The marvels of 1080i came and went a long time ago in this house. Gt5 and RR7 made me ooooh-and-aaaaah more tbh.
I'm going to trade this. I never enjoyed all the side-quest stuff in any game. All I wanna do is kill stuff in 3D. ...But this is grizzly. In GTA3 the most fun you could have was to stock pile a bunch of weapons, setup camp near a hospital, and then declare war on the neighbourhood. And then the cops. And their helicopters. It was kind of fun.
In GTA4 there is something wrong with the way this game does the violence. Too close to the knuckle perhaps? Too gritty? More Police, Camera, Action, less A-Team?
Despite the massive city, the graphics and the (utterly brilliant) radio, it's not all that realistic, except the violence that has taken the super-gore-o-sickening-syrum, and to be honest it's very little different from GTA3, VC and SA. The lead character never needs the loo. Never gets tired. Only eats when he's beaten or shot.
Cars magically appear and disappear as per the script. Cops ignore everything except for gunning the toll, hijacking cars, playing wth guns or bashing into cops. So, you can run someone down on the pavement (sidewalk

) and as long as don't kill the pedestrians it's fine. Red lights mean nothing, to the player or cops. Crashes with other cars mean nothing. Driving without due and care and attention... Nothing nothing nothing.
Car chases: once you've wrestled with the world physics, car chases have set staged obstacles: Like broken down lorries, and lorries spilling stuff. Except half of them are impassable. Well, you can get past, but there is no elegance to it, normally you just crash through it, and if you are lucky your car comes through the right way without being ruined.
Then there is the lighting. It's too dark. I did the same mission in the daytime and the nighttime (in the game) and had the same problem.
It's the mission where you get to climb over a crane and jump along the buildings, except the first time round it's in the dark, the games night time. And it took me 20mins to find my way up. Thanks to Rockstars inability to write code to write data to the PS3 hard-drive without corrupting it, I did the same mission again, same problem, same darkness, only this time the mission time was in the games daytime.
The camera is crap too. Walking outdoors, indoors or in a car, the camera is often rubbish.
Moving on to the irritatingly stupid NPC's: Michelle. My stupid slack-jawed in-game girlfriend, who in real life, if Michelle really existed, I would hate so much I would encourage my wife to beat up, went on a date with me.
I could see with this date I was being drawn into some dreadful sandbox style side-quest shenanigans, that I wasn't interested in, but what the hell, the game was in stealth tutorial mode, so sod-it, why not?
Me and bloody-Michelle, went to the fun-fair. Except the fair was closed. So we went bowling.
Before we start, the bowling? It was rubbish.
Anyway I stopped the car, and sprinted (Tapping the X button) to the bowling alley. Michelle is waaaaay behind my character, but Michelle and my character are still holding a scripted conversation. My character keeps turning his head and talking normally behind himself. Michelle, some 100meters behind, answering normally back. Maybe they should have made her run OR stopped me from running? Genius eh?
I rush through the doors to the bowling alley and Michelle must have hit 88Mph at some point, because 'behold' she is now stood next to me. WTF?
I rush through the very adequate bowling mini-game, that reminded me of hating my Wii, and head back to the car double-time, sprinting all the way. Michelle this time left behind.
No problem, I'll pick her up in the car!
Except the bowling alley is on a sort of pedestrian only wooden pier-like walk way. "No matter" I thought and I rocket the car up the steps, nailing a few pedestrians en-route.
Michelle is stood there. She's not concerned. Why should she be? It's not in the lets-go-bowling-date script that a player of GTA4 would behave like psychopathic lunatic on speed. I mean - who could I have predicted that would happen? pfft.
I decide I can't face much more of this sub-game. I don't like sub games. The point of gaming is to beat the game as quickly as possible. An attitude I have developed from predominately playing arcade games. Sub-games distract me from winning you see.
So -- I race the car down the rest of the pier at full speed, a few more pedestrians get mowed down, and then, to make matters worse, lo-and-behold at the end of the pier, exiting on to the road, is a cop car. Which I rear-end at about 70Mph. Fortunately my car and the cops, still run OK. Mr Policeman however is angry and starts chasing me. Michelle, as it turns out, makes for a much better passenger than my wife, as she seems oblivious to the Police, the blood, the absence of headlamps, the missing bonnet (hood) and the black smoke pouring from the car. Incidentally: her car.
In my efforts to avoid the cops Michelle's car gets really beaten and we arrive at Michelle's house with the car actually on fire. No matter: Michelle nonchalantly gets out of the car declaring she had a lovely time. Okay then.
I get out of the car as quickly as possible and then it explodes. Michelle isn't all bad. She never mentions the exploding car, the police, the death.
The point is, if the game makers can spend so much time on doing the animation of me stamping on some guys head, could they have done another script where michelle was a little annoyed. Could they not? Would it have been so hard to write the script:
If Michelle$ = Angry
then gosub Michelle-hates-Will2097-script.
I have no problem with uber-realism. I have no problem with uber-fantasy. But this is neither.
Even tearing round the city in the better cars is ruined because all the cars are moon buggies, affected by moon buggy gravity that Liberty City enjoys. I've driven hundreds of real cars, and thousands of computer cars, and the cars in GTA4 really do have the most bouncy-suspension since Moon Lander.
After hating Michelle, I went to the strip club, paid for a private strip and was creeped out. A quick tour of Second-life some months back put me off virtual nudity for life i reckon.
This game is too hardcore for me. In the same way all the online stuff, in any game, is too hardcore for me.
For the money, I paid £10 for Driver 4: Parallel Lines, I got more enjoyment from that than I do this; pound-for-pound.
To make matters worse, the save file on GTA4 was corrupted and wouldn't load, so i have to start again, the specter of the PS3 RRoD (error 80010514) trashing my PS3 loomed and I'm afraid.
Nah - it's going back to Gamestation.