GTA4 Quick thoughts

Graev and I picked up GTA4 yesterday – woot! This game has been a long time coming for us and all GTA fans. For me the last GTA game I actually played and payed attention to was Vice City. Graev managed something like 100% on San Andreas but I was a heretic and actually just “watched” SA for the most part. I want to give you guys our random quick thoughts on GTA4.

Graphics = Awesome. They are as good as I expected but I don’t think they are 10/10 good. Graev and I were talking about this after we played for about 3 hours yesterday. He turned to me and said “The graphics are real good, but not 10/10”.

Cars fishtail reeeaaally easy. The driving mechanics in GTA4 are really superb. The physics and attention to detail on the wheel and driver are really nice. The cars do fishtail really easy though and it takes some getting used to. It feels like momentum’s effect on cars has been quadrupled which is surely more realistic. Overall driving is great once you realize you can’t hold the hand-break and get precision turns like you used to do in VC/SA.

Guns and Combat… oh so nice! The combat has really been improved upon. I like the aiming and the ability to duck and peak from behind cover. I love how everything feels more realistic including fist fighting.

Sounds great. Our surround sound was hooked back up just in time for us to enjoy it with GTA4. Wow… the sounds are awesome! Even the pistols are thunderously loud. The ambient sounds of the city have made me look out the window more than a few times to make sure there’s not a gang war going down on my street.

Story is interesting. I’m not going to give anything away but it’s great.

Mission system and Friend activities. As you make friends in Liberty city they will want you to do stuff with them. You’ll be in the middle of a mission and suddenly someone you just met wants to go bowling or shoot a game a pool. Heck, we even got an invitation from one friend to see a cabaret show. These are almost like mini-games in a way and add to the realism of the game when you focus on actually living the character’s life for him. It’s another dimension to the game.

The AI still needs work. Argh! Frustrating GTA AI! Some things never change. The AI getting stuck in bizzare locations during a mission or ramming into walls repeatedly has made an appearance in GTA4. It took us 5 retries of this mission where we had to chase this guy for the AI to finally not stuck at a tollbooth. Very frustrating.

Great game so far overall. I’m about to sit down now and go play some more! We’ll post more thoughts and even videos of the game sometime this week.

  • Keen, I’m not trying to make fun of you, just trying to understand. But… how in the world do you and Graev have the money and time to buy and play all these games? And the energy? If these things are meant to be government secrets and you guys are biogenetic experiments in over-caffeination then I understand. Hush hush and all that, but if you can tell me please do. 😉

  • First thing I did, was starting a fist fight. The guy had friends standing nearby… I ended up running two blocks. The angry Mob caught up eventually. I put my sorry ass into place. Woke up at the hospital.

    Now that’s one well rounded ass of a game! I got nothing but love juice for this sexy daughter of the sandbox momma! Gotta go! Need to go deep and dirty with this one!

  • I’ll tell you how awesome multiplayer is as well. We had this one coop mission 4 players at an airport. We have to wait for our boss to come out of the plane and take him to a field in another area of the city to escape while we had cops and swat after us.

    Well as we have our shootout with unlimited amount of cops a couple of the players go and get some helicopters to make our escape(you can also steal anything else to escape ground or air or water vehicles) so once the boss is out of his plane we all jump inside the helis and take off to the field. As we head there, talking about how much money we going to get for completing the mission and make our descent to land and finish, the 2 helicopters clip each other in midair and the tail from our helicopter just breaks off sending our helicopter spinning slowly toward the water. It was awesome as we all bail over the water but ended up failing the mission as the boss drown