GTA IV Over-Infatuation

What am I missing about this game?

I still have a ways to go with it, but I am over 10 hours in and I’m actually completely baffled that this game is still sitting atop Gamerankings.com as the best game of all time (actually the best 2 games of all time, since there’s a 360 and PS3 version).  This could still change, of course, but with over 30 reviews now in for the game, it will definitely be retaining a spot in the top 10 if not the top 5.  Typically, the course for these heavily hyped games is to get some really high early scores, and then later reviews tend to “backlash” against those scores to bring it down into a somewhat more “reasonable” range.

That hasn’t happened with GTA IV. Instead, after IGN’s “exclusive” perfect-10 review of the game, which named it the best game since Zelda: Ocarina of Time (and, therefore, in a sense, the best game of all time), amazing reviews continued to trickle out.  A few days after IGN’s review, Gamespot, who like IGN rarely awards a perfect 10 score, awarded it with that coveted score while saying that Liberty City “is more convincing as a living, breathing urban environment than anything that you’ve seen in a game before.”  Game Informer gave it a perfect score and compared the game to The Godfather.  Clearly, a lot of people really love this game, but I’m amazed at how apparently deep that love is.

Part of the reason for my amazement is that what a lot of reviewers tout as real strengths of the game, I actually view as slight weaknesses (or, perhaps strengths with some real drawbacks).  Here’s an example from IGN:

“And just as in modern life, the phone can become a nuisance. Date Carmen and she will constantly be ringing your digits and sending texts checking in to make sure you aren’t sleeping with some other girl. Yes, there are needy people even in Liberty City. You’ll also get casual calls during missions. You can always ignore the ring or you can pick up. It’s most likely a friend calling and asking to hang out.”

Wow, just what I’ve always wanted in a game: a replication of a “nuisance” that occurs in real-life.  While I appreciate the amount of thought and energy that went into creating good characters with interesting social dynamics, is it really “fun” to have to tend to their silly social needs in an almost Sims-like fashion in this game?  Rather than enjoying and following-through on the story presented in the game, I get distracting calls from all my “friends” who want to do stuff like play a generally boring mini-game like Darts, Pool, or Bowling.  I suppose it’s something I could ignore entirely, but then you lose out on some of the “special” abilities that your “friends” can give you.  As such, in order to keep my rep up with my friends, I’ll typically just do some sort of meaningless (and less time-consuming) activity like eating, drinking, or seeing a show.

Here’s another example of seeming praise of the game that sort of baffles me, this time from Salon.com’s Machinist column:

 ”On the other hand, as several reviewers have pointed out, the graphical and narrative realism of “GTA IV” serves, unexpectedly, to diminish a player’s blood lust. The game’s story line is so absorbing that you aren’t really moved to murder random passersby.”

Actually, I have a different theory as to why people aren’t moved to “murder random passersby”: it’s boring.  People have had the opportunity to create random mayhem in 3 other 3d GTA games to date, and there’s really not all that much different about creating more mayhem in GTA IV.  Considering creating mayhem has absolutely zero impact on the storyline and very little practical impact to yourself in the game, it’s still a possibility.  However, this is typically something I’ll usually do after I do a few missions in the game, or after I’ve had trouble completing a mission.  Of course, after about 5 minutes of it, I realize I could have more fun doing basically the same thing with other people in multiplayer mode, so I’ll boot the multiplayer game up for a bit.  Needless to say, the “narrative realism” in the game doesn’t impact my “bloodlust” in the game in the slightest: the fact that randomly killing people gets old quickly, does.

It also seems like reviewers gave a complete pass to some of the games real shortcomings. To begin with, there is a fair amount of glitchiness in the game, from friendly AI refusing to follow you unless you go in a very specific direction, to texture AND model pop just about everywhere. I agree with the bulk of reviews that these aren’t total killers, but they do raise the frustration factor quite a bit when your stupid friend doesn’t follow you at the right time and causes you to have to re-do a mission, or driving becomes a lot more difficult when a bunch of geometry suddenly appears on your screen that you weren’t quite accounting for.

Speaking of frustration, the lack of “checkpoints” in missions is one of the game’s more annoying problems.  While the addition of being able to retry a mission simply from your phone is greatly appreciated, taking another 5 or so minutes to re-drive to a car just to restart a race or having to completely re-do a longer, more difficult mission, has given me more moments where I want to throw my controller at the screen than most games that I can think of in recent memory.  Considering Mario Kart Wii also just came out, this is something special indeed.

Now, I know I’m complaining a lot here, but all of this isn’t to say that I don’t like the game.  The game does have a lot of great things going for it: an excellent and expansive soundtrack with hilarious commentary and commercials; professional, realistic voice-acting; a beautifully rendered New York City-like environment; and a story that probably does, in fact, actually mark an important advance in gaming narratives.  Add in the extra attention to details like the Internet, TV, and stage shows as well as a fun and well-made multiplayer component, and it’s certainly an impressive game.  I’d probably still put it somewhere in the “A” to “B+” range.  But I’ve personally been more impressed with games like Bioshock, Resident Evil 4, God of War II, Shadow of the Colossus, and, yes, Ocarina of Time.