So what is my favorite thing about gta4? The laughs. The humor. The tv. But The thing I love the most is when you get grenades. Yes. Go draw a bunch of cops to you, then get in a car with your grenade selected. Once a lot of cop cars are around and cops start coming up to the car, throw a grenade out the window but just sit in the car, don’t drive off, sure this kills you, but you get to watch lots of people get launched into the air in slow motion while you die. This is so fucking hilarious to me. I’m a fan of violent entertainment(yes, movies, games, sports like ufc). I have played all the GTA games. I love mob movies, scarface, donnie brasco, godfather, you name it. GTA, and I mean all of them are mob games. You play a thug climbing your way up the mob ladder. NOW, let’s talk about what is good. The aiming system is improved big time. Now, you can either lock on by holding L2 all the way, or free aim by holding down L2 only a little bit. There is now a cover system ala Uncharted or Rainbow 6 Vegas. This adds a whole new dimension to the game play. The gunplay is amazing, especially when people are up close. The screen kind of blurs and its frantic and loud and when you shoot people the animation of them being shot is simply amazing. This game is so intensely overbearing, It stirs up emotion in me. Especially the close combat gunplay. The over all feel of the game is so much better than previous games. Sure the graphics are a lot better, but the biggest difference is in all the small details in the world. From the random people on the streets, to the physics of the cars, to the animations of everything, this is a huge leap up from GTA3: SAN ANDREAS.

Ok, ok, Rockstar seems to be the only company that can really pull off an open world type of game and do it well. What sets this above all the clones and copies? The characters, the music, the humor, the story, the writing, the acting, the physics, the gun play, the cars, the driving, the look and feel, the game mechanics, and the missions. This world breathes and lives. There is a ton of sarcasm. I love how it picks on reality. I love how it portrays politicians, and authority figures. This is closer to reality in many ways than what the real media shows us(especially the stuff on the rich and powerful). One of the shows on the TV is this series called Republican Space Rangers. This had me on the floor laughing. This is so damn spot on! SO HILAROUS! The fake radio commercials are hilarious as well. So much work went into this game to really make you feel like you are living in this world. Sure the relationship aspects(dating and bromance) of this are kind of shallow and boring once the driving drunk(btw, you can call a cab instead of getting in a car while drunk), bowling, darts, and pool gets boring, I did not find this part of the game that fulfilling and ended up blowing most of it off, and it does effect the game. If you don’t keep up with your friends and girlfriends, they wont help you out as much in some of the missions. So yes, there is dating, the internet, and cell phone texts in this game. Whoo, like in real life but much funnier. You can have insinuated sex in the game after a date, it doesn’t show anything, but you can hear it as a camera pans around the house. No hot coffee this time I bet. I love being able to play as the bad guy, another thing that the GTA series always seems to do well. I like anti heros. I like dark art. This game has a black sense of humor, one that I can really identify with.

The graphics are pretty impressive. Well, at first I was not that impressed, I was like wow, a new paint job on an old game. Then I went back and looked at vice city. This is a huge improvement over the past games. When I compare the visuals of GTA4 to something like Uncharted, Heavenly Sword, or even Call Of Duty 4, I felt a little underwhelmed by the visuals. However, as I played on and noticed all the details in the city as more and more of it was unlocked to me, I realized that this looks amazingly detailed. The explosions are amazing. There is so much going on in this game. How the different people walk, talk, fight, die. So much polish went into this game and this is really obvious once you go back and play one of the older GTA games. The world is seamless. Not many loading screens at all once it boots. the initial load in (when you start the game) is a little long, but I can live with it. The driving mechanics are a lot more finicky this time around. The cars will spin out and you will lose control a lot more often than you used to from the previous incarnations of the game. I found this new sense of driving realism(no nothing like a simulation racing game or anything) to actually help the game play. You really can tell the difference between the different makes of cars in how they drive and turn. Car wrecks are much more fantastic now. Not to mention that people will be thrown from their cars in really bad wrecks(through the windshield). If this happens to you, you can lose major health. Another thing that has improved is the common people in the streets. Some will fight you, some will cower. When you shoot people and wound them, they will hung over and crawl off or gimp off, sometimes only making it a few feet then falling over, then getting back up after a minute and trying again to fall again. What detail.

The multiplayer is PHAT! So many modes. It plays well. Lag is not really an issue from what I can tell. My personal favorite types are Helicopter Race, and Cops and Robbers, only because I have not really played much else. Getting online with a bunch of friends and having 4 people in a car shooting at other people is so much fun. This is serious fun. I mean I will play this for years type of fun, or until the next installment of GTA comes out. My only real complaint about this game would be that when a lot of stuff starts happening on the screen, the frame rate can slow to a crawl and really have a negative effect on the game mechanics. Back to what is good. In one of the missions you have to run down some people fleeing from a drug deal gone sour. I put the driving view mode into first person cockpit view. Let me tell you, running over people like this is amazing. The way their bodies curl over the front of the car and how their bodies go limp and flail and slide off. The detail is amazing, and it is never the same twice it seems. Sometimes its so hilarious. I also love when you spook a crowd of people, and they go running into a busy street and get hit by cars and go flying. Man. This game makes me laugh in so many ways. From the artistic satire found in the media in the world, from the web pages, radio, and tv, to the many senseless ways you can find funny ways to kill people. Niko the character you take control of in the single player game is by far my favorite character of all the GTA series. I really like the single player story. Its a great mob movie in the form of a video game. In fact better than a lot of the more recent mob movies that hollywood has barfed up recently. It’s not just Nike I like though. I like a lot of the bad guys in the game, they are very entertaining to say the least. The story and the characters really make me want to beat the game and do all there is to do. The music in this game is pretty cool as well, in fact, for me, some of the best because they put in Nitzer Ebb, Aphex Twin, Killing Joke, Sisters of Mercy, Black Sabbath, David Bowie, Smashing Pumpkins, Tangerine Dream, Jean Michel Jarre all of which i really listen to. I do still like all the fake music in the original gta3 the most especially the techno. But this one comes in second. Although I really did like the Vice City sound track as well. Just a warning, this game is hard. Towards the end you will have to try missions over and over before you can beat them. This really puts a lot of people off. I just wait a couple of days once i get burnt out and try again. This works well for me. I have beat every GTA game. I would say this game is a little harder than all the others.

10.0 Presentation
The way the story is told, the menus, the look and feel of everything, the radio stations, the tv, all of it looks and feels alive. TOP NOTCH.

8.5 Visuals
I do not agree with the rest of the press on this. I know the ps3 can do better graphics than this. I was kind of miffed to find out the game ran at 630p, not 720p like the 360(even though the game still runs and looks better on the ps3)(so what, call of duty 4 on ps3 and 360 is 600p, so what, that looks amazing still too). Still, the ps3 should be able to do better. Hopefully the next GTA game will improve on the visuals and the frame rate slow downs when lots of things happen. The frame rate is pretty high and stable most of the time though.

9.9 Audio
The kick ass music sound track! The sound FX, The Voice Acting, the background music, all of it is spot on!

8.8 Game Mechanics
I still think the game could be more responsive like Uncharted. I will say that it is a huge, and I mean BIG step up from it’s predecessors.

5.0 Replay
100 hours of game play if you explore everything. The story is about 40 hours. So there is a lot of game here. Finally a game that is actually worth 65 dollars. Its worth beating he single player game a couple of times to tinker with the relationship aspect of the game. The multiplayer is simply great. This world is so fun to play in. The modes are great as well. Nothing else like this on the market. UPDATE: It was fun, till i got into it hard core, now the frame rate issues in multiplayer make it unplayable. Big thumbs down on multiplayer.

9.2 Total Score.
(out of 10 / not an average)

If you do not like grand theft auto from previous versions of the game, this one will not win you over, the core is still the same. There is just a lot more detail. Even with the duck and cover system, it does not change the game that much. So If you hate gta, you wont like this one either. I happen to love them all. I love the big free world, how you can ignore the story and just spend hours being a hooligan destroying things, killing people and running from the cops. If there was no story, I would still buy this game to just be a hooligan in this world. That is so much fun all by itself. So far, this is the best game of this year so far. Wonder if MGS4, Little Big Planet, or Killzone 2 or Resistance Fall of man 2 will topple this. I doubt it. One last thing: To all you fear mongering jerk off conservative media fucks who say that games, tv, music, and movies lead to violent behavior, excuse me, go read some history. Long before there was tv, electricity, and guns people were killing each other. With knives, Spears and arrows. War after war after war. People did not kill because of fictional art in those days and people do not kill because of fictional art in these days. Violence and murder pre date all of this entertainment my friends, so stop spewing forth your un-scientific idiotic religious fear monger claims. Art is a reflection of life with a twist. Art is a result of life. Art is not instruction. It is entertainment, it is fantasy. Dumb people do Dumb things. People should take responsibility for their own actions. These games never tell you to kill anyone in real life. They are fiction. They are entertainment. Just because a small handful of idiots do stupid things, don’t blame the rest of us. This is a game made by adults for adults. This is not for children. The box clearly states this. GO BUY THIS GAME: Click Here to buy Grand Theft Auto 4 for Sony PS3.

PS: Now you know why my blog has been so stale this week. This game is like 100 hours of game play in it. I cannot get enough of it.