Alright, I’ll admit it.  I’m a Grand Theft Auto fanatic.  I’ve played them all to exhaustion.  I’ve bought games such as Mafia, The Godfather, and True Crime: Streets of L..A. on the mere promise that they were similar.  I have pre-ordered Saint’s Row even though I don’t even have an Xbox 360 yet.  Maybe addict is a better word.

To say the announcement of Grand Theft Auto IV has got me excited is a bit of an understatement.  It has also started me thinking about what I’d like to see in the game.  Some of my ideas are (in my opinion) pretty solid; some border on the edge of silly.  At any rate, here’s the list…

1. Continue with the current “universe”-I’ve heard rumblings about Rockstar retiring the current group of characters and cities.  I really hope they don’t.  I want to know what happened to Donald Love, Carl Johnson, Tommy Vercetti, etc.  Many characters’ status hangs in limbo since the end of Grand Theft Auto III (chronologically the last game).  What happened to Joey Leone?  Avery Carrington?  Woozie?  I want to know.

2. Set the game in the current time period-GTAIII is set most recently.  The next edition should be set in the present day.  If Rockstar is really planning to retire the current universe, then one more game is needed to tie up all the loose ends.

3. Return to the Mafia-inspired roots-Don’t get me wrong, GTA:SA was a mind boggling game in every sense (except visually).  But for some reason, I didn’t get into the story of the game with the same intensity that I did with GTAIII and Grand Theft Auto: Vice City.  Had the series started out gangsta, I might have been a little more receptive to the cast of GTA:SA.  But, I found myself wishing I was back doing muscle jobs for the Mob.

4. Make Grand Theft Auto IV completely all-encompassing-Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas showed that an enormous game world was possible…on the PlayStation 2.  With the power and capabilities of the next-generation hardware, why shouldn’t you be able to be assigned a mission in Liberty City that takes you to Las Venturas, with a pit-stop in Vice City?  Rockstar briefly experimented with this in one mission in GTA:SA. 

5. New city: Carcer City-Even if they were to use the current cities in GTAIV, they still need new geography to explore.  Carcer City (from Manhunt) is tailor-made.  If you pay attention to the radio broadcasts in the previous games, you’ve heard several mentions of Carcer City.  And while, theoretically Chicago/New York (Liberty City), Miami (Vice City), and Los Angeles/San Francisco/Las Vegas (San Andreas) are represented, there hasn’t been a tough, gritty Cleveland/Detroit/Pittsburgh type of city.  A little bit of expansion and remodeling and you’ve got yourself a new city to destroy.

6. A speedometer and gas gauge in the cars-The speedometer is one of my sillier ideas.  Wouldn’t everyone like to know about how fast they’re going as they rip through rush hour traffic to elude the police?  The gas gauge would add a bit of strategy to the chaos.  You’re running from the police and you jack a car, but it only has a quarter of a tank of gas left.  Do you get as far as you can?  Or do you ditch that one and try to find a car that will get you a little farther?  Gas stations can be a form of extortion income.  The possibilities that a gas gauge will open up are actually quite extensive if you think about it.

7. Get rid of the RC missions and the municipal vehicle missions (or at least make them optional instead of critical to 100% completion)-I’m tired of saving bleeding people, driving people around, putting out fires, delivering pizzas, etc.  They’re a nice way to make money, but getting to level 12 on the Vigilante-type missions are part of the reason my hairline is receding as quickly as it is.  And the RC missions are usually so clunky to control that they become more irritating than they are worth.  While I don’t mind blowing up cars with little remote control bombs, flying a tiny RC plane around an entire town to machinegun full sized vehicles ain’t my idea of a good time.

If Rockstar stays true to form, the next GTA will find new ways to blow our minds.  By waiting almost a year after the release of the PlayStation 3 (and two years after the Xbox 360), they should be able to push the systems to their limits both visually and content-wise.  With all the extra stuff that consistently gets packed into the GTA games, a 200-hour experience wouldn’t surprise me. 

While no one knows what Rockstar will do with their next installment in the Grand Theft Auto saga, I do know one thing: I can’t wait.