Grand Theft Auto IV (Potential Spoilers+First Impression)

[Ultrawolf]

Wow. Ok so I picked this up early this morning and I've been playing it for a few hours. To preface, I've never owned a single GTA game until this one. I had played Vice City a lot when I borrowed it from my cousin but this is the first one I've played since then.

I bought onto the hype train really early, the idea behind the story really drew me in. Here's this guy Nico who's been caught up in a lot of bad business so to speak. He's got a Cousin, Roman, who doesn't shut up about this amazing life he has in America. Fancy sports cars, luxury condo and lots of babes. The "American Dream" so to speak, capitalism at it's finest and this idea draws him in. So he comes over, and finds out everything his cousin has been telling him is garbage. In fact his cousin is in debt to all kinds of shady people and is drawing Nico into it. And slowly but surely Nico's finding out that the "American Dream" wasn't really what he imagined as he finds that the things he left behind are slowly creeping back up with him.

It's a pretty stellar story so far, I'm actually really interested in it so far. The game is gorgeous, I have the Xbox 360 version but I've heard both versions are pretty much the same. (Also I'd like to please refrain from turning this thread into yet another debate about which version is good. I'd like to keep this on track with the GAME content.) I opted for the collector's edition because I'm a sucker but it's actually pretty nice. It comes in a metal lockbox that doesn't feel cheap like those shitty tins that most collector's editions get packed in. It comes with a small hardcover Artbook, I thumbed through it and it seems pretty fine. A soundtrack CD in one of those cardboard sleeve things (I would have preferred an actual plastic case, I hate these cardboard things). A duffel bag, Rockstar key-chain and keys to the lock on the lockbox. And of course the game itself in the retail box. I haven't had the chance to listen to the soundtrack but it's obviously not on the same level as that amazing Vice City soundtrack box they released after VC came out. It's more of a sampler with songs from across the board as well as the theme.

Also- the xbox version comes with a coupon code for one month of free Xbox Live. Can anyone report on if the PS3 version comes with PSN points?

Regardless, the game itself controls pretty smoothly. I'd classify myself as a GTA noob but I haven't had any issues yet. Pretty smooth gameplay. The world is incredibly large. I paused and looked at the map and realized just how small of an area I was playing around in was. There's three huge huge islands in the game. I played a few of the mini games including pool and bowling, both were pretty fun though I suck at bowling but got the hang of it towards the end. I haven't had any crappy missions yet, so far everything has been really fun but then I'm not that far into it yet. I went on a couple dates with the first girlfriend character you meet.

So far I don't think I've had any issues with it yet, that may change over time but if you're worried about the hype engine covering for a less than stellar game, don't be. The game is really fun so far.

I haven't tested the multiplayer online yet but I did fiddle with the menus and it SEEMS like a seemless transition from the game to online.

OH! One more thing, I really like the cellphone interface in the game. As you gain contacts they'll call you and/or send you text messages and It's been really fun calling people and screwing around with the cell phone. Nico's cousin Roman hints at obtaining a fancy and better one just like this so maybe there's an upgraded one later.

[Senkir]

it's set in "liberty city" which is basically New York with R* style changes. it might make it easier to understand the layout that way.

i haven't got the game yet, but i was planning on picking it up sometime next month, once my glorious plan to get a 360 comes to fruition. We'll see how it goes.

[Blackmage]

I've been running around on the PS3 version, love it so far. Only real complaint is hotdog stands are sometimes hard to come by.

Oh and I like how they gave cars ABS and some no ABS and other random little things like that.

[RivaOni]

I'm gonna be keeping a GTA Diary on bitparade, I'll post the daily links up here, but I'll also post the whole passage for ya's (aslthough I would definetly appreciate people clicking the link even if they read the post here).

Anyhow, Day 1:- Welcome to Liberty City

This series may contain spoilers, so read at your own peril, however I will try not to include them where possible

So GTA IV was obviously released yesterday, and being as I was heading into town anyway to do the fortnightly food shop (I refuse to call it Grocery shopping, I’m not American) so I decided I’d had enough of Guitar Hero 3: Legends of Rock and that I’d quite like to come home with a copy of Rockstars latest free-roaming murder simulator, if Gamestation or GAME had any copies that weren’t tied up by pre-orders. So as GAME was the closest to the bus station, I headed into there, and grabbed the manager to ask him how much I’d get on a trade-in with Guitar Hero as the queue was 6 people deep and this was only something like 3 minutes past 9 so I didn’t really want to queue, find out how much I had in store credit then grab the game and queue again. He told me he wasn’t 100% sure but if I wanted to grab a copy of GTA there would be enough credit to cover it, so whilst I did that and joined the queue he checked how much I had exactly.

This is where my day began to get irritating. He came back and told me I had £42 in credit, £3 short, that was fine, I had £2.50 on my GAME reward card that I knew about and I could hardly see Charly moaning about the fact I’d used 50p to pay for the rest! Anyhow, whilst stood there with my big GH3 box, a copy of GTAIV and a Pokemon Gachapon (for my little girl who was with me), a woman that I’d describe as a Primark Value WAG Wannabe (I’m not knocking people who wear Primark clothes here, hell, I buy alot of t-shirts there) with her 8 year old (by the looks of him) son, joined the queue. My first thoughts were to why he wasn’t at school, the managers first thoughts were to see if they were buying GTA or something else, it seems they were taking people out of line that weren’t buying GTA. It turns out that she was indeed buying GTAIV, but not just GTAIV but the GTAIV PS3 bundle, it also turns out her son wasn’t at school because he was going for a dental check-up (one of the best things about queues? eavesdropping on idiots). But he really didn’t want to go and kept moaning and crying and throwing himself around. After a little while (all of which was filled with my 4 year old daughter declaring he was being naughty) the Cheryl Cole-alike used bribary to get him to shut up, but not any old bribary, oh no. She gave him the whole day off school and told him he could play the game until he went to bed, irresponsible tart.

Anyway, I was served, asked if I’d pre-ordered, I said no (I later found out this was stupid as they weren’t checking if you had or hadn’t and were giving out 500 gamerpoints and a code for some gamerpics, but nevermind), did the trade over, stuck the game in my bag and went to do the food shop. Once that was all out of the way, it became time to play the waiting game. You see being as I’m a games player, and all this whoo haa wether videogames are desensitising kids and stuff, my fiance and I agreed that no violent games were to be played whilst our kid was around, so the rest of the day was taken up with chores, sorting through the shopping, looking after her then going to meet Charly from work, then waiting till it was the sprogglings bed-time before I could play.

7pm came about and after having a bath and a story, we’d put her to bed, Charly settled down to watch some TV and do some coursework, whilst I settled down in front of the PC monitor, which was now hooked upto the 360, with a bottle of Magners and my 360 controller in hand, signed myself to appear offline to avoid any invites to the multiplayer and set about experiencing Liberty City for the third time in my life.

So the cut-scene kicks in and we’re introduced to Niko, he moves convincingly throughout the cut-scene and its incredibly the attention to detail the guys at Rockstar North have taken in giving him character and animated the characters well, both in body language and lip-synch. I’m asked to drive Roman, Niko’s cousin, back to his “mansion” which as you’ve all seen, either from trailers or from playing the game yourselves, isn’t quite that. After this section was done I decided to go for a bit of a drive around the recreation of Liberty City, if only I could get Niko to walk down the stairs. Oh dear, thats a bad first impression to have, walking Niko feels sluggish and clumsy and I found myself banging into things more often than I’d like, I took a short walk up the road before deciding to steal a car. Just cruising around I begun to notice little things popping into view, nothing important, just posters and air ducts on buildings, bollards further ahead too but with enough time to react to them if I needed to, although I’m not sure if that would of been the case if I’d of been dricing fast. I also noticed that there was a lot of jaggies going on, most notably on cables above the city streets and on car grilles, but this seemed to only happen at times when the lighting was an odd colour, usually around sunrise and sunset.

Initially driving felt difficult, the cars had really large turning circles and braking wasn’t as instant as I remembered it being in GTAIII, Vice City, San Andreas or the PSP releases. It was pretty jarring and I wasn’t too sure about it, but by the end of the night I found myself actually preferring the new driving model, which actually makes the cars feel like you’re in a big bundle of steel, aluminium, plastic and glass moving along the road, and it creates an incredibly enjoyable driving experience that I’ve only really experienced in Forza (thats not to say that it drives like Forza, its not quite that realistic!). Something else I found odd was that I started to obey the rules of the road, stopping at traffic lights, moving with the traffic at pretty much the correct speed. The one occassion that I did speed through some lights, a cop car witnessed it and flashed its lights, I slowed down and he didn’t give chase, a nice little touch if indeed that was actually what happened as it happened in a rough area of the city and I’ve noticed the cops do hit the sirens and flash their lights for a second whenever turning into a new street in this area of town.

The missions have so far been the usual Grand Theft Auto fare or “go here, pick this person up/steal that car/shake this guy up” and thats to be expected, I wasn’t expecting a re-imaging of the wheel, and as Halo 3 showed, anyone expecting that from one of the worlds biggest cultural franchises (as unlike Mario nowdays, GTA spans further than just the gaming community, everyone wants a piece of the action), is just deluding themselves. However the inclusion of a mobile phone you can actually use to call people has opened up the game immensley, now you can call people in your phonebook and chat to them, see if they have anything available for you to do, or even go out on a date with a certain someone, and the conversations via this device are as inventive and humourous as we’ve come to expect from the Scotland based developer over previous instalments of the franchise. It was also the phone that led to one of the funniest moments I’ve ever experienced in a game, Roman calls me and asks if I wanna go see a show, so I say sure, pick him up and take him to the bar first, we come out pissed as a fart (or two farts) and I begin wetting myself with laughter as I struggle to walk Niko to the car and then drive it to to caberet show, the police spot us, and start to tail us, its only a 1 star so in thoery it shouldnt be too difficult, but the camera is shaking all over the place, the controls have become more sensitive than an emo kid with a bottle of vodka and a knife and it takes a while to lose the police especially seeing as I don’t dare drive any faster as the camera shaking is becoming even more erratic. I decide to lose the car and stumble (backwards) down a side alley, with Roman in tow, we wait a little while, the police interest dissappears, and we gradually make our way back to the car, by the time we get there, we’ve sobered up and I can drive us to the caberet no problem, if only I could see through the tears of laughter and avoid the dirty looks from Charly as I laughed through a good portion of Holby City or whatever it was that she was watching at the time.

I carried on doing missions for the night, which each pretty much introduced something else in the game, wether it was the controls for gun fights or fist fights, or how to get new clothes, that kind of thing before saving and heading upto bed. I’ll post another entry in this tomorrow after I’ve played some more tonight.

[Shino]

We'll be doing a "first impressions" this week on InDis... then next week we will probably have a round table about GTA as a whole.

[Robb]

I haven't played a GTA game since Vice City, so may give this a look after all the good words said about it

[Aiman]

The game is amazing. I do have some complaints...

1) The game is way too dark (lack of light) in certain areas. You have to set your brightness and contrast up high to be able to see in these areas. (Easily fixed)

2) The game freezes up randomly for a couple of seconds.

Those are my complaints. Now... there are a few other things that are going on that I just read about in Kotaku.

1) The game, on both systems, locks up in the opening movie rendering it unplayable and they don't have a fix yet nor have an idea what's causing it.

[RivaOni]

To be honest, the lockup has happened to me on other games on 360, nothing so far on GTAIv though, id say its probably related to streaming data off the disc really.


As for the brightness issue, i only noticed how dark it was sometimes when I smashed a headlight going down a side alley earlier, I quite like how its that dark at night to be honest.

[Faye]

This will be the first GTA I havent gotten on release. Thats right, I've been playing GTA since Beta on the original PC version. I've always loved GTA, its really in a genre all by itself. I've enjoyed reading yalls take on the game, it wont spoil anything for me. And when I finally get my PS3 I assure you it will be the first game on my list.

[Blackmage]

From what I've read about the PS3 issues a lot of them are related to the 60/20GB versions and not so much the 80/40GB.

I so far have yet to have any technical problems with my copy and I have a brand new 40GB PS3.