GTA IV succeeds where Bioshock didn't

I beat GTA IV last week, finally! I got the "Liberty City Minute" achievement for beating the story in less than 30 hours - though, I think extensive retries and loading had something to do with that. I probably put that many hours into it, overall.

GTA IV was a lot of fun. The shooting / combat system was much improved from the last GTA I played (Vice City) and made the "kill everyone at this location" missions a lot of fun. The occasional rampage also made Liberty City more pleasent - whenever some asshole driver hit me or my car by making a stupid driving move, I could just blow them up with a friggin' grenade! Who hasn't wanted to follow up a fender-bender with a few rounds of explosives? The minigames were entertaining (except pool), and I got really good at darts by the end of everything. Stealing cars and outrunning the cops is as fun as ever - grabbing a Hummer and running over other cars made it very enjoyable.

There were some parts that made the game a bit less golden. The physics were very frustrating on a number of occasions - as Zero Punctuation notes, slamming through rows of lamp posts, mailboxes and people only to be halted by the world's thinnest 2x4 really got on my nerves, and made some of the missions extraordinarily difficult. The car chases were very difficult, and often frustrating due to mixed up mission objectives: it would say 'take out these guys,' then give 'these guys' an invincible tank with perfect acceleration and handling. Really, you're just supposed to follow 'these guys' until they get to a more cinematic location. But trying to drive and shoot at them becomes impossible. Also, some of the missions were incredibly long, and having to redo multiple cutscenes on failure was pretty aggravating (bank robbery mission, I'm looking at you).

These are minor gripes, however, when you consider the story and what it succeeds at. It constantly puts you in up to your neck, and you can feel Niko's desperation as you try to dig your way out.

And, getting back to the title, GTA IV succeeds at something I have not seen in almost any video games - creating morally ambiguous choices. Most games which claim to "allow the player to make mature decisions" such as Bioshock, basically boil down to "Do you want to brutally murder this innocent person, or not?" Very rarely are there consequences (Bioshock promised these, but I found saving the little girls didn't make it any harder than killing them) for good or bad behavior, and very rarely do you ever feel confused about what to do. GTA IV breaks this. Several times in game, you're offered the option of letting someone you're supposed to kill go. Often, they're really slimy people who have it coming. That's pretty binary, but it gets better - two guys you work for, who both seem to play it straight with you, and neither of which seem like double-crossing dicks, hire you to kill each other. Which one do you kill? How do you decide? Even at the end of the game, you're allowed to make big decisions which alter the way the story plays out. It's really, really awesome.

Aside from the quibbles above, I only have one major problem with this game: there's nothing to buy! Niko and Roman are always trying to make it big - and you do! I spent half the game with $300,000+ because there was nothing to spend it on! No safehouses, no cars to buy, nothing! I got a cool suit, all the weapons & full ammo, then that was it. Once I had a huge amount of money, the game's plot stopped making sense - Niko was taking all these jobs to make money, and I'm like, "Dude, I have almost half a million dollars - why do I need this guy's measly five thousand?" I wish you could have bought more safehouses, or permanent car spawns, or buildings with missions attached (like in Vice City) - that would have added a whole lot to the game's sandbox appeal.

All in all, GTA IV was a freakin' blast, and very worth the wait and the money spent on it. Can't wait for the next GTA!

My 2 cents: Halo 3

Zero Punctuation has a particularly funny, if undeservedly harsh, take on Halo 3 here. I love watching ZP, even though he's usually very harsh on games that are high-quality and super-fun. But I'm not writing a review of our fast-talking Australian, I'm writing about Halo 3.

Story:
At a time when Half-life had just invented the concept of FPS games having a story, Halo did an awesome job of taking a simple story and making it awesomely epic. Halo 2 didn't quite live up to its predecessor - the story felt repetitive and somewhat hackneyed. Halo 3, on the other hand, brings back the epic in full force. You are part of a last, desperate force trying to save what little is left of humanity, and the pressure is plenty to keep you turning on the 360. It feels very immersing.

Gameplay:
The game plays pretty much like you would expect. You have to kill lots of aliens, and the strategy required by this task is what makes the game fun. "Run in and shoot everyone" definitely does NOT work, even on Normal difficulty - something my buddy Jaspar found out last night.

In Halo 1 and 2, I felt very much like a one-man show. Master Chief owns, everyone else sucks. In Halo 3, you feel like a part of something - in almost every level, the NPC's get as much crazy equipment and vehicles as the Master Chief, and if you strike out too far on your own you get squished like a bug. Well, except when you've got the tank. But you're required to be part of the attack force, rather than the attack force. It's a much more epic style of play.

On the minus side, it's a little short. I felt very satisfied at the end - I had gotten plenty of play out of the game, but some folks feel differently.

Graphics:
Duh. I mean, really. Certain details might not look as shiny and neon-awesome as Bioshock's characters, but Halo is set in the outdoors, whereas Bioshock was a corridor shooter. Halo's outdoor environments, which has been the series' hallmark since the first Halo, return in even more gorgeous form. With details like plant-mapping and spectacular water effects (watch what happens when lasers hit the h2O), Halo looks as pretty as a next-gen shooter ought to. It dares the Wii to try something.

Sound:
Sound is lush and gorgeous. I had the theme song stuck in my head for hours after beating the game. Voice acting is tastefully done, and enhances the game's story rather than detracts from it.

Summary:
Halo 3 is a great game. I haven't heard all the hype about Halo 3 becoming God and causing the Revelation or whatever - I've only heard people complain about how the game didn't live up to the hype. Since I didn't have any expectations about the game (except that it would be another excellent Halo game), I can say I came away from Halo 3 completely fulfilled. This was a totally worthy project.

Amazon's MP3 Download Store

Amazon just released their MP3 Download Store, and so far, it's been pretty awesome. While browsing, I actually found music I like, by artists who aren't exactly mainstream. ILS and Thunderball were in there, even with some of their newer albums. The Itunes Store has these CD's, but for $3 more and loaded with Apple's FairPlay DRM crapware. They're also sold at Itunes' standard 128kbps AAC encoding, as opposed to Amazon's 256kbps mp3s.

I've downloaded one song and one album off Amazon's service. They give you a free song for signing up ("Energy" by The Apples in Stereo -- subtle jibe, eh?) and I bought a cd of ILS remixes. 35 tracks of excellent breakbeats for $8.99 - beat that, RIAA. The download times have been surprisingly fast (about 5 minutes later it's downloading track #26, and I'd guess their servers are getting slammed today), and the quality is pretty good. Maybe not up to Beatport's DJ standards, but leagues better than what you'll find on typical p2p networks.

My only beef with this service is that Amazon requires us to download and install their downloading software. It's a small program (1.1MB on Mac), and it's well designed - pretty icons and an easy-on-the-eyes interface. The adding to iTunes is convienent, especially since the program leaves the mp3's themselves in an external folder for later reorganization. But it's still a little worrisome to have to install software to use a web service - Amazon's privacy agreement seems pretty straightforward, but do I really want to trust them with access to my applications folder?

I suppose for now, with excellent cheap, legal music at stake - the answer is yes.