One and a half days with GTAIV

Apr 30, 2008 00:39

Welp...I grabbed my copy of GTAIV at a midnight release and, despite feeling a bit under the weather, I have managed to play a good bit of it so far, although my in-game stats say I'm only 4% into the game.

So...impressions time I guess.

In short, it's good. It's everything that most hardcore fans of GTA3 wanted from the next GTA game but forgot about in the meantime when we got all the GTA side-story games. Not that there was anything bad about Vice CIty or San ANdreas or LCS and VCS....they were all great, fun games. However, there's no question that all the GTA games since the release of 3 have leaned towards the side of going all out batshit crazy, especially San Andreas which not only had a bizarre, over-the-top plot involving alien conspiracies, the CIA, helping destroy a rappers career, and growing weed with Peter Fonda, but also towards the end devolved into things like kart racing with enemy gang members. Now, I'm not saying that was bad shit at all. BUT, it did tend to diminish some aspects of what GTA3 had established as a darkly humorous, but still reasonably serious, grim crime game just as much about the world it was set in as the storyline.

GTAIV seems to want to set the clock back a few years and, instead, rather than build itself off of everything inbetween, it goes to the roots of 3 and builds new characters and storyline onto a base that is firmly planted back in those old Liberty City days. It's an extension of where 3 was going and where most people had hoped the series would go afterwords until it took the radical direction it did.

So, there are undoubtedly going to people who play it for an hour, and be disgusted with it.
Me, personally, I think the game is the essence of everything I wanted to see in the next GTA game after 3, when people were strongly urging Rockstar to make an expansion rather than a whole new game. Not that GTA4 isn't chock full of new ideas and features...but it feels like returning that world again, only now the technology has caught up to the vision in a way that really fits the whole thing.
Everyone keeps making GTA clones and trying to one-up Rockstar with this gadget here and this widget there. It looks like here, they just said "We're not going to play that game" and instead focused on making a game with the same intimate environments and focused gameplay that worked so well for 3. So..I think they did right by themselves and right by the gamers, personally.
Anyway...it's fun.

Just off the top of my head, the laugh-out-loud moments have been:
A classic rock station with Iggy Pop as the DJ.
Disco/DIsco-pop station with Karl Lagerfield as the DJ.
Great ambient electronic station with A COMPUTER the DJ.
The fake TV shows, the fake internet, the attention to detail in the city and how it still sort of lives on its own.
When dawn comes up and the sun starts hitting the buildings and casting shadows and you drive over a hill or something and see the scale of how Rockstar finally made a city proportionally correct.
It's all good.
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