A Great Place to Game (Though You Wouldn't Want to Live There)

Posted by Nate Patrin at 2:15 PM May 16, 2008

I know we're right about at the point where a significant critical mass is brewing against Grand Theft Auto IV, and not just the usual Moral Guardian bullshit: there's the requisite anti-hype backlash traversing the internet, one that is likely to fall in terms of sheer irrepressible "I am Rowdy Roddy Piper and I just put on the Ray-Bans" defiance somewhere between the great Strokes fiasco of 2001 and the loathing any baseball fan outside the New England area is developing towards the post-World Champion Red Sox. So I'll try not to play up how big of a geek I am for GTA IV, since that might mean I'm on the take, part of some corrupt video game review cabal that hands out 10s like candy to undeserving subjects and conspires against the success of cult classics like God Hand. Or something. In all fairness, I tend to have a soft spot for big sprawling ambitious kinda-flawed pop-cult-crazy epic games like this, which is why my two candidates for Game of the Year so far are GTA IV and No More Heroes. (Though it remains to be seen how Fallout 3, this year's potential king of big sprawling ambition, pans out.)

But I love Grand Theft Auto IV for reasons that don't necessarily have to do with gameplay or story or sandboxy freedom. As a game, it's a decent (if not total) improvement on some old flawed mechanics, and it's got some minor problems that I can ignore easily enough since I am big on all those familiar but spectacular "holy shit" moments the franchise typically delivers. (My favorite so far: passing a mission by fleeing from the cops, panicking, losing track of where I was going, heading straight for a ramp headed towards a bay, leaping out of my battered, smoking, shot-up car just as it exploded over the water, then frantically swimming my way through the cresting waves until I made my way out of the police alert radius.) And as a story, it's solid enough; Niko's an oddly sympathetic character with a bleak sense of humor and a deep-seated melancholy he hides behind a facade of flip smartassery, and his evolution from a schlub dependent on his ne'er-do-well cousin to a successful hired goon for an escalating hierarchy of gangs and crime families is handled well, even if some pivotal characters and antagonists make their presences scarce for uncomfortable amounts of time.

Still, out of all its elements, the time where GTA IV really first knocked me on my ass, made my jaw drop, had me shaking my head and muttering a startled "damn" over and over, was before the first mission -- when I was simply walking down the street. I never realized how empty the cities in previous PS2-gen GTA games felt until I touched ground in this new incarnation of Liberty City. The elevated trains, the lighting, the multiple generations of architecture, the street layout, the analogues to Times Square and Coney Island and the boarded-up remains of some long-abandoned Jersey boardwalk resort -- sure, it felt real, or at least real-ish, since there was an entire metropolis to draw reference from and condense into a caricaturized microcosm. (On that note, check out this great comparison shot-filled Flickr page.) But there were just so many little details and perfectly-hit urban-landscape references everywhere I turned that it felt remarkably vivid and true to life. Vice City and San Andreas now seemed as transparently phony and oddly-toned as an old shot-on-video sitcom set with a lax prop department, and this new locale filled me with an impulse I hadn't felt so strongly before while playing a video game. I didn't want to start out the game as a carjacking, AK-spraying, cop-killing rampaging maniac -- I wanted to be a tourist.

Sometime several years ago when sandbox games started to become popular and I started seeing the possibilities of go-anywhere-do-whatever gameplay, I got this notion in my head: why not have a game that isn't necessarily a traditional player-vs.-something narrative, or even an adventure game, but an actual travelogue inside some interesting place? Maybe an environment like Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, where you traverse the jungle without the shooting-people bits, or something like Bioshock where you're trapped inside this outlandish, stylized fantasy environment but are free to explore without fear of some crazy fucker jumping out of nowhere and hitting you in the head with a pipe. This is the beauty of Grand Theft Auto IV: sure, you have to play through the dirty work for several hours before can visit all three islands of Liberty City, but at that point you can wander around and take in the sights at your leisure without a care in the world.

This idea of non-storybound exploration is something the GTA titles have always done well, and it's particularly resonant after you've played through the "entire" game ("entire" in quotes; like all the other ones, this GTA can be as perpetual as you want). Wandering around on foot through a location you'd previously only experienced at 100 MPH can prove illuminating, and might spur some strong memories from a few days or weeks before: there's the pier I drove that burning taxicab off; there's the plaza I chased that drug dealer through; there's the building where I stupidly threw a grenade only to have it land right at my feet and blow me up. And now the typical "hidden packages" of the game's series seem like less of a distracting carrot-on-a-stick collect-a-thon and more like an extra bonus for exploring some of the weirder, more out-of-the-way corners of the city. Rockstar appear to have put together this place with every intention of egging on players to look through each and every last inch of it, and with that goal on their agenda they decided to cut no corners whatsoever: trash and discarded pallettes and burning barrels and abandoned cars are judiciously and appropriately strewn around where you'd expect them, houses look like they've always belonged right where they stand, the projects look like a place where people actually live and not some exploitation-movie cartoon, and skyscrapers look like they're actual places of business and not hollow props solely there to present some vertical clutter. It is, as the old song goes, a hell of a town.

But there's a downside to being a tourist in Liberty City: you risk being one of the few people wandering around in the city who isn't some kind of self-centered jerkoff. It's funny that a relatively true-to-life location is populated almost entirely by pedestrians and residents and merchants that fit some outsized, caricaturized notion of what it is to be a New Yorker in particular and an American in general: reckless taxi drivers blithely knock over lampposts as they drop you at your destination, oblivious drivers brake too late to avoid hitting you or sit lazily at the tollbooth long after the gate's been raised, and the few pedestrians who don't hatefully curse you out for bumping into them or even being poorly-dressed in their immediate radius are busy working over their mortifying dysfunctions via noisy cell phone conversation. I guess when you've created a vivid, living, breathing city like none other before it, there's got to be something to help ease the guilt when you run some of its denizens over.