GTA Original Trilogy Remake

Decks are you on a new game or an old modded save? I still can't get my old saves to load

The rain is giving me seizures on San Andreas.

To try to say something nice, Quick Resume seems to work well.

And yeah, these are still some of the greatest games of all time, such a shame Rockstar couldn't treat them accordingly. If they get some decent patches, probably worth the £17.99 they will be by May next year, but they could have been so much better.

That was me with Silent Hill 2 HD. It looked like mud but it was still SH2 beneath that.

I'm always tempted to buy the collection when it goes on sale despite knowing how bad a job they did.

Carl looking like Richard Pryor in your game.

It's my Humpty Hump default skin

So I know Rockstar Lincoln well. A school friend of mine was a tester around 08 - and at least until 2010 so he did both GTA IV and RDR.

Another friend was there later.

They both explained to me the testing process as full playthroughs and sections. You play, send a report over to San Diego/ wherever and then they send you the changes, if any.

Of the two, one pretty much gave up gaming except for Nintendo first party titles. "They actually work and seem like they listen to QA" - his words. The other lasted maybe 6 months and hated it. He games still but yeah I gather it's shit. Crunch for GTA IV (which was bumped back 6 months) was apparently 7 days a week, two months solid until they went gold.

My overall impression was that gameplay came secondary to story and "spectacle".

To be fair I work in books and barely read anything now.

Im not going to ask who those people where but if they were there at that time I definitely met them. The crunch on GTA4 was almost a year long. I ran the nightshifts which were for the multiplayer side exclusively. I did nights for 9 months, usually 12 hrs a night, sometimes normal hours. For me that meant 14 hours as I was in charge of the building, the test kits, the work and tasks for the testers and then the shift would start.... First in last out kind of deal. I never got any instructions from the day shift or the company at large. I had to make it up as I went along but fuck me we blew it apart. R* first real multiplayer game and the blueprint no doubt for what has come after.

If your friends did nights with me then I give them a virtual hug and apologise for how loud I would play my music on occasion, but I did have a whole 'quad' as they call them to myself. Certainly if they did RDR I know them, but I did leave about 6 months before release.. because the management were utter cunts.

That isn't how testing worked though. There was a database called Bugstar (featured in a GTA mission as an injoke involving pest controllers) that all issues would be reported on and classified for their severity. A,B,C class bugs etc. Actioned or waived. Some of my of my time was spent monitoring that so dumb shit didn't get through.

As for GTA4 though, we always kicked New York's ass. Always. We had a guy called Ian... Not a great tester but. Could. Play.

Fucking hell that's insane. What the hell kind of people wouldn't give some time off for something like that.

You say that, but Southampton city council wouldn't give me compassionate leave when my Mrs was in hospital and we weren't sure if she had miscarried due to me not being married to her. That was 22 years ago but there you have it. It wasn't far into the pregnancy and they weren't ever certain what happened, they said it may have been twins and we lost one at a best guess but we won't ever know.




Didn't stay there long after that.

I may have misunderstood what my mate was explaining to me. Tbf it was 2008. 

He'd have been about 23/24 then and was local - went to one of the grammar schools near Sleaford. Actually - both of them did. You'll probably be able to remember one or two characters like that, if you know the area. 

I remember just being so sad at how jaded they were. Launch night of GTA IV - midnight at the old Gamestation - you'd have thought Rockstar would have done something to celebrate or thank the nearby staff but not a bloody word. About 2 years later, early 2010, I bumped into my mate at the old Blockbuster by Sainsburys and asked him if he was working on Red Dead - all I got was a resigned "yes, I am" and that was it. 

One of my other mates who used to code for EA (and actually created a level of DLC for Dante's Inferno) left gaming completely and now does app development, sometimes for online betting. He actually told me that the new bosses are way nicer "because they at least know you can't treat your staff the way you treat your customers"

Apparently some of Hot Coffee is still in SA but not enough to bring it back. Would’ve loved to see what the AI upscaler did to that