'So far, it's been received well overall. The character animations in GTA 4 aren't as sharp as we're used to in 2021, says Zuma, thus keeping things interesting on the road can be tricky – something overcome by mixing up camera ranges while rolling, and drawing focus to organic moments within the active sandbox, such as random police chases and NPCs fighting with one another.įurther subtleties, such as ensuring Nico is wearing new clothes on every new in-game day, helps maintain the world's credibility, and Zuma keenly listens to feedback from his peers as he goes. On top of technical hurdles wrought by dated in-game features, Zuma says keeping car scenes interesting is over and above the hardest part of his project. This takes a lot of time and effort, but I enjoy working on these episodes, especially when I see the end product.' Are we there yet? I create my own scenes using a mod called Native Trainer to fill the gaps in the scenes. 'Sometimes, the parts that the game allows me to record aren't enough. I often end up with missing parts in between clips, so I'm forced to go back and redo the whole segment again from the start.' The length of the recorded clip varies and there's no indicator that the whole segment has been captured or not.

'For starters, I have to press a button every 20-30 seconds to save a clip, because it can't record long clips of gameplay.

The game itself is old, over 13 years old now, and the built-in clip editor can be difficult to deal with at times,' adds Zuma. Despite the prestige of the end product, though, streamlining its scenes is far from straightforward. Perhaps the biggest compliment I can pay to his work, in fact, is that, despite an increasingly daunting backlog of games I should be playing, I now really want to return to Liberty City as it appears in Grand Theft Auto 4. In practice, it all flows well – so much so, I wholeheartedly agree with Zuma when he says GTA 4 would make for a great TV crime drama. He's even folding in the cut-scenes and gameplay footage from GTA 4's two timeline-overlapping story-pack DLCs – The Lost and Damned and the Ballad of Gay Tony – and as such reckons the project in its entirety will span 15 or so full episodes. 'Perhaps the biggest compliment I can pay to his work, in fact, is that, despite an increasingly daunting backlog of games I should be playing, I now really want to return to Liberty City.'Īt the time of writing, Zuma has finished five full episodes of The Soviet Connection (opens in new tab), whose runtimes stretch between 25 and 40 minutes a piece.

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