My impressions so far

[kdrnic]

#841

Circa 8 years ago, I played GTA London 1969 to completion, so this wasn’t my first contact with classic GTA.

So far, I have finished Gangsta Bang, and played a tad of Heist Almighty also.

Here are some issues I find with the game:
-You can’t see very far, so if you go fast you end up colliding with traffic a lot. There is no speed limiter like in Mafia also, which could help driving around in a manageable pace
-Contrary to the AI, it is impossible to aim accurately. When trying to kill someone on foot, the only hope is to take the SMG and spray all over the place, and if the target is armed you end up needing to shoot him from an off screen distance. This could be solved by a “snap to closest target” button, or a “rotate player more slowly for precise aiming” button
-Every mission is single-try, and most are hard to play well on the first time. To keep with the design of the game, a good solution would be to be able to retry the mission for a price in points
-It is annoying there isn’t an ingame map, it could well be just press a button to show a fullscreen image of a map of the city, although I am aware a paper map was part of the game box contents, originally
-I often open pickup boxes that I don’t need, because I can’t tell their contents
-The text telling what you have to do stays only very shortly, and you often are too busy to read it

The score target for Heist Almighty sickens me, at 2000000 points, I have so far managed 1100000 but then ran out of lives. It is very annoying to have to redo all the missions.

[rnlf]

#842

You can set the speed for the text in the options. And you can use F6 to pause the game while you read the mission description. And there’s another F-key (F8, maybe? Not entirely sure) that replays the last message you received.

What do you mean, you pick up stuff you don’t need? It doesn’t hurt either and you can’t pick up stuff you already have (for example, you can’t pick up more Ammo and only one Get out of Jail Free card and such).

Yeah, it’s a bit annoying that you can only try each mission once, but then again, playing a complete city including all missions takes about an hour. I think it’s intentional and not such a big deal. The game is probably designed to be replayed several times (it even gives you a high score list and all), and on the next time you play the level, you’ll do better. It’s not like in Mafia or the later GTAs where you’re playing a single campaign. It’s much more arcade-y.

I’m not even sure the viewing distance is the real problem. I think the cars are too jittery at high speed to evade other cars, even if you see them early enough.

It’s actually pretty easy to get to the 2,000,000 points: Just finish missions and don’t let the cops get you. Each successful mission gives you a +1 score multiplier, after four successful missions you already get 5 times the normal points for everything you do. The first 1,000,000 points are hard, everything beyond that goes really quick. You can also pick up a +1 in every level, I think. Getting killed doesn’t reduce your multipliers. Sometimes it’s better to let the cops kill you than to let them catch you.

And yes, the aiming thing is probably my biggest point of criticism. I just avoid gun fights completely, whenever possible.

[kdrnic]

#843

I didn’t know about F6, I was using DOSBox’s Alt+Pause.

Once you break the box, will it be reboxed if you don’t pick it up? I assumed that if you break the box and don’t pick it up, it could disappear after a while.

The frustration is in that one hour you may well fail to proceed to the next level, and you can’t save also, so I’d say it is too big of a session.

What did you do to get points? Even with a x6 multiplier I couldn’t find anything too safe to increase the score at any decent rate.

A user that joined the IRC late yesterday suggested that a strafing button would be a great solution to the aiming problem, which I agreed to.

[kdrnic]

#844

Finally got Heist Almighty.
Did all the missions I could find, failed some, got the multipliers except the one which needs the very tricky jump to the island, and had x7. Then did all the kill frenzies, and still had to do some car dock selling.

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[DavidN]

#848

A well-earned victory 🙂 Sounds like it was a struggle! I noticed when I went through that the kill frenzies really don’t give you a lot of points, even with the multiplier.

I definitely agree on the aiming problem, too – later in the game you’re asked to go up against whole gangs on foot, and the only way to fight effectively is by doing this strange dance where you run perpendicular to them, wait for them to fire and then turn around spraying your machine gun during the pause. In addition to that there’s a definite limit to the number of directions a gun can fire in, leaving large blind spots!

I found myself wanting strafe controls so that I could move with WSAD and aim with the mouse, although I admit that swapping between the two would be awkward when you’re getting in or out of a vehicle.