The Second Playthrough: Grand Theft Auto 4(Part 1)
Niko does rely on Roman for a while, but one else can he do? He's new in the city, arrived with nothing, has no money, and his english isn't so perfect. I initially thought that too about Roman and Mallorie. On the first playthrough, I got the impression he was just trying to flirt with her. As for Vlad, while I hated the guy, I thought he was an interesting character to watch, but I never had too much of a problem with killing the guy. He is quite a scumbag, afterall. Niko is definitely no joke, I think he's a fantastic character. The thing about Little Jacob is his accent is really quite difficult to understand, and it takes some time to get sort of used to. The first time I played the game, I pretty had no clue what the guy was saying, but by the end of the game I understood him fairly well and knew he was a legit homie. As for Michelle, yeah, I don't think I noticed she jumps around the truth. In fact, I actually preferred her over any of the other girls I dated in the game (though I still haven't taken 2 of them out on dates, probably for the sole reason that I don't want them to continuously call me afterwards trying to get me to take them out). Heh, I remember the first time I went on a date with her to the bowling alley, I actually walked at a normal pace along the whole boardwalk with her thinking that it actually mattered.
With that out of the way, I think the game does a solid job of introducing you to Liberty City and its residents. It does a good job of teaching you gameplay mechanics throughout the first few missions, while still managing to make some cool missions. In the last 3 GTA games, I actually had made a habit of doing the R3 taxi missions when first starting the game and trying to knock out 100 consecutive fares. That way I'd get plenty of money, I'd get the taxi bonus, and I'd actually get pretty familiar with the map. Unfortunately the taxi missions in GTAIV kind of suck and are pretty much a waste of time. Not to mention those taxis handle horribly. Anyway, good blog, dude. Keep enjoying the game.
Yeah, I think they're all interesting enough to listen to. During my second playthrough, I was trying to get the Liberty City Minute achievement which requires you to beat the single player mode in under 30 hours (and yes, cutscenes count towards that time). So because of that, I had to cut some conversations short, which kind of bugged me. Considering you favor Sony, I imagine you're playing it on PS3, so you don't have to worry about all that. Anyway, it must be kind of discouraging that you take all this time to write these blogs and apparently I'm the only guy that comments on them. Either way, keep them coming, and I'll keep replying.
The game was very solidly built, it was the first game that actually made me feel for the characters and cared what would happen to them.
The choices that you had to make in the game didn't seem to effect the overall outcome of the game. Like you Guero i tried for the 30hour acheivement and said to myself that i'd go back through and do all of the side missions etc to get the additional gamer points, but i never really did that...
The Second Playthrough idea would be a great website if done properly, it would allow people to go deeper into games and discuss them more freely. Have you ever thought about that TurboMan?
A really great idea you have here. I love to see some appreciation for recent games.
I really do agree with you in that GTAIV really does make me care about the characters enough to want to hear their everyday conversations.
I started doing some writing about game replays, but never got it organized enough to really do much with it, but I was going back to some much older games.
Just in the past 6 months, I've replayed Final Fantasy 1 & 2, Silent Hill & Tenchu on PS1, Disaster Report on the PS2, Full Throttle, Day of the Tentacle, Flashback, Total Distortion and Fallout. I think it would be fun to do a blog detailing all of that.
I also restarted GTAIV a couple of weeks ago, but got bored around the time of the first date and just started causing a bunch of chaos and police chases. Now that I know how the Michell stuff pans out, I pretty much just ignore her, but I haven't seen if that has any effect on the later story yet. Even though the big decisions in the game have little effect on the ending, I thought they had some decent concequences, like wheter or not you get Dwayne's backup guys.
Please Log In to post.
Log in to comment