Sirens blare. Gunfire erupts. The police are after you, for a myriad number of reasons. Perhaps you shouldn’t have broken into that expensive sports car in full view of the police. Maybe you shouldn’t have shot that random motorist, even is he/she was on her cellphone and ran you over. And running from that cop right when he was about to cuff you was probably a dumb move. It doesn’t help that you’re in the country fresh off a Ukrainian cargo ship with no Visa. Glock 17 drawn, you duck into an alleyway, estimating that you’ve moved well away from the search radius of the police. As the sirens fade, you breathe a sigh of relief as you put your Austrian-made nine-millimeter handgun away. Looks like you got lucky, again. This situation isn’t something you had in mind when you pictured “The American Dream,” is it?
Certainly, it’s not something that Niko Bellic, the protagonist of Grand Theft Auto IV, imagined when coming to Liberty City in 2008. His cousin, Roman, had been sending him e-mails stating that he was living the good life with women aplenty, a stable of sports cars, and a mansion. In reality, Roman is living in the ethnic Hove Beach community in the Broker section of Liberty City, running a small-time taxi depot. His ‘mansion’ is a run-down studio apartment under the El tracks. This harsh reality is one of the central themes in Grand Theft Auto IV, specifically, stepping into the shoes of an immigrant in search of prosperity in the land of opportunity.
Grand Theft Auto IV has been anticipated with much excitement for some time now. Both the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3 have the processing power to accommodate the sheer massiveness of the redesigned Liberty City, and the result is a completely interactive environment rendered beautifully in real time. Game physics are certainly no slouch here. Car damage is more realistic, with bodywork crumpling exactly where impacted. Too bad no one wears seatbelts in Liberty City. Too often, players and NPC’s (Non-Player Characters) alike will drive at high speed and mistakenly collide with a pillar or similar stationary object and fly through the windshield in an explosion of glass and get tossed as far as a whole city block from the site of collision. Even the helicopters in the game are realistic; smack your main rotor against a solid object for too long, and you’ll find yourself falling to the ground like an anvil.
Back on ground level, much like in real life, there is no car that is inaccessible to Niko. Want that flashy sports car? So what if it’s locked? Pressing the button to enter a vehicle will make Niko try the doors on the vehicle in question. If it’s locked, he will use his elbow to smash the window, unlock the door from inside, and then enter the vehicle and start it up by hotwiring it. Don’t do this with police nearby, though, or else you start taking incoming fire from them. If you absolutely must get into a gunfight with anyone, you can engage them from the comfort of the driver’s seat with complete aiming capabilities, meaning that drive-bys are no longer just a matter of “spray and pray,” but rather, actually aiming at your targets. On foot, you can choose to make incapacitating shots at your target by aiming at your target’s arms or legs. Even when you’re not shooting or driving, simply exploring the city (provided you have legal access to all the islands) is an adventure in itself, with realistic travel time. It takes nearly an hour to get from the eastern end of Liberty City to the western end by car, to say nothing of several hours on foot. Add the option of going on an online crime spree with friends in multiplayer, and you have yourself one crazy fun game.
Of course, such realism has drawn the ire of critics, deeming Grand Theft Auto IV and games like it as “murder simulators,” a phrase not entirely unwarranted, but also an overreaction. Playing games like GTA IV will not influence a player to murder someone in real life. If anything, it’s what keeps players from doing so, since the virtual world of New York-style Liberty City lets one take out all his or her frustrations from real life on in-game enemies. Besides, GTA IV now features consequences for your actions. Letting people live or die when you are forced to choose between the two will affect what happens later in the game. Plus, one cannot forget the situation Niko is in. Both he and his cousin Roman came to America in search of prosperity. What they found were streets paved with blood and violence rather than gold. The two must work their way up from the ground, but in Niko’s case, the work he must do is often less-than-legal, adding more to the skeletons in his closet as a former Serbian soldier in the Bosnian War. Unlike previous games in the series, Grand Theft Auto IV helps you empathize more with the characters in the game as you watch them go through their trials and tribulations. One particularly emotional point in the game is a mission known as “Roman’s Sorrow.” Threatened by the Russian Mafia, Niko and Roman must escape from Broker (the game’s equivalent of New York City’s Brooklyn section) for an indefinite amount of time. Unfortunately, when they go to retrieve their belongings (including an engagement ring Roman was planning to propose to his girlfriend with), it is too late to do so: The Russians have already firebombed both their apartment and Roman’s cab depot. The two leave Broker, with Roman in tears and anguish for good reason. After all, how would you feel if everything you worked so hard to achieve went up in flames, never to be seen again? As you can see, this game has the most gripping storyline thus far in the series.
In short, Grand Theft Auto IV has managed to be more in-depth than its predecessors. Grand Theft Auto IV is no longer simply a mindless smash-and-grab hullabaloo of violence, guns, homicide, and vehicular theft. Taking in $310 million on the very day it was released, the sales record is indicative of the sheer popularity of the much-anticipated game, kicking Halo 3 (what kind of square plays that anymore, anyway?) off of the “First week sales” throne. Because of the large amount of Xbox 360 owners and the somewhat more marginal PlayStation 3 owners (like myself), Grand Theft Auto IV has already made more than $500 million in worldwide sales. So let anti-gaming gorillas like Jack Thompson and Lyndon LaRouche (you might want to Wikipedia the latter just to find out how much of a nutjob this guy is) beat their chests. I’ll just tune them out while I’ve got virtual police on my back

Posted By
Jacob Unson