The Save Spot

GTA IV: Running Diary Part II

 

 

 

(originally written on Thursday, May 1st)
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The level of detail in this game borders on sickening. I’ve spent 4 hours just watching TV in the game. That’s more than I spend watching network TV on a normal week. This should bother me, but it doesn’t. What you can watch is very concentrated and meant to be funny. If you have played a GTA game before, or are just enjoying the heck out of this one, you owe it to yourself to watch CNT.

Now for the basics. There has been far too many things to note, so below is an itemized list of everything I can think of after being up for 2 days and being completely buzzed on caffeine.

- The first topic to note, and probably most important, is that the default brightness and contrast settings in the game suck. The first night they were giving me a splitting headache on a mission where I needed to follow someone hogging a corner selling dope. I did manage to find a door to another alley to follow the prick, but it was simply by doing the House of Mirrors trick to find my way out. Do yourself a favor and up your brightness and contrast to 75%. Thank me later.

- I’m about 35% of the way through, which seems slow. It is. I get easily distracted in these games with people who cut me off while driving. Thanks to the addition of the cellular phone for all contacts, which is a big plus, you have to be careful walking on the street because idiots will slam into you. If you need a physics lesson then let me just state that the conversation ends and you have to start the whole thing over again. When this happens in the middle of a mission it is quite frustrating.

- Killing pigeons is always fun. Finding 200 of them will not be.

- I identified two highly annoying characters to date in the game. They are now dead as a mandatory plot point. Okay, that may need clarification. Mandatory in this sense means scripted, not “JD is pissed so he’s going to make it his life’s work to take out someone annoying”.

- A choice in the plot was to kill a poser or someone who managed a successful strip club. This wasn’t one of the tougher decisions I’ve made in my life.

- Roman is family, but he is a hopeless loser. He’s going to cause problems throughout the game and, as much as it would please me to dump him, toss his body into a river, or whatever, it just would not work. I have a feeling that as long as he tries to be loyal to family then the game will punish me if I try to do that. Chronic gamblers never seem to get their cards in order.

- The artwork for the buildings in this game is nothing less than awe-inspiring. If I could get rid of the main UI I would have a ton of pictures by now. I never liked action bars or anything else clogging up the scenery. Oh well.

- GTA has reaffirmed another one of life’s valuable lessons. Wanna guess? Nevermind. In a nutshell, you cannot trust women. Maybe I’m just bitter.

- Seeing a cop car driving into a notably stationary car fire was quite amusing. Okay, seeing the cops get out and run around while on fire was better. This makes me wonder how cops with the ability to shoot you from a quarter-mile away with automatic weapons could be so horrific at driving.

- Fire hydrants are sources of fun.

- Dragging people while they hold onto the door of a car you just jacked is also a source of fun.

2:31 – The bank job begins. We shall see how this compares to the Vice City bank mission and the San Andreas casino mission. I never did finish the latter because gaining rep with that psycho female employee who was into bondage was just too damned aggravating.

2:33 – Okay. Anybody who doubts the ability of Rockstar to write a script or to make good cinema with voice acting and character animation needs to watch this Three Leaf Clover mission. The stare-down between Niko and Patrick’s older brother is something that Hollywood actors need to study. How many current movie stars could pull that off? Is three too high?

2:35 – That took way too long to type.

2:37 – This Patrick character is voiced almost perfectly. I can’t say for certain because I was laughing too hard during the conversation in the car on the way to the job.

2:51 – Do bank jobs ever go perfectly in games? It may never happen. I’m not going to give it away, but when you don’t plan out your conversations accordingly really stupid stuff can happen. Maybe being called Mr. Pink isn’t such a bad idea.

2:56 – This mission is blowing my mind. Aside from surviving 2 minutes with blinking red health, the level design and how the cops close in on you is top-notch. If I was tired right now I wouldn’t need Red Bull because so much adrenaline is pumping through me that caffeine is pretty much irrelevant.

3:00 – If I was nodding off that oncoming train probably would have been a bigger issue.

3:03 – Dammit! I really thought I had this mission bagged. It really stinks when your death costs you $7000 to be resuscitated at a hospital. Maybe dumping some guns would be a good idea. Somehow these 1500+ pistol rounds might seem excessive.

3:05 – Hrmmm, I just had an evil thought about the subway. If this works I’ll be scared.

3:08 – It took a heck of a long time, but congratulations Michael McReary. You are the first gaping chasm in the game. Your voice acting could be described as excellent… as in Bill & Ted excellent.

3:16 – During the firefight in the streets there was some body armor lying around. It is nice that the game hasn’t been littered with weapons and items in the strangest spots. The realism added a whole to the city. This feels like one of those “we feel sorry for you” moments from the developers. Hey, I think this horse had its tonsils removed.

3:20 – I feel ashamed. I found a disgusting loophole in getting rid of the wanted level. Still, finding an underground homeless shelter in the subway is a nice touch. I’m going to spend several minutes exploring this area before heading back home.

3:26 – Must avoid traffic collisions. Must avoid traffic collisions. Must…

3:29 – Toll booths. I mean, avoiding the wanted level is so easy and paying the $5 toll is just morally reprehensible. However, there’s this whole “sitting on a gigantic pile of money” thing in a topsy-turvy pickup that has me thinking twice.

3:32 – Mission is over. $250,000 for the mission. Thank god toll-booth restraint went into effect. It somehow seems worth it now. Still, that’s like making excuses for using a potion in Final Fantasy. I’m going to have to consult a few friends to see what the line is for it being okay to pay a toll. This may be the only acceptable circumstance. Escaping a 5 star wanted level with that much cash should be on the short list, right?

3:50 – Forgive me, I just spent the last several minutes staring off into space and drowning myself in the stats menu in the game. Then again, the Red Bull consumption rate is also going up. This could be leading me to the conclusion that I may in fact be tired. These all-nighters used to be so much easier. I would say that this sounds pathetic, but the reality is that I took the week off from work to do this. On the plus side we passed pathetic in September of last year when I reserved this game, so that is no longer an issue.

3:59 – By the way, Brucie is a massive lunatic. Sure, he is a funny lunatic, but anybody who routinely smashes their head into things and causes blood spatter should not be alive by the time they reach thirty. Of course, there’s a lot of stuff in this game to be scared of.

4:00 – I just love setting up missions to up rep with players only to have plot-related phone calls come in and nuke them. This should have been worked on a little. Missions should not interrupt other missions. It seems wrong.

4:03 – Everyone in the McReary family is now in the address book. At what point can I file for citizenship? Shouldn’t Russian mobsters have a lot of Russian contacts? Apparently most Russian mobsters are jerks worthy of a bullet in their forehead while the Irish ones are fun to party with. Hey, maybe we can turn this into the first civil suit in the game. I wonder if the Vice City Haitians wouldn’t mind passing the torch on this one?

4:08 – Brucie is just one-dimensional. I have yet to find anything besides the strip club that ups the rep with him. Part of me is wondering why this is worthy of a complaint.

4:12 – It is so comforting to know that bowling in video games is always 400% more difficult than in real life. Is this true for all video games that aren’t exclusively bowling? Someone should research this.

4:15 – Out of the blue I can now get helicopter rides from Brucie. Maybe that’s enough to not make him a complete waste in the game. Cab rides and ammo would have been enough. This makes me wonder how long before there’s a bonus for getting extra cars. This needs to happen in the worst way.

4:16 – It dawns on me that it probably won’t happen.

4:16 – I’m mad.

4:18 – Driving cross-town in an SUV is slow. Being too lazy to take the train or get into a faster car has its drawbacks.

4:26 – A small correction is in order. The bowling difficulty percentage may be off by a decimal place.

4:30 – Having normal in-car conversations while flying in the air may be the best part of the game. Then again, there are a lot of oddities to choose from.

4:35 – Smoking cars and grenades are a good mixture.

4:36 – It just occurred to me that maintaining rep in this game makes GTA a lot like the Sims. Caffeine is preventing me from deciphering how good or annoying this is.

4:38 – Irishmen and whiskey. I feel my real name should be mentioned any second now.

4:38 – Odds are that revealed how little I know about alcohol.

4:39 – Derrick doesn’t think Niko is a complete tool anymore. This should be a positive, but it does eliminate the possibility of another staredown. Maybe dating the sister can provoke something? Let’s hope so.

4:43 – You would think driving with a bomb in the car would turn me into a careful driver. Two lanes of oncoming traffic just realized how wrong that assumption was.

4:45 – Flipping bikers into the air never gets old.

4:45 – If the detail of the city was not highly praised yet, let me do it again. Even the gigantic neon signs that are not in downtown Algonquin are blowing my mind. The graphics team over at Rockstar North should get a lifetime achievement award for this game alone.

4:48 – I’m being asked not to get too close to a car that refuses to obey the traffic laws. Following it with a car spitting out black smoke probably is not too smart for trying to remain inconspicuous.

4:50 – The jokes involving babies in this game, from a completely moral perspective, should not be funny. The soda stain on the monitor, however, is evidence to the contrary.

4:53 – Basic cleanup skills involving care while caffeine is coursing through my blood stream like a raging river are not accessible. This monitor will never be the same.

4:57 – That warehouse explosion was very cool. Having failed to mention it yet, it’s time to point out that the particle effects and explosions in this game are some of the best I’ve seen in any game to date.

5:00 – The mission is over. So is this running diary for today – but you were wondering how much longer this could go for anyway.