Last week, I finished Grand Theft Auto IV. All in all, I’d have to say that it wasn’t as difficult — and definitely nowhere near as out-and-out throw-your-console-out-the-window frustrating as its predecessor Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. This is fine by a casual player like me, who got in a few hours’ playing every week, with one marathon Sunday afternoon. Now it’s time to take the online multiplayer part of the game for a spin.
Game Design Essentials: 20 Atari Games is a long (23 pages!), thorough but incredibly fascinating look at games from the time when Atari mattered as a videogame company. Back when they were something, they weren’t afraid to bust out of the genres of the time, take chances and come up with some innovative, experimental and sometimes mind-bending games with unique touches, right down to that unmistakable bell sound whenever you inserted a coin into the machine.
What if Grand Theft Auto IV had come out in 1990, for the NES? The ad would probably look like this:
“In the past, Grand Theft Auto has been severely criticized for being too violent,” says Conan O’Brien. “Well, the new version — I got it yesterday and was playing with it — it’s been toned down a lot. I’m not sure it’s better…”
Here’s the only way that the game Portal could be improved: by adding Chrostopher Walken to the mix!
Click the picture to see an even larger version!
Here’s a first in a series of regular updates on the just-released and much-awaited Grand Theft Auto IV…
In some of the dialogue between Niko and Roman, they switch between English and (I’m assuming here) Serbian. The bits in Serbian are asides that aren’t crucial to the story and can be inferred from context, but if you really want to feel like Niko, you’d like to know what they’re saying, right?
The solution is simple: just turn on subtitles (you can do this from the Game menu). When they speak in Serbian, the English translation will appear in grey text.
For those of you who haven’t yet had a chance to try out GTA IV, here’s another video showing the next 10 minutes of gameplay (the video showing the first ten minutes is here), featuring:
Here’s something from Fargo’s Thought for the Day, which is included in GameSpy Daily, an email newsletter from GameSpy:
Thoughts on Sandbox Games
Since around the time that Grand Theft Auto 3 and The Sims came out, the phrase “sandbox game” or “open world” has seeped into gaming literature and even into marketing speak. It kinda drives me nuts, because a “sandbox” in and of itself isn’t very fun. It’s easy to screw it up.
Ask any game designer and they’ll tell you: if you put a person in an open world, where they can do anything they want, they spend a few minutes testing the limits and then he or she will get bored. The real trick to these games is to provide a lot of directed gameplay even if people don’t realize it. The object of an open world is to let the player set his or her own agenda, and then to provide tons of cool gameplay once they decide what to do. Sims 2 is a great example: you can do whatever you want, but no matter what decisions you make for your characters, you’ll always run across interesting mini-games or tough decisions to make in order to accomplish your goal.
Of course the Grand Theft Auto games have an overall story that you can work through via a series of directed missions, but even when you go “off the rails” and start freestyling in the sandbox world, you’re never far from the guiding hand of a designer encouraging you to collect something, discover something, set a new record, kick off a minigame, etc. Few design teams can do an open world right — but when they get it right, the experience is spectacular.
Grand Theft Auto IV Goes Out at Midnight! Games stores all over Toronto are opening for an hour at midnight to sell the hotly-anticipated and universally praised next installment of the Grand Theft Auto series of games. If you’re in the Toronto area, all Future Shops and EB Games will be open at midnight, as will the Yonge/Dundas Best Buy. For more on the game, check out the IGN Review and the GameSpy review.