Grand Theft Auto Liberty City Stories: Oh the story games, capitalizing on already created assets that can be easily utilized for telling a different story with minimal effort. And I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing, it's nice to have a game that takes you back to Liberty City again especially with a few extra added things and you get to play as an okay character.
Liberty City Stories is okay at best. The game plays similar to that of San Andreas but with the smaller environment it works out better. And they get to utilize a few of the fun toys they got from San Andreas as well. Overall it's kind of an interesting as you're just traveling over the same territory and the graphics look kind of off again because they're using a more modern engine. Or if not a modern engine that at least a more modern version. But hey you get to play as Tony that fat guy from the first GTA 3 game who kind of sits around and acts like an idiot. There's a mission in that game where he's on the radio talking to somebody on the Chatterbox station. But he's also sitting next to you in the car. I guess they couldn't be bothered to remove that part or just didn't think it through, or more realistically just didn't care because it wasn't that big a deal. But with that nitpick out of the way.
It's once again your standard GTA story. Your a thug although you're not at the bottom of the food chain you're more in the middle. Who's working for a mobster who's trying to reestablish your dominance in the city. it's a little limiting given that you can only really work with the mafia and you're never truly against them at any point even when your boss suspects you of being a traitor. They can only play with the story so much because your character has to survive in the end. You're in a future game after all, so if anything it's just a bit of backstory for an already-established universe.
you're certainly not missing anything by not playing it, but it's still nice. As stated before going around Liberty City again is fun .
and there's this wonderful indo-western Asian radio station that plays mainly music from India but the occasional old 70s and 80s Lebanese music. It's a lot of fun, of course it's on and every cab car because every cab cars driven by an Indian cuz he got to keep that stereotype alive.
Grand Theft Auto Vice City Stories: Well if Liberty City Stories was fun to play than this one's kind of a drag. Vice City Stories is more or less the exact same game, only the ugly Graphics really hamper your experience compared to the original game. You play as the character who makes absolutely no sense with the original game because you were some a fat Colombian looking dude who dies at the very beginning of the first game.
the missions aren't that fun, at all the joy that you had with Vice City is just kind of sucked out. Everything's ugly, a lot of the areas aren't properly developed yet. You don't get to have fun with any of the real story because you can't destroy any of the true power houses that are here. It's another prequel game that's hampered in by an already-established story.
And this game loves to remind you that it's the 1980s. In a really pushy and obnoxious way. The original game didn't have to do most of that, mainly because it was just trying to be a movie from the 80s. So it just went off and already established aesthetic. But here they want to tell you about pagers and how cool it is to be in the future that is the 1980s and all that kind of crap.
this game also has some pacing problems. It takes forever to get anything done, you can't just start playing the game immediately cuz you're stuck in this military base doing other crap. This was a little bit of a problem in the last game and it was also a problem in San Andreas. All these games have slight pacing problems. They don't just let you get right down to the business and enjoy the game for yourself. They force you through a linear section and then let you enjoy the Free World. Which is a really misleading way to start your game.
And just like in Vice City you get to own businesses in this game too. But they're all the exact same business. And they don't really do anything or add any interesting missions. They're just there to get money and a pad out the game. Which initially isn't the worst thing considering this was a PlayStation Portable game which was just meant to break up time. But any other way of playing it just feels tedious especially when the place is continuously get attacked by other guys and stop you from getting the main game done.
It's best to avoid this one.
Grand Theft Auto IV: Here we are the Modern Age of gaming. Grand Theft Autos grown up and it's joining the rest of us. And it first I really wanted to like this. I was kind of on board for Grand Theft Auto going in a more realistic direction. We had already seen what it it done with over-the-top zany games and it was time to enjoy a new line of GTA.
And as environments go it does okay. We're now in New York City, they call it Liberty City but it clearly is just the actual City now. Which isn't a bad thing. I like the idea of going around a real place and countering actual problems and realistic people.
And the idea of playing as a sloppy guy who's not an over-the-top murderer but instead of kind of innocent man whose just lived bad life and is now trying to escape from all his former Problems But ultimately being pulled back into that life is intriguing to me.
I like Niko Bellic, I like how he acts like his General backstory he was a character I'd like to see a novel based on (maybe just a novelette). But we encounter a major problem here. You can tell me all you want that this is a troubled character, that he's trying to repent for past sins and make his life better. But it's still an open sandbox game that gives you the ability to do anything. And the second I can go up to some random lady and stabbed her in the face of a knife all that character drama kind of melts to the Wayside as you realize your character is no better than any of the other Psychopaths.
Now part of this is the fault of the player, nobody told you to stab that lady in the face you just went and did it. But it's still conflicted with a story that acts as if you're trying to avoid these things.
however none of this matters because of one horrendous problem. The gameplay, now when you're just wandering around or driving your car and doing your own thing it's okay. I don't mind the more realistic cars or how their weight . I actually kind of like driving these cars. Driving at high speed turning your car to the left and seeing the suspension lean with you as your car turns is kind of cool. I like that certain cars brakes squeak when you activate them or how even the littlest scratch can be seen on your car. But when you put all this into a mission it becomes incredibly stressful. Especially because we still haven't escaped that old GTA tradition of if you die in a mission you go to the hospital and you have to start again. And if the game was slow before in the days of San Andreas and beforehand it's super slow now. It takes you forever to get anywhere to do anything.
And the fun and Intrigue of the environment quickly loses its appeal as you attempt to redo the same mission for the third time in a row. I got about halfway through this game before I decided to start cheating. Because I just couldn't do it anymore. The idea of dying at a point so far into the game and then having to redo that entire Mission Again was just Dreadful. So I did technically complete this game, but not without cheating.
And it's a shame, I love what this game was trying to do. I like their characters I like a lot of the serious tone. I would have loved to seen certain aspects of this game explored farther. And the amount of tiny detail is amazing. But it's a video game, and no matter how good the story is or how much I like the environment but core mechanics of the game don't work with the story aspect of the game. And it makes the entire thing worse off.
And much like San Andreas this game has a lot of secondary activities for you to do. Some of them involving friends that you can go on dates with and the activities are okay, but they can take a little too long to do sometimes and you get Mighty bored of them real quick. That's all so annoying that you can't really stop your friends from constantly interacting with you and there's this whole buddy system thing that goes up or down depending on how you spend time with them. And it becomes really annoying if you're just trying to play the missions. Once again just on its own in free roam they're not bad. Especially because I like most of secondary characters. I like all their little backstories and all the little details you could learn about them. It flushes out the universe so much.
There's DLC for this game where you play as other characters. There nothing great either they have a lot of the same problems, if I remember right I think it would start you at a certain checkpoint during certain missions so you could avoid some of the stresses of dying as opposed to the original. But the biker guy is not that interesting he's just kind of there. And I actually kind of like the guy from The Ballad of Gay Tony. But he hangs out with these two thuggish guys who are so goddamn annoying and so up their own butts that I just didn't want to help them. They were scum characters that the main character setup avoided with all Prejudiced. And I wish the game would have given me the option to execute the two idiots so they couldn't ruin anyone else's lives with their horrible horrible decisions.
GTA V: The grand Improvement many have claimed. It brought colour back to the games, made Vehicles more entertaining and brought back some of the zaniness that that's serious game just didn't have. And for all the good this game does. I ultimately have similar feelings to it. It's just kind of there. All the driving mechanics are great. It's flat-out the best game to just drive around aimlessly in. And I love just being a taxi driver and taking people from one destination to the other, or playing a game of golf. Or driving around in my late 90s sedan painted in the most creamy beige I could find. In other words just being boring middle-aged North American man is kind of fun.
And that is what I'll give this game. As game mechanics go it's the absolute best.
It runs smooth, there are checkpoints where you need them so you don't have to keep going back to the hospital time and time again. And if you really screw the pooch the game can that you sometimes skip a certain Mission. I've seen people complain about this, I don't see why. It's not like it's compulsory you don't have to use it.
However there is one absolute glaring flaw. And this was an issue in San Andreas and it's kind of an issue in GTA IV as well. The environment of the game doesn't matter to the actual missions. That is to say you can't utilize different directions or different techniques to achieving a mission. The whole thing feels incredibly streamlined.
And that just feels really annoying when you're an open world game. It's not just Grand Theft Autos fault, the Saints Row games do this too. In fact I think they did it even worse. And yet I'm more forgiving of those games. Funny how that works.
It's one of the reasons the environment is so much lower on my chart for this game. Because it all timidly doesn't matter towards the actual game. It also doesn't help that it has one of the most boring settings of any Grand Theft Auto game. The city of Los Angeles is not interesting. It is a very boring very basic City, and every 15 years it looks completely different. Now before anybody thinks that I'm purely bad-mouthing Los Angeles I do want to stay at the city I live in doesn't look that different from Los Angeles. It to is a boring spread out city that changes every 15 years. There's little-to-no interesting architecture and there's nothing that really captivates you to want to explore it. Now the forest in the game look okay, and I really do like the desert. But there's only so much you can do when half of your game is the boring City. And it bugs me because America is full of cities. Far more interesting cities than this one.
Heck why not a new city in a new country. Something like say Berlin in 1989 right before the Wall came down. You could use it as a game mechanic spend half the game on the west side and then when the Wall comes down you got the East Side to explore with all the CD Eastern European crime and Incredibly weird environments that would come out of it.
I don't even remember the story to this game. You have three different characters which is kind of nice for variety, but their personalities aren't distinct enough to make me care. I guess at the end of the day I don't mind and Michael is a character he's kind of fun to play as especially if you give him the golf course and pretend to be middle-aged man. But the other two are just kind of boring. Yeah the one guy's a psychopath but whoopty freakin do.
every character in every Grand Theft Auto is a psycho. I don't see why this one should seem so different. I do kind of like the customization for them in this game. The ability to give him all interesting clothing and the car customizing is fun too. That's actually something I forgot to mention when talking about San Andreas. You could customize your clothing in that as well but it took for freaking ever to do. This game at least quickens the pace on that. It quicken's the paste on a lot of things. Which is a step in the right direction. I just wish they had something really fun they could do with it. The best place in the whole game you can only spend 10 minutes in and that's the first 10 minutes of game when you're in Fargo town. I don't know what the actual towns called but it reminded me of Fargo, I wish you could go back there. I'd love to have a Grand Theft Auto game that took place in the snowy Wilderness. Why not. Take a chance do something weird.
Anyways that's my long-winded badly worded rant on all the Grand Theft Auto games. The whole thing was only supposed to be a few paragraphs long that went along with my little chart.
So because the internet loves list I'll put my games out best to worst ''Maybe''. I wonder if it'll match the graph?
1. Vice City: The overall Golden Goose. 92% Great
2. GTA 3: The solid overall video game 98% Good
3. GTA V: Best taxi simulator 90% Good
4. Liberty City Stories: Dance Raja dance! 85% Fine
5. San Andreas: One huge world 50% Average
6. GTA IV: You can surf the Internet 60% Fine
7. Vice City story: Golden Goose is a poopin 60% Lame
GTA List 1
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