The kind folks over at Rockstar Games just sent us over our very own exclusive high-res (and quite lovely, might I add) screenshot of the upcoming PC version of Vice City. Between bouncing around happily and prodding the news includes to write this update (a new news system is on it’s way, honest), I took a moment to study the pic to see what kind of improvements and such I could find. For starters, there’s the obvious, well, high-ness of the resolution, which is most apparent in the fact that you can actually make out the taxi in the background. After playing the game for so long on a low resolution, good ol’ fashioned TV, the switch back to a PC monitor alone is reason enough to get excited.
Another interesting thing about the aforementioned taxi is its textures- I can tell from the shape that it’s one of the low-poly models which the game uses for far away vehicles. And if you’ve done any car modding for GTA3 on the PC, I’m sure you’ve noticed that these versions are usually somewhat flat shaded. I know it might not seem like a big deal now, but the little details like this really do add a lot to the feel; I mean wow, you can even distinguish the shut-lines on that distant taxi.
The most interesting part about the screenshot would of course be the player model. If you take a minute to compare it to some of the old PS2 shots, it really does look a lot smoother- which is extra interesting when you consider that most of the old shots were most likely made using the development kit on a PC. The first thing I noticed was that the textures are much cleaner, and it looks to me like the number of polygons may have even been bumped up a bit. Maybe I’m just too accustomed to the PS2 version, but it really does seem as if the model is a bit smoother now. I know one of the main (and few) complaints about the console version was that the hands were rather blocky, however here they seem much more defined. Anyhow, I’ll quit rambling now and let you soak in the high-res VC goodness for yourself now:
