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Seriously though, I thought GTA's tone was feeling a decade out of date even in 2013. It just stinks of the late 90s and early 2000s, specifically of early South Park
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this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2024
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It's especially clear if you listen to the in-game radio stations, it's just like South Park.
Yeah it does, it also has current-year hits, classics etc., but it also has in-universe advertisements and like, fake talkshow type things. It is very on the nose when it comes to these two things.
IIRC for GTA5 it was all satire aimed at mid 2000s Fox, both the trashy reality TV side of it and Fox News. I'm not gonna say it doesn't revel too much in the spectacle of just taking something that's already awful and dialing it up a bit, but it's more in the style of the Onion where most of the bits are taking the mask off an institution or trend and having it honestly portray itself as what it is (like the Fox News expy literally having the tagline "confirming your prejudices" or an American Idol expy literally just being assholes reveling in cruelty) than South Park style nihilism - it has a point to make and that's that American culture is reactionary and repulsively self-centered and consumerist, even as it is itself reveling in being trashy slop.
You've got to remember, everything after GTA3 was written in the context of the Bush era and none of it was written after gamergate: it has the sort of incoherent dirtbag quasi-left contemporary counter culture stance of recognizing the US as bloodthirsty, pointlessly cruel, and deeply unserious but also not having any sort of framework for understanding or addressing that and being entirely too libertine and chauvinist on top of that. It's kind of alien to anything we have now, because that whole counter culture basically got wiped out by gamergate crystalizing the chauvinist libertines into open fascists baying for blood and forcing everyone else to stop tacitly tolerating them.
Hey, I actually liked listening to opera/classics more than any other music while driving on my car/vehicle in these games. >:T /nm
I never understood the "fun" of running ~~people~~ harmless pedestrians over in games with vehicles on them and laughing about it. Are these people kids or smth?
Running over bad guys in Halo is very fun, and it's ludonarratively appropriate since they're either genocidal aliens or red/blue bad guys that are also trying to run you over in multiplayer
that's true, but i was talking about running over civilians/pedestrians that are minding their own business in games like GTA. i just don't get what's so fun about that.
maybe i should've clarified this.
ragdoll physics are very funny tbf
Ah. Yeah, that never appealed to me either. I'm the kind of dork that tries to obey all the traffic laws in GTA like games though. At least in LA Noire driving like an asshole is appropriate since you play as a
I remember trying to do that in good 'ol Vice City, only for pedestrian-driving vehicles/cars to ignore them and speed on through (sometimes even hitting my vehicle/car in the process). The funniest part is I didn't even aggravate them or had cheats on, yet they still did it anyway. :^)
I'm pretty sure one out of every 1000 cars randomly (maybe more likely than that) in gta 5 is specifically coded to drive like a complete maniac. I've seen them do a lot of wacky shit. Wouldn't surprise me if that was a feature all the way back
Ragdoll physics. Euphoria is a great physics engine. It's morbidly silly, and feels taboo.
GTA's solution to make regularly recreating those ISIS truck attacks on busy sidewalks feel less morbid is making sure every NPC comes across as incredibly vapid, stupid and repulsive
All the stuff the NPCs blurt out makes them sound like awful, shallow people
It all gets a bit tiring after a while
After a while of that, my headcanon became that it's actually hell, with the player and all the npcs there to punish each other, where nothing ever changes