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Grand Theft Auto IV Review (continued)
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Manufacturer: Rockstar Games
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ESRB Rating: Mature
Platform(s): Xbox 360
Release Date: April 29, 2008
Average Rating: 4 out of 5 Stars
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Retail Price: $59.99
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More User Submitted Grand Theft Auto IV Reviews
Date: 2008-08-09
WOW!!
this game is the best ive wasted so much time on this game...the first 2 days i got it i spent about 13 hours each day playing it because my girlfriend was out of town so i had time to just do nothing...lol...and in the first 3 days i was only 45% done with the game but of course u cant just do missions all day there was plenty of time just free roaming around messing...lol...but yeah THE BEST GRAND THEFT AUTO!!!
Date: 2008-08-05
Unbelievable detail
You can drive for hours and not see the same street twice; and never under the same lighting/weather conditions...in a Ferrari... just amazing. Some missions can be frustrating when the bad guys get away, but overall a great game. There are very few 1 player games that I have ever put so many hours into.
Date: 2008-08-05
a videogaming achievement
i'm a mature gamer who bought a dozen or so videogames with a new xbox just to see how the technology had evolved. (the digital animations in many recent films had piqued my interest.) some few important flaws aside, grand theft auto is in my view exactly where the medium is headed, and is head and shoulders the best game available today ... and i say that as a great admirer of half life 2, portal, assassin's creed, bioshock and crackdown. the point here is total, seamless, deep immersion in a world. not just an environment, not just a point of view or mission or skill set, but all the redolent layers of culture: people, infrastructure, authority, television, radio, internet, dating, sex, weapons, power, money, recreational activities, jobs, vengeance, justice -- and not just culture but a world where hydrants erupt when you drive over them, jetliners blink their slow trace across the night sky, the city breathes with distant sounds of traffic, disorder, and heavy objects, the light changes almost second to second with the time of day or the weather or the illumination of interior spaces, and your vision blurs and your driving becomes erratic if you have too much to drink. against this rich background of sardonic humor and social commentary in the guise of "urban landscape", the splendid graphical rendering and gritty art design, the two big flaws are the waxy and unconvincing computer animation in cutscenes, and the still less than lifelike animation of the wireframe action figures (those strip club dancers are not very enticing). but the depth of detail here is remarkable -- the way different weapons handle, the way different cars drive (carjack an ambulance or stretch limo, for example), the completely unique content on different car radio stations, the internet parodies, the cellphone text messages, and the sheer variety of characters in the mix -- all of it designed with unbelievable detail and dramatic interest. despite the segmentation of the game into separate missions, the narrative has a compelling overall architecture. as one example, i had early on tried to cross to the largest of the four islands of the city (blocked by a plot motivated police action), and had been shot or arrested every time. so as i worked the missions, one of the fortunate recipients of my gangster skills asked me to drive him home: and home was on the inaccessible island. crossing over the bridge, the light of late afternoon streaming into the car, the music on the radio playing a vatic beat, it was an emotionally rousing moment. i say "me" but of course it's really niko bellic, an eastern european thug on a quest that only gradually becomes clear as the plot unfolds; and it's a third flaw of the game that this quest, as important as it is to niko, does not seem very important in his unstructured and varied choices of dating, driving and drilling bad guys with high calibre. but that's because the richness of the storytelling has made all the conventional story lines of videogames obsolete. the essential point is that this videogame has i think crossed the milestone of creating a digital, full length feature film, with much more depth and detail than any feature film has ever had to come up with, and a film that is potentially open ended, multilayered and even life changing. (i've learned that the addictive effect of videogaming is considerable, which means there is power there to affect "plotted" change of all kinds in videogamers.) videogames can now be anything: the story of an individual's search for the meaning of life, non stop sex with a harem, fighting the revolution and constitutional wrangles of a new republic, solving a deep scientific mystery, getting married and starting a family, building a career in a corporation ... anything and everything, but computed in real time and with an open ended architecture. videogames can do these things with the compelling visual realism and depth of any major studio film with digital special effects, and with the possibility of a collaboratively constructed reality through network game play. the painting of light and visual objects is i think a trivial problem: the obstacles now are in managing the narrative complexity and event interactions, in building new narrative conventions or genres, and in the animation of life forms, in particular a speaking mouth and an exerting figure (for example, a figure that actually runs *on the ground*). the fourth and last flaw of this game is the gangster mentality of all the characters, which is not really a flaw so much as a genre convention (as in for example film noir or chandler novels). this gangster ethos actually reduces the impact of the violence, which i think motivates too much of the game. but grand theft auto prototypes a new cultural modality, the digital fantasy domain, which as fantasy can come very close to reality and as game can stimulate any perplexity of emotion. it's an achievement.
Date: 2008-08-03
Don't Believe the Hype
I read many positive reviews of this game and was convinced to purchase it. I played it for several hours and lost interest. It has got to be about the worst story ever written for a video game. The characters are all shallow and not at all interesting. The gameplay is slow and repetitive, to the point where you feel like you are doing the same boring tasks again and again... oh wait, you are. The driving portion of the game becomes annoying very quickly... there is no realism.
Date: 2008-07-28
Addictive Gaming
This game is the violent version of second life. You develop a character by building relationship before you start cracking heads. Rockstar out did themselves with this one.
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