The city is alive like Ocarina at the time seemed alive. That's still quite an ambitious goal and thinking critics reward it lavishly obviously. Have fun with the critiques, but I hope everyone enjoys it as much as me and Jack:

Though it is worth noting the guy who gave Jade Empire it's very obviously undeserved 9.9 is exactly who reviewed GTA4 for them. Iszk

That's not true unless David Clayman changed his name to Hilary Goldstein.

It's not like GameSpot doesn't have some scores it would like to forget, so what's the point? That GTA IV isn't perfect in the absolute sense (we already knew that) but that GameSpot is perfect? I'd like to see that argument.

Thanks for IGN review. :) The reviews are a middle ground between trying to read everything or avoiding everything.

Gamepolitics said Take Two at their shareholder meeting revealed that they've already seen numerous reviews and they're all perfect. Metacritic and Gamerankings still have just the one review up.

http://gamepolitics.com/2008/04/17/t2-shareholders-meeting-reveals-perfect-review-scores-for-gta-iv/

The poll is funny but not as funny as the arguments flowing from it. It certainly doesn't show American parents think violence is ok for kids.

I won't make fun of the poll because I know American law has similarities to it. But don't kid yourself, this is insulting (again) Americans, when the console makers are the reason you don't have sex in video games. The papers reported there won't be graphic sex or nudity in GTA IV.

I actually tried to understand, UpInFlames, your threads on sex in video games. Not even a wikipedia entry. Just one old book and an old website by its author whose last thread died years ago. Quite frankly it creeped me out and the avatars of the people posting there looked like Fester from the Addams Family.

I personally am not wasting my time anymore.

RE 5 is where the controversy will be this generation.

Violence is a significant aspect of the human condition and the reasons violence and death are explored in gaming are largely the same reasons these concepts are exploited and examined in film and literature: because people are fascinated by the taboo of violence and the stark, unrelenting finality of death.

Virtual violence is a benign issue as far as I'm concerned because ultimately, it hurts no one. People who want to turn this issue into something malignant do so at their own peril, as such mentalities can lead to censorship and the prevalence of ignorance, something this world simply does not need any more of. If a person has a moral objection to the content of a videogame then they can exercise their right not to play it but as to the issue of content and acceptable levels of violence in the medium as a whole, those decisions should always be left to the developers and artists.

Grammaton-Cleric

That was simply superb.

There is a difference between violence and "violence" in video games, and we're complex human beings. I play video game "violence," but this weekend wrote the following article because UCLA's Final Four run is a chance to spread the word about John Wooden. The others standing up for "violent" video games are similarly complex. Tell me how I'm wrong?

What I would give for a basketball video game based on John Wooden.

http://www.squidoo.com/coachjohnwooden

This man should be applauded for his refreshing honesty on this board.

I think you'll be alright, for one thing you have very good insight into your own mind and honestly examine yourself. For another thing, many go through a period like that. I certainly understood you.

Anyway, I enjoyed your post.

Thanks for those reviews. :)

Gears did have a great intense story and characters. It was just short.

I was looking for the article but I wanted to respond even though I couldn't find it.

It's embarrassing that Ken Levine doesn't admit how much he stole from a novel and movie, Sophie's Choice; the doctor lady with the accent is Meryl Streep, the impossible choice was from Sophie's Choice, loads of BioShock were ripped off from there; Wikipedia lists a lot of other books and movies Levine stole from. Most of all, Ayn Rand made for a great video game, just as her Fountainhead made for a great movie. So when he calls himself a writer, so are all the high school and college students writers who plagiarize their essays and term papers. I myself was a writer in college. :)

Sophie's Choice is worth seeing. At least Levine had taste.

But Gears did have a great story although I believe AtomicTangerine's point was it was balanced with gameplay, with gameplay most important. The characters in Gears were fantastic; they were quirky too, although I never got a solid answer why they were all built like Arnold Schwarzeneggar.

I think this prejudice against people like Kojima, who started as a non-programmer who was made fun of because all he did was come up with goofy ideas that were never made into games, until his idea for a game based on hide-and-seek where you don't blam everything, and Miyamoto, who also wasn't a programmer, was the same in comic books or graphic novels, where cartoonists used to argue about Alan Moore, a comic book writer who used artists, versus Frank Miller, a man who can both draw and write better than almost anyone in either field. There was a lot of prejudice against Moore and for Miller among artists, and this sounds like the same bogus argument, because the truth is Frank Miller never said that, it was only the cartoonists who were jealous of Moore's writing ability.

As a side note, the scariest day of my life came when I first found out about google image and wanted to see a picture of the great Alan Moore. Don't do it. :o

I agree this isn't a Spitzer like case, where Jack got caught telling Dtoid to rape a child, but he needs something for that dirty mouth of his.

Ex-Governor Spitzer was the most serious threat to video games, and the hypocrisy exposed in that case, although staggering if you knew what Spitzer was up to as Attorney General, seems to fit all the anti-video gamers. If a non-hypocrite who knew what they were talking about came along, I bet we'd all listen respectfully, even if we disagreed. Find me such a person.