Super Adventures in Delisted Racing Games Part 1: The Crew

This week on Super Adventures, I'm playing racing games you can't buy anymore, not online anyway. In fact, you can't even play The Crew anymore as Ubisoft shut the servers down last March! They just took a game people bought with money and made it entirely non-functional.

I struggle to write about racing games as basically all you do in them is get in a car and turn left or right. Sure the process of winning races is a little more complicated than that, plus I can talk about the types of races they have and their various features, but if I go down that route I'll pretty much end up writing an instruction manual and no one reads manuals anymore.

But screw it, this is my last chance to write about The Crew while it's fresh in my memory, so I'm doing it. Plus I'm throwing in Need for Speed: Undercover and Forza Horizon 3, because it's easier to see what makes something distinct when you put it next to the things that it's similar to.

Grand Theft Auto IV (PC)

Developer:

Rockstar North

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Release Date:

2008

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Systems:

Windows, Xbox 360, PS3

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This week on Super Adventures I'm having a quick go of acclaimed crime 'em up Grand Theft Auto IV. Though knowing what these games are like, I'll have to put 20 hours in before I really get how it works, maybe more! So I hope you appreciate the sacrifices I make for your entertainment.

Actually I've got a vague memory of playing this once before and not liking it much. I've beaten Vice City and San Andreas (and I came so damn close to finishing GTA 3) but I didn't get on with this one for whatever reason. Probably something to do with the combat; I've got another vague memory of arguing with someone about the shooting being the worst thing ever, while they tried to convince me that the driving physics were worse.

The game came out the same year as sandbox rival Saints Row 2 (which I really liked) and one difference between the games I've already noticed is that Volition know how numbers work. Rockstar on the other hand have given their sixth game the Roman numeral for 'four'. Well really it's the eleventh game on the Grand Theft Auto series, if you include the two GTA: London mission packs, the Stories games on PSP and Grand Theft Auto Advance, but I'm happy enough to consider them outside the main series.

Unlike its predecessors GTA IV has multiplayer, which I'm not going to even try. I'm not going to use iCEnhancer to prettify it either; this is pure, straight out of the box, vanilla single player GTA.

(Screenshots can be clicked to view them in their original resolution, but I'm warning you now it's not great.)

The Saboteur (PC)

My selfish stylish sexy sandbox shooter starting with an 'S' series stretches on to its third game: Pandemic's swan song The Saboteur. Yep, this was the final game ever made by Pandemic Studios, which kind of sucks as I love everything I've played by them. Mercenaries was one of the best open world sandbox games to follow Grand Theft Auto 3's lead, and I had some good times playing the Star Wars: Battlefront games in multiplayer. So I've got unreasonably high hopes for this one, and if it lets me down at all I'll be distraught.

The game came out for PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, but I'm playing the Windows version because... well, it's a lot easier to get screenshots out of it. I've heard that this is a bit of a bad port, especially on PCs with modern processors and an ATI graphics card like mine, but I made it through the dodgy PC version of Saints Row 2 so I'm sure I can handle it.

(Click any screenshot to open up a 1280x1024 resolution version. Yeah yeah I know it's not exactly what you'd find on deadendthrills.com.)