I hated GTA4, popped it in to play it again after months and...

no tanks, no planes :cry: Seriously, again, GTA4 and its other stories/expansion (L&D/G.T) pwns any other GTA to date. Ignore the fact that it lacks a plane and a tank and look at how detailed and alive the world is. And if your from NYC and go out often, you will really feel at home because R* nailed the personality of NYC. Borough from borough. Do something in the gaming world, hear it on WEAZELNEWS or read about it in the news after a mission. I remember one time outside of a mission, I blew up a car with one of those bombs that Packie gives you. Minutes later on the radio, you hear "car explodes near Purgatory." Literally when I play the game, I also see and hear something new.

The controls have improved drastically for GTA4 compared to San Andreas. I am still puzzled as to how someone cant agree on that. Last gen GTA, the controls were horrible. They improve in GTA4, yet so many cry about it. One user here said that turning right in a car is a pain due to the camera not centered. Really? As for the physics,look at the car physics for example from San Andreas and GTA4 and tell me which one is better...

The story, no other GTA story is as deep and well connect as the one in GTA4. Vice City and San Andreas dont even come close. The characters were also the most convincing and memorable. Dont agree, well then what about Brucie :lol: ? I'm sure everyone remembers old Brucie. The characters that played a convincing role are Playboy X, Dwayne, and Packie. Niko was also cool.

The Phone. Look, I admit, the calling the friends thing was a bit over the top but guess what , just like a real phone, you can turn it off. If it gets in the way of a mission, skip the call.

Lastly, the fun factor. Like i've said already, literally every time I play, I see and hear something new. Be it an incident with a ped or some detail I missed earlier. That allows me to keep on playing. Blowing things up is fun, setting up races is fun, playing online in GTA game modes are fun. Heck, plain old exploring is fun. People say no one still plays GTA or lacks interest, well then why is it in the top 6 on LIVE (or so it was a two weeks ago when I last looked).

The bottomline is that I understand it got a 10, and with a 10, there will be a huge hate crowd right behind. It improved the series, and imo, for the better. Cant wait for GTA5! If you miss the over the top, crazy, nonsense gameplay, there is an option for you this gen. And that is SAINTS ROW.

I know, its imo.

[QUOTE="thelastguy"]

San Andreas was a lot better

Lucianu

Yeah, i consider San Andreas to be the pinnacle of the GTA series, trully a incredibly fun game. But only for now. Just like GTA III first appeared, and like VC and SA improved on it, the same will happen, hopefully, with GTA IV, and with later installments improve on it..

I dislike the game due to its way of taking itself to seriously, and fails. No fun at all.. i couldnt even finish it. Unfortunatelly, though i really tried to like it.. , i can't help but say to my self that this is the worst GTA game.

disagree, i think vice city was the pinnacle of the series. san andreas was a big step down in terms of characters, story, fluidity, immersion, atmosphere etc. it was much more quantity rather than quality, jack of all trades master of none etc.

gta iv was a welcome change for me but, like san andreas, had its fair share of faults, its just i could put up with the faults of iv much more than i could the ones in sa.

still, after the superb bogt im optimistic for the next installment of the series

lack of checkpoint itself makes it a huge letdownfunsohng

I recently got rid of that game myself. I had it since it came out and never finished it. I don't even think I got halfway through it. I too would pop it in from time to time to see if it was any better, but every time the gameplay made me hate it more. I've never played a game that felt so sluggish and unresponsive that people praised so much.

I gave it away to one of my fellow board members.

To me it felt like GTA3 2.0, and that was an amazing game.

I guess Im one of the only people that actually loved GTA 4. Its in my top 5 favorite games of all time.

disagree, i think vice city was the pinnacle of the series. san andreas was a big step down in terms of characters, story, fluidity, immersion, atmosphere etc. it was much more quantity rather than quality, jack of all trades master of none etc.

gta iv was a welcome change for me but, like san andreas, had its fair share of faults, its just i could put up with the faults of iv much more than i could the ones in sa.

still, after the superb bogt im optimistic for the next installment of the seriesMacutchi

I'm not surprised, there are a great deal of people that consider VC as the pinnacle of the series.

I consider San Andreas though as the pinnacle, also consider it to be a big step up in terms of everything, the 90's atmosphere was fantastic, as was the gameplay, the amount of vehicules, detailed game-world, and the immersion. And, because i always loved Scarface, i will always have a soft spot for Vice City, which i played and finished a .. well, more then i could even count, using so many mods. I basically know the game inside and out.

To each he's own.

[QUOTE="funsohng"]lack of checkpoint itself makes it a huge letdownspliff_man

The worst thing about this game is the controls, it pretty much ruins the whole experience for me. It's so slow and the poor framerate doesn't help.

[QUOTE="TheEroica"]

Hated it even more... What a peice of garbage this game is... The only reason im making this thread is because I want logical discussion and understanding as to how this game got the praise it did. forget the gamespot 10, just over all how did no one call this game out on the terrible broken gameplay the horrible cell phone interface and the wonky infuriating physics? I know its years after the fact and GTA4 has been eclipsed by dozens upon dozens of games, but truly this is one of the worst games I have played this generation. I gave it an 8.5 when it released... its way worse now. anyone agree? I know im not taking crazy pills.

GoreyFeldman

GTA 4 is one of the most detailed, most atmospheric game this gen. Far greater than any other GTA game including Vice City and San Andreas. Yes, greater than San Andreas and Vice City. It also had the deepest, well connect story out of all of them as well. I know, im one of the few in gamespot forums that thinks GTA4 deserved every bit of praise it got from gaming websites/journalist. Fuhgeddabouditt

Its one of the few games I own. That I still haven't finished. It just bores me quick. But its still a great game.caseypayne69

I find it funny that you say it would have been an 8.5 when it first came out but yet you say say you hated it. Ace6301

I absolutely hate the driving physics. Cars have suspension made of silly string and cornering is like turning on soap.

Yeah, I hated the game, too.

I loved where the story was going, but the wonky controls made it unbearable

I thought it was awesome, but it's been over 2 years since I played it.

I have a hard time believing that it's one of the worst games you've played this generation.

mD-

I have a hard time believing that it's one of the worst games you've played this generation.

mD-

Yeah, unless you are incredibly spoiled and have never touched an actual bad game or even average game, and if no one did that people would miss out on gems and personal favorites.

[QUOTE="Macutchi"]disagree, i think vice city was the pinnacle of the series. san andreas was a big step down in terms of characters, story, fluidity, immersion, atmosphere etc. it was much more quantity rather than quality, jack of all trades master of none etc.

gta iv was a welcome change for me but, like san andreas, had its fair share of faults, its just i could put up with the faults of iv much more than i could the ones in sa.

still, after the superb bogt im optimistic for the next installment of the seriesLucianu

I'm not surprised, there are a great deal of people that consider VC as the pinnacle of the series.

I consider San Andreas though as the pinnacle, also consider it to be a big step up in terms of everything, the 90's atmosphere was fantastic, as was the gameplay, the amount of vehicules, detailed game-world, and the immersion. And, because i always loved Scarface, i will always have a soft spot for Vice City, which i played and finished a .. well, more then i could even count, using so many mods. I basically know the game inside and out.

To each he's own.

exactly (his own technically ;) ).

for what its worth i absolutely loved the opening sequence of missions of san andreas and when you discover the great plot twist of big smoke and rider's betrayal in the green sabre mission i honestly thought it was gonna top vice city.

but then it just all went downhill so quickly and i just couldnt stand what came next. pointless mission after pointless mission, endless driving and a whole load of other issues i wont even bother mentioning

[QUOTE="mD-"]

I have a hard time believing that it's one of the worst games you've played this generation.

SPYDER0416

Yeah, unless you are incredibly spoiled and have never touched an actual bad game or even average game, and if no one did that people would miss out on gems and personal favorites.

▲ Agreed man. I don't like GTA games either. But for some reaon R* games always get good reviews. ▲

I wouldn't go so far as to say the game was garbage. The city was beautifully constructed and had a lot of detail to it. I didn't find much complaint in the physics to be honest, and I don't see why so many people complain about the driving. That said I was definitely disappointed with it.

I liked some of the characters, but I just didn't like Niko much. I mean how do you expect me to like a character that doesn't want his life to revolve around violence anymore, only to keep continue doing it as time goes on. I understand the whole thing about protecting his cousin, but it went way beyond that. You can't help but feel that everything that transpired wasn't so much because of the circumstances Niko was in, instead he was the one to blame(which imo made him a total idiot). It's difficult to create a character like Niko in a series like GTA, so I can kind of go a bit easy on it.

I liked the driving, I liked the city and I liked the shooting, most of these elements were most definitely improved in this GTA, but the flow and pacing of the game was horrible imo. The mission structure was down-right monotonous(even in comparison to other GTA), which imo made the game become an extreme bore half way through and the character development and story only got worse as the game went on. Sure I didn't end up liking Niko much, but I feel that had the game centered on Niko's story and developed his character from there, that the repetitive mission structure would at least have been a little bit overlooked by me.

What started being an interesting story about Niko arriving in a foreign country and life, wanting to escape the past he had left behind in his native country, ended with him working for a lot of random characters(who the game projects as garbage, though Niko for some reason isn't) for the sole porpuse of gaining money. As Niko's past unraveled, I just kept losing interest in it; still, my problem wasn't just because I found his past story uninteresting, but how it was told made it even more so. The game shifted from Niko's story, to complete irrelevant characters and situations and by half the game, within all these irrelevant characters, Niko's story became almost lost and irrelevant in itself.

The buddy system was awful, I reached half of the game and stopped giving a damn to it(didn't do it sooner, because I didn't really know if any consequences might later have been elicited in game).

I still think the game maintained quite a lot of the satire known in the series, but I simply didn't find it as charming as the other games, mostly because the game tried to convey a more serious, adult story than the others. In this way a bit of what I've always found brilliant in the series was lost: A huge open-ended virtual world built solely out of satire(something I've never experienced before in any other medium, and probably never will). Still, GTA4 had followed on a lot of what has made the series great imo.

I ended it and I couldn't shake this feeling of extreme disappointment, it started out great imo with lots of potential, but it just didn't end up as great from where I'm coming from.

to each his own, in my humble opinion GTA 4 and its DLC episodes represent the best we've seen this generation bar none in presentation, playability, consumer value and replay value.

when this generation ends in 2016 game historians will look back at Bioshock 1, Halo 3 and GTA 4 and its Episodes as the high water mark.

The worst thing about this game is that it got a 10 on Gamespot. You quite simply cannot look at that score with a straight face. It's just wrong.

I disagree. It's an excellent game, though I did enjoy SA more. Both are 10s in my opinion.

I played vice city recently and I say that game is better than GTA4. GTA4 seemed awesome at the time but I think it's just because the game world was crafted so well that it distracted me from the truth. I give GTA4 props for that massive city that is more alive than ever. The game itself is not that great though. Ballad of Gay Tony was better, but it's still GTA4 at its heart. The people that compare BoGT to Vice City are out of line

I played vice city recently and I say that game is better than GTA4. GTA4 seemed awesome at the time but I think it's just because the game world was crafted so well that it distracted me from the truth. I give GTA4 props for that massive city that is more alive than ever. The game itself is not that great though. Ballad of Gay Tony was better, but it's still GTA4 at its heart. The people that compare BoGT to Vice City are out of line

GunSmith1_basic

Other then the cover system which is WAY sticky and outdated and the 2 year old graphics, the game has aged pretty well. I still have loads of fun just messing around with the world and having online standoffs.

I have a hard time believing that it's one of the worst games you've played this generation.

mD-

[QUOTE="mD-"]

I have a hard time believing that it's one of the worst games you've played this generation.

SPYDER0416

Yeah, unless you are incredibly spoiled and have never touched an actual bad game or even average game, and if no one did that people would miss out on gems and personal favorites.

[QUOTE="mD-"]

I have a hard time believing that it's one of the worst games you've played this generation.

ocstew

GTA4 sort of struck me as a glorified tech demo. It was as if Rockstar spent so much time and effort just getting this thing running on consoles that they forgot to make it fun. Certainly the game is a stunning technical achievement, and I have always appreciated it as such; however, although it's not "garbage," it definitely lacked the over-the-top humor and action of previous titles. Red Dead Redemption took what Rockstar learned, I think, from the development of GTA4 and improved it accordingly. The engine feels much more sharp and polished. Graphically it's much better. Even if you didn't like the game, there was much more to do in the game aside from the main story. I imagine the next GTA will be a fantastic return to the cartoonish, over-the-top action and mayhem that made Vice City and San Andreas some of the most entertaining games ever made. Like I said, GTA4 was a tech demo.Jared2720

the gunplay and ai in last gen gtas were a joke. gta 4 has gunplay on the level of a 3rd person shooter. the ai makes even current gen sandbox games look like a joke. mission failure is much less forgiving than the old gtas since you dont have to restart from your last save at a safehouse

Worst game I've played in five years, on the PC. So buggy, unoptimized. Killed any respect I might have had for Rockstar, it shows that they really don't care about their PC fanbase and only are willing to work for their consolites. Lethalhazard

I really enjoyed GTA4,not as good as San Andreas IMO but it was still a good solid game