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April 30, 2008
Media Glutton, April 30, 2008
I hadn't really planned on playing, much less buying Grand Theft Auto 4. I'd tried the last two games, and while I could see that they were well made games and had a certain appeal, they just didn't do anything for me. It wasn't the violence or the language or the protagonists fundamental lack of morals or sociability. I'm cool with all that stuff in games. Nor was it the sex and language. I'm cool with that even outside of video games. No, for me it was the driving. I just don't much care for driving games. I'm not good at them, I don't have fun playing them, and, well, I just don't care much. I put up with all the driving in the great Simpson's Road Rage game because the character and story and humor content was so great, but I never got far enough in the previous Grand Theft Auto games to get sucked into the stories or care about the characters, which just left the driving. Which in turn just left me playing something else.
Despite my studied indifference to the new release of GTA 4, the hype started to get to me. First came all those reviews with the perfect scores. Best game in years according to some. An experience not to be missed. OK, I started to feel some sort of obligation to try it out and see what all the fuss was about. Then G4 TV tarted giving it wall to wall overage and I got even more sucked in. Then they were saying it was going to be the biggest, best selling release in video game history - maybe even in media history. They expected to sell 9 million copies in the first week, which by my calculations would be a gross sale number of over $500 dollars. That's crazy! But also cool. Good for video games. And then something snapped in my brain. Maybe it was the fact that it was also the 4 year anniversary of the release of the video game I helped design, City of Heroes. Maybe it was just media saturation. Maybe I've developed an addiction to release-day lines at my local Game Stop. Whatever. With 30 minutes before they closed I drove over Monday night and put my money down so I could be one of the lucky millions to have a copy on day one.
And yesterday morning at 10:30 there was a line, and I waited in it. I waited and texted about the fact that I was waiting, which seems sort of digitally decadent of me. There were 30 or 40 of us total in the otherwise mostly empty mall. I then proved my adulthood by actually going home and working on my new novel for a few hours before I actually loaded the game into my X-Box 360 and fired it up. I was excited. The intro was cool. It looked great. The first thing you do is drive a damn car...
You drive a car and for five minutes I hated it. But all the time the story is unfolding around you, as is the really well designed and rendered city you're driving through. The voice acting and dialog are both top notch - as good as I've ever experienced. The characters may be very familiar in tone and spirit, with little that seems groundbreaking at first but they're familiar in a way that feels right rather than cliched. They have depth and dimension and, while I'd hate hanging out with them in real life, they're immensely compelling as protagonists in a crime drama. As the story eased me into the world, the game play eased me into the whole driving, and later the car jacking and the shooting. It all builds up seamlessly, one element after another. I drove my cousin to a poker game. I went out on some dates. I drove a getaway car, I helped run a protection racket, I became a gunman for a drug dealer, I killed someone in cold blood. It all fit, it all made sense in the game's twisted world, and most importantly of all, it was all a hell of a lot of fun. By the time I went to bed, I'd played about 5 and a half hours of Grand Theft Auto 4, and if I hadn't come here to the coffee shop to get work done, I'd probably be fighting the urge to play some more right now.
At 5 or so hours, the game tells me I've completed about 10% of the game's content. I'm going to take my time with it and really let myself explore some of the smaller, hidden moments in the game, because often that's where the humor is hidden. Like the TV shows you can sit and watch in your apartment (including a great Halo goof), or the DJ's on the radio stations as you drive around, or the little mini-games. And oh my god, the magic show I went to on my third date with Michele - hilarious. A lot of the game is hilarious in fact, even in some of its darkest moments. It never takes itself too seriously, but it also doesn't undermine its own drama either - that's a fine line to walk, and I congratulate the writers/designers for bringing it all together so adeptly. I've now played more of GTA 4 than I did of the predecessors combined, and there's no way I'm stopping now. Hell, I even like the driving parts now.
Posted by rdakan at April 30, 2008 10:50 AM