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| Initial Impressions by Ice Cream Jonsey 12/28/2009, 11:02am PST | ||||
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| Every GTA game since the third one has ultimately, for me, devolved into an exercise in frustration and soapbox preaching. It's the perfect series to pop your monocle and force you to write terribly long screeds on the current state of game design. I've given GTA3, Vice City and San Andreas a try, and at each point I've abandoned the game when forced into replaying missions where the lack of save-anywhere has unduly frustrated me. This has been as late as a third of the way into GTA3 and as early as the bicycle race in GTA:SA. To make the same mistakes three times had me swear off GTA4, but what the hell. It's Christmas and my brother gave me it.
Another reason I avoided GTA4 was that I thought there was no way Rockstar was going to write Czeckoslovakians well. I expected the entire dialogue to be Steve Martin and Dan Aykroid belching, "WHAT A COUNTRY" to the delighted chortles of the Madden & Halo crowd. So I can't believe how well Roman and Niko are coming off so far. I'm at the point where I was just given a pistol, but I actually want to play this game to see how the story develops. I've turned into every gamer's girlfriend, caring not for the horrific violence and chase scenes, but the thing's plot and cut scenes. The highest compliment I can give GTA4 is that they flipped me from the disaffected hardest of the hardcore to the girl in the PS3 Uncharted commercial who is making popcorn in anticipation of the "movie" starting again. The most unexpected moment in video games in 2009 was probably how addicting a port of Scorched Earth to Flash Basketball is, but second to that was when GTA4 broke mimesis to take me to the 360's hard disk screen unprompted a few minutes in. I was unable to believe it was saving anything, so I wasn't going to fall for that trick. But it did! I would have been more willing to believe GTA4 if it suddenly told me my 360 could now play the complete library of PS3 games at that point or, more preposterously, the same for the original Xbox. But no, the thing is autosaving at regular intervals. I'm amazed. And happy. The GPS function, with its nice, clean, green lines makes going back to any other version impossible. It is the Baldur's Gate II Faster Default Walking Speed of GTA games. It's not all perfect: I'm floored by the sheer number of controls the thing is offering. Basically, any button at any time is seemingly context sensitive, which is fine when the game has instructions in the top-left corner, but I will be very lost if that ever goes away. I'm hoping it will give me pointers right through the last boss, like BioShock did. The camera control is hilariously awful - just lock the fucking thing behind me, RE4 style, until I say otherwise! And the hand-to-hand combat is straight from an EA hockey game. I don't know who was beating up Roman in the park, but I just assumed it was Tie Domi and Donald Brashear. But it does finally seem like they have the perfect mix of chaos and order for the driving sections, and I hadn't realized how much I hated the automatic gunfire from the Triads until just now. I'm very aware that I am eventually going to be stuck replaying a mission that involves multiple driving segments, and I am going to curse it. I'm aware that all of Lizard King's complaints are going to come true for me. I will probably end up hating this game, but man, this is certainly progress and I can also actually play it with the windows open without spontaneously starting a race riot. the dark and gritty...Ice Cream Jonsey! |
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