(It appears that it's difficult to get a single, game-encompassing result when you search for pictures of GTA IV, so have Niko being welcomed off the boat)
Grand Theft Auto IV (PS3, 2008)
This is one of the first games I had for the 7th generation. This, Call of Duty 4 and Gran Turismo 5 Prologue were bought bundled with my 40GB monolith. I got Guitar Hero III too because a friend of mine had got it for his birthday the month before and it was cool as ****, and I had to have it. I wrote about COD4 not too long ago and my nostalgia trip turned to IV, bringing me full circle. If I ever finish the online stuff with Soupy I'll even Platinum the game some day, but that's another conversation.
It took me a few weeks to get through the game but I'll try and combine my first impressions with what I ended up feeling at the end of the thing. First off was the radar which looked extremely small. But I got used to it. Or one day it seemed like it was bigger is probably more accurate, that was weird. To start off there's a strange... sluggishness is how I'd put it. Not just to driving around because all the cars are a bit **** in the first area you're in but the surroundings, the characters, the story, it all seems very... muggy. It's strange to think that this was such a landmark for such a successful and popular franchise on a new console which then gave you such a limited opening. Having never played a GTA game before this I never particularly noticed or cared about that but there's a real sense of constriction to start the game which is noticeable now, especially after having played V where I followed the first mission purely by driving to see where I went and ended up being amazed as I looked at the stars over Mt. Chilliad while at a dusty petrol station somewhere. But that's besides the point.
Any sense of feeling trapped by your surroundings in the early stages of the game could be argued as being deliberate and actually quite clever since that's how the story's going. Niko, fresh off the boat to an American existence depicted by his cousin as being wildly different from the reality, expects opulent wealth and leisure. He does oddjobs for a ****** taxi company and is a rentagoon for the local Russian immigrant Mafia. I think the characterisation in the first stage is important because in what is largely a closed system to open with just two neighbourhoods available does make the whole overarching theme of chasing the American Dream seem more necessary if nothing else. Certainly the sense that there is an existence, a world larger than the one you inhabit is strong and when the payoff comes in the form of the rest of the city opening up, it seems like a logical progression.
Sadly, one problem that comes with this is the physical reality of the situation. The city is tiny. It's all broadly similar, even if the street patterns change a bit and some of the buildings get higher, there's very little variety, and you can get from one side of the city to the other (or the top to the bottom) in a hilariously short space of time. This is obviously down to the limitation of the capability of the developers when the game was made, but playing it now it really stands out. I enjoyed the snug feel of the city playing it before because I played it that much the familiarity I had with even the street names made me feel accomplished but now, it just feels limited. With what I said earlier about the point of the story being Niko progressing himself, this sense obviously translates to the story as it unfolds. Niko has two motivations, one of them is money, and there's just no point to it at all. Nothing you can do with the money besides buying hot dogs and clothes, which subsequently makes the whole game and the things you do feel sort of redundant. It doesn't help either that once you get into the high end Mafia rentagoon stuff that they all end up being broadly the same anyway. The missions you do are all pretty similar (some variation on "go here kill this person" and "go here steal this car" and occasionally "go here steal this car and kill this person") and there is a strong sense of it being a grind at points. I do think the location is a bigger cause of this than anything else though. What sort of variety can you put into gameplay when your surroindings barely vary from mission to mission? There's not much.
The story is at its most interesting when ye olde Greek storytelling method comes in: Revenge. It's what drives nearly everyone. Niko turns up in Liberty City looking for some people he was in the army with who betrayed him. Along the way he finds new enemies who wrong him who he wants to kill. It's hard to feel empathy during cutscenes with someone who makes a big deal out of certain people when you could have run over literally hundreds of people on the way to get to the showpiece event. Sadly this is a necessary evil of the genre. Thankfully though the chracterisation and the acting in these situations is very strong. For however many memes you'll have seen of Roman's daft face and NEEKO LETS GO BOWLING or some such, when there's heavy stuff, there's genuine emotion in the voice acting. The graphics aren't quite there yet but the effort is, and that's what counts. There's lots of strong characters actually, Roman and Niko are very good, villains like Dimitri, Vlad, Pegorino, the ULP guy, they're all very well fleshed out and convincing. Even Little Jacob, the man whose subtitles are in patois, when he has to be deep, he is. The strong characters go some way to cover up the shortcomings of the setting and keep the repetitive missions and story from being too draining. And for every interaction Niko has with various people (various relevant, prominent people) the progression all follows logically that leads to a great climax in the end. The only problem then is there's only really one ending you can have that has any sort of emotional resonation with you (I mean who called Kate, really?), but I'll do that in a minute.
In what was presumably an attempt to create depth and a greater sense of immersion in the extremely shallow city, there are activities you can do like bowling, pool, darts, drinking, you know, if the thought of firing RPGs at police cars ever wears off. Sadly these are generally suggested to you by annoying friends while you're in the middle of something else. These are, nearly without exception, awful and a complete detraction from the game. I hope whoever allowed them was fired at some point. The assorted companions you can build relationships with by doing these things with... who careS? Who cares about the online dating stuff (the lawyer puts out after two dates!)? Why does anyone want to do this? Horrible, horrible stuff.
Uh, what else. Graphically, it again suffers from its time in the generation, I'd imagine. Lots of grey and brown. Lots of "earth" colours. Weird grainy stuff when you drive at speed and move the camera. I really like the weather though, thunderstorms and fog especially look really good and feel very realistic. Truly idiotic NPC AI for drivers and pedestrians. I love driving across a bridge at full speed to have someone in the lane next to me drive in front of me. That's just super. The social commentary/parody is slightly jarring hearing panic merchantry from seven years ago (although terrorism is the order of the day so maybe it's not that far off). The soundtrack to the game seems quite limited. The rock station (and Iggy Pop's DJing) is largely great and pretty much the only thing worth listening to. The talk radios are all very good (and a sad loss from V), Radio Broker has one or two good songs and Electro Choc is good value at night. The hip-hop stations though, all brutal. Guess I'm a West Coast guy. Gameplay wise it's pretty standard. Driving isn't as bad as it's made out to be, although the brakes on every car seem really weak. Trying to move out of cover is annoying sometimes, and the auto-lock when aiming has strange ideas about what constitutes a target, but I enjoy picking off headshots. Oh, that reminds me.
Two things I did while playing this to make it more fun: During missions that involved gunplay I took two approaches. Generally in open areas I had a pistol, and I picked off headshots. The lack of accuracy from automatic weapons is really surprising. Aiming slightly and taking people down in one shot is much more satisfying. So is going through interiors with a shotgun like you're Omar from The Wire, just walking around blowing people five feet through the air. Great fun. The other thing I would recommend which goes back slightly to my problem with the size and immersion level of the city. To go to some missions around Algonquin/Bohan/Dukes/Broker, I took the Subway. Just walked from where I was, got to the station, went on a train and got off. It's a surprisingly efficient transit system in that regard and it's... fun. I'm not sure if fun is the right word to describe a visual equivalent of probably the most mundane part of anyone's day but it does give some amount of scale to the city, makes it feel like a more organic and believable recreation of a fully functioning system.
As I mentioned somewhere before, when I first played this I had no real context to place the game in because I'd never playd a GTA game before. I enjoyed the game then. I've played it through several times since with focuses on playing it seriously and just to **** around in, and I've had tremendous fun. I've played it recently now after having played many more games since and with a wider array of experience to call upon in deciding how I feel about it and now, I say it holds up. It's visibly dated for a number of reasons but I don't think any of these are strong enough to detract from the whole experience. It's fundamentals like the story that will do that. I do think it retains some merit as a historical point, a starting point even, for games for a whole generation, so it deserves praise for that if nothing else.
I bought the HD version of San Andreas today, so you'll see that at some point in here. At least I don't have any expectations for it or anything.
