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Grand Theft Auto Xbox 'Double Pack' Explored

Posted by simoniker on from the yummy-custom-soundtracks dept.

Thanks to GameSpy for their brief interview with Rockstar Vienna's managing director over the forthcoming Grand Theft Auto/Vice City 'double pack' for the Xbox, which ships on 4th November. He reveals this conversion of both GTA games has "upped the resolution for HDTV usage, enabling 480p support along with a 16:9 aspect ratio for widescreen TVs", significant other graphical enhancements, including "much higher resolution textures", "specular lighting" and "reflection maps", and best of all, that "...players will also be able to create their own stations and can make multiple soundtracks by ripping their favorite CD's onto the Xbox hard drive. Grand Theft Auto 3 recognizes each soundtrack as a CD that can be changed by the new CD changer."

3 of 40 comments (clear)

  1. Feh! by jvmatthe · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Incidentally, this is also coming out for the PS2, although without the graphical upgrade and soundtrack enhancements, AFAICT. But that's not why I posted.

    Biggest Missing Feature:
    Motorcycles in Liberty City.

    Honestly, that would suck me into playing GTA3 all over again, just trying out the bikes for hours seeing what I could pull off. If they added that, I'd consider selling my GTA3 and GTA:VC for the PS2 just to have the upgraded version of GTA3 in the double pack.

    Surely they thought about this. What's holding them back? Make it an easter egg, if need be, so you can avoid the "we couldn't test all situations and it wouldn't pass QA" argument.

    Oh, and while you're reading, I always love plugging this little article. In short, GTA3 much better than GTA:VC, and that's all there is to it. Flame on! :^D

    --
    Curmudgeon Gamer: Not happy
    1. Re:Feh! by Babbster · · Score: 3, Interesting
      Oh, and while you're reading, I always love plugging this little article. In short, GTA3 much better than GTA:VC, and that's all there is to it. Flame on! :^D

      Besides the bugs - many of which I found exceedingly annoying in Vice City - most of that article seemed to be written by someone who was simply nostalgic for the "original" (as original as the third in a series can be), like the people who claim that Pac-Man is superior to Ms. Pac-Man. There's nothing wrong with that, since it's always going to be a matter of taste, but Vice City is certainly defensible as a superior game.

  2. Re:also 720p by Babbster · · Score: 2, Interesting
    Unfortunately, even 720p is a stretch for the video memory in the Xbox when high-resolution textures and anti-aliasing are used. The games so far that have implemented 1080i (Dragon's Lair and Enter the Matrix) have used relatively low-resolution textures or cel shading, typically with no hardware anti-aliasing (admittedly, less of a problem at higher resolutions), to squeeze the higher resolutions into available memory. After all, despite 1080i being interlaced, you still need to render 1440x1080 or 1920x1080 - the two common 1080i resolutions - per frame to get the benefits.

    I would prefer that for now they use high-resolution textures and anti-aliasing to achieve nice 480p pictures, rather than applying workarounds to get to the HDTV resolutions. With the next console generation, I expect that all the consoles (at least I hope all, but I'm 99% certain for Xbox2) will have NTSC/480p/720p/1080i options built into nearly every game. I'd rather wait a bit for the real deal rather than get a half-assed result now.