Kia Venga 1.4 CRDi SR7 – <b>car review</b> | Technology | The Guardian |
| Kia Venga 1.4 CRDi SR7 – <b>car review</b> | Technology | The Guardian Posted: 10 Apr 2015 10:00 PM PDT 'The engine started reluctantly, always raising the possibility of failure.' Photograph: Simon Stuart-Miller for the Guardian The power to surprise, is the Kia's motto. You see, even that's wrong: we all have the power to surprise. The hard part is being able to give people a nice surprise. The headline problem here is that the Kia is so underpowered. The 1.4L diesel engine seemed to run out of puff going round a corner. Long-distance driving was miserable; it was never happy in any gear. The brakes felt squelchy and uncertain. It was skittish on the motorway, making heavy weather out of the slightest change in road surface. At 71mph, the rear-view mirror shook, giving the impression that the cars behind were vibrating. To the very front, are two triangular side windows – their purpose could only have been decorative. But by some law of physics that car designers ought to know, they reflected the white lines of the road into the sides of the windscreen, so you drive with a perpetual flashing on both peripheries of vision. It was exhausting. I'd emerge from the car shaking my head, as if concussed. The light, tinny fitments of the cabin undermined all the natural authority that should emanate from a car. Cheap-looking armrests flapped down to interfere with the usability of the hand brake. The engine started reluctantly, always raising the possibility of failure. It's the first car I've been in for ages with neither satnav nor docking station. A USB port made nonspecific promises. It didn't look as if you could connect an iPod, but perhaps you could charge it? Nope. The parking beep is sluggish – you'd be better off using your own senses. Even though it is short, the combination of width and blunt steering meant it had none of the nippy mischief that makes the compromises of a small car worthwhile. And yet, the boot was surprisingly large. The back seat could accommodate three adults (many small cars make this claim, but they're often talking about child-sized adults). The on-paper combined mpg is good, beyond diesel-good – heaps better than the petrol version, which might make you feel better about the pokelessness. They say emissions are so low they didn't feel the need for ISG technology (Intelligent Stop and Go). They could go lower if they were serious about it, but cost is the third factor: anything to push it above £15k would make serious mincemeat out of its competitiveness. I did not like it. Is that coming across? Not one bit.  Price £14,895 (as tested £15,385) • Follow Zoe on Twitter  |
| Grand Theft <b>Auto</b> 5 PC <b>Review</b> In Progress - Rock, Paper, Shotgun Posted: 14 Apr 2015 12:00 PM PDT By Graham Smith on April 14th, 2015 at 8:00 pm.
I've played almost four hours of GTA Online and I haven't had any fun yet. I've been trying – to find a Last Team Standing match in which my foes aren't overpowered or barely visible, a race where my opponents don't teleport due to lag, to participate in heist preparation in which the other players communicate or at least stick together, or to make my own fun with Los Santos' open world of vehicles, guns and players. But any moment of levity has felt like it's come in spite of the game, not because of it. Grand Theft Auto V [official site] came out on console 574 days ago, so there's a good chance you've played it, read about it, watched videos about it, or made up your mind about it long ago. The PC version of Grand Theft Auto V came out at midnight however, which means you might have some questions: Is the performance good? Does it offer a broad array of PC graphics options? Is the PC-exclusive Replay Editor improved over what we had in GTAIV? Is first-person mode everything we dreamed it to be? Has GTA Online grown beyond those teething problems that made for such a bumpy launch on PS3 and 360? I'll endeavor to answer each of those questions over the next couple of days, updating this feature as I go and eventually sloping my way towards an all-encompassing review – with a few new words on singleplayer, too, just in case you haven't read about it before. But for now: I've played almost four hours of GTA Online and I haven't had any fun yet.
GTA Online is Grand Theft Auto V's persistent, multiplayer cousin. It takes place within the same open world of Los Santos, but instead of playing as singleplayer stars Michael, Franklin or Trevor, you create a character of your own via a neat system which begins with choosing a parental pairing to determine the basics of your appearance. After you've tweaked your eyebrow shape, nose width and how much your chin looks like a butt, you're set loose to make your mark upon the city. That means taking Jobs, which are online missions and game modes and range from races, deathmatch and last team standing modes, to committing crimes alone or with others for NPC characters familiar from the singleplayer story, to taking part in co-operative heists. In theory, these missions should combine to create a constantly rolling experience across the surface of GTA's beautiful open world, in which you tumble from caper to caper against a background of multiplayer japes, and are regularly rewarded with character progression through levels, and money with which you can buy outfits, cars, and eventually apartments. In reality, I've found the experience far from frictionless.
After a brief introduction in which you do missions for a couple of NPC characters, you're turfed loose into the world with their names in your phone but without a high enough level to call them to get jobs. Instead, you're reliant on joining Jobs created by other, higher level players. These are accessed via an app on your in-game phone, where you can see who has created the activity and what it involves. If it's a race, you might get a description of the area and type of cars you'll be driving. Choose to connect though and you're spinning a wheel and hoping for a good experience. I've joined races and, after the loading screen, found half the players juddering around Los Santos' streets, appearing in front of me one moment and behind me the next. I've joined races and discovered that they're already in progress, leaving me with the option to either spectate or quit back to the open world. The latter means another loading screen and being deposited in a different place than I was before; the former comes with no guarantee that the other players won't up and quit as soon as their current race is done.
Pick Last Team Standing and you're likely to find that the guns are limited to those the players own, which you carry with you at all times, and those that you can pick up around the level. This was my first experience playing GTA Online and I hadn't yet visited a gun store to stock up on weaponry, and the mode's menu screen only allowed me to buy a pistol. Every other player in the game had machineguns and the only weapons I could find lying around were other pistols. I resolved this afterwards by visiting a weapon shop and stocking up, but not before a couple of round of being blown away by opponents I had little chance of hitting. I could have quit, of course, but this risked branding me as a Bad Sport, and if that happened often enough I'd eventually only be able to play with other Bad Sports. Of the Jobs so far available to me, the most appealing is a four-player co-op mission to prepare for a heist. This involves driving out to an airfield, three players clearing it of enemies, while a fourth steals a plane and flies it to safety. The mission begins with a long five-minute drive and each player able to either ride together or pile into separate vehicles.
In my experiences so far – I've played through this same mission seven times – people almost universally leap into separate vehicles and race off independently. On the five minute drive there, they naturally go at different speeds, by crashing, wrecking their cars, or finding themselves lost or stuck. Unfortunately this usually doesn't stop the person who arrives at the airfield first immediately starting the shootout, and unfortunately a single person getting killed instantly fails the mission for every player. All of my attempts at this have gone the same way: at least one player gets left behind and arrives minutes late, and by the time they've arrived, someone else has got themselves killed. There's either no or irregular checkpointing, so this returns you to that long drive or at least a shortened version of it. The counter to these criticisms are obvious: it's my own fault that trying to play a co-operative mission with random internet strangers. When is that not a recipe for disaster. I will certainly find a team of friends with whom to play the game with, but surely some of the appeal of a persistent, open world is negated if it requires a group of close-knit friends before it becomes fun. And even with a posse of buds, there's little they could do about the lagging races – which can't compete with races in, say, a racing game anyway – or the slightly dull deathmatch modes, which can't compete with, say, a deathmatch game.
I hope I'm wrong, and that I grind my way through these early levels until the game opens up, and the online heists turn out to be as fun with friends as I imagine they could be. But right now, GTA Online feels like it has the same problem as GTAIV's nascent multiplayer, in that it's the kind of experience where you and your friends have to make your own fun. This might not be so bad, of course. I spent dozens of hours crafting stunts and other chicanery with a crew in GTAIV's open world, and there's even greater potential to be found in Los Santos. Making your own fun is, of course, a staple of Grand Theft Auto even in singleplayer. Put 30 minutes into the game – to play through two, short, character-defining tutorial missions – and you're turfed loose in its open world, free to go anywhere without the limitations of locked islands that plagued previous Grand Theft Auto games. You'll be limited to playing as Franklin, not yet able to cycle between multiple characters at any moment, but you'll be free to do the things that make GTAV fun even to those who find its po-faced and inhibitive macho-man storyline a bore.
The first thing I did was grab a car and go driving to the beach, where I took photos of passers-by with the in-game cameraphone. Then I drove up the coast, till the sunset, at which point I ditched the car in favour of riding a cargo train around the entire extents of Los Santos. I saw rabbits hop, mountain lions roar, factory chimney stacks rise up in front of glorious mountains, and I arrived back in downtown in time for the sunrise. It was energising, and I will spend a hundred more hours doing similar between now and the inevitable release of GTAVI. Shortly after my soulful tourist trip, I punched a man off a cliff just to watch his ragdoll tumbled down the mountainside. I then spent the next thirty minutes editing a video of this using the Replay Editor. I'll write more about that tomorrow. For now, I'll finish with a brief performance report. On my i7-4770K, with 16GB RAM and a GTX 780, I'm getting almost uniformly 60fps with the graphics settings on near-maximum. During busy action scenes, the frame rate drops to 40fps, but that's a small price to pay for how good it looks. More worrying right now is how often I've experienced crashes. Once during a singleplayer cutscene; twice while playing online; three times while attempting to view the Gallery on the pause menu. I've also had mission fail screens remain even after a new round has started, and for some reason the benchmark test under the graphics options stalls midway in a Mission Fail. PCGamingWiki have created a catalog these errors and more, along with some simple workarounds for those that can be worked around. None of these things have stopped me playing, but they're a frustration for a game that took 574 and multiple delays to get to us. Tomorrow, I'll update this article with more on performance, the Replay Editor, the singleplayer and I suspect GTA Online after I've played it with friends and advanced a few more levels. What are your experiences so far? Beyond waiting a hundred hours for it to download.
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