Thursday, March 12, 2009

Grand Theft Auto IV - First Impressions

Apologies for a very long absence. But due to personal concerns I could not offer any time for this blog coupled with the fact that my workplace banned a lot of vital sites. Overzealous IT admins is every workers nightmare when it comes to successful procrastination.

Moving on, Over Christmas I obtained an Xbox 360 and have been playing it heavily ever since then. Fighting with my flatmates to get some cuddling time with the gray little box, which I have developed a sort of love/hate relationship with. The games are great and the graphics amazing, the improved Xbox menu system is very well thought through and easy to navigate while Xbox Live is just as easy to set up. My great hatred has to do with the completely baffling amount of bugs, freezes and glitches the system produces.

Moving onto GTA IV. I had only played the game for about 2 hours before I had managed to encounter gamestopping bug and freezes no less than 6 times. First I had the loading screen getting stuck at loading indefinitly (twice). Then the whole console would freeze up (twice), forcing a hard restart. And thenI entered the bowling alley with my easily impressed lady Michelle who was not impressed when I was completely unable to start the bowling mini-game due to a bug upon which I accidentally punched wildly into the air due to S.I.R.B.M, or Stress-induced Random Button Mashing. This did not impress and had her flee in panic from our date.
And finally, I encountered some sort of 28 days later reference when I would walk out my apartment after loading only to find the streets completely empty, no human in sight anywhere.

Now I REALLY hope this is just my bad luck and that it was just coincidental. I simply cannot believe such a massive production would regularly stop in its tracks every 30 minutes. Because beyond the repeated technical raping I had to receive the game appears to be quite good.

The city is very fluent and organic, it doesnt feel like a world made up of soft or hard textured boxes interacting like the previous games did. Following the mission structure is just as engaging as it is to go on a stress relieving killing spree across the city, just to see how many pedestrians you can ragdoll under your wheels before the cops finally corner you. I believe the combination of these two styles of play to be the most winning concept of the whole game. Especially when the game put you right in between and you just barely escape with a mission accomplished. All the GTA games have a tendency to give you loads of tedious, infuriating, hard and ludicrous missions requiring you to do everything from piloting RC helicopters to playing strategic table-top war games, so the killing spree aspect is vital in keeping you going.

The eurotrash theme they introduced in this one works quite well, and while not as flamboyant and graphically toy-like as the previous two games, it sets the tone very well and creates that dark and dirty side of New York in a way none of the previous games could, on the downside it seems a bit dull and while the graphics are great you don't really take notice because there is nothing really interesting to look at. The main character being an ugly redneck from the middle-of-nowhere give you that sort of blank slate to work with, it will be interesting to see how the game will allow me to shape him, if at all. I'd loveto see him go from a poor and humble war-veteran to a power-hungry psychopathic druglord similar to Tony Montana or that guy in Vice City.

But still the game suffers from that fake and shallow feeling, especially in gunplay. The guns sound like toys, NPCs take far too many shots to go down, the blood and gore just doesn't come out right. Massacring three pedestrians doesn't seem to bother the acquaintance you just picked up at the subway station. I understand a lot of this is to keep the game playable rather than realistic, but still I would like to feel a bit more impact when i decide to run over a whole sidewalk of innocents. But most of all I would like to see GTA treating the FPS component seriously and actually delivering a satisfying shooting aspect rather than taking time to create dozens of quite pointless mini-games and playing dress-up.

As I see it GTA needs to finally decide what it wants to be. Is it an RPG or an arcade action game? Is it a driving game or a shooter firstly? Should it be truly open ended or have a linear mission structure? Because right now the game just feels like a table of tapas, no dish particularly engaging or in-depth but nice for a snack. But trying to eat all of them simply steals too much time and effort and still leaves you hungry one hour later.

No comments: