Last month I was given a bottle of whiskey and GTA IV as a birthday gift that's when it all started. I find myself unable to stop playing the latest installment of the Grand Theft Auto series (serious gamers just refer to it as GTA or so I am told). I don't consider myself to be a "gamer", perhaps "gamey" at times but since we purchased our XBOX 360 last Christmas I've mostly stuck to Rockband and Guitar Hero. Having mastered those games and become a serious musician, I thought why not try my hand at being a petty criminal. GTA IV is my first foray into 21st century narrative driven games.It's really interesting how my game play has evolved. At first I didn't really know the city or where the hell I was half the time. Not knowing how to fight and being pretty terrible at driving, I was pretty tentative a little bit paranoid of screwing up and getting arrested. After completing a few missions you start to make new friends and even start a relationship with a dumpy dull naive OCD midwestern girl. In between missions you have opportunities to hang out in bowling alleys, bars, pool halls. The little games within the game like tetris, bowling, darts, pool are kind of fun and at first as a character trying to be invited up for a "warm cup of coffee" is exciting. After a while, much like real life the dates get pretty tiresome. You feel sort of obligated to drive to various locales around the city so you use the GPS and start to drive a bit faster, especially after getting busted or crashing the car a few times you realize there is very little consequence, it is a lot like Groundhog Day.
The only downside to screwing up is it can just get really frustrating repeating the mundane driving portions of the missions. As you accumulate more weapons and outrun the cops a couple times I became less patient and way less careful. The first trip to the strip bar or time with a prostitute is amusing just because your curious how nasty the game is going to get. Overall it's pretty tame. I'm at the stage now where I drive everywhere as quickly as possible and try and get any non mission related interactions over as quickly as possible. How quickly I have degenerated into a callous hardened criminal. I find it spilling over a little bit into my daily life, walking down the street seeing someone leave their BMW running while they run into a convenience store part of me is really tempted to hop in and take it for a spin, not good.
I'm about 20% complete, but I expect I should be able to make a lot of progress in the next couple weeks now that I've figured out the basics provided I stay on the straight and narrow path.
