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Underground > Games & Gameplay >

Grand Theft Auto 4's a comin'

  
  

Page: 123(4)

 
 
Mug Chum
18:43 / 12.05.08
It doesn't have the physical scale of San Andreas, but it has far more content.

Yeah, from what I gathered it's more about refining the existing model to utter perfection (and with more enjoyable content per territory instead of huge territories) in working on more minutiae and details and micro aspects of it, than to try to reinvent the overall model (like GTA3 did, contrasting to its previous versions) or go for a different wallpaper and scale (San Andreas/Vice).

I'm somewhat excited to play it, but oddly not as much as I was expecting I'd be.
 
 
Spatula Clarke
19:34 / 12.05.08
I wasn't all that pumped for it. Out of all of the games that have been released in the series to date, the only one that's felt full-on special to me is San Andreas, because of the scale, because of the world it was set in, because of the characterisation (deeply flawed though it was) and I was of the opinion that a return to Liberty City, with an associated move away from that scale (riding SA's pushbikes around the countryside, just because the control was so much fun, ate up far more of my time than was healthy) was a mistake.

But no. It honestly is that good. Get a bit fed up with the missions and you can sit in Niko's flat and watch one of the spoof TV shows that Rockstar have created. Or sit in a car and listen to the radio stations, the writing for which blows away that of the previous games. Or just take one of the cars out and mess about in it - the handling is good enough to be pulled straight from this game and plonked into the middle of a fully-fledged arcade racer, without any modifications necessary. Or just mess about with the procedurally-generated animation and try and make people fall over in new and interesting ways.

It feels like a legitimate city, and just wandering around it, taking it in, is a valid and purposeful form of entertainment, which is something that I don't think could have been said of the earlier games.

The really special moments are the small ones that happen randomly, thanks to the robust integreation of the different bits of software into the game engine. Like:

I stole a helicopter the other night, and somebody ran up to it while I was trying to take off and grabbed onto one of the rails on its underside, refusing to let go until I started shaking the thing around.

I crashed my car into a wall and found both myself and my passenger flying right through the windscreen, into the park on the other side of it.

I got carjacked by a passerby.

I shot out the tyre of another car during a chase and then managed to lose sight of it. Thirty seconds later, the mission complete icon flashed up. I hunted around to see what'd happened, and came across a pile-up, featuring the car I'd damaged, the guy driving it having gone through the windscreen himself and then got run over in the resulting chaos.

I had another car chase against an NPC who, again, crashed into a building. I was expecting him to reverse, but instead the car stayed where it was, the horn blaring. When I got out to scope the situation, it turned out that the crash had snapped his neck forwards so that his head went straight into the steering wheel, killing him and setting the horn off.

I know they're all terribly violent examples, but their importance is that these are all emergent moments - none of them were scripted, destined to happen (bar the carjacking, but even then only to a degree). You always see something new happening.
 
 
Mug Chum
20:35 / 12.05.08
I stole a helicopter the other night, and somebody ran up to it while I was trying to take off and grabbed onto one of the rails on its underside, refusing to let go until I started shaking the thing around.

That's the sort of thing that is making me most excited. All the foccus on huge possibilities and scope (not just on scale, but that was also what defined it) that GTA3 reinvigorated into games (and San Andreas put it into bigger territorial scale and some minor addings) being brought to these little corners that you'd play with for far more time than the main story. More about the minor variations that have its alluring sandbox-like ripples and repercussions. Like you said, "emergent moments". And the sense of the world genuinely reacting and being open to back-and-forths with your inputs and reactions (even if that sense is somewhat illusory, and might have its obvious arbitrary limits to what's possible), of something actually there, responsive, and subjected to uncountable variables. Well, "more interactive", really, without having to go on and on.

'Modelling-putty city' always seemed to be more the appeal of the GTA series than just guns, drugs, cop-killing and prostitutes (although the playful anarchic/free dinaymics of that sandbox sensibility just seems to take in easily some representative forms of 'anarchic freeness' of law-breaking mingled with boyish power fantasies -- LittleBigPlanet might be the next big thing in that sense but without being juxtaposed with that outlaw sensibility. Curious to see how that'll go).

I shot out the tyre of another car during a chase and then managed to lose sight of it. Thirty seconds later, the mission complete icon flashed up. I hunted around to see what'd happened, and came across a pile-up, featuring the car I'd damaged, the guy driving it having gone through the windscreen himself and then got run over in the resulting chaos. / (...) it turned out that the crash had snapped his neck

Out of my way, 3RL!!! On your feet, soldier. You’ve just been drafted.
 
 
_pin
20:45 / 13.05.08
I'm sympathetic to MACC. I have my own rules about games: I don't play games that are not really games, but elaborate and innovative Graphical User Interfaces for hitmen, for instance. But you see, there's a compelling case for this just still being GTAII. The series' numbering has always been of an... ideological bent: why is GTA: London not GTAII? What does it mean that GTAs III through San Andreas are all the "same" number?

They're obviously saying that they were all fundamentally the same experience, and I think the ballsed up on II, actually. It should have been GTA: The Future, and the next batch should have been IIs. Which of course brings us to whether the matter at hand is really another jump forward, and I'd argue that no, it is not. Nintendo's revolution/evolution schema is instructive here, and, as has been outlined above, what we're getting in GTAIV isn't so much NEW content as EXTANT content the way it should have been. It's like it's not in beta any more.

On a more pressing matter, what is Roger Travis fucking on about when he says that "you can’t go to church in GTA because (despite appearances) whatever else you do, you’re still the main character of GTA, in the world of GTA, and there are no churches there." Despite what appearances? I don't have many cousins, &mdash certainly not a representative sample of cousins &mdash but none of them, to my knowledge, have written to my aunt regarding all the titties they're getting, out there in America.

There's freedom in the game, sure, but it's heavily loaded with context, built up through character interactions and the physicality of your relationship with Niko and, through him, Liberty City itself. There are actions I could do all the time in the game, and certainly a bit in real life too, but chose to perform only when I think it's appropriate.

I was rushing to Roman's one time, trying to avoid pranging anything while some douche who was just ambling around, causing a mass of cars to all jam up a crossroad. Eventually, the guy gets out of the mess, and I fuck up, because I appear to be steering a vehicle constructed in part from elastic bands, and clip him on the side, causing his hat to come off. In revenge, said douche pulls me from my car and, trying to get to my cousin in time, I do the only reasonable thing in my Army-past, psycho-gangster circumstances: I batter the shit to the floor, kick his head, and drive off.

There's something insanely satisfying about physical combat in this game, in narrative circumstances at least, that gives the sort of thrill I last got, in real life, from managing to make a shelf mark in Dewey that accurately conveyed that the book in question is about Torture, in the Imperial Project, of the United States of America.
 
 
Alex's Grandma
20:21 / 16.05.08
I simply have to say that I won't even bother trying a game which contains a number in its title higher than 2.

I can't help but feel this policy is going to have to be reconsidered when God Of War 3 comes out.

In the meantime, if anyone's played both, how does GTA 4 measure up on X-Box, as opposed to PS3?
 
 
Janean Patience
21:42 / 16.05.08
I won't even bother trying any game system with a number in its title higher than 2.
 
 
Spaniel
10:26 / 23.05.08
Personally I eschew all numbers higher than 2.
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
17:51 / 25.05.08
I will only accept ANY form of entertainment which ends with a "2" if it is subtitled "Electric Boogaloo".
 
 
Triplets
21:28 / 25.05.08
I don't acknowledge anyone with a power level lower than 2






thousand.
 
 
Lama glama
01:01 / 04.06.08
The last game I played (for an almost unhealthy amount of time) was Persona 3 and the social-networking aspect of that, where you have to maintain a healthy relationship with your fellow school-goers was something that I really enjoyed. The clever story-lines, options to change the friendship in various ways, were all very clever and served a tangible function in other areas of the game.

So, GTA 4's similar social system, where you choose who you're friends with and accordingly get different abilities is hugely enjoyable for me. More games with sandbox elements should employ such systems and we can finally be rid of free-roaming cities that feel empty and lifeless- I'm looking at you, Spider-Man 3! Very much appreciating the level of detail in the city so far, and the consequences that various actions have are frequently surprising: attempt a mission after failing it and you usually get different dialogue during it. This made repeating missions (often due to death at the hands of the still clunky and horrid combat) actually tolerable.
 
 
Phex: Dorset Doom
17:37 / 04.06.08
Do you really choose who you're friends with in GTAIV through? Sure, there are people who could be your friends who you don't call much (I couldn't really imagine hanging out with Brucie for more than a few seconds, even if it means free helicopter rides, whereas I enjoyed many a drunken night out with Patrick and pool game with Little Jacob) but apart from dating from Lovemeet and Craplist there aren't any optional friends, only ones foisted upon the player by the game's plot.
 
 
Janean Patience
09:30 / 30.08.08
Two-and-a-half weeks of hardly obsessive play since I got a 360 (with 20g hard drive, a week before 60g drives for the same price became the new standard) and I've completed a quarter of this game according to the stats screen. Which really shocked me. I felt like I'd completed maybe 10 to 15 per cent, that I was just warming up. Because so far I've not seen anything new.

Sure, the weight and the handling is better and the way you use your mobile is brilliant, a seamless way of incorporating and making real all the game's mechanics. The satnav's great too. Flying through windscreens, getting shot dead by cops at the seat of your stolen car, the physics of driving are all huge improvements. But the game doesn't feel like a great leap forward. There's a lot that's unchanged about it and a new series of irritating tics, like not being able to pass a pedestrian carrying something without making them drop it, like all the empty buildings where you climb six flights to get to an empty roof, like all the phone calls from Roman asking you to some social occasion which come once per session, at least, so you're always saying yes or no.

Most importantly, this doesn't feel like New York, or doesn't feel like a New York worth exploring. With the caveat that I haven't reached Manhattan yet. Firefly Island is mapped very accurately from the real thing right down to the train station, the light is right in the early mornings, the rainstorms are properly impressive. On every previous GTA game, though, right back to the first one, I've spent hours when opening any new area just roaming, exploring, getting in trouble with the police, seeing what there was to see. Here it's all the same. Brooklyn doesn't feel as iconic as it did in Ultimate Spider-Man. The environment and the way it seemed to place you in a continuum of movies and TV was the secret of the last two games' success. I spent hours in the desert and the outskirts of Venturas, just fucking around. Just being there. I've tried to do that here, but very shortly I'm bored. The graphics are fantastic, the new physics make everything more real, but Liberty City isn't working as a place I want to be.
 
  

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