Metagaming is a series where I force myself to play through Metacritic's highest rated PC games, working my way down the list one game at a time. There's no real goal other than giving myself an excuse to experience these critically acclaimed games. Sometimes I'll beat the games, and sometimes the games will beat me.


It's kind of crazy that the #2 PC game on Metacritic held on to the same position for eight years until Grand Theft Auto V came along to dethrone it earlier this year. Of course this game has been available to console gamers for nearly two years now, but for we PC gamers this is a new release in 2015. It was a game that we waited for - only sometimes patiently. Heck, I bought the strategy guide nearly three months before the game was finally released on PC. Not only did I buy it day one at full price... I made sure to pre-order a physical copy of it. To me it felt like the anticipation had been so high, there needed to be a certain ceremony. The act of going to the store and picking up my preorder was a needed part of the experience.  And so you're probably wondering if it was worth all the hype to me. At least I assume you're wondering if you're taking the time to actually read this...





Now some of you may recall that I have already written quite a few glowing words about Grand Theft Auto V just earlier this year. But what I wrote about back then was how much I enjoyed the wide open world of Los Santos. It was an article about the joy I found in ignoring the story of the game altogether and just exploring at my own leisure with no goals nor motivation to make any progress towards completing the game's story mode at all.

Booting the game up this time for this little Metagaming experiment meant that I was going to be approaching it from a totally new perspective. Yup, it was finally time to play the story mode. Or so I thought.




Now this is a huge game. Just the required missions to get through the story are going to be around 30-40 hours of playtime. So with that in mind, I decided that I'd be sticking to just those missions. As fun as it is stumbling over side missions, I just didn't feel like I had the time nor motivation to see 'everything.' So instead I kept the strategy guide on the side of my desk, and just used the titles of the main story missions as sort of a checklist.

As it happens I found myself with a long weekend and lots of downtime (thanks to a particularly brutal strain of the flu). This presented itself as a pretty perfect stretch of time to waste many hours plowing through Grand Theft Auto V. And I was having lots of fun. First as Franklin - stealing cars, training dogs, kidnapping dudes and shooting my way out of warehouses. Then as Michael where I got to assassinate a social media mogul, orchestrate a jewelry store heist and infiltrate a porn-boat. Later I dragged myself through some of Trevor's missions - by far my least favorites. And eventually I got all three of these characters to meet. Everything was going swimmingly.

And then something infuriating happened. After three days of playing long stretches of the game I hit a glitch. There's a mission involving Trevor where you must pretend to be a dock worker. You have to do things like use forklifts to move boxes from point A to point B. You might remember this as "the reason your friend hates Shenmue." It's really tedious stuff. And once you finish you can climb a crane so you can take pictures of a boat. You need to take three pictures: the front of the boat, one the guards on the boat and the back of the boat. It told me to take a picture of the front of the boat. I did. It told me to take a picture of a guard. I did. But it told me (again) to take a picture of a guard. I did. Again it wanted a picture of a guard. After 15 minutes of attempting to take pics of every guard on that boat and none of them registering, I realized I might be in trouble.




My first thought was to check Youtube. Maybe I was doing something wrong. Maybe I was standing in the wrong spot, or not taking a picture of the right guard, or not focusing correctly. I watched several Let's Plays of that mission, and nope - I was doing everything right. So I started Googling to see if this was indeed a glitch. I couldn't find much, but I did find several people in the same predicament. Some said it was a glitch known to Rockstar that they hoped would be patched eventually. My game was up-to-date, so I knew there was no such patch. Some said it was solved by playing the game in borderless windowed mode. So I decided to try that. Which meant I had to restart the boring mission. I got through it and... "take a picture of a guard on the boat." Ugh! Still stuck at that part.

So here I was, sixteen hours and 22% into a game and can't figure out how to proceed. There's no way I'm going to restart the story mode to see if it fixes itself. So basically, I'm done with the story mode until I hear that this has actually been addressed. I still think that the game itself is excellent, and I'll still enjoy running around aimlessly. But sadly, I can't say that I've actually played through (the majority) of the story itself.

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