Why So Serious? (I'm Sorry)

More interesting than the actual game.

Recently, after beating Saint’s Row 2 I decided to go back and play Grand Theft Auto IV just so I could compare the two with less of a memory based bias. After spending roughly an hour in GTAIV driving around, I realized that I wasn’t having any fun and promptly quit playing. This is a very unusual occurrence for me, so I decided to compare Saint’s Row 2 and GTAIV. This way I hoped to discover why exactly I wasn’t having any fun with GTAIV. In the end I came to a rather surprising conclusion: GTAIV is a mediocre game, and a thoroughly terrible sequel. As there are quite a few of you out there who may disagree with me, I am going to go over why GTAIV is a mediocre game and why Saint’s Row 2 is better in almost every way point by point.

Art Direction

I chose art direction for this category rather than graphics because the fact is that despite what most video game developers may try to tell you, good graphics are not the end-all be-all of video games. Super Mario 64 as an Nintendo 64 title is inherently ugly video game (graphics-wise), but it is one of the most fun video games of all time, and its worlds are pleasant to look at and memorable. Regardless, GTAIV does have some decent art direction going for it. Liberty City looks and feels like a living, breathing city, and all of the characters look appropriate. What they are not, however, is memorable. Outside of Niko Bellic, the main character and poster child for the game, I would challenge you to remember what any character in the game looks like. The fact is that Rockstar designed the characters in GTAIV as an odd mix of a real-person and a cartoon caricature (if you don’t believe me take a look at the picture of Vladimir Glebov, one of the first villains in GTAIV, shown below). Realism in itself is not a bad thing to try for in a video game, but you cannot allow yourself to forgo making your art interesting and memorable for its sake.

Believe it or not, this is one of his more realistic expressions.

Music

I have nothing to complain about when it comes to the quality of the music in Grand Theft Auto IV, it is a nice mix of various genres and artists,  what I can deride is the method in which this music is delivered. As with all Grand Theft Auto games, music is only played from the radios in cars. This in itself is not a bad thing as it adds an element of realism to the game, and it certainly made sense in the previous titles. However, with the addition of the mostly-useless cell-phone mechanic in Grand Theft Auto IV they completely neglected a chance for the player to be allowed to play music anytime they’re on foot. Cell-phones today can act as media players (iPhone anyone?), so there is no loss of realism, and I sincerely doubt that there is any mechanical reason within the game’s code that would keep such a thing from being possible. Furthermore, there is no way to customize the radio stations within GTAIV. If there’s a song you don’t like on a radio station, then you better pray it never comes up, because there’s no way to skip it.

Saint’s Row 2 let’s you make your own playlist from the songs in the game, hell, even Perfect Dark for the N64 let you customize your playlist for multiplayer. Adding insult to injury, the GTAIII games (GTAIII, Vice City, and San Andreas) all had a separate station for PC players that they could add custom music to. There are games on both PS3 and XBox360 that allow players to utilize the music they have saved to their hard-drive within the game, but GTAIV ignored this capability. Even better, the PC version doesn’t even have custom soundtrack capability.

Story

Ah GTAIV’s much vaunted story. I don’t know how much they spent writing the story for GTAIV, but judging by the number of voice actors alone, it must have been quite the pretty penny. They should have spent a bit more. You want to know the story for GTAIV, here we go. Serbian gets into trouble and flees to America. Trouble follows Serbian to America and he deals with it. There you go. Any new characters that would force some sort of growth in the main character or change the situation at all are conveniently killed off. Rockstar touted regularly how you would be given choice in the game, and the actions you chose would alter the story. Guess what, that’s a lie. You decide not to kill a guy, 9/10 times he’s gonna come back and attack you and you have to kill him. In the end, no matter what you do, the people who are going to die, are going to die, and where Niko ends up is going to be the exact same.

Let’s talk about Niko actually. Niko Bellic, the main character, a Serbian who has fled to America illegally to escape some bad men he pissed off. Niko is “supposedly” a nice guy who doesn’t want to live a life of crime and violence, yet constantly gets sucked in. Already we have two problems. One, Niko BellicVercetti, is a sociopath and perhaps even a psychopath. When you go one a killing spree in Vice City, it is completely in character. Saint’s Row 2 offers you a full character creator, and the choice of six (or more if I remember right) voice actors, and yet even without the ability to make any kind of decisions I never felt any of my actions were out of character.

In the end, Grand Theft Auto IV has the same exact story as Grand Theft Auto III (whose main character is completely mute) except without the interesting, “my ex-girlfriend betrayed me and I want revenge” angle. Hilariously, the first girlfriend you can get in Grand Theft Auto IV, does in-fact betray you, but I’ll refrain from talking about that for now, since she’s the most interesting character in Grand Theft Auto IV, and I could write an article as long as this one, just about her. In the end Grand Theft Auto IV’s story is like watching a season of The Soprano’s except all the parts that aren’t criminal activities are cut-out (i.e. Tony’s family, the therapist, talking with his friends, etc...).

One of these two characters will actually grow as a person in Grand Theft Auto IV. Hint: It's not the protagonist.

Gameplay

Gameplay, the most important part of a video game. Some players, like me, can slog through boring gameplay for a good story, but we are a rare breed. However, all players will slog through a terrible story for good gameplay. Where to start, the fact that Grand Theft Auto III had some of the best driving mechanics ever made and they should never have deviated from them? The idea that having multiple checkpoints in difficult missions has been a video game standard since the middle years of the PS2? How about the fact that nobody has ever enjoyed having a limited distance they can sprint for, especially without an on-screen indicator for how long they can sprint? How about all those enjoyable, well-made mini-games that were in the Grand Theft Auto III games? What’s that, you replaced them with the shittiest bowling and dart-throwing minigames I have ever played in my life?

I could go on for quite a while, but I’d rather move on quicker, so let’s just go over what GTAIV did right. Regional damage, cover mechanics, and a hilarious physics engine. Three things they did right. Three. Ooh I almost forgot about the dating and friend mechanics. Why yes, I would love to go play that horrible bowling game with you every ten minutes girl who lets me keep my guns when I get sent to the hospital. Oh cousin, you want to go see some big, American titties? Of course I’ll go with you to the strip club that feels awkward and creepy enough to go to when I’m playing alone, much less when there are other people in the house.

In the end GTAIV did a lot of things wrong, but where they made their biggest mistake is in a category that I only bring up because of Grand Theft Auto 2, III, Vice City, San Andreas, Saint’s Row, and Saint’s Row 2 all have it in spades.

Humor

The Grand Theft Auto series was once a paragon of tongue-in-cheek humor. As irreverent as South Park, and as satirical as The Daily Show, the Grand Theft Auto series snuck humor everywhere. From ads on the radio that made you burst out laughing, down to the billboards you would see while driving, the games were absolutely filled with satirical and raunchy humor. However with Grand Theft Auto IV Rockstar decided to make a more realistic game. Rather than modelling Liberty City on New York, they literally copied it. Then they took out all of the color, traded the vibrancy and almost cartoonish palette of Vice City and San Andreas for grays and browns. Where once a mission might have you stealing an ice-cream truck so you could load it with explosives and crash it into your rival’s headquarters, you now have gravitas and people getting killed left and right. 

This is not to say that GTAIV completely forgot the humor; there are some genuinely funny fake radio advertisements, and almost the entirety of the in-game internet is filled with the same humor they had in previous GTA’s, but that’s it. All of the good humor is left to advertisements that play when you want music instead or in a single area that you essentially have to stop playing the game to visit. It seems humor has been replaced with people saying fuck, shit, and titties a whole lot. GTAIV tries to improve itself by ditching the humor and replacing it with swearing and mildly disturbing sexuality. The tanks, attack helicopters, and grenades have been replaced with a darker world and seriousness. Meanwhile Saint’s Row 2 added more humor, more attack helicopters, more rocket launchers, and it has not only more, but heavier hitting moments precisely because it did just that. When everything is rainbows and explosions, when someone dies, it’s a hell of a lot more of a downer than when your streets are rainy and filled with crack-whores.

Does this look more fun...

...than this?

The fact is that when you give someone a living city to play with, filled with civilians that have ragdoll physics, nearly every single person that plays in your world is going to prefer a rocket launcher to the ability to call 911 on some guy who started hitting you. GTAIV should have brought the series to a brand new level in absurdity and exaggeration, instead I had to go play Saint’s Row 2 to get my next-generation Grand Theft Auto. Even in a world where there is no Saint’s Row series, I would rather play any of the previous Grand Theft Auto games, even number 1, than play Grand Theft Auto IV, and that is why I say Grand Theft Auto IV is a terrible game.

Edit: I'm sorry about the formatting, but Blogger was being really annoying and not letting me change it at all.