There were a number of sites declaring Grand Theft Auto IV to be a 10\/10
\ngame. It’s good, I’ll agree. I would not rate it quite that high though.
\n(And keep in mind, I played it on the PC.)<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
So how does GTA4 differ from previous iterations of the series?<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
We’ll start with driving<\/b>. There’s no mouse control of the cars,
\nwhich sucks. It takes some getting used to, controlling only with the
\nkeyboard. The reason you can’t drive with the mouse is they added the
\nability to aim fire while driving. I know that in Vice City you could
\nonly shoot directly left or right and I can’t remember now how San Andreas
\ndid it. The shooting is definitely much more convenient, with almost 360
\ndegrees of aiming. Of course, your choice of weapons is limited (no
\nassault rifles or rocket launchers from the driver’s seat).<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Cars in GTA4 have far too little traction, and the real beaters and crappy
\ncars can drive as if their tires are made from congealed cooking fat.
\nHigh-end cars are much better at gripping the road. The emergency brake,
\nnecessary to get some good sideways slides and fast turns, will
\ntemporarily disable both your ability to steer (to some degree) and to
\naccelerate. While in a sideways slide, your spinning drive wheels won’t
\ngive any traction at all until you slow down. Kind of annoying, I wish it
\nfelt more authentic.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Combat and weapons<\/b> work pretty well. Right mouse button puts you
\ninto aim mode, left button shoots. Melee weapons and hand-to-hand combat
\nuse a lock-on system, where your right mouse button locks onto a
\nparticular target and then when you move, it’s in relation to your target,
\nand when you swing, stab, or punch, it’s at that target only. The mouse
\ncontrols here were a bit twitchy. The game (a console port) did not quite
\nrecognize very very minute mouse movements, so if you try to aim
\ntoo<\/i> precisely, your mouse won’t move at all. GTA4 also has a cover
\nsystem, whereby you hit a key to take cover behind a wall or barrier, then
\nyou can pop out and fire or shoot blindly. It’s pretty useful, especially
\nthe blind-fire. I just wish it was more reliable. Sometimes you’ll be
\nrapidly sliding the mouse to move your crosshairs and it just won’t react.
\nThis only happened with using cover. So other than the flakiness with the
\ncover system, combat in GTA4 (at least on the PC) is pretty solid.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Ever since GTA3 came out, Rockstar has been trying to incorporate more of
\na story<\/b> into the GTA games. And they’ve all, more or less,
\nrevolved around organized crime. This seems to be the easiest way to
\nweave a narrative around a sandbox game where you can run people over
\nwithout a second look from the cops. The character’s personality is far
\nmore defined here than in GTA3, where your silent protagonist was a blank
\nslate for whatever the player wanted to bring. In GTA4, the problems
\narise when the actions of your main character (Niko) are completely at
\nodds with what he says.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
GTA4 is two games at war. One, a sandbox game where the player can wreck
\nhavoc on an unsuspecting metropolis, go on grand crime sprees, and indulge
\nin epic shootouts with police. The other game is a wannabe-Scorsese mafia
\ndrama told through cut scenes, with nearly as many betrayals as it has
\ncharacters. It’s a bit self-indulgent and long-winded and takes itself
\nfar more seriously than it should. And when the two games interact,
\nproblems arise. The cut scenes and dialog are all laid out in advance,
\nwith little flexibility or openness to player choice. Thus the game
\neasily presents situations where Niko in a cut scene expresses reluctance
\nto perform violence, just after finishing up a mass murder spree. Or if
\nyou don’t make the choice to hang out with certain characters outside of
\nthe story missions, you’ll be left wondering scratching your head at some
\nof the character dynamics in cut scenes.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
What most impresses people is the realizing of the city<\/b>. The
\ngame’s setting of Liberty City is a scaled down rendition of New York City
\nwith a bit of Jersey City. The illusion is very impressive. You can get
\naround by car, taxi, subway, and there are bridges and tunnels connecting
\nthe islands. The architecture of the buildings reflect their location
\n(skyscrapers in their version of Manhattan, industrial buildings along the
\nharbors). The smallest prying reveals the illusion right away, of course.
\nWhile many of the buildings will have stairs or ladders that let you
\naccess the roof, the insides can’t be reached because the majority of the
\ndoors are fake. There are a few stores that can be entered (clothing
\nonly), some bars, a few restaurants, a couple of strip clubs. Everything
\nelse is a mirage. Now I’m not saying that Rockstar should have created a
\nfully interactive model of New York City! That would be a ridiculous
\ntask, at least for a game like this. It’s just that people need to
\nrealize what you can and can’t do before jumping into the game with false
\nimpressions. Liberty City can give you a great sense of immersion, but as
\nsoon as you try to do anything, you’re reminded of the fact that it’s just
\nwindow dressing.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
As you encounter more and more characters in the progressing storyline,
\nmany of them will go into your phone as contacts. Some of them you’ll be
\nable to call up and go do social activies with, like bowling, darts,
\ndrinking, that kind of thing. These are your friends<\/b>. The game
\ntracks how much they like you and for some of them if their appreciation
\ngets high enough, they’ll offer to do special favors for you. One girl
\nhad the ability to give me health over the phone if I called her. Another
\nwas able to get police to stop chasing me (as long as my offenses weren’t
\ntoo<\/i> egregious). The irritating side to friends is that you have to
\nkeep doing crap with them or you’ll lose their approval. Then the favors
\nstop. Sometimes they’ll call you in the middle of some goings-on and nag
\nabout how you never hang out anymore. Turn them down and their approval
\ndrops. A nice idea, but poorly implemented.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Grand Theft Auto games are famous for having sandbox<\/b> environments,
\nwith near total freedom to go and do as you please. GTA4 is no different,
\nwith an even bigger city than ever before. And without the need to drive
\nthrough along boring country roads to get from one area to another, as
\nthey did with San Andreas. Some aspects of the sandbox will only get
\nunlocked as you progress through the story missions, however. There are
\nlocations around the city where you can find weapons; except these only
\nstart appearing after certain missions make them available. So you cannot
\nignore the missions and expect to get the full experience of the sandbox
\n(especially since the other islands are closed to you initially).<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
With all the moves forward with GTA4, what were the steps back<\/b>? In
\ntheir drive to make a more serious story-based experience, Rockstar tossed
\nout a number of game aspects that I really enjoyed. There’s no buying or
\ncontrolling property now. You get a few safehouses as you progress
\nthrough the missions; they’re just places to safe your game and change
\nyour clothes. (You can also watch TV there, if you’re so inclined.) A
\nsafehouse has a parking area out front where you can stash cars so that
\nthey’ll persist if you leave or load a game. This area’s pretty small
\nthough: you can only park 2 large cars in it. It’s not as nice or
\nreliable as the garages you’d get in Vice City though. And the safehouses
\nare far apart, so if you find your have no room to park, it’s a hell of a
\ndrive to get to the next one.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
So there’s no owning property the brings you income or gives you access to
\ncars. The money thing doesn’t bother me. I do hate having to hunt around
\nfor nice cars though. (As I said before, the crappier cars can’t drive
\nworth shit.) Your properties won’t have weapons readily available at them
\neither. It used to be that you’d find “packages” around the city and as
\nyou grabbed them, you’d unlock various stuff at your safehouses. Not in
\nGTA4. Instead, you hunt pigeons (flying rats) and you have to exterminate
\nall<\/b> 200 of them before you get anything<\/i>. And even then,
\nit’s 1 thing: a military helicopter placed the top of a single building (I
\nhave not yet unlocked this).<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
They dropped the chop shop part of San Andreas. No more customizing a car
\nyou’re really fond of (with the tiny parking spots, you probably wouldn’t
\nhave anywhere to put it anyway.) GTA4 has nicer 60s American muscle cars
\nthan San Andreas did; a shame the most common ones — the Dukes (a ’69
\nCharger) and the Stallion (’68 Cutlass) — are two of the worst handling
\ncars in the game. The Sabre GT is a blast to drive though and looks
\ngreat, much like the Sabre Turbo in Vice City (my favorite of that game).
\nThere are a few specialized vehicles in the game that have parts that look
\nlike they should function (forklift, car-carrier with ramp) except that
\nthere’s no apparent way to work them.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
They did away with some staples of the series: while you can still hunt
\ncriminals from a cop car with the help of the police computer, there are
\nno taxi missions, no ambulance missions, no firetruck missions. This is
\nthe biggest deficiency of the game. The sandbox nature of GTA is really
\ncrippled when you take away the most popular alternatives to the main
\nmissions. So what do you do in the game without them? Drive and cause
\nmayhem. There’s side mission to collect cars for a shadowy Stevie
\ncharacter. Go bowling? Play darts? They’re fairly shallow mini-games
\nwith (IMO) poorly implemented controls. And I still haven’t gotten the
\nhandling of putting spin on my ball when I bowl.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
I’m kind of frustrated that Rockstar seems to have a habit of taking one
\nstep back for every two steps forward when it comes to the GTA games.
\nSomewhere there has a vision of what the games should be and it just
\ndoesn’t seem to match mine. They want to turn it into a serious vehicle
\nfor crime dramas, no matter how at odds that may be with the gameplay
\nmechanics. Even so, it’s a really good game, especially for a console
\nport. And it didn’t hurt that I only paid $7 during the Steam holiday
\nsale for it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
There were a number of sites declaring Grand Theft Auto IV to be a 10\/10
\ngame.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7096","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-games","category-review"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rps.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7096","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rps.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rps.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rps.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rps.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7096"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rps.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7096\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7487,"href":"https:\/\/www.rps.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7096\/revisions\/7487"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rps.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7096"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rps.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7096"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rps.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7096"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}