5. Grand Theft Auto IV
When
Grand Theft Auto IV came out, there was at least one day in the office in which every cubicle had a different radio station blasting, a different gunfight occuring, and varying degrees of police sirens blaring. Few games have effectively shut down the office during business hours, and
GTA4 is one of them. It would be easy to lose track of what's improved in Rockstar North's sequel besides its beautiful depiction of the Big Apple, but the difference between
GTA4 and its predecessor
GTA: San Andreas is vast.
Sterling: Miguel has only recently taken a break from dumping on Will's effusive
GTA4 review. But I have another piece of praise to heap on
GTA4: It's the only game in the series that I truly relished playing all the way from start to finish. In my opinion, that was due to Rockstar North's choice to force just one mandatory racing mission on us all. I felt
GTA4 lacked the looseness of past
GTAs and simply played better.
Will: Come on, we all know the game's Oscar/Pulitzer/Nobel-worthy! All joking aside, I still think that
GTA4 is an absolutely amazing game from start to finish, with some of the best writing in recent memory. Sure, there's plenty of the racism, homophobia and misogyny that is rampant in every other game in the series, but there's also a layer of emotional depth in the interactions between Niko and his fellow Liberty City residents that hasn't been seen in a
GTA game before.
Sterling: I definitely agree that there's a humanity to the proceedings that wasn't quite as pronounced in the gangland tales of past
GTA games. Usually, the games consisted of your character reacting to some wacky person during pre-mission cut-scenes. Niko does that, but
GTA4 provides you with more choice (friends, "business decisions"), and therefore, more humanity. There's a big exception to that toward the end that I found distasteful, but generally,
GTA4 does a great job with trusting you to make choices that affect Niko.
Will: While
Grand Theft Auto IV was a great game in and of itself, it's the future potential that's really got me excited. From what I've heard from some folks at Rockstar, they're almost viewing the game as its own platform that can be developed and expanded in the coming years.
The Lost and Damned is a great example of this, and I really hope that we see more standalone vignettes set in Liberty City in the coming months and years. Now that the sandbox is in place, I don't think it's too much to ask for RockStar to let us play in it for a few more years, is it?
Sterling: After seeing what
Burnout Paradise did (and is still doing) to expand its universe, I truly hope that we'll see Rockstar work more within
GTA4's world in the future. The environment feels far too vast and wonderfully constructed for there to be just a single DLC pack.