During the recent RedCardGroup reunion podcast (which is somewhere on Brendon’s computer, slated for a release date of three or more weeks ago), I expressed my disappointment for Grand Theft Auto IV. I’d played through the core game a few months ago, and I was incredibly disappointed by the change to the traditional format of the series. Prior to Grand Theft Auto IV, I’d played Vice City, San Andreas, Liberty City Stories and Vice City Stories, so I had experienced a substantial amount of the series and was looking forward to a next-gen upgrade and a story with dark humour and loads of classy film references.

However, somewhere between the GTA 3-era games and the GTA 4-era games, Rockstar seems to have lost a lot of the sense of fun, chaotic mayhem that their games used to embody. I have many fond memories of Vice City, and accomplishing missions in the most bizarre ways possible. There was one mission where your friend - Lance Vance - is being held hostage in the city dump inside of a large shed. You could drive into the dump, or you could take my strategy and hijack a military helicopter and crash it - missiles firing - into the doorway of that shed. It was chaotic, and ridiculous, but a lot of the fun as being overpowered and creative in a giant sandbox city.

I don’t view GTA IV as a sandbox game, because the creativity aspect has been tremendously stifled. In most missions, you are given a specific car to use, and if that car explodes, you fail. You cannot come to the mission prepared with a durable vehicle or a speedy vehicle. You must use what the game designers intended. Without the creativity aspect, the game tends to fall flat in many areas. Missions are very heavily scripted, which is occasionally exciting, but also frustrating.

Vehicles all handle so sluggishly and even piloting helicopters is a chore. The game definitely took more of a gun-focused gameplay style while abandoning the trademark driving style gameplay.

Since I made a lot of complaints in the podcast, I have played one of the DLC storylines: The Ballad of Gay Tony. The reason that I played it was because it looked most like Vice City. It certainly had a lot more epic moments and creative missions (though many were still restrictive), but the parachute aspect was kind of cool. The storyline was definitely satisfying.

Yet, with all the good changes that came with the Ballad of Gay Tony, the bad changes appeared alongside. Each mission in the Ballad of Gay Tony is scored based on how well you did against some unknown list of required actions in a mission. Some of them are as simple as completion time, but others include how enemies are killed. This stifles creativity extremely, and was a huge disappointment throughout the DLC. Even when I was satisfied with how awesome a mission was, when it told me that my completion statistic was 60%, it eroded all of the pride from the mission because I didn’t shoot enough people in the head, or didn’t duck at a specific time (this was actually a completion statistic in a mission).

If Grand Theft Auto continues to change in this fashion and have very specific mission objectives to be accomplished in a method that is scored, I will be very disappointed (and will probably stop buying those games or playing them altogether).

Also since the RCG podcast recording, I’ve had a chance to play and beat Pokemon White and rather than boring you with a long post, let me just say that the only good thing about this game is the fact that TMs can now be used indefinitely. Everything else is awful.