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:What next?

[ChowRiit]

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

hmmmm...

[MagdJTK]

Is it just me or are people getting way too excited about this game?

Now before everyone instantly mods me troll, I'll point out that I own GTA3, Vice City and San Andreas and loved two of those three games (I'll leave it to you to guess which ones), but I never saw them as deep or as art. I saw them as a fun way to pretend to be a gangster and run around causing mayhem.

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?

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.)

Yay

[OverlordQ]

Remind me in a year or two when the PC version finally comes out.

Re:Yay

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree that R* doesn't seem to care much about their PC releases once they've gone gold. And there are bugs that could do with fixing (not so much with San Andreas imho), but overall the PC ports are reasonably polished if you ask me.

And they most certainly do make enhancements to the PC versions. They all have higher resolution textures than their console counterparts. They all support using a mouse in a reasonable fashion while also using a controller for driving/flying. You can configure every single key, and you never have to deal with unbindable keys or unchangeable binds. If anything R* probably is one of the best development houses at making decent PC ports of titles that started on a console.

Still, it's certainly disappointing how little they appear to care for PC gamers.

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.