I'm posolutely, very absitively on the side of GTA IV. I think it's fantastic.
It's inconsistently executed, but not nearly as inconsistent as San Andreas was. It's also trying to do something new and different, in that it's staying character-focused... including limiting the activities to things that the character might do, instead of delivering noodles or shuttling people around in an ambulance or bus driving.
I'm finally getting to the point where I am enjoying the game they made, rather than trying to play the game I was expecting to get.
so basically you concede that rockstar should have killed off features in favor for actually being creative and making new ones. Right. And the result is the most boring sandbox game ever.
You are forgetting that only Synthesizer Patel is capable of executing sarcasm in text. Please include rolleyes or something to give me a heads-up next time, because I live in a country which has stripmined its irony content, and I'm not prepared for it in normal speech, let alone trying to parse it from text.
What I concede is that
GTA IV is not
GTA III,
Vice City, or
San Andreas; I think Rockstar was trying to make a game in which every choice the player is given is in the context of "What would Niko do?" This means no go-cart racing on city streets, but there is an urban racer circuit. This means instead of having special powered cars which start missions, imbuing the environment and vehicles with the "special-ness"</david_byrne>, Niko accesses them through his Friends by communicating like we do, through a cellphone; in doing so, the power is transferred from the landscape to his interpersonal relationship with his new contacts in his new home.
And to as large a degree as possible, they've tried to trim the bonuses and enhancements back, I'm guessing because most people (myself included) played the SHIT out of the R3 missions and hidden packages in an attempt to buff up their character for the story missions, making the story missions way too easy for their buffed characters, but meanwhile casual gamers were unable to finish the game because the missions were already pretty challenging, but when faced with trying to complete with a non-buffed character, they were unable to do so. This is, of course, wildly irresponsible speculation -- but there it is.
