I agree, K-Man. Well, I did finish GTA3, but I think that was the only one I saw through to completion. Generally the formula just got old for me before the games were over. 20 hours into 4 at this point with no signs of abating, though. I can't *wait* to see the rest of the city. I've got over half of it yet to be explored! The city is just amazing.
Couple of stupid things to look at - In case you want to get your stupid fanboy on, Gametrailers posted another stupid
comparison video which demonstrates absolutely nothing.
And if that's not enough stupid GTA-related crap for you, here's
a mostly worthless article from IGN about the possibility of GTA4 seeing a PC release, and on the PC sales of the other GTA games.
Pre-analysis Rant - I'll hopefully get my little "article" up at some point, but for now I'd like to take this opportunity to point out that I think a lot of people in the game journalism industry and a lot of gamers themselves help to perpetuate the eternal stereotypes of GTA and similar games. In the IGN article one of the guys says:
And while it's true that the console crowds are growing a bit more adult in their tastes (is it right to use the word "mature" when discussing a game about killing cops and prostitutes?), there's definitely a huge group of players on the PC who are hungry for this kind of grown-up experience.
We all understand the point he's trying to make with the comment, and I'm kind of just arguing to argue here, but what the fuck? Why do we go around spouting hyperbole when we're dealing with something already misunderstood? Obviously GTA is far from some high-art masterpiece of philosophy or whatever, but the game isn't about killing cops or prostitutes. Seriously, think about that for a minute. How many times in all the games combined are you actually tasked with going out and murdering cops? Almost never. 95% of the time the cops are an *incidental* enemy, opposed to you simply because you're doing stuff that they have an inherent interest in keeping you from doing. But your actual enemies are almost exclusively other crooks (or corrupt government officials, etc.). Everyone spends so much time overgeneralizing the specifics of GTA's irresponsibility to the point where they inadvertently make it look like a completely different game from what it is. It isn't as though we're going to change a lot of minds by changing that attitude or anything, as the topics are still controversial in any light, but doesn't it seem stupid to anyone else that we still indirectly hurt our own causes by being so careless in our own representations of things?
I've been playing GTA4 for 20 hours now. In that time I have only killed 87 people. That's about four and a half deaths per hour. When you consider that many missions task you with killing like 5 to 10 other crooks, and you tackle a number of missions in an hour, how many death-free gameplay hours does that equal? On top of this, while the game doesn't track how many cops you've killed, I can tell you that the number is less than 5 in twenty hours of play, and at least 2 of those would be accidental. I don't really care about fighting cops, and given that the game practically never tells you to go do that (it just tells you to lose your wanted level or avoid them, whatever... and I assume that's the case for much of this game since the other games seemed to be almost entirely free of that too), how can you possibly say on any level that this game is about killing cops? Yeah, you *can*, but it isn't at all what the game is about, just like the game isn't "about" having sex with women even though you *can* get a brief little entirely-implicit scene when you hook up with a girl after a few successful dates. The game isn't "about" eating hamburgers either, though you can buy them. And frankly, I've purchased probably 4 or 5 times as many hamburgers and hotdogs in this game than the number of cops I've killed.
I know, it's sort of a pointless rant, but it bothers me a little. Why aren't we concerned about actually providing real information when we talk about games? Why is it we're so willing to just accept that there's controversy and that there are myths nobody seems to want to dispel? The IGN guy's comment is just exemplary of that attitude. Why do you have to make it seem as though GTA4 isn't mature? It *is*. The drama here is really quite good, and there are some very interesting themes about the nature of crime, American opportunity, and crime/violence begetting more crime/violence. Don't fucking dumb it down and make it seem as though the game is an entirely sophomoric enterprise with nothing to offer an intelligent person.
I know, I know, that wasn't his point and I'm sort of arguing semantics. But still, you get my point, right? GTA has plenty of toilet humor and low-brow stuff that I could do without (not to mention plenty of political statements I don't agree with), but in general I think much of what's in there is written off or left unacknowledged, both by gamers and by media outlets or politicians. There's more here than I think we're giving Rockstar credit for. Maybe not the highest tier of social commentary, but this is more than just prostitutes, jacking cars, and killing cops.
