What I Hate About You 01.05.09: Grand Theft Auto IV

Posted by John De Large on 01.05.2009

Spike TV's game of the year? Time to rake it over the coals. Also, more girls of gaming!

Here's something new! I present:

What I'm playing now!
In my X Box 360: The Orange Box/Team Fortress 2. Every day. Great graphics, great soundtrack (sort of), balanced gameplay and it is infinitely replayable.
Also: Lost Odyssey. Holy crap, this game's graphics and sound get an auto 10. The battles and sidequests are fun, but the story is all over the place.
Also: Fable 2. Cleavers, axes, guns and decapitation. Sometimes I need gratuitous violence in a colonial/rural setting.

In my Wii: Nothing. It's unplugged at the moment. I'll likely hook it up to an older TV downstairs. Wii + my HD TV do not mix.

In my PS3: Metal Gear 4. Why the hell did Konami needlessly complicate the controls? This game is beautiful to watch, but I'll be damned if I know what's going on or what I'm supposed to do.

In my DS: The Chrono Trigger Remake. An excellent re-release, more on that in a bit.

In my PSP: Final Fantasy Tactics: War Of The Lions. This be the good shit. Another excellent re-release, lots of changes here, but none that I dislike. There's new characters, new scenes, new battle(s), extra equipment, different translations, super sophisticated dialogue and Phil LaMarr as Ramza. Oh yeah, Monks and Ninjas will still rock everyone's face. If you want to win battles, get Monks and Ninjas and get their Bravery up, then punch the enemy 'til they dead.
Also: Smackdown vs. Raw 2009. This really is a fun game. Review here.

Okay, enough of that. Let's get on with the hating on!

It was a warm day in the spring of 2002 when I played my first Grand Theft Auto Game. You see, I was hanging out with a guy named David, a poor kid from my grade who constantly smelled like old milk and sidecrotch. I never hung out with him, (mostly because of the smell) but when he told me he wanted to come over and show me GTAIII, I decided to invest in some Lysol and have him over. When he showed me GTA and that you could carjack other NPC's, then immediately run them over to throw salt in the wound, I fell in love with the game. I managed to get him to leave it with me for a week by trading him some of my snacks for the game. The dark humor, the violence, the implied lesbianism, all of this was too much for my 16 year old brain to handle. I loved every second of this game and I was even a little sad once I finally beat it.

Later that year, I snagged a copy of Vice City. Holy shit, what an awesome game that was. Even though it was long and plagued by long load times, I still loved it. I loved Tommy Vercetti and his rise to power, then having to defend his future as kingpin from people from his past (Forelli family) and present (Lance Vance). It was when I played San Andreas that I got a dose of bad gameplay, bad story and a hero I couldn't side with. It was at this point that I cut myself off from the GTA franchise.

Cut to several years later, when I decide to get back into gaming and pick up an X Box 360. Turns out I picked the right week to drop $440 on a new 360, I got a free $50 GameStop gift card with the purchase of a 360 and GTA 4. Now with a 360 and two brand new games (I used the $50 to grab the Orange Box) it was time to find out what I was missing.

Well, it turns out I was missing out on a lot of things I would HATE. Game of the year? Hardly. Grand Theft Auto 4, this is What I Hate About You.



What I Hate
-The multiplayer mode sickens me, mostly because I'm so bored of it. Every time my mates want to hang out, we usually hoof it back to my place, cram inside my room and take turns playing Deathmatch. Yeah, take turns, like we were in fifth grade or something. It's not like we can chill and play split screen against each other. No, that'd be fun, convenient and frugal. If we could play split screen, then my mates wouldn't have to spend $60 a pop on the game and communicate with me through a headset. What's more is that when people are talking, there's no indicator to let you know which member is insulting you or telling you something important. The multiplayer sucks.

-Sometimes I'll be on my way to do a mission like I'm supposed to and then I get sidetracked by Roman or his Puerto Rican wife (who sounds like a Jewish stereotype more than anything), Little Jacob and his incoherent nonsense, or the blackest emo kid ever, Dwayne.


What a biggety bitch.

I hate that I have to stop what I'm doing to appease them so I can get free cab rides or some extra gang members to get shot in my place. The previous games (see also: the good ones) got along fine without posse members, best friends, cousins and in-laws, so why'd we get them for what was supposed to be the biggest Grand Theft Auto title yet? Forget Roman, throw him into oncoming traffic and get some cheap hooker to replace him!


C'mon Niko, just deck him and run!

-I hate cellphones, mine always needs charging and it gets no service. As if my cellphone wasn't enough of a nuisance, GTA sticks me with the world's longest umbilical cord too. I HATE having to manage my phone while getting shot at, running from cops, flying a helicopter, winning the game, etcetera.

Eh, at least I never need to charge this phone.

.....I hope Rockstar isn't reading this and getting any ideas.

Driving away really fast should not allow you to get away with genocide. There've been lots of time when I've shot cops and innocent bystanders point blank but I've gotten away with it because I could dodge cops with my stolen sedan and drive really really fast. I thought it was bad enough when all you had to do to get rid of the police was change your car's color from red to orange red, but this is ridiculous. I feel gypped, it's like Rockstar dumbed down the difficulty of escaping the 5-0 just to appease the bubble-gum gamers.

-What was the point of crowbarring TV, comedy clubs and the internet into this game? Yeah, everyone enjoys these things in real life, that's why we do them in real life! The comedy shows featuring Katt Williams and....what's his name? Be right back.


Yeah, that guy.

The comedy shows aren't very funny, the TV doesn't interest me, I don't even know anyone who watched it. As for the internet, I only ever used the internet during a few missions and almost never during my downtime. The internet is best left for perusing in real life.

What I Don't Hate
Even with all of the things I don't like about GTA, I'll admit there's lots of little good things in Gee Tea Ay Four.

-One of the things I hate about all GTA games is (ironically) the driving. Short distances, through streets, that's fine, but I still remember in San Andreas having to drive from the countryside all the way to the city, which took like a good 8 - 10 minutes each way (Likely longer, had I obeyed the traffic laws). I hate long drives. Thankfully, in GTA 4 you can just hop in your cab, press start and voila, you're at the destination of your choice! The cab system isn't perfect though, you can't always catch a cab to go your mission sites and it always costs money (never much though), but it's a lot better than having to take those long trips back and forth.

-Hah, TF2 thought they had good rocket jumps? Get out your copy of GTA 4, buy a rocket launcher, point it at the floor and see how far you can go. Do it! You'll love it!



-Long before I had bought the game, a close friend of mine tried it and informed me of the Euphoria physics. Not sure what the hell she was talking about, I did some research and found a webiste explaining Euphoria. In their own words:

"With euphoria, animations are not canned but are generated on-the-fly by the hardware's processors as the game is played. Every tackle is your tackle, every haymaker is your haymaker."

That's pretty cool, more and more games should use the Euphoria physics engine.

-Helicopters are a fun lot, I love hijacking them, flying up someplace then jumping out while Niko kicks like a crazed newborn baby as he plummets to the ground.



-Rampaging is another aspect of the gameplay that makes playing worthwhile. Once in a very rare while, I'll hop in a car and plow innocent pedestrians over. Then as soon as I've got Johnny Law on my ass, I'll hop out and put two in his head, then drive off into the sunset.... and into more cops.

-Stunt montages (whether they be your own or someone else's) are also awesome. Proof below.



-The bank heist mission with Packy is by far one of the greatest missions in any game of all time. Running through Chinatown, shooting cops, ducking through the subway and the sewer, jacking a car, then racing to safety makes me feel like I'm in a movie. Man, there should be a game with just one bank robbery mission, with extra stuff like recruiting people, committing small time crimes to pay them while you work your way UP to the bank heist.

What I Wouldn't Hate
Every GTA game is so.... samey. Here's my idea for something different.

I want to play a game where you play as a small time henchman in the Marvel universe, working for the Kingpin. You do shady deals, run from the cops and battle superheroes with freeze guns and sonic disruptors instead of AK's and RPG's (although they are there early enough on). You'd have to escape most of the time, being no match for guys like Spidey and Wolvie, but eventually (through luck? through really good planning?) you bring down Thor and you become a legend. After that, the Kingpin becomes frightened of you, so he tries to kill you, but you just escape, plot revenge, turn his men against him, kill him and become the new Kingpin. Can we get Marvel and Rockstar on that, please?

My game of the year?
SSBB for me was the multiplayer game of the year. In my neck of the woods we had so many dedicated SSBB players (see also: jobless nerds) that we held weekly SSBB get togethers and even had "championships," a la wrestling.

I've also got my man K-Wak in my ear telling me that Fallout 3 was great but he also makes another valid point: This year was a big year for micro games and downloadable content.

For all you wonky artsy types, there was Braid, the little puzzle platformer that could and for all the meatheads there's Street Fighter HD. Braid's soundtrack and graphics are top of line, with some innovative, yet sometimes samey gameplay. SFHD had graphics that looked custom drawn, but lacked a good soundtrack. Still, it's hard not to enjoy a game where you can set your opponents on fire with a Shoryuken.

So which game gets my Game of The Year pick?



Yeah, that's the one. Featuring a great (if sometimes wrong) story, a really good cast of characters, excellent music and an interesting take on turn based combat, Chrono Trigger was the game I had the most fun playing/re-playing this year. I get goosebumps when I think that I might get to buy this game for my kid one day with the amount of times they re-release it.

Here's a quick Top 5 for this year:

1. CT Remake
2. Smash Brawl
3. Fable 2
4. Braid (Not Blair as my friend Maddie had thought. Silly.)
5. SF2HD

F@ck Marry Kill please?
-While I'd like to stay on topic and mention some of the girls of GTA for this edition of FMK, I cannot. All of the girls from GTA 4 weren't that attractive and I'm not so sure everyone is going to know who they are.

Also, there were five potential girlfriends! How'm I supposed to narrow it down to three?!

Anyway, since last weeks girls were from FF7, this week's girls are Rinoa, Selphie and Quistis from FF8.



Rules: Of the three girls, pick which one you'd sleep with, marry and kill. You cannot pick the same girl twice, if you want to bed a girl before killing her, go ahead.

Last week's edition saw the majority tie the knot with Tifa, have hot ninja relations with Yuffie and off Aeris (myself included). Since marriage indicates the woman you like best, Tifa is considered the winner of last week's game. Once I get three winners from three games, we'll have a winner's only round. All of your picks go in the comment box, make 'em as detailed or as short as ya want.

Okay, now that this article's dunzo, I've got two more to write. I'm John De Large and that's What I Hate About You.