THE LEGS!

neeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeerd

Mods or no, San Andreas was and will be the best GTA game ever made. GTAIV lost the ball entirely. Not only was the story made more down-to-earth, it also lost about every single sandbox element San Andreas introduced to the series. Character development? Actual use for money? A fucking jetpack? All gone.

San Andreas was amazing. First thing you are thugging it up in a ghetto and just when you are lulled into thinking the game is about thug lyfe 4eva it throws a fastball and you are suddenly running away from a whole platoon worth of gangsters, riding shotgun on a motorcycle while a damn 18-wheeler follows you in a viaduct all T2 like. And this is only about 1/3 into the game.

I understand what GTAIV tried (and succeeded) to do but I can't but feel that something irreplaceable was lost in the process. Good thing Saints Row 3 continues where San Andreas left off.

At least Saints Row 3 hasn't gone grimdark and serious.

I don't get all the hate for GTAIV; it had excellent writing, graphics, gameplay, music. Even the voice acting was superb, which is almost unheard of in videogames.

Sure it's no San Andreas but, aside from just mindlessly parroting Yahtzee's complaints, it was great in its own right.

Indeed it was a great game. It just didn't wasn't a great sandbox game preceding games in the series were.

If you want to experience the GOOD GTA4, just ignore the core game and get the Tales of Liberty City version, which is just hte expansions. The expansions are WAY better than the core game...the writing, characters, and overall atmosphere is way more like a traditional GTA game. I think Lost and the Damned is better than Gay Tony, but they are both easily much better stand alone games than the original Niko/Roman one.

I'll tell you why people hated GTA4.

One, the roads and bridges to the other places were blocked off until you got a certain amount of missions done. People were lenient with that shit in the older games to some extent, but this was supposed to be huge.

Two, the stuff you did that was supposed to be fun and cool was just really boring shit. Who wants to play a video game where their foul-mouthed Russian cousin keeps nagging them to play darts sometime? And you go on those dumbass date scenes because you pretty much have to, and the characters and experiences are flatter than hell.

Three - they took out a lot of the "cartoon physics" that made the game fun and made things way too realistic. If you're used to playing GTA3 and the expansions you're used to getting away with shit you just can't do in real life, like looney toons driving where you never fly out of the windshield and you can drop the car off a cliff and it just keeps going. GTA4 made things too real, to the point where it wasn't fun and there was no sense playing the game with any sort of bravado.

Having said that, they kept in things that were really stupid from the old games, like other people falling in water and drowing. Seriously, they finally made it so the main guy could swim but no one else can, apparently. Water is instant death to anyone but the protagonist. That's bunk ass shit, man.

They also kept in the really annoying "follow the dot" mission play, and the ways to fail a mission that you can't know are going to make you fail until you end up failing it. Like you have to get out of a car and go on a footchase after a guy who will run up some stairs. If you get out of the car TOO SOON and go off and kill the guy like you're supposed to, you can fail the mission because you were away from the car too long and now you have to do the car chase and foot chase and kill the same guy all over again. You weren't supposed to leave the car until the game told you to! D'oh!

Now, San Andreas and GTA3 and Vice City had their fair share of these problems, as well, especially the very last mission in San Andreas, which, I'll admit, I strongly hated, but with all the hype and newness GTA4 was suppposed to be bringing to the table, you'd think they'd have corrected that. What a lot of players end up with is driving around for a while running over pedestrians, wondering what they're supposed to be doing, wondering why his cousin keeps calling to ask about darts, wondering why I should care about Bimbo number 5 and her hobby of bowling, and then wondering where the cheat codes are so you can crash a helicopter into the park before you die. The rest, I guess, is a matter of preference of style. For me the humor tries too hard to be potty-mouthed, there's nothing good to listen to on the radio, and there's no such thing as just causing some casual havoc anymore. If you get so much as a ding on someone else's car it's practically a death sentence.

Then again, some players are masochists and it's right up their alley.

Worth it.

Well done. Better late than never!