Sunday, May 18, 2008

GTA

So here I am again after not posting for almost two months. I'll maybe try to maintain this a bit more now that I'm out of school and looking for approximately anything I can do to stave off the extreme boredom. I just beat a little game you might have heard of called Grand Theft Auto 4. It was pretty damn enjoyable. Is it the best game ever as several hyperbole reviews around the internet have claimed? I dunno about that. But it's certainly an incredibly entertaining and polished game that everyone should play. I don't really feel like regurgitating everything you can read in any review of this game, so I'd rather talk about a couple specific things that really impressed me.
It was, for me, all the little things that made the game what it was. By "the little things" I mean all the little touches that really fleshed out the game world. The fact that you can sit in your apartment and watch two separate TV channels full of potentially hours of entertainment. The fact that you can go to the Cabaret club and see a different act a surprisingly large number of times. Same thing with the comedy club, where they have two real world comedians, the amazing Ricky Gervais and amazingly unfunny Katt Williams, who do multiple five minute sets of comedy. Why would any developer take the time to put such things into a game? I mean there's already 18 radio stations in the game. Hell, there's even a fairly entertaining tetris clone on the arcade machine in the game.
The other things that was really impressive was some of the choices that you have to make near the end of the game. Unfortunately, I don't want to spoil anything so I won't go into any specifics. but the choices you get to make are so far beyond the typical choices in videogames. There is no obvious Good choice or Bad choice. Both sides of the choices have benefits and consequences, and the writing and voice acting really manage to transfer the conflict that Niko feels to the player.
Now to dig some more into the multiplayer. Or get some more achievements.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Are you the Dave Vehonsky from Cleveland, Ohio? I think I dated you in the early 70's!

David Vehonsky said...

Nope. Originally from Columbus. And kind of didn't exist in the early 70s.