Grand Theft Auto IV -- It might feature crime and prostitutes.

i like how much more visceral the gunplay is in this one though it kind of cuts down on the pleasure taken from murder sprees.

i really appreciate that it draws a best route for you to take on the mini map, so you don't have to keep switching up to the big map & thinkin' about if you have to go left or right & getting lost. It's a big help. I do however wish the mini-map was a little bigger. I guess they didn't want to take up a lot of screen real-estate, but that thing is too small

did you get a copy, jim? I had a real nightmare trying to find one

-- czn

Ended up not being able to go out looking at lunchtime and had a doctor's appointment straight after work. Working 'til 6 tomorrow as well. Might check on my lunch hour but doubt anyone will have either a) Still stock left from yesterday or b) will have had a restock of it since selling out yesterday.

The long national nightmare continues.

Actually might just get my friend to do a certain not quite legal thing to my Xbox so I can play it tomorrow.

love:
- the in-car SatNav/GPS on some of the fancier cars
- toll bridges!

Aah, I think you get extra stars if you don't outrun the cops quickly enough.

i also really like the cover system. like everything else in gta games, it is not perfect but running from car to car, spraying bullets at the police, trying to make it to the alleyways to effect your escape... nice.

satnav does offer some crazy routes sometimes (but perhaps r* didn't fancy spending a lot of time coding a cutting-edge system).

I think I'm getting way more lols out of the multiplayer right now. Cops n crooks is still the best but the races are pretty fun. And try and do a deathmatch in the airport... where there are three helicopter gunships available.

Also the only station I've been listening to is The Journey

lol, same here.

finally opened up the second island, the place is pretty awesome especially when viewed from a chopper.

I found some armour on the beach but fuck knows if i can remember where abouts.

I'm adoring the combat system, the cover feature is brilliant and the last few missions I've done with it have felt really satisfying to complete.

Almost smashed it to be bits though, for the mission where go get a car for Brucie. He's fucking hilarious!

gawd i just can't be arsed to do the 'dates' with my contacts, am i going to miss out on anything?

but i kinda like LJ and so last night i agreed to go play pool with him, but i was stuck on the second island. I thought I'd try my hand at using the subway, so out came the foldaway map. After completely going in the wrong direction I ended up in uptown. Then scrambling around subways looking for the flippin J line, by which time LJ had cancelled.

I tried ringing him back for a game of darts, but he blew me out lol.

this game is too real!

body armor in Broker: take road East from Soldier Monument (i think that's what it's called - the one with the circle around it) and on the first block there's a Y-shaped alleyway to your left. inside that is a building with a gate out front - go inside the gate to the right, and there is a respawning body armor tucked in the corner.

Thank you!

Ste, you definitely want to keep up the friendships in the game. I don't know about the other guys or the gfs, but Roman gives you a free car service you can call from anywhere, and LJ will show up to a location you specify with a trunk full of gunz.

Thanks, I got Romans, but he still rings. Do i have to keep taking him out, will he take away the free car option if I don't?

LJ sounds more useful

I do however wish the mini-map was a little bigger.

as someone who always gets completely overwhelmed by these sandbox games I could not agree more. it would also be convenient to have active locations made a little more apparent on either the minimap or the actual map - I missed a date with Michelle last night b/c I was driving around like WHERE IN THE FUCK AM I EVEN SUPPOSED TO BE GOING WHAT ARE ALL THESE ICONS WHICH ONE IS MICHELLE WAS I SUPPOSED TO TURN THERE ARGH

but then again I make no claims to be anything other than a GTArd - is there a way to set navigation points like in Assassin's Creed? and if so, will the GPS plot a course for you to it/them?

Yeah, go to the map and you can set a waypoint, then if you're in a car it'll plot the GPS route.

Heh, I've just worked out what the hidden packages are :).

I've just been blowing all my money on taxis - I must've laid down £2k at least today on taxis alone

man at Game told me today they won't be getting stock again till two weeks time, at the very earliest. yikes! hoping to snag a review copy this weekend, but otherwise - the dudes selling the game on amazon marketplace, they're a bad idea, right?

this is pretty fun. i'll have to take the day off tomorrow so i can really dig into this.

oh hell yes my package just arrived so I will be on tonight, hoping to slay a few of you bastards

I re-post - for those of you on PS3, my name is DenaSmith

Lets go kill some people.

as usual my ps3 just can't see my broadband, the same problems occured with my psp. oh well.

yes, i now have over 10 hidden packages. fuck there's a lot.

i enjoyed this game a lot tonight.

that motorcycle gang mission was hard! had to re-do it a bunch of times.

best moment so far, head-on crash with some other car, both the driver and passenger fly thru the windshield simultaneously.

SPOILER

was that the Mr F mission? Mine ended with a shoutout in a park, my bike ended up with no tyers.

big sesh today whilst i'm off. I have already a lot of ideas i want to check out.

haha last night, I tried to take LJ out for a drink in my helicopter but ended up slicing him up with the blades trying to park it. Then five minutes later he rings me asking for a lift from the hostpital, so we were cool again lol.

fucking love street races, the high performance cars are shit hot.

Mr F = Mentally Retarded Female?

SPOILER

yeh the faustin motorbike mission was tricky!!

SPOILER

brucie is hilarious but I coulda done without the bait and switch no homo mission. the game really blurs the lines sometimes

SPOILER

fuck manny

SPOILER? not really

So I just completed the kill Lyle Rivas mission after about six tries - by the end I was ready to kill someone IRL. Reminded me that I actually have a love-hate relationship with this game, and man that was one hateful mission.

And Ste is otm about the relationship management. I wish people would stop ringing me all the time! I keep on feeling pressured to do stuff when really I just want to spend all day driving around like a bastard.

Just like real life!

IGN and 1Up went talked about how great the story was...don't know what I was expecting but it's the same embarrassingly bad dialogue as is found in the GTA3 sequels. GTA3 got it right by making the main character mute.

I don't know where this "bad dialogue" thing is coming from, as the games from III forward seem to do just fine in the dialogue dept. Tho that might be as much about the acting as anything.

Love Jacob & my idiot cousin (& even Vlad). Also love stealing a car in front of cops I didn't see, zooming around the city to get out of their range (while causing max property damage), and then slowing down long enough once I'm in the clear for the passenger THAT I DIDN'T EVEN REALIZE WAS IN THE CAR THE WHOLE TIME to get out of the car & stumble away. I missed GTA.

Also love that, while tooling around, I found a "friend" on the street. Stop & talk to this guy that starts busting on me about his being rich and me being some sort of chump, then he gives me $100 and walks away. Thanks!

^^^^^^^^OTM. I was like "What the fuck is Jamie Kennedy doing giving me $100?"

I think I rememer reading somewhere that the dialogue or story was "Oscar caliber."

as soon as I got the cell phone last night I hopped on multi and had a blast (literally): I like deathmatch-type stuff but I really appreciate the "realistic" environment of GTA more than sci-fi setups like Unreal or Halo. And the rocket launcher brings the lols. I did a team deathmatch that was awesome too. Tonight I think I'll try a cops and crooks.

I don't have a good feeling for which of you are playing on 360, but I'll try to keep my eyes open.

the dialogue is great!

The dialogue for me is hit and miss, but hits much more often than any other video game I can think of. Still think the lip-sync in some of the cut scenes could use more work, and wish someone could figure out how to make the mouths of video game characters look more normal. Also, given how sophisticated the physics engine is, some of the characters still move around like hilarious robots with flesh-colored cinder blocks for hands.

Some of the vocal performances are really solid, and Niko is very likable. He reminds me of the moments when my dog seems to say, "Hey dude, I killed this rat for you!" Even his evil moments seem good-intentioned, somehow.

1. Shooting from moving cars while driving, while still not perfect, has been much improved.
2. The pool mini game is pretty good - shot about as well as I do in real life i.e. I lost
3. 2 trips to the Cabaret Club have been unbearable - hopefully I won't need to go there again.
4. Mercifully there has yet to be a mission involving loading a truck with a forklift!!! :)
5. Not really feeling the multiplayer after initially being into it - still haven't tried out all the modes though.
6. I did enjoy free roam - grabbing a helicopter and flying over the city at night... it's damn good looking.
7. City is BIG - and feels more and more real. I'm really impressed with the little things & that nothing really feels generic. Starting to learn my way around and recognizing the sights is fun. First drive across a bridge into new territory was a real joy.

there's a tall observation tower style building as part of the world's fair complex in Meadows Park. the view across to 'Algonquin' from the very top was really really awesome, which sounds like a retarded thing to say about a video game, but there you go. sunset was amazing.

fucking sold out everywhere, innit.

sometime this summer, i'll finally break down and get a 360 to play this. the chat about missions being hard is warming my heart.

huh? so far the mission have been quite easy (though I'm not super far into the game, maybe 10%?)

slocki and czn and them, saying something was hard, i dunno.

no point to this post other than to say, have fun gents, see you later when i get around to this

The missions have been easy so far. 'Ivan the Not So Terrible,' which features a high-speed jump through the Grand Army Plaza arch, being the most challenging thus far (still in Brooklyn).

Bummed you can't go into the Brooklyn Library.

Found an ilicit way into Manhattan.

fucking hell, i'm going to end up buying a 360 for this, i can just tell. and i forswore gaming two years ago :(

i got the widely-reported load screen freeze of death last night. checked the ps3 forum and people were saying they had spoken to take two and had been given a laundry list of things they had to disable on their machines and in the game AND were told they had to delete all of their saved game and profile info for the game. by this point i had already deleted my autosave because i assumed it was corrupted somehow, and i had a recent regular save too to fall back on. that didn't fix the problem - as before, the game started up fine until it got to the mission loading screen and then it just sat there. so i got into a bit of a panic and started deleting back through my saved games (DISCLAIMER: I had been drinking) and ended up deleting all gta4-related files on my HD, as per take two recommendation. couldn't even start a new game. so i took a look at this list of things they said to disable and i decided to go through one by one, starting with disabling internet connection. and what do you fucking know, that was all it was. i just had to sign out of ps3 online and everything was rosy. but by this point, everything was gone.

so in conclusion: lol @ me, lol @ fucking developers, and for the xboxers, lol @ ps3.

KIDS - don't get drunk and delete your saved games. however much of a good idea it seems at the time, you will prob regret it. this has been a public service announcement courtesy of Bobby S.

Roberto, which mission was this on?

Someone at work told me this was an issue with older PS3s.

for me it was after the first street race mission with Brucie, No. 1, but reading other people's posts on forums it has been happening on any number of different missions, so it doesn't look like a factor. the machine version/age looks like a red herring too although at first people were speculating it was a 6oGB thing, which is what i have. it has definitely been affecting other nmodels too, though. disconnecting from the internet seems to be working across the board though. i don;t know if it;'s a ps3 network wthing or if they'll need to release a patch. personally i'm too consumed with the 1p to even think about online multiplayer right now, esp with having to redo all of the missions i already beat. but i will never get back the hours and hours of pontless wandering and random baseball-bat beatings :(