily fit with the characters- Michael's a heist man, so he wouldn't be interested in selling drugs like that. In fact, they're all heist men.

Well goddamnit. I was certain Chinatown Wars' Drug Trade was in GTAV, and I went to where I was certain I'd read it, in that big original Game Informer blowout. This one: http://imgur.com/a/8vOrJ.

Good stuff man, it's definitely worth a look.

See, I'm not sure about that. I see what you're saying. It's very slow and heavy in terms of movement. But this is similar to how Killzone 2's aiming was incredibly heavy as a control choice, and how GTAIV and Red Dead Redemption have incredibly heavy and imprecise controls as part of the control design. It's not that…

Yeah, I wholeheartedly agree.

Nah, I'm gonna keep playing the imprecision as realism card because it only affects one aspect of the game- guns. Aiming. Because ND don't want the player to rely on guns, they want to force the player to mix their gameplay up; so they give limited ammo and make aiming difficult, like it would be in real life. Job…

But the controls are 100% precise within the design of them being imprecise! There's obviously no programming issue with them on a game like this, with such a ridiculous budget, pedigree of staff, years of production under the belt, and production.

Yea, it's definitely an issue in how they approached the simulation. I think they assumed that, because it's an open world game, they'd be able to sacrifice some precision and lateral (i.e. 360 degree) freedom of movement because players would be making sweeping direction changes, not specific or precise ones. And in…

You can definitely kill people who are at your side- you just have to be accurate about it. You have to point the left stick directly at them. Otherwise you swing at nothingness. Which is realistic- it'll be harder for Joel to be accurate about hitting the dude if he's in Joel's peripheral vision.

No, I totally agree with you. It just isn't input lag. The game receives your command to turn 10 degrees to the right immediately, as quickly as it should. It's just a design flaw in the game's animation system. The game doesn't have a basic "step slightly to the right" animation, like an Uncharted or Gears would. The…

Fucking brilliant. Can't believe this comment fell so low on the Kinja comment board. Nobody will see it :(

Interesting point. I haven't played either of those, so can't say.

Yeah, I meant in a game the son-taking-over plotline was original. And what was even more powerful about it was that the game's mechanics evoked it: you play John Marston, teaching his son the things which you learnt yourself how to do, then you play the son who can now do them. Really ingenious perspective and…

I totally agree regarding sequels. If they made anything else with Joel and Ellie it would have to be filler, filling in gaps from TLoU's narrative. For example, something within that massive journey from the East coast to Colorado, or whatever. Where they had suddenly done like 3 days travel in one jump-cut.

Good call-out; what I meant was that my perspective at the time was one of ambiguity, but that the story itself isn't ambiguous.

Thanks, man! I definitely agree; and that discomfort/ "making you question yourself" affect is what makes it so great to talk about this kinda shit.