30 Day Video Game Challenge 2 - Your Least Favourite Game

[For the concept, go here]


There were a few competitors for this.  I was considering going with "Dead Space" or "Amnesia", and then going off on a tangent about how frustrating I found it that my inability to deal with horror games/films has precluded me from enjoying some genuinely intriguing plots (yes, I look them up on Wikipedia because I can't experience them first-hand - what, stop looking at me like that!).  I was thinking about going for "Oblivion" for the shock factor (for non-gamers - Oblivion was billed as being "the game that would change gaming forever" for a number of reasons, and is still considered to be an excellent experience 5 years after publication), and then explaining that I was referring to its inability to live up to its hype, and the undeniably cookie-cutter nature of what was promised to be a "rich, vibrant world" once you strayed off of the quest lines (How many Ayleid ruins or cave systems can you explore before they start to feel painfully alike?  How many times can you hear several different characters utter the same lines in the same voice before it starts to grate?), but then I realised that was massively unfair to a game that was still fantastic in its own right (to say nothing of the modding community).  Hell, I was even toying with writing about "Mary Kate & Ashley's 'Get A Clue'", till I remembered that, actually, that was a fairly decent and reasonably innovative platformer!  But no, I went with this:

Would you trust your children with this man?

So, GTA IV.  Also, many would argue, a great game, if not a Great game.  Certainly, the sales would seem to back this up - an estimated 609,000 copies sold on the first day[1], and Take Two Interactive (the publisher) estimates approximately 20 million copies total[2], more than their second biggest selling franchise (Midnight Club racing) combined.  Indeed, it's one of the easiest games that I own for a casual gamer to pick up and have a bit of fun with - blasting around in a sports car, gunning down civilians and trying to outrun the police, exploring the visually impressive setting and scenery.  So, as one of the cheerfully racist stereotypes from the game would ask, what is problem?

To go off on a tangent (which will most likely be a running theme of this blog), I remember vividly a preview of GTA:SA in PC Gamer magazine (for reference, I played SA on PC, IV on 360).  Two points that it raised are relevant:

• As a positive, it mentioned the vast spaces of the play area, and the noticeably different feel that they all had.  Cruising around downtown Los Santos was a fundamentally different experience from riding the hills of San Fierro, or walking the streets of Las Venturas, or piloting a jet over the desert, or burning down a freeway in the middle of nowhere, or riding a dirt bike or tractor into a hick town.  The preview even mentioned that, "as 'inner-city' CJ, you feel distinctly uncomfortable being out in the countryside".  There's immersion for you right there, when you're identifying with your character and the setting so strongly that you get actual reactions to being in different places.  I know that I, for one, would always make a point of finishing up any gaming sessions by returning to the garage in San Fierro, parking up whatever nice car I'd been whizzing around in, and saving there - because it felt like "home".
• As a negative, it pointed out that CJ's character felt a little one-dimensional. To quote the article; "his attitude seems to be 'Kill that man?  A'ight'.".  They would have liked to see a bit more depth, a bit more anguish, or at least some concern over the things he was being asked to do.  Personally, I don't think this is entirely fair - if you're creating a game where you'll regularly take hookers into darkened alleys for health boosts and then run them over to reclaim your cash, you can't make your main character too moralistic without a jarring clash of values, and besides, I seem to recall CJ was more opposed to "the game" than many of his compatriots, viewing it as a necessary evil to be escaped than an aim in itself - but it's a valid criticism nonetheless.

Now reconsider GTA IV in light of these.  Though I must admit that I haven't fully completed the game, I'm told that one of the final missions has you confronting Darko Brevic who sold out your unit during "the war".  During the confrontation, this man admits that he sold out the squad for $1000 to feed his heroin addiction, and Niko (your character) is disgusted that it took such a paltry sum of money.  Darko asks how much Niko has charged for all his murders...a question which is promptly ignored.  Throughout the game, in fact, Niko shows even less remorse over his actions than CJ did - during the bank heist, for example[3], he yells "This is fun!" while gunning down police.  Grrrr.

You have to work pretty hard to make me disapprove of this.

[Disclaimer: I might be misremembering details, and Niko may have dropped into a existentialist funk after the horror of seeing a dead bird by the side of the road, showing that he really is a sensitive soul after all.  If so, I apologise.  This is just my impression]

So, we still have a flat, psycho/sociopathic protagonist.  OK, that can be accepted as a necessary flaw of a series that practically begs you to murder innocent civilians, evade the police, take a hooker to a back alley for a health-restoring blowjob, then run her over to reclaim your cash.  What about the good points of SA, have they carried forward?

Unfortunately, not in any way. Gone are the wide-open spaces of SA, the characterful areas – instead, we have a single urban sprawl, that [personal opinion disclaimer] feels almost exactly the same throughout. I'm pretty sure this must have been an intentional decision, but it's one that baffles me. If you played SA, think back to the feeling you got at the end of the first act, after your forced relocation (if not, re-read the bit I quoted from the review up there about feeling out of place in small-town America). I challenge you to say that that didn't feel like a major upheaval, and that it felt like you were playing a slightly different game for the next few hours – and again, every time you changed location. In GTA IV, when Roman's taxi depot was burnt down, I felt “welp, guess that means I've opened up another island. Yay. I wonder if that will have slightly different cars to steal” (barely any)

It was about as dull as this looks.

OH, and that reminds me – don't get me started on the cars! .....You got me started! You fool, I told you not to! In SA, the driving was a joyful experience – challenging enough that you really felt like you'd achieved something when you cracked it, but simple enough that you could enjoy the thrill of buzzing between two lanes of oncoming traffic or lining up a ridiculous motorcycle jump to a rooftop to evade police. In IV, all the cars seem to have had their inertia pumped up – they accelerate slowly, they corner atrociously, they drift uncontrollably for silly periods of time, and the steering alternates between unresponsive and twitchy-spins-galore. I know this may be closer to the real handling of an equivalent car – and I don't care. If I wanted a driving simulator, I'd buy Gran Turismo, or Test Drive Unlimited. Hell, I could log on here: http://geoquake.jp/en/webgame/DrivingSimulatorGM/. But that's not what I want from GTA. You know why? Because GTA is not a driving simulator. It is, for want of a better expression, a transgressive-behaviour simulation. You get to do all kinds of things you can't (and, in many cases, wouldn't want to) do in real life – drive fast cars, break the rules – with no real-life consequences. This is not a place for realism. For goodness' sake, you can take a goodly number of shotgun blasts before croaking in this game, and that's if you don't escape to a nearby burger joint to be magically restored to full health – why should the driving, something you will spend even more time doing than shooting, be hampered by realism?

Now, I have more to say about the act of driving in GTA IV, which I'll return to later, but the words "driving simulator" might be raising unpleasant associations in some people's heads. Anyone who's aware of the culture of video gaming will have heard of Jack Thompson, and his crusade against "murder simulators", as he calls games like GTA and Manhunt. This is not the place to go into my opinions of his actions and beliefs, but it is an undeniable fact that this sort of publicity gives gaming a very bad name. In some cases, that's not entirely unjustified (reviews of Duke Nukem Forever seem to cast it as puerile rubbish), but it's a shame that the only view that most members of the public have of gaming comes from these biased reports. It's the spotlight fallacy – assuming that the entirety of a class are similar to the elements of a class that get the most publicity. There are far more awful, awful films or books than there are games, but no-one takes that as proof that all of those media are equally awful, because they're more often exposed to the better quality examples. I was talking with a gaming neophyte the other day, who told me "if someone had told me about you before I knew you, and said that you were the type of person who played this sort of game [GTA IV], I wouldn't have wanted to know you" – not an unreasonable response, by any stretch[4], and probably one that would probably be shared by the majority of non-gamers. So that's another reason that I dislike GTA, perhaps unfairly – because it brings a bad reputation to a medium about which I am passionate, even evangelical.

This man does not want you to play video games

But I'm going off-topic. Back to the cars. Here I'm shamelessly stealing from this ( http://bitmob.com/articles/grand-theft-autos-biggest-problem-cars ) excellent post about the GTA series in light of the upcoming GTA V. I really can't put it any better than they have – but, since you've read this far and are probably unwilling to churn your way through another article, I'll summarise. They have one main problem with GTA – cars aren't fun anymore. Not only are they hard to handle, but they are delicate and prone to explosion. Moreover, they don't make you feel powerful – quite the reverse, you're spending so much time trying to avoid explosiony death or inconvenient breakdown that you can't enjoy anything else the game has to offer. The article contrasts Niko's experiences with those of Batman, Ezio Auditore, and Cole McGrath (from Arkham Asylum, Assassin's Creed, and Infamous, respectively – all wonderful games, though I would humbly suggest adding Just Cause's Rico Rodriguez to the list?), wherein simply getting around the game world is a fun experience, and not a method of triggering the next mission.

Do I really need to say any more?

Notice I said “trying to avoid explosiony death or inconvenient breakdown” there, rather than “trying to avoid damaging your car”. This may have been just me, but I never felt a sense of ownership of any vehicle in GTA IV. Of course, this is an inherent problem of the series – the streets are teeming with available rides, so if you tire of/explodify your current ride, you can hop in another one easy-as-pie – but at least in GTA:SA the uniqueness and rarity of some cars, combined with the excessive storage facilities available (THE AIRCRAFT HANGAR!) meant that you could indulge your hording tendencies a little. In GTA IV, there's practically no reason to ever save a car.  Even those that open up side missions (like the police scanner) are pretty easily accessible - just phone emergency services and wait for them to turn up with a shiny new ride.

Then again, there is another reason that getting around in GTA IV isn't fun – there's nothing to do outside of the missions. Or rather, there is, and they're a dull grind. The side missions in GTA:SA may not have been everyone's cup of tea, but they were certainly more interesting than IV's recreations of bowling, darts, and snooker, or the endless pestering from Roman and Brucie to “hang out”. The random encounters on the street were a nice touch, but really didn't add much – invariably, they'd be a interfering distraction from somewhere you needed to get to, rather than a pleasant side quest. In what is becoming a running theme for this game, there's just no engagement. You just don't care about what's happening in the game. When I picked up the game again recently after a few months away, I realised that I had literally no idea about the state of play – what characters were alive or dead, who was allied with whom, where I fitted into everything. Re-reading the Wikipedia article to remind myself of the plot, I realised that I had excised certain characters completely from my mind. That's not the sign of a well-written, well-characterised game.

So, in summary. GTA IV has carried over all of the weaknesses of its predecessor, and capitalised upon none of its strengths. It is a shallow, vapid, gun-and-run simulator, with little coherence or direction to its overall plot, barely any characterisation beyond racial stereotypes, and very little to recommend to it as a sandbox experience. It's a sign of quite how much the industry has moved on, when you consider the glorious freedom of the games listed above, or of the truly excellent “GTA-with-horses”, Red Dead Redemption, and see quite how far behind them GTA IV falls. So, though I bear it no animosity, and acknowledge that it's certainly good fun for a half-hour or so, for managing to ruin the level of brilliance that was GTA:SA, I'm forced to label GTA IV my least favourite game.

Honestly, did you really prefer it to this?

[1]: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7379624.stm

[2]: http://www.industrygamers.com/news/gta-iv-sales-near-20-million/
[3]: Another example of SA's superiority over IV - in SA, a bank heist was a major operation, requiring many missions of preparation, having several sub-sections, and giving a real sense of achievement when you finished.  In IV, it sprang up out of nowhere, involved the death of a minor character whose name I can't even remember, and then progressed through a number of staged shoot-outs as you escaped on foot.  Dull, uninventive, and unengaging.
[4]: Let's ignore the fact that soon they were gleefully asking me to show them how to pick up hookers – the thrills of transgression are hard to understand until you've experienced them!