Eurogamer was fortunate enough to get a little hands-on time with the PC version of Grand Theft Auto IV. How does the title stack up against its PS3 and Xbox 360 brothers? Apparently, it manages to easily hold its own.
The crew were quite impressed with the accessibility of the new clip recording feature present in the PC version of the title.
The clip editing mode also comes with a number of visual filters to really make your video that much more spectacular, including sepia, film noire, cinema, and neon just to name a few.
Read more from the three page preview over at Eurogamer.
The crew were quite impressed with the accessibility of the new clip recording feature present in the PC version of the title.
Viewed from behind in the traditional third-person perspective, though, this picks up all the little wrist and finger movements that contribute to mouse or analogue stick camera control, and as a result looks more like a steadycam doing the robot than a scene from a Michael Mann film.
Add a marker to the start of the clip though, and another to the point where Nico slams up against the first cop car to take cover, and you can specify a camera that orbits 90 degrees from behind him to the side, capturing his knee slide and framing up his new targets - the cops at the end of the street - in classy fashion. There are options for smoothing the camera's acceleration and deceleration, and if you don't like the orbital approach you can specify the path the camera takes manually with a few interstitial markers. Or perhaps you'd rather do the Gears of War roadie-run style handheld camera shot.
Add a marker to the start of the clip though, and another to the point where Nico slams up against the first cop car to take cover, and you can specify a camera that orbits 90 degrees from behind him to the side, capturing his knee slide and framing up his new targets - the cops at the end of the street - in classy fashion. There are options for smoothing the camera's acceleration and deceleration, and if you don't like the orbital approach you can specify the path the camera takes manually with a few interstitial markers. Or perhaps you'd rather do the Gears of War roadie-run style handheld camera shot.
The clip editing mode also comes with a number of visual filters to really make your video that much more spectacular, including sepia, film noire, cinema, and neon just to name a few.
Scaling a console game up to PC levels of detail is fraught with difficulty, judging by the number of games that **** it up spectacularly, but Rockstar Toronto appears to be aware that if you're going to tweak a game fitted to current-generation consoles, then you need to be mindful that the new details are coherent with what's already there and that you're choosing the right things to accentuate. PC gamers expect to be able to read the wording on the posters and flyers slapped around the game world, for instance (not for them the Vaseline and airbrush filters of modern 3D console engines), so here they can. If you're playing GTA IV for the first time on PC, you'll find a lot more humour rubbed into the backgrounds, like leaflets in the bank. "Hey kids! Wanna know about credit?"
It should be comforting to know that extra care is being taken to not simply turn this into a mere "port" from the console versions.Read more from the three page preview over at Eurogamer.
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