Grand Theft Auto V: Delay of Game

By Shamus Posted Sunday May 20, 2018

Filed under: Notices 69 comments

Well this just sucks.

Maybe you were wondering where your Thursday post was last week? We recently finished up Black Desert Online, and it’s time to begin my next series. It’s supposed to be on Grand Theft Auto V, with a bit of a retrospective on the series as a whole. That’s still the plan, but I’ve had a setback.

How my workflow goes is this: Usually I play through a game a few times before doing a review. On my final playthrough, I’ll have Bandicam record all of the game footage. Then I write the review. Then I go back over the footage and gather up the screenshots and edit the whole thing together into blog posts. It’s a pretty good system and it’s served me well for the last couple of yearsBefore this, I used to take individual screenshots when it seemed like a good time. But I tended to miss a lot of stuff that way. Now I’ve got a few TB of storage so I just record everything..

A few weeks ago I went to begin gathering up images for Grand Theft Auto V and found that most of the footage was corrupted. Worse, the odds of a video being corrupted seemed to be directly proportional to how annoying it was to obtain. Ten minutes of me dicking around as Trevor, blowing up cars? That footage is fine. The fifty minutes of me doing that one block of missions I really hate? Gone.

This scene is really interes ng |¶ause º°¬¬¬¨¿toÐ Öockstar's† ay. °¬|¶+------
This scene is really interes ng |¶ause º°¬¬¬¨¿toÐ Öockstar's† ay. °¬|¶+------

Things got worse last week. VLC (my video player) has an option to automatically repair corrupted files. I turned that on, and it looked like it was helping. I’d open up a file, it could give me a three minute progress bar, and then the video started playing. I scanned through and it all looked good.

It wasn’t until I’d “repaired” a dozen files or so that I noticed the fixed files were a lot smaller than the broken ones. It turns out the auto-repair feature just truncates the file at the first sign of trouble? Great. Thanks for that. Now all the “repaired” files are the first 90 seconds of a 20-minute mission.

So now I don’t have any screenshots. Thankfully GTA5 offers a “replay mission” feature, so I don’t have to play through the entire game again. On the other hand, even with the ability to replay it’s still going to take me a lot of hours to recreate the footage.

But big deal, right? I supposedly like the game. What’s the harm in replaying a few missions?

Slight spoiler for my upcoming series: I really, really hate the torture scene. The first time I played through it, I nearly turned off my PS4 in disgust. I found the entire sequence to be juvenile and revolting. Once I was done I thought, “Shit. I’m never doing THAT again.”

And then I replayed the game on the PC in preparation for this series, and had to sit through it (and participate in it!) a second time.

“Okay, that was the last time for sure!”

And now here I am, facing a third trip through this obnoxiously wrongheaded and childish attempt at “political commentary”. (At least, I THINK that’s what the author is trying to do. If you think they’re trying to do something else, that’s fine. Whatever they’re trying to do, it doesn’t work.) I’ve been putting it off for the last few weeks, which is why I missed my publish date last week.

|¶ause º°--°--°--------------°-;----¨¿the last gamа¬diving mechan|¶cs^despite the fac+------ŒŒŒ
|¶ause º°--°--°--------------°-;----¨¿the last gamа¬diving mechan|¶cs^despite the fac+------ŒŒŒ

Yes, I could probably get the images I need from YouTube, but some people are REALLY sensitive about that. (YOU STOLE MY FOOTAGE!) You can get around that by asking permission, but I’m not really interested in emailing the randos of Youtube and asking for permission to use single frames of their videos. Most importantly, when you’re doing negative commentary it’s really important to use your own screens because otherwise dissenters will accuse you of not actually playing the game.

So that’s where we are right now. Sorry for the delay. The dog ate my internet-homework.

 

Footnotes:

[1] Before this, I used to take individual screenshots when it seemed like a good time. But I tended to miss a lot of stuff that way. Now I’ve got a few TB of storage so I just record everything.



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69 thoughts on “Grand Theft Auto V: Delay of Game

  1. kaljtgg says:

    If you have a reasonably modern Nvidia GPU (600 series or later) you should give shadowplay a shot. It sucks to have to use it through Geforce Experience, but FRAPs and Bandicam both have their own overhead anyway. It also works outside of games ( learned when I had to edit out several minutes of desktop from a recording.)

    1. Rick C says:

      Windows 10 will let you record games as well. I haven’t used it for anything long, but it’s great for short clips.

  2. Zak McKracken says:

    Oh … after seeing just the title I was about to jump down here and ask how you made the cool glitch-art for title picture …

  3. Is the word “Grant” in the title intentional?

    I thought at first that it was a play on words. But if it is, I don’t understand it!

  4. RCN says:

    I also tend to be squeamish about torture scenes (for instance, I really, really can’t stand to watch 24 and I had to skip through most of the Ramsay Bolton scenes in Game of Thrones).

    Though for me it is a personal issue.

    My grandfather was tortured by my government. He went from a good engineer with a sharp mind not unlike Shamus to a bumbling idiot who liked to waltz through the neighborhood screaming at the top of his lung about vultures and cucks (hey, look, now the English language has a word for this portuguese concept! Unfortunately) with roughly a 20% chance of actually having his pants on and even then a 100% chance of having them on wrong. At 3 AM. And later suffering a stroke as an aftereffect of the torture that eventually killed him.

    So, yeah, after knowing you had to willingly torture someone in GTA V to get through the game, I decided I didn’t want the game anyway.

    1. Atke says:

      I stopped watching GoT all together after the first Ramsey torture scene. Also I am not going to buy Last of us 2.

      Allthough torture is a part of reality, it’s simply not entertainment for me.

      Sorry to hear the story about your grandfather.

      1. RCN says:

        Thanks.

        It was during the Brazilian dictatorship during the cold war. He was discussing ideologies with some co-workers and communism came up. That is all I know. Someone must’ve ratted that he knew “too much” about subversive ideologies (as the dictatorship called any unapproved work) and he was taken from my mother and grandmother for a month. Might as well had been forever.

        The worst part of the ordeal is that… to this day I have no idea who was responsible and who tortured him. Democracy was achieved basically because of international pressure thanks to the protests of exiles and because they broke the economy but didn’t want to deal with it. But before they stepped down they made sure the new constitution would have a clause that forever forbid the new democracy of investigating or pressing charges against the torturers and executioners of the dictatorship. They also destroyed every internal document regarding intelligence, internal security or likewise could be used to investigate their crimes.

        One of the most vicious torturers, one man named Colonel Ustra, knowingly died peacefully surrounded by loved ones and suportes without ever even having to testify.

        1. Daemian Lucifer says:

          The worst part of the ordeal is that… to this day I have no idea who was responsible and who tortured him.

          It doesnt really help to learn the truth.My mothers uncle suffered a similar fate during the communism regime,and she too endured a lot of shit in her youth for sharing his family name.Some years ago,the documents from that case were leaked and she and her family finally learned the truth,some 40 years after the fact.But nothing really changed.Being such a public matter at that time,it became a really obscure thing after all that time,so having the name cleared did not affect anyones opinions.And most of the responsible people were already dead,and those that werent were simply too unimportant to have anything be done about them.There wasnt even a token apology from anyone.

          1. RCN says:

            The problem is that the people who committed those crimes not only mostly kept their ranks and post, they were left completely free to raise and teach a new generation as well as gather political power. Some of those torturers would end up in high ranks in the police after the democratization. Not only that, some now preach for a new dictatorship.

            In fact, one of the guys who worship the dictatorship is right now the forerunner for the presidency, and there’s a very real chance he’d use his post to do everything in his power to give political power to the military and start a new pseudo dictatorship.

        2. Opagla says:

          As a brazilian, I am sorry for you grandfather.

          It’s really a shame that no one from the regime was really judged or punished, even though there is plenty of proof on the atrocities that the government commited at that time.

      2. Daemian Lucifer says:

        Allthough torture is a part of reality, it’s simply not entertainment for me.

        Not every form of art is meant to entertain.I can see why an uncomfortable scene gets included into a game or a movie.But,you also have to be careful as to how it meshes with the rest of the work.And how they did it in gtav is…not that good.

        1. Zak McKracken says:

          Seeing how tossing grenades and punching people around in GTA is just some light entertainment (unironically. That’s just the GTA world), I cannot imagine how any sort of violence-related topic could be brought up and played straight.
          No more than you could put “serious” violence in Roadrunner vs. Coyote and get away with it.

          1. Daemian Lucifer says:

            Yeah,it is pretty hard for a gta game to do it.Which is why it still boggles the mind how much 4 tried to do it.At best,you can satirically highlight a real world issue.

  5. Olivier FAURE says:

    At first I thought my browser wasn’t loading your blog correctly :(

    1. Daemian Lucifer says:

      Same

      1. Echo Tango says:

        Ditto! ^^;

  6. Daemian Lucifer says:

    Yes, I could probably get the images I need from YouTube, but some people are REALLY sensitive about that. (YOU STOLE MY FOOTAGE!)

    True,there are some assholes like that.But most people are fine as long as you just credit them.Just give a link and “Image taken from” and youll be fine 98% of the time.

  7. Redrock says:

    Huh, I never guessed anyone would be bothered by the torture scene in particular, given all the other terrible, violent and immoral stuff you can do in the game. Curious.

    1. Daemian Lucifer says:

      It really depends a lot on the presentation.For example,the one violent scene that really got to me was the game of thrones head crushing thing,even though far worse things were shown earlier.

      As for gtav,most of the things you do are presented from afar.You shoot people,you run them over,and only occasionally you melee them but in a cartoony way.The torture scene gives you a close and personal experience,and your victim is continuously screaming in pain,pleading and crying.

    2. RCN says:

      It is the same difference as killing someone during a firefight and executing someone. Or, say, the reason why soldiers who are expected to kill on command on the battlefield have to shoot someone with a sack over their head (and usually a gag over their mouths) when they are ordered to execute someone.

      The first is cold and impersonal. Regardless of why each side is fighting, it is kill or be killed. There’s some leeway. Likewise the acts of thievery and larceny you commit in the game are like that. Distant. Done by the whim of the player. To digital people you don’t care about. Most people have no problem mowing down hordes of npcs. But get squeamish when the engine leaves a guy limping for dear life trying to escape you.

      Now, execution? Torture? This means deliberation. You are doing harm to someone close and personal who can’t fight back, can’t escape and can’t do anything but plead for his humanity. It takes much more dehumanization on the active party to go through it.

    3. yd says:

      I haven’t played through most of the missions in GTAV, so I don’t know about the torture scene.

      The *opening* scene was hard for me both times I played it. Like Daemian mentioned, the majority of GTAV is very detached and 3rd-person feeling. The opening scene, instead, has you holding civilians hostage, murdering cops, and generally being a horrible person, and in a very intimate and first person way. It’s closer and it’s directed as if you are the person doing the act, vs. just directing a remote controlled caricature.

      I have no problem with most violence in games, but something about how GTAV played out in the opening was very off-putting and not consistent with the series as I know it. If the torture scene is the same, I don’t have any interest in playing through that.

    4. Atle says:

      It’s the victim being trapped by someone with the intent to cause suffering that makes me feel sick and terrible.

    5. Guest says:

      It’s the edginess for me. The game is so high off the smell of it’s own farts with it. The best version of Trevor is a satire of the player and the game, the worst version is when he’s used as an ultimate expression of the game. The torture scene falls in the latter camp (Same with his implied sexual abuse). He tortures a guy, and you’re forced to participate, so that the game can tell you “Yeah, torture is wrong and the information you get is unreliable, isn’t that wacky? Torturers just do it because they get off on it”.

      It wants the moral high ground to condemn torture, yet as you pointed out, the game doesn’t have the high ground to do that. The sequence ends with a character who is meant to be a parody telling another character for the benefit of the player, the moral of the section. That’s the game’s justification for all the BS of the torture mission, and it doesn’t cut it for me, nor for a lot of people. A lot of people felt really uncomfortable with that scene, and the conclusion, the message, isn’t worth it.

      To be fair, it’s a problem that GTA V has with a lot of it’s satire, it’s pretty bad satire. It’s not really subversive, and it’s not clever enough to make the viewer come to the intended conclusion without being either obvious or outright stating the point, and the point was nearly always a shallow one. That approach just gets really bad when they tackle a couple of topics.

  8. Cilvre says:

    If you have it on ps4 and the replay missions option, you can record from there and copy to usb. If recording on pc again, i suggest using obs to record locally to mkv.

  9. Mintskittle says:

    Due to some people being decidedly uncomfortable with torture, you included Shamus, maybe this is a time to substitute in cute cat pics, so you don’t have to go through that again, and it will be less upsetting to others.

    1. RCN says:

      This won’t do as an analysis of why the torture part is horrible. I hear you have to take an active part in it and there are specific gameplay mechanics JUST for that single objective.

      1. BlueHorus says:

        Well he can still talk about it. Even describe what happens. I’ll be happy to admit I can do without graphic pictures of torture on my internet articles. Just embed a video of guinea pigs fighting over food or something, instead.

        And I quite liked the ‘garbled comments over the garbled pictures’ joke. It’s got potential. Might get old after a couple of articles, though.

        1. Daemian Lucifer says:

          The pictures arent that graphic when compared to the rest of the things in the game.The sounds are what adds most of the gore to that scene.

        2. Viktor says:

          I suspect the captions will be relevant. The solution, of course, is pictures of guinea pigs fighting with the in-game captions pasted over the bottom of the screen.

          Because seriously I doubt the actual images of the torture are worth viewing. Everyone knows torture is evil and wrong and no person of conscience would ever approve of it no matter the circumstances, so why expose us to it?

          1. Daemian Lucifer says:

            no person of conscience would ever approve of it no matter the circumstances

            Not true.Mythbusters did the water torture because they were dumb and wanted to see whether it would work.And they kind of did the bamboo torture,only on a dummy this time,to see if that would work.Vsauce did the truth serum(kind of torture),for research purposes.And of course,there are the famous Milgram experiment and prison population experiments,again for research purposes.

            So even if we disregard all the political things around the subject going on today,people of conscience DO approve of torture in SOME circumstances.And though these were all instances of controlled events,the last two have shown that many regular people would not oppose torture if the circumstances are right.

            1. Viktor says:

              Both Milgram and the Stanford Prison experiments are now used as examples of unethical research that would never be allowed by a review board today. Evil people have tortured in the past and will continue to do so. I’m just saying that “Torture is evil” is not debateable, and so there’s no need to display graphic images of torture while Shamus discusses the subject.

              1. Daemian Lucifer says:

                But presentation of an evil thing in a video game IS debatable.Does this game present its evil thing well?Is it fun?Does it say something meaningful?Does it enhance the game?Etc,etc.Thats why Shamus is looking at gtav after all,not because its a game about murder,robbery and torture.

                Also,as Ive mentioned above,the visuals from that scene arent much worse than the visuals from the rest of the game.Its the audio component that pushes it further,and the interactive component that makes it go over the edge completely.So having just images from that scene is the same as having images of any other violence you do in that game.

                1. Viktor says:

                  Shamus tries to keep his blog family-friendly. The audio, and therefore the captions, will probably be relevant to the discussion, so yes, he should keep them. But all the images will tell us is “How big was the hammer used to break the fingers” and “Is the victim blubbering and broken after he’s been beaten for an hour or after just two blows”. That info is irrelevant. The first touch of the lash or the jumper cables or the water is when the moral event horizon is crossed. Because of that, we don’t need to see anything, and since this blog tries to stay family-friendly, the images can be replaced by literally anything else.

                2. Isaac says:

                  “Does this game present its evil thing well?Is it fun?Does it say something meaningful?Does it enhance the game?”

                  No, to all of these questions. GTA V’s torture scene is completely pointless ham-fisted political commentary.

                  1. The Nick says:

                    Ham-fisted commentary is not necessarily pointless. Artless, perhaps, by definition of being ‘ham-fisted’, but not necessarily pointless.

                    You’re conflating two different concepts here.

                    It’s like having a play that’s being put on as a fundraiser for cancer end-of-life care and treatment, and extrapolating that the cause is bad because the play allegedly has poor foreshadowing and terrible characterization of its supporting cast.

                    Your critical commentary of the individual elements making up the “art” of the play does not necessarily make the topic “pointless” or “invalid”.

                    Or to put it another way, if the only reason a little kid can say not to do racism is “cuz it is bad”, we can agree that the ARGUMENT is lacking and without proper support for its main thesis, but also agree that the TOPIC is an important one.

                    1. Droid says:

                      I think Isaac is well aware of that distinction and just made a list of two (not necessarily connected) properties that GTA’s commentary has: It’s both artless and pointless.

                    2. BlueHorus says:

                      Your critical commentary of the individual elements making up the “art” of the play does not necessarily make the topic “pointless” or “invalid”.

                      Sure. And the fact that the topic is an important, one worthy of discussion, doesn’t necessarily make the fact that it’s been clumsily shoehorned into a game any less bad.

                      To take your example of a kid talking about racism: Yes, racism is bad. We know. Just saying that isn’t really ‘discussing’ anything: it’s shallow virtue signalling.

                      Usually when people put racism in a story, they try to say something more, like ‘racism can be unthinking and done by people who wouldn’t call themselves racist normally’, or ‘here are some of the ways racism can ruin lives’.
                      That’s something worth saying or discussing.

                    3. Isaac says:

                      Nah, the reason why I say it is pointless is because it literally is pointless. The torture mission has no impact on the story, has loads of heavy-handed dialogue and GTA V wouldn’t have lost anything if it didn’t have the mission in the first place.

                    4. Guest says:

                      It is pointless.

                      The mission literally ends with the conclusion that there was no point, regarding the objectives of that mission, or with the greater plot. It’s pretty much isolated. There was no point torturing them is the game’s hot take.

                      And the very common sentiment that “Torture is bad, you shouldn’t do it, you don’t get reliable information, and it’s mostly for the satisfaction of the torturer or people who order torture” isn’t insightful enough that there was a point to including it.

              2. Ciennas says:

                Didn’t the Stanford Prison experiment invalidate itself, though? The head researcher admits he deliberately jumped in and mucked about and introduced variables well after the experiment had gotten underway.

                I had to look up his website about it- he tried to play it off by saying that he became a part of his own research, but the entire thing becomes entirely worthless in that regard.

                Shame too- if he hadn’t deliberately tried to work out whatever fucked up issues he had, the research could have been actually useful.

                Now, it’s non replicable and invalid to boot.

                I wonder why no one else points out the experiment was completely useless.

          2. Zak McKracken says:

            no person of conscience would ever approve of it no matter the circumstances

            Wish that it were true … I’ll just mention the “no politics” rule and leave it at that.

  10. Nick-B says:

    I’m sure there’s more than a few of us that’d be willing to assist by loading up our games and getting the appropriate screenshot you require. I don’t think I’m far enough in my recent playthrough to get to the torture scene, but certainly someone here could be the guinea pig that takes the bullet for you.

  11. Mousazz says:

    The dog ate my internet-homework.

    If you’re using homework analogies, then I’d suggest getting the resident nerd to do your homework for you. As in, I, personally, would probably ask someone on Twitter to play through the torture scene, record it, and send the footage over. That way, you get automatic consent for said footage, hassle-free. Besides, from what I remember, the torture scene is a barely-interactive sequence, like a branching path cutscene, so the fact that it isn’t you playing shouldn’t be too problematic for any intellectually honest dissenters.

    But, these are only my thoughts on the matter. Feel free to torture (pfft…) yourself through that scene if you want to.

    1. Mousazz says:

      And, basically ninja’d by Nick-B above.

    2. Daemian Lucifer says:

      Problem is,Shamus is the resident nerd.

  12. BlueHorus says:

    Oh joy, political commentary in a GTA game? This is gonna be good.

    And when I say ‘good’, I mean ‘shit, irritating, and irritatingly shit’ – if GTAIV’s POLITIKALL KOMMENTRY is anything to go by.

    1. Viktor says:

      The thing is, you CAN do political commentary in a GTA-style game*. At the very least, you should be aware of the politics of your work and ensure they’re politics you can stand behind. I just don’t trust the GTA writers to do any of that well.

      *This scene from Saint’s Row 3 comes to mind:
      https://youtu.be/VHk8u_npvew?t=11m55s

      1. Daemian Lucifer says:

        It doesnt have to be a gta style game even.Gta 3 had instances of actually good political commentary in it.Whether they were more careful back then,less pretentious or had more skill,I cannot say.

        1. Cubic says:

          I wonder who real estate mogul ‘Donald Love’ is supposed to be?

        2. Decius says:

          The entire GTA franchise is political commentary.

    2. Guest says:

      GTA V’s political commentary makes GTA IV’s look like Pulitzer material.

  13. ElementalAlchemist says:

    Just post a bunch of non-sequitur images of Trevor randomly blowing shit up from your various streams. We come for the text, not the screenshots (well, except for in the case of the comics I guess). You can always point out what specific element of a scene you wanted to illustrate in the image’s alt-text.

  14. Dev Null says:

    ” It turns out the auto-repair feature just truncates the file at the first sign of trouble?”

    And saves over the top of the original? Unforgivable.

    1. BlueHorus says:

      At VLC Motors, Inc:

      ‘You know you brought your car in because there was a problem with the engine? Well, I couldn’t find out what the problem was, but in the interests of looking busy I removed the engine, steering wheel, front two tires – and sent them all to the dump. Thanks for your business!”

    2. Philadelphus says:

      It might depend on the file format and container used to store it. I’m by no means an expert, but I believe the way some (fairly common) formats work, if something screws up while recording there’s no recovering it, so VLC might be doing the best it’s possible to do. (Can’t say for sure without knowing more about the format used to record.)

  15. BlueHorus says:

    At VLC Motors, Inc:

    ‘You know you brought your car in because there was a problem with the engine? Well, I couldn’t find out what the problem was, but in the interests of looking busy I removed the engine, steering wheel and front two tires and sent them to the dump. Thanks for you business!”

  16. Dreadjaws says:

    This is a bit strange. I understand the torture scene being uncomfortable for people who are not used to these kinds of games, but the way GTA games are written I find it really, really hard to think of these characters as anything other than caricatures, so frankly I don’t feel any different than I do from playing the rest of the game. Hell, after the driving at the end of the scene implies this is all some sort of commentary, I found it laughable (probably not in any way the developers intended).

    It’d be different if they made me torture someone in a game like, say, Silent Hill or The Walking Dead. I felt really uncomfortable in that scene in Spec Ops: The Line because characters were well written, so even if I had never seen all those particular people before I still felt astonished at the consequences of my actions.

    But here? I mean, maybe in GTA IV, where at least the main character wasn’t so outlandish I might feel different, but that’s certainly not the way I felt in this one. Not calling you “soft” or anything like that, I’m just saying, this particular game just can’t cause that effect on me.

    1. Daemian Lucifer says:

      Human psyche is weird.You can find something that bothers you in practically anything.Its just a matter of having the right combination of things to match in a precise way and BOOM,you are sobbing when someone tells you a fart joke.

      Of course,there are certain things that are icky for many people and are easy to figure out.Like the sight of nails being pulled.In the case of this game,its mostly the pleading and crying that pushes the scene over the top for most people.

    2. Geebs says:

      I actually think that Trevor is exactly the *right* character for this sort of scene. If it had been either of the other two leads, they would have tried to at least persuade themselves that what they were doing had some sort of justification. Trevor, on the other hand, doesn’t *need* any justification for hurting people, but is under no illusion that what he’s doing is pointless.

      I think that’s pretty much the only way you can successfully deliver a “torture doesn’t work” message in a video game, and to be fair the scene does a good job of forcing the player to participate without the utter cop-out of implying that the player is in some way meta-obliged to stop playing the game altogether.

      1. Guest says:

        But Trevor’s also a sadistic sociopath and the basically a meta commentary on how people play GTA and what GTA is. Having him deliver a moral is incongruent because he’s inherently untrustworthy and immoral.

        And vanilla movies and tv shows of all stripes have made the same comment that the game does before, it’s not edgy or new, or subversive. It’s a cliche, packed in edgy trappings, so people can feel clever for being validated for something they probably already knew, while also edgy because they “get” the torture scene.

  17. Hal says:

    If you took screenshots, single frames, from someone’s video, and it’s just in game footage, how would they know the difference?

    1. Droid says:

      I guess the protagonists in the cutscenes are going to look the way the LPer customized them to look like, so it’s pretty easy to figure out (or at least assume with some credibility) that you “stole” their screenshot.

      1. Dreadjaws says:

        Indeed. Shamus would have to find a video that plays in the same resolution as him, where characters are customized the way he does, using the same video settings he uses in order not to raise any suspicions.

        That being said, I think Shamus is overreacting to complaints that are unlikely to actually come. I feel he simply hates the idea of having lost all that progress.

        1. ElementalAlchemist says:

          The game aggressively changes character outfits every time you switch or start a story mission, so it’s highly likely that most screenshots Shamus would want use would all look the same regardless of the source.

  18. ccesarano says:

    Man, I’ve been running into this kind of crap since I started trying to record video. Roxio GameCapture HD was weird when it came to bitrates and certain consoles, and the fix was even stranger. If the preview/initial recording was coming in glitchy, increase bitrate by one, then reduce back to normal and everything will record fine.

    Now, with Elgato GameCapture HD, I’m… well, I’m limited to 720p30 on my laptop. I can do 720p60 for maybe 30-60 minutes, but at some point it starts getting glitchy and my laptop can’t keep up with the data streaming in. 1080p60? Fuggedaboutit.

    Never used Bandicam, so it’s curious this would be the first time you have issues. Is there a reason you prefer Bandicam? I tried X-Split, it ran like trash on my PC, and then Googled instructions on how to interpret the hieroglyphs on OBS to capture simple footage only to have it run smoothly and capture gorgeous footage. On my under-powered laptop! Not recommending you switch over, just a curiosity as to preference. As someone stuck using WMM6 for reasons beyond his choosing, I understand being unable to move on despite all the people saying “You should try…”

    1. Dreadjaws says:

      I don’t have a capture card, but I never used Bandicam either. I use GeForce Experience to record, and never had an issue. But who knows what could have caused this problem. Maybe it wasn’t the recording software.

  19. SKD says:

    Shamus,

    I noticed that nVidia Shadowplay had been pointed out as a possible alternative to Bandicam. I thought I would also give a shout out to Open Broadcaster. I’ve been satisfied with it in the past and it’s free so costs nothing more than time to test. Only issue I’ve encountered with it is that the 64bit version does not autocapture some full-screen games. The 32bit version works without issue though.

  20. Lachlan the Sane says:

    My advice for getting through the torture scene is to fail again and again. I deliberately killed the torture victim three times (which honestly seemed vaguely in-character for Trevor, insofar as Trevor has a character), and the game gave me the option to skip ahead to the next checkpoint. I repeated this a few times, until Michael got to the sniping spot. Then I looked up who the intended target of the assassination was, shot him instantly, and succeeded the mission. It was still garbage that shouldn’t have been in the game, but I’m glad that I got to skip over it — it felt like I was overriding the developers’ arseholishness.

    1. Daemian Lucifer says:

      Gta offers skipping missions due to multiple failures?Where was that option back in vice city and the driver mission?

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