Five Days Locked in a Room With GTA IV

bippy writes "Five days, one game. The Rocky Mountain News has a write up of five days spent playing Grand Theft Auto IV recently in a San Francisco hotel. It ends: 'In Grand Theft Auto IV the story isn't just an amalgam of cut scenes and cleverly written dialogue, it's the experiences I create, too. It's now, watching Niko stand, his shoulders slumped, that the depth of this game finally hits me. Niko's journey, the one crafted by Rockstar, may have ended, but Niko's adventures in the story I am creating have just begun.'" The most anticipated game in a while, to be sure. I'm certainly looking forward to busting some heads and jumping ramps.

Comments

Re:hmmmm...

[drinkypoo]

Yet this GTA comes out and people are practically wetting themselves over what is going to be the same thing but shiny? Don't get me wrong - I'm sure it'll be a good game and win lots of GOTY awards, but does anyone honestly think they'll see a lot they're not expecting?

GTA is still the finest sandbox-game series, of course we're eager to see it. And the incremental upgrade approach works fine for me so long as we keep getting new storylines. Odd games tend to introduce game mechanics and even ones provide a large world in the game; this title improves mechanics, and the next one will probably have the large world again, AND the new complexity. At least, that's been the pattern so far. So yes, I think that people are justified in being excited.

Personally, I want to see new things done to continue improving replay value. I will keep buying the games if this happens; otherwise I'll get tired of them eventually. It hasn't happened yet, though.

Give me split-screen and/or LAN play, and I can keep the game fresh basically for eternity.

My Impressions

[Dr Kool, PhD]

I've played the game a few hours since the ISO was released on Thursday. The main difference between GTA IV and previous versions is that the city feels more alive. Pedestrians say more and varied crap to you, people act in a variety of ways when you jack their car, the police act intelligently and hide behind their car doors, etc. There's a ton of stuff to do in the game and I'm sure it took a superhuman effort by the programming staff to get all this stuff packed into the game.

My main complaint is that GTA IV is just a souped up version of the previous GTA games. You play a gangster who goes around breaking laws and doing gangster stuff. The missions are basically the same since the first GTA III - Steal this, muder that, etc. Also there are some frame rate issues, I notice FPS lagging on some occasions. Strange because Burnout looked better and didn't have these problems.

Overall it's a great game. But in many ways it's the same game you've been playing for years.

Re:What next?

[Mr. Bad Example]

> So they've done Miami Vice, mobsters, LA street gangs, and now Russian mobsters. What's next?

Chicago gangs of the 1930s? (I know it's been done by other games, but I'd love to see a GTA version.)

Re:What next?

[CastrTroy]

Would be an interesting storyline, but I'm not sure the whole "auto" thing would work out. There wasn't a whole lot of variety in cars back then. It brings to mind Need For Speed, Porsche Unleashed. Which was a great game, but the story mode kind of sucked, because you had to spend so much time driving cars from the 50s and 60s. Really shows you how much cars have changed since their early days.