Grand Theft Auto 4 Recap

Yesterday I posted my thoughts on GTA 4 but as promised today, I revisit the topic.

GTA 4 was something new in a dire gaming scene at the time.  It was an attempt for seriousness.  While most games were offering nothing but masculine wish fulfillment, Rockstar tried to make a story in which crime didn't pay.

GTA 4 is a hard game to judge because the more I think about it, its the flaws that make it achieve.  Spec Ops The Line was an excellent showcase of the idea that games don't have to be fun to be worth playing.  In fact, the absence of that fun can be used to showcase the hollowness of the ideals the games try to showcase.

GTA 3 and its followups showcased a world in which completing the various missions would let you take over the city, while going on a mindless rampage was easy and fun and wheeling about in a car was as simple as can be.  It played into our fantasies were if we were in scarface, we would have won.  We would have been the bad guy.  Ruled the city.

GTA 4 systematically dismantles that idea in every part of itself.  It refuses to be fun.  It makes Nico's life banal and repetetive.  It makes him little more than a tool in the demented plans and machinations of other.  Nico is in over his head and has no way out, no matter what happens.

A while ago, the amazing guys over at Extra Credits (watch them, no really, watch them) said that gaming had not really had the equivalent of a movie moment like The Cabinet of Dr Caligari.  I suggested that perhaps it may have been Silent Hill 2.  Regardless, gaming has started to recieve it's moments.

Spec Ops bases itself loosely off Heart Of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, an inspiration it shares with Francis Ford Coppolla's Apocalypse Now.  With its intense, headtrip of a story and it's painting the medium aesthetics, you could very easily consider one to be an analogue of the other.

So if Spec Ops is Apocalypse Now then what is GTA4?

GTA4 is the wire.

It's gritty.  It's real.  It tries to comment on what life is actually like as a criminal, all aspects of it.  From the bored waiting to the sudden bursts of violence to the dull mundanity of day to day life.  Just like the wire, it doesn't compromise it's vision in the name of being accessible.  Much like the wire, it decides to tell it's story the way it needs to be told, to make its point the way it needs to be told.

If you're here looking for fun, you're in the wrong place.

"We're building something here.  And all the pieces matter" is a phrase that crops up early on in The Wire.  It works on multiple levels.  In the show, it's a comment on the case the cops are investigating, but also a clue as to how to watch the show, taking every little piece and combining it into a whole to see the full story.  But it's also a clue for how every aspect of the show is to comment on the shows message.

GTA4 tries to do the same thing.  When we look at the game as a whole, as a single, constructed piece of art, we see a character study of one man.  Nico.  Flawed, ruthless but unable to be anything else, no matter how he might want to.  Trapped in the life of crime that was the only option ever available to him when he stepped off that boat.

As for GTA5, I don't know what to expect.  The trailers look good.  It looks as though the game wants to make a move back towards the fun end of the scale, which is fine.  After all, Saint's row have been grabbing their fanbase eagerly out from under them.

But I hope we will continue this sort of wholesale, heuristic storytelling in gaming.  Because when I look at the games that really did well for me last year, GTA4 continues to look more and more ahead of it's time.  Rockstar games will always be worth playing as they continue to do exciting new things and it makes me sad to say it, but that's a rare enough quality in video games to keep pulling me back.

Posted in: Apocalypse Now, Game, Game Review, Grand Theft Auto, Grand Theft Auto 4, Grand Theft Auto Four, GTA 4, GTA 5, Heart Of Darkness, Review, Spec Ops, Spec Ops: The Line, The Line, The Wire