Why do games companies take beautiful game covers and then make them all ugly with some big yellow strips down the side? I was looking at some PS3 games and now if you want them new you have to buy them in the ugly platinum boxes. With Xbox 360 games it is not quite as bad but the classics covers are way uglier than the originals. Why? I find it hard to believe anyone is attracted to these covers.

I know that they are the same games inside. It makes no real difference. Except that I feel repulsed buy the cheap, tacky looking covers. I try to buy games new to support the companies making them. The cover should be a small thing but I hate them. With the Platinum and Classics lines, the games aren't even cheap. At least with the Sold Out line the games hardly cost anything. Why can't they just leave the covers as they are?

Solved. Turning off widescreen cleared up this problem for me and I finished the game.

Having played and enjoyed Vice City onwards I decided to go back and play GTA3. I have got through to the final mission (Catalina's The Exchange) with fair ease but now I can't complete that last mission. The trouble I have that I have noticed the whole time I have been playing is that I have to stand about 6 feet away from anyone for any gun without a sight to hurt an enemy. It has just been an strange quible of the game up until now. I have generally been running right up to people to kill them and using the sniper rifle and grenades in tight spots. However on this mission I am stripped of all my guns. There are loads of guys with M16s. You get a sniper rifle with 5 bullets at one point but there are still about 15 guys to kill.

Playing on a 3GHz Duo, 4GB RAM, ATi 4850 512MB, Vista 32bit. I am playing at 1920x1080x32 resolution. Could that be the issue? I watched some videos of people playing the final mission and they obviously did not have the same problem I had.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8f-VvkXJHp4

Any suggestions? I'd have asked this on the Rockstar forums but they don't seem to exist at the moment.

Thanks for the advice. I'll look into those suggestions.

I just want something to game on. The minor improvements won't be worth it to me. I know a friend regretted buying a very expansive systems 18 months ago as it isn't working as well as he'd like now.

I need a new PC. I am thinking I want to build my own PC. The last computer I had was bought by my old company so I didn't spend much time thinking about it. Now with a new job I have lost that computer and I will have to spend my own money. With it being 7 years since I last bought a computer with my own cash I can't work out how much I should spend. Am I better off buying a lower spec and upgrading it later or buying a higher spec now that will last a couple of years. I am a gamer. I'd like to play the latest games but I am not bothered about high resolutions and saving ms on lag.

Is there a formula for how much I should spend like there is for engagement rings? Which is best value in terms of how long you can play the latest games before your next upgrade? Spending $1000, $2000, $3000, $4000?

I always used to say it was around the equivalent of $2500 but computers seem to have gotten cheaper. Or is it just that cheap computers are not as painful when it comes to doing day to day tasks like the internet and word processing?

Anyway, I am thinking that I want to spend a little extra on the case, PSU, monitor to give be a good basis for a later upgrade and to get nice quality, quiet components. Then I am wondering if I should stick a i7 920, 6GB 1600 RAM, 300GB 10000rpm HDD, NVidia 260 GTX or would I be better with a Core 2 Duo 2.66GHz, 2GB RAM, 7200rpm 1TB HDD, NVidia 9800GT 1GB (This has aspecial quiet version available is the reason for this graphics card).

Will there be a noticable difference in the performance of these machines on current games at standard resolutions? How long would you estimate before I wanted to upgrade (most likely to be able to run newer games) each of the two systems?

I am guessing there is about $800 difference between the two systems. I can afford both but which is better value? Sorry this is kind of rambling. I can't make up my mind at all.

I want to get myself an external hard drive to give me more space,back up my data and make it easy to transfer data between computers. Does anyone have any recommendations? My biggest concern is reliability. Pretty much every drive I have read reviews for have a few that talk about them breaking down. Are they really that unreliable? Which manufactures do people think make the sturdiest and most reliable external drives. I don't think I have ever had or heard of anybody having trouble with an internal drive so what makes external drives so unreliable.