GTA4

By Andy Chalk · July 13, 2010

I'm in the early stages of Grand Theft Auto 4. Glitchy mess. This is the PC version, by the way, which is plagued by no end of bugs and performance issues. But it's so damn good that I'm muscling through it anyway. The writing is just mind-bogglingly good; the characters, the dialog, everything really rings true despite the obvious caricature of the city and those who live in it. It really is a fantastic example of how "good," to use a vaguely-defined term, games can be.

It's also a blast to go crashing around the city in a stolen luxury sedan with Roman riding shotgun.

Comments 3

Suskie Jul 13, 2010

Yeah, it's a ridiculously expansive and thorough game. Playing it a couple of years ago made me wish there were more games like it. I think I still like it even better than Red Dead Redemption.

zippdementia Jul 13, 2010

Whereas I think that was when I finally became disillusioned with free-roam gaming and the GTA series in particular. My review of it goes into more detail about that, but in short I felt that there was too much driving around doing nothing and not enough high-octane chase sequences.

Malygris Blogger Jul 17, 2010

I don't mind the "doing nothing" part, in fact at this point (about 15% into it, according to the game, which admittedly isn't very far) I think it strikes a nice balance of free roam vs. mission-based play. But I'd far rather have a smaller game world and less technical issues than an environment this massive that I have exit and restart every couple of hours. It's a fantastic game and it's drawn me in, which is what a game needs to do, but it's sad to think about how close to truly spectacular it could've been if only some care had been taken with the PC port.