Cat Torture Simulator

I have this thing that prevents me from concentrating on stuff for more than just a few minutes at a time. There's always at least a dozen open browser tabs on my computer, I'm jumping back and forth between writing this blog, watching random shit on youtube and telling people on Facebook how much I hate my job right now. And somewhere in this room is a giant monitor lizard, lurking to eat my comically bite-sized cat. And now that GTA V on PC is actually a thing, I'm trying to decide whether this game is the greatest thing ever made just for me or whether it's gonna be the end of me. Probably both.

Look, the game has been out on consoles for a while and everything I could possibly say about this game has been said by other people, it has been said a lot and it probably has been said better by some of them than I ever could. I'm just talking about it, because I need to get it out of my system. Frankly, I have no idea wtf you're even doing here. But hey, who am I to tell you what to do with your time? You know what I've been doing? I've stalked a cat.

Los Santos is full of people and some of them walk their dogs. All kinds of dogs in all shapes and sizes, there's some random gay dog humping, which I assume is all over Youtube. Also random rabbits, cows that love to stand in the middle of the road, random suicidal foxes and all kinds of other critters. And cats. Last night I saw a cat walking down the sidewalk, so I stopped my car and followed the kitty for a while. It went into some dark alley, sat down behind a dumpster and took a nap right next to its cat-buddy, which had already been sleeping there. They just slept next to one another, purring away, sound and everything. So I fired a gunshot, just to see what would happen and the cats jumped up, totally lost their shit and ran all over the place for about 28 minutes until I lost sight of one of them and the other one kinda ran into traffic. I felt genuinely bad when that happened.

No dogs were hurt, though, so there is that.

Many of the things you can do in GTA V shouldn't even be fun and they probably aren't if you look at them on their own. I think I've spent over an hour playing Golf on there on my first day. I don't even like Golf and the way it works on GTA isn't all that great. But I guess the fact it was there, seeing how my character would do all that shit and having an actual, interactive golf course on there was fascinating enough to keep me entertained for a while.

Bank heists? Jet plane stunt flights? Fuck that, man, I gotta work on my handicap!

Tennis is pretty decent. Sometimes I sit in my online character's 500k apartment to watch weird cartoons and the seriously ridiculous advertisements on the working tv screen whilst drinking wine or broccoli juice or hitting the bong or wasting my time with other such useless virtual bullshit. All that stuff is interactive and... hey cool, I can take a shower and my character is suuuper hairy!

Sometimes I drive to a mission and I just don't get out of the car, because the music is too damn good. And then I can see my character rocking out and dancing along to the music in his seat, because hey, we built this city on rock'n'roll! Cars are fun. Then I figured out how bicycles work.

You don't know online gaming until you've beaten over a dozen people in a virtual bicycle race!

But you know what? Fuck those, because speedboats is where it's at. And fucking rollercoasters. Definitely not darts. Maybe monstertrucks. Oh hey, they're playing Queen on the radio now! Absolutely EVERYTHING about Los Santos screams at me, says, HEY! Look at me! Fucking interact with me, asshole! And I obey! Holy fuck, do I obey! I can dial 911, order a firetruck, steal the firetruck, drive around in it until I get bored two minutes later, then set a bus on fire and watch as the entire street starts to burn and random cars explode everywhere five minutes later.

Because all the best stories start with a little arson.

Maybe I should have tried doing something about that rapidly spreading fire using that sexy firetruck I stole, but then I had all those cops chasing after me.

Los Santos isn't just incredibly interactive and alive, but it's also full of crazy little details. I love shit like that, even though I assume most other players probably don't even care or notice. People sit down on a sofa and you can watch as the cushions flatten under their weight. Who does that? Who even thinks to put stuff like that in a video game and who the hell notices it? Well, I do apparently.

One of the glorious story mode's protagonists falls out with his wife and you can watch as his place gets a little messier all the time. Random takeaway bags piling up, used ash trays all over the place, whiskey bottles and painkillers on the tables. Rotting apples in the fruit bowls attract flies, all the flowers are wilting, that sort of thing. Meanwhile, another main character hooks up with a lady for a while and his place looks a little nicer each time you visit. Then again, I'm already freaked out at the fact that you can drink a glass of wine in first person and actually watch the liquid disappear, which is so much cooler than all that pretend eating and drinking in other games. I'm easily amused.

Tattooing a dick on to this guy's body was pretty fun, too.

This is the first GTA I've actually ever really finished. I played GTA 3 with all the cheats in the world, had tons of fun with it for about two days, then never looked at it again. Vice City was great, but eventually I got frustrated with the annoying and complicated missions. GTA V feels easy by comparison, I don't feel incredibly challenged, you get your shooting gallery kind of events, there's a lot of scripted stuff happening and you know what? I don't fucking care. Because it looks great, it's not full of annoying quicktime event bullshit like certain other AAA-franchises and the characters are so fucking great, I'd still watch this shit if it was a movie and no game at all.

Their butts flatten the fucking pillows! Is it even possible not to be impressed by that?

Characters' facial expressions, their body language, movement, everything is motion-captured and you get to read such glorious things about it on IMDb:

"Steven Ogg would actually record his lines in his underwear to help him get into character."

"In the beginning mission "Fresh Meat" Trevor is going to meet up with Franklin and hops over a small fence and trips, sending him into a rage at Franklin who laughed at his accident. This scene was accidentally improvised, as Trevor's voice and motion capture performer Steven Ogg actually did trip over the fence and Shawn Fonteno (Franklin) broke out laughing as a result. Steven Ogg completely improvised his freak out reaction. Look closely at Franklin and Trevor's faces during this scene, they are visibly trying to hide laughter and smiling, since the motion capture software also captured their facial expressions."

It's also one of the best games to feature love-making to the face of a teddybear.

I see critics, who say they can't get themselves to finish the game, because the main characters are all evil, they're criminals and one of them is fucking, shitting or pissing in more cutscenes than I dare count. I'll never understand why that's such a big deal in videogames. Walter White let Jesse's girlfriend choke to death on her own vomit. He pissed in the kitchen sink. And there are legions of morons naming themselves "Heisenberg" on the internet, most of which have absolutely no fucking clue where that character in Breaking Bad even got the name from. Or take Game of Thrones. House of Cards. Orange is the new Black. We love asshole characters. Granted, most of them aren't as fucked up as GTA V's Trevor, but why are some people okay with psychos on tv, yet hate them in games?

I assume it's really because you sort of have to be them. And GTA V can be pretty damn immersive.

I LOVE shooting shit in first person!

I LOVE driving shit in first person!

I can't get over the detailed interiours of all the cars, planes, helicopters, forklifters, taco vans, buses and all the other stuff you can board and drive around on there. Fully animated dashboards, the fucking radio even tells you what station you're listening to on its little display inside the damn car, everything looks great, except the lousy rear view mirrors, which do practically nothing for some reason. Which is weird, because windows, polished surfaces, even your freaking windshield, EVERYTHING reflects stuff, so why not the mirrors in the cars?

No two pedestrians ever seem to look the same (within the game's character creation limitations, obviously). Sometimes I hang around in one of the buildings on there, look through the windows and see a tiny little car somewhere on the horizon. And I know there's a little NPC driving around in it and his little dashboard is all animated and tells him how fast he is going. And it gives me a raging boner.

Don't you dare judge me!

It's weird how in a game world so detailed, so realistic, they didn't think to give people umbrellas. But nothing is ever perfect. The game runs like total ass, too. There's a lot of people claiming they run the game on "ultra" settings on relatively moderate hardware at 60 FPS, but benchmark tests say you can't even get this game to run at a solid 60 FPS without frame dips on a Titan X when everything is cranked all the way up, so there's that. But there will be patches, driver updates and Direct X 12 is on the horizon and one day I'm just gonna have to cough up for some new hardware. I just don't know how to find the motivation to get any more work done when I could be playing GTA V, instead.

-Cat