Grand theft auto 4: is doing crime worth it in the end?

If you gather a group of XXX rated hardcore videogame freaks in a room, but why would you; it might take a minute, it might take an hour, it might take all night but someone is going to blur out a racial slur.

...now loading...

...now loading…

Jesus christ, this is taking a while. I’ll go make a cup of tea.

...loading…

Oh it’s bugged out, back to the start then. Grand theft auto five warrants a full, luscious and silky review. Horns, trumpets and maybe a bass guitar for that swing slam hit. Shame i’m not doing it today, the loading times are too long and i’m not skipping steps. I’ve not reviewed a gta game since the edge of 2017 but that will by no means break my stride.

So now i need to do a check notes jokes to *checks notes* maintain a facade of spontaneity. Right.

Have you ever been driving along a busy highway only for your car to, without warning, spin out, roll, catch fire and then explode… ruining your no claims bonus and forcing you to drive a fucking micra that smells like cigarette buts and an acrid vanilla haze. This is the Grand theft auto four experience. I used to think it was just my club hands awkwardly smashing the controller as my voice broke and I realised boobies were a form of high art but have since found it to be a universal motif.

I played a lot of this game during my formative years, so take it from me when I say the cars handle like hot ass. Not that i’ve had much occasion to handle hot ass, but well, you’know.

The game is grey and dreary. Is the name of the prompt I was using to outline this paragraph, i thought it succinct enough to use as an opener. In terms of design it peak 2008 gritty washed out dreariness.. Which means none of the game’s scenery really stands out for me in any meaningful way, despite me knowing my way around town even now. It’s like learning your way around a bog, a very relatable experience for all my readers I'm sure, you crettins.

The game was kind of a pain in the ass too. It was a lot of driving, go figure, well no let me take that from the top, no? Well i will anyway, driving at triple digits along some kind of lakeshore drive while swerving in an out of traffic, such things are the prize opale of the experience but what gta4 had was traffic, more jams than a lonely grandma’s pantry and toll booths to boot. They hit the realism cue right on the nail’s head and drove it through the sternum to rupture the heart of the fun, killing it, fairly dead, not to be revived.

Well that’s if you don’t want to be shot at by pigs, which lets face it, we’re all kind of hoping for at this point. I had an officer of the law waltz into my work 5 minutes before closing.

“We caught you just in time” he said.
“Am I being detained?”
“Well you don’t close until 10 right?,”
“Don’t try and mindfuck me pig, i know my rights,”

When you do a crime in the game, any crime the popo come around and try to bust you up. This was the days before Immigration and Customs Enforcement, so the law was generally armed with low calibre weapons that gave the criminal a fighting chance rather than the modern drone strikes that level a block in baltimore twice a week. Don’t ask me to cite a source for that i made it up.

This is when the game is at its peak, the thrill of the chase, the eternal dogged pursuit that pits man against man in the game of the deadliest… game. The more you do a crime the more they send black vans and helicopters to swat you in a section what would make news editors pants pop up like a teepee. All of which is entirely freeform as set you your choice of soundtrack via the radio. The game even has the option to switch to a cinematic camera that swaps between low angle shots of the cars wheels and top down views that will almost certainly lead one to crash.

The story mission were frustrating. Yeah, that point makes itself, a lot of it was fun; but it’s the dog turds in the punch that ruins the party for all the guests, who now have roundworm: the larvae of which can cause blindness.
That being said missions and the story of the game were entirely secondary to its appeal. Weirdly enough a game called grand theft auto makes is mark with… bowling.

That’s right, you can go bowling, you can take your friends bowling and they will try and out bowl you, it’s a striking minigame that’s real show stealer, I'm split as to whether it’s revolutionary or just utterly outstanding. Niko, the umm.. Player character, can be down and out having just had the ass kicking of his life, then in a fit of pure impulse, spend the next three days bowling his life out until he plays the perfect game.

This review is getting a bit girthy so let's wrap it up with the next paragraph.

The end.

Steamy sales and Burgess shales. When it's cold, it hails and out comes the snails.

As I nibble on a pan au chocolat, piping hot and fresh from the oven, I become concerned with, another nibble, the dread baron of gaming events that has begun today, or possibly yesterday while I was out. In 1909, Burgess shale was discovered. It contained fossilised creatures from a time early in earth’s history, the Burgess shale contains many unique and bizarre specimens which science, in the intervening century and a decade, has failed to turn into a living Lazarus theme park. Representing the largest failure of frog DNA to date. This however pales in comparison to the real shale, the steam sale and it’s ongoing circus of spending memes.

Okay, so in my talking about this i am in fact drawing attention to it’s happening and benefiting gabe by doing so. Most people, and use the term loosely because I am referring to journalists, which is also fairly loose because i am referring to videogames… let’s start over. Troglodytes can content themselves with knowing the foot traffic they get from their topicality if what keeps the lights on in their subterranean swamps.

That itself is an oversimplification, but one I am willing to use because the written word with all it’s infinite combinations of corncob whiskery was not designed for nuance. Oh god i’ve invoked my mystic word of total smug. I guess we have to go deeper.

The meta discussion about that is and isn’t news, in relation to riding popular events and dwelling on community staples, like the steam sales, has been a wing of self aware troglodytes corncob whiskery since some point, i’m not really sure when, i’m not going to do any research for this paragraph so just take my word for it if you like. Or don’t, it doesn’t matter. I might be “Writing to persuade,” but like a gcse student in an english exam really i’m just trying to get through this without farting too loudly.

Right so as I was saying, the steam sales, yeah nothing really jumped out at me this year. When I was a child, I thought as a child thinks and brought things in much the same way a child does. Impulse buying is now something I consciously try and avoid, though not always successfully, I recently splurged on a reduced 9p carton of yogurt. The guilt for which is still haunting my dreams.

You see the issue is, and this is my gripe with the whole reporting on open events, that the reporting replaces having your own dumb thoughts with another tossers dumb thoughts, or worse having two sets of inane thoughts about the same thing. It doesn’t matter how many sets of babble you’ve read about the latest episode of whatever. Not in the sense of there is no intrinsic value, or that there is more meaningful things one could be doing, but that doing so isn’t additive to the experience. That’s not my opinion that’s a fact!

That being said, not all topical content is inane, there are some really good bits of media analysis out there. None of which start with “top 5 hidden gnomes in the new spiderman trailer”
I am currently refusing to look up any reviews or articles pertaining to the show I am currently watching, instead i just think about it a bunch because i am really sad, but also because I think I'm better than everyone else and have a general disdain for modern media trends.

Deep down i’d rather have spent the last page splurging out about how into this show i am, well not even that deep really because i am explicitly fucking telling you that.

Social media buzz implies we are all bees, honey bees or bumble bees it doesn’t matter. we all do our complex honey dance pointing each other towards perspective sources of nourishment. In this analogy I am a fumigator whose equipment doesn’t work and hence has had to resort to spitting phlegm and bile on the hive.

Destination E3: phantom plain

9:16am, i’ve been up for about twenty minutes. Hopefully the today’s topic will come to me as i void my bowels. It’s left me whole but broken. The curry from last night, won’t. stop. hurting. It’s been nearly at least 9 months since i finished playing metal gear 5: the phantom pain, i had planned on doing a review sooner, then again, i planned on having a readership and we both know how that turned out.

Let’s jump back in time to the 1984, big brother is everywhere, well no not really but they do have a 1984 reference…. FUCK, boring, boring review boring thing. we need a resolution not a another pissuptripewalk of cesspit effluent, such a thing is not affluence it’s tired and desperate cry of the mind yet to gorge itself on the mindfuel on morning coffee… it’s 10:05am and the goose is loose.

I want to talk about graphical comparisons on games. With E3 bearing down out neck like some demented swan snapping at our tongues. it’s time to stop taking names and start drop silky hot waxy facts. THIS IS NO LONGER ACCEPTABLE



A picture is worth a thousand words and not adding a figure for images brings back memories of my supervisors shouting at me. Here we see the greatest electronics expo had to offers. Simply : graphics are a lie and i’m here to prove it. Sure okay, that might be a fluke, one dev decided to take the weekend off or came in lit Thursday afternoon and tried to hand out his phone number to the company cat, but what matters is this is systemic.

Above we see the ground pounding action rock’em out shooter and microtransaction slagfest Player’s unknown’s battle’s ground’s. The only difference here is the white balance which i could have fixed on gimp if it wouldn’t have broken my writers flow, like a turd, in more ways the one, the goal is one long unbroken chain of grammerless mass that coils around the edge of the porcelain white and refuses to go down when flushed.

Flushed is what these graphical updates look like and therefore should be, i mean they speak for themselves or they will if you have text to speech enabled but that would be a bit too much like pivoting to video for a journalist of my integrity (my voice is annoying, i think we all knew that already.)



Look at this, all they did was make the lighting lighter, that isn’t graphics, i mean they both look pretty bad to honest but i don’t see how this is a remaster. It leaves me with a shrug. I may sound outraged, well it’s because i am. For year i’ve argued, quite rightly, that graphics don’t really matter and technical innovation is only useful in how it can be used to deliver a better experience, it ain’t a goal in itself.

Okay fine, i got got kind of excited about making shots of graphical updates look worse by lowering the resolution to shit therefor making the image redundant. The prior 513 words were a loose justification of having done so, i am blatantly willing to lie to your face in order to push some made up images to you that’ll have no bearing on the product that will be shat out in crunch and because of that this is the real E3 right here. (what is subtext?)

My intuitive guide to going pro

I was at a gathering of friends the other week; quiet in keeping with my persona, it look place under a bridge. That’s not a bad opening line, shame i ruined it with this needless comment immediately after.

So, at said gathering we were, as one imagines, sitting in total morose silence while the spiders ate our legs, or maybe we were having a chat, not exactly groundbreaking. Someone, not to name names but they were a plebeian, decided that video games weren’t a valid hobby. Well not exactly they said: “Being very skilled at a video game is nothing to be proud of and shouldn’t be sought,” which got me wondering. What about video games, is being very skilled at a video game nothing to be proud of and something that shouldn’t be sought? If only i had a format with which to express thoughts on the top.

Back, whenever; some kids, science kids decided to take this here mouse and jam a bunch of electrodes into its skull. Sounds funky right? But it gets weirder: they gave the mouse a button, two in fact; one gave the mouse a snack the other gave the mouse a F’ed up mind blowing orgasm by directly stimulating the region of the brain that dealt with it , thereby dispelling any notion of extraphysical existence, I.E the soul, and killing god like a stoned bird in midflight. All the while leaving the mouse's face twisted up and tongue out like some deprived hentai.

Well, scientists being scientists, the way they rigged it up every hour the mouse had to choose which one to press, the mouse died, never once choosing food over a good long hard hentai face; but that’s not the point here. There’s a find of moral intuition about artificial pleasure being wrong or less worthwhile, when asked if you’d prefer to be hooked up with the pleasure electrodes or just go on living most choose the latter. I’ve seen the look on those little white mouse faces and knew what i’d choose.

That’s an extreme case but the shades of it colour our discussion around games. Because the conditions are arbitrary it feels less real. Give me a standard football any day, along with a regulation size pitch, with clearly designated markers, roles, timers, movement rules, technicalities, restrictions… leagues, preconditions, referees and equipment and i’ll show you how to have fun.

I know this sounds like a lot of thought just to justify being a fucking cretin who would have continued being a cretin regardless but you’know. You’re right, that is a perfectly valid criticism. There was no substantive outcome for the task i set myself which i took to be a challenge of learnt skills and decision making ability from which i might derive a sense of validation from, just as you will have by forming any opinion on the above text.

That is how you deal with criticism: Bullshittery.

So should i hook myself up to the pseudo orgasm hole of becoming a pro gamer? Is there anything to be said for its emerging role as an entertainer like on twitch? Well i’ve not looked at twitch hardly, character flaw i know, but i might have some musing on becoming pro.

LOL YOUR SHIT M8: most people (me) aren't very good at games, of those that are only fraction of which are suited to competitive play. We all like a good kick around but just because you’re a pretty good kicker of balls doesn’t mean you should go pro or let it take up time from your otherwise pitiful mess of a life. I don’t need to make your hobby less valid to make you less of a cretin, you’re a cretin regardless. I hate your dreams, everything you do will turn to ash, achievements will spoil like rotting fruit in your mouth as you savour your feeble pyrrhic victories over a vast uncaring world… i baked a cherry crumble.

From all this you might think i’m fairly content with people gaming and feeling fairly good about it, but if the tone of the above paragraph is any indication then y’all know that ain’t hapn’in. Valid, yes; practice, less so. The mouse died after all, in a monotone existence. You’re more than just a joystick smasher, doing a variety of different things, that engage different sense and styles of thought… is something i’d recommend if i was a self help book, i’m not; clearly i’m a cretin so let me scream into the cosmos while clapping my hands “WHERE’S MY DEADLY BRAIN ORGASMS”

Alan wake me up inside.

There is a pigeon singing gutturally outside my window, the loud fucker isn’t getting their bread handout for a week, to the squirrels go my toasty crusts.

Horror, it takes many forms, like when you misjudged the gaseous quality a fart, forget someone's name or come face to face the entities whose existence renders your own meaningless and more fragile that the flame of a candle as the last droplets of wax flow away. I myself am trapped in the horror of my own fickle memories, i could have sworn i’ve done a review of Alan wake before but apparently not, it could have just been that i intently focused on doing so, maybe one afternoon during a thought shower, i’m not adopting modern terminology there, quite literally showers are great places to mull things over because nowhere else i am free to cup my lathered scrotum in peace, it’s a kind of freedom that promotes free thinking.

The Game: could you make a game out of a stephen king book? Is the premise of this game, not the narrative premise but the actual intent. For those struggling with the difference, the narrative premise would be me going to the shower to think, while the intent would be to cup my lathered scrotum in peace: a sentence one ought never have to read twice.

Set in a sleepy new england town with a terrible monster living in the lake, a writer; with writer's block and presumably a twitter account that see’s the lion share of their typing efforts, goes to get their mojo back, by living in a cabin on the lake side; so they can get over their twitter addiction and actually write something... but WHOOPS, he accidentally writes the creature in the lake into existence and the pages of his new book starts playing out around him. Can he spoiler himself by finding the pages in order to stop what is going down… Maybe.

In terms of metafiction mindfuck the game is fun enough to float through the narrative beats of a pulp novel, which is aware that it’s a pulp novel, also a game; and takes some measure of glee in being a touch on the cheesy side while retaining that capacity to drive genuine fear into the player. Like when someone knocks on the door of the bathroom to ask about your thought shower when really…

The monster is your evil shadow eldritch kind of thingey and so you can only kill an enemy after shining a torch at then, naturally the game plays up the contrast between light and dark more heavily than a silhouette portrait. Upon rereading this i realise silhouette portraits are really out of favour in a world when you can snap chat your lathered scrotum to just about anyone, using a glass of wine and flew clicks. Fortunately i don’t phone.

On top of that the enemies are just townsfolk that have been possessed by the shadow which makes you real monster? Both ammo and batteries are sparse, the classic trick to making everything all the tenser and on top of that the safe points, under street lamps, occasionally cut out just to stop you recovering too much from the intensity of the shadow shit show floating around you.

If memory serves there are some pretty good bits of storytelling going on here and the action is never truly overwhelming if not a touch repetitive, if anything one gets a bit worn out from being so tense all the time.

I didn’t finish the game, not because it was bad or anything just didn’t manage to find the time when i played it a few year ago, which is maybe why i held of on a review for so long but if they’re truly aping stephen king, in the true and time honoured fashion, then the ending wouldn’t have been that good anyway. It would just sort of peter out, tired, kind of predictable. Limping on to a, belated, slow… finish.

Alice: madness returned? or just another dose of Ritalin required?

At some point we all find ourselves through the looking the looking glass. The original Alice in wonderland, the story by Lewis Carroll, who else, has become a staple of popular tropes. The Alice allusion crops up just about anywhere that things might get the slightest bit surreal. It doesn’t take a great leap of imagination then to expect that it was remade in the last decade by Tim Burton. That film was about as good as the red queen would be as a hairdresser or as a flamingo is as a croquet mallet.

But we don’t talk about films here, because the we is me and i’ve no time to deviate from my strict schedule of video games, hattery and tea parties. At the centre of all three lies a Alice: madness returns, a 2011 release that took the whimsy and childlike awe of the original and sanded it down to a grit laden grim ‘psychological’ edgy...thing. This is not an uncommon occurrence for many works of fiction, least of all for Alice in wonderland whose tvtropes pages lists this as a “frequent target of grimmification” the page then reminds readers of the all the dark jokes the text has, pointing out this is hardly surprising.

The game itself is mostly a bit of platforming, light puzzling and some ‘use the weapon that thing is weak against’ combat thrown in for good measure. It’s not really the thing we’re here to discuss and that’s by design, the game never really wanted to be more that a vehicle for this aesthetics of an edgy alice in wonderland; hence it didn’t really try. It wears black rim glasses with no lenses in them. It has suspenders that hold nothing up because it’s wearing a belt. It has a personality about as interesting as porridge and has tried to hide this by stating ‘controversial views’ it’s a teenager’s alice in wonderland.

Exactly what one would expect from alice in wonderland for teens. Now at this point one might rightly expect that i don’t like this game, but i do. Not massively, but i had a good time with it, just not a good enough time to make me forget my criticisms after 5 years. Teenagers with personality like porridge aren't the worst. They’re boring and vexing at times but otherwise one can see the quality in them, knowing this is just a phase for them and the making of something good is within.

So in this version of events, taking place after the book. Alice’s house burns down, and she is now living in an orphanage with some therapist who is trying to cure her of the madness. Meanwhile in wonderland there is a giant cathedral train bringing ruin by ummm… ruining everything with muck and oil. Making all the characters from the book go more loopy than usual. This all culminated in peak ‘psychological’ edginess when at the end we discover the TheRapist is actually The Rapist who burnt Alice's house how and is now trying to erase her memories to make her a into a child prostitute… lets take a breather for a minute to let that sink in.

Even in ludicrous abstract i find mental fuckery disturbing so it actually hit a note for me. The edginess of it if anything was a detractor to the gold that lay within. Madness, you see, has two sides to it in popular imagination: Psychotic behaviour and creativity. In reality the relation is non existent. Alice in wonderland is read both ways, hence a gritty sequel naming itself madness returns, but a remake by burton emphasising the power of imagination and creativity. HA, there was a reason i brought that film up earlier, not that i planned this it just worked out neatly. For a moment i could almost convince myself that the game knew the difference and was exploring it, then it went on to talk about creating child prostitutes using hypnosis and it kind of lost me, along with all sense of credibility towards being self aware.

The game went for it’s teen edginess over any true sense of horror, which it inadvertently stumbled into nonetheless. The porridge boys and girls have an amazing capacity to blunder into good things while aiming for something not very interesting. The history of treating things thought to be mental illness is full of true and skin crawling nightmare fuel. The use of mass lobotomies, electroconvulsive therapy to ‘cure’ homosexuality and the treatment of the female orgasm as a defect were all hallmarks of the time in which the story was set.

Children experiencing auditory hallucinations often report their voices being of a kind and positive nature. This changes in adolescence when the voices become altogether more sinister and grim. I don’t mean to imply too strong a linkage but one can see the analogue here. That alone is the basis for a compelling aged up Alice. Instead they went for the most tweedledum version they conceive, urggghhh.

Post scriptum: the deadly mind trap at the heart of it all.

After words have failed, there will be only blood shed. I’ve been drafted...ing this review for a while now, that’s a lie but so is the glory of war. So who’s the real monster here? Still me? Okay fine. Let’s hear from someone else for a change:

“Hands down best WW2 on the market at the moment. Very immersive with some of the best sound and visual effects of any game. There have been frequent content updates and optimisation improvements and I have never had trouble finding a full server (UK based)”

This was a friends summary of post scriptum. I told them i would feature it and well, i’m true to my word, rarely. I could describe PS as squad set in ww2 but then i’d have to explain what squad is and give a run down of world war two and only one of those things will bring me any joy and it’s the unnecessary one that will bloat the word count.

Point the first, “the best world war 2” this quote is key to our understanding of subjectivity. The second world war has happened precisely once, multiverse and other plothax not withstanding. So to say this is the best one is to hit on some key, he misspoke. No it’s all about simulacrum! The event has been transcribed and repeated many times over in it’s various depictions none of which themselves are the war but which give us a lense with which to view it... He probably just misspoke. Misspoke? Mistyped, mistress bonbons candy cane rod? Sorry i got distracted for, reasons.

Head count up in this female dog, how many world war two’s are the? Post in the comments below #engagement, don’t clog up my pristine comments with your tripe.

So with that question laid to rest we can move on the point in question, immersion. A topic that makes me want to drown myself because i am overly literal, edgy and suggestible. The game has no narrative to speak of, so what are we being immersed in? Immersion is really just bypassing that critical aspect of mind that reminds one they are staring at screen smashing a keyboard when there is washing up to be done. Easy enough for someone suggestible like me or you, but gets harder (sorry) for a normal person.

The graphical potato of the game is certainly quality, so it can’t be that giving me the immersions, sorry anyone who likes graphics, DING DONG you are wrong. What's in the game that’s so immersive then? Well i’m getting to that if you’ll stop pestering me but i didn’t want to say it straight out or without context because that wouldn’t build up a set of expectations and experiences around the text that can be played off for dramatic effect.

So when you load into the game, you join a squad, like in squad, each player having equipment suited to their role, in the case of standard infantry, you don’t get anything special so nothing is lost when you’re moan down by a 42 from the next bush over, or flattened by a coax of a panzer, or mortared, or friendly fired by a misplaced grenade. Then you may lie on the ground waiting for your medic, who is also dead for one of the above reasons, so unable to revive you. Then you can walk for ten minutes because the logistic team parked the respawn truck on a landmine.

The game's diversity of roles and need for cohesion is the difference between this and a normal FPS. You can’t do achieve on your own by design and victory always goes to the better organised team rather that who is the best at 360 no scoping, which are both things i am terrible at and your tongue doesn’t fit in your mouth anymore, why is that?

Which brings me onto tank crews, you seen fury? Yeah i liked it to. It’s essentially that but much less flashy. You drive looking through a letter box, your turret turns slower than a clock face and the only way to spot anything is for the commander to poke his head out and risk eating an 7.92×57mm Mauser general-purpose buffet. It’s rude crude and the most novel fun i’ve had in a video game in some time. All the clunkiness and awkward shouting over the microphones builds up a tension that makes every encounter terrifying. As you rush to spot the enemy before they can blow you up. you miss a shot, and some truck gets away? Now the German army know where you’re at son. So high tail it out at 25 mph while bullets rain on down.

The team sizes too, are just large enough to give a sense of chaos to the cohesion, like the cold sensation now running up your legs. One speaker can’t direct all so command chains form, this is made more messy by the need for radiomen to keep up the broadcast and to call in mortars or planes. Respawns and extra defences can be set up by an already mentioned logistics crew, which isn’t just for show. Put supplies and sandbags in the right configuration and you can take a turn being the lawnmower of infantry for a change.

Because of how feeble each person is, it takes on a horror-like quality. One man in csgo can take out a whole team but one man can’t win this war. So at once you are vulnerable and need to trust your team to win, this is a recipe to get someone invested.

Realism in many games is putting about putting obstacles in your way to reflect real life considerations, in post scriptum they reproduce the war in your own psychology with the simple mechanical operant conditioning of teamwork good, rambo bad. Never has being a rat been so appealing in order to experience the favour of a time that will live in infamy.