Tag Archives: PC games

Best of 2008, Games, GOTY, PC games, PlayStation, Xbox

Best of 2008 #4: Grand Theft Auto IV

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Grand Theft Auto IV

For some reason the online forum hive mind has turned against GTA IV since not long after its release. It’s true that it’s smaller than San Andreas; that the missions generally follow an established formula; that Niko’s transformation from never wanting to kill again to… uh… killing again is about as convincing as Anakin Skywalker’s fall to the Dark Side; but I stand by every word of the praise that I heaped upon it back in the first few days of release.

It may be far from perfect, but the fact remains that I had more fun tearing around this next-gen Liberty City than I did almost any other game this year. It’s the first GTA that held my attention long enough to finish the main story – all 40 hours of it by the time the end credits rolled for me – and I had a great time almost the whole way through.

I’m obviously not expecting any revolutionary changes to the gameplay in the upcoming DLC, but there are kinks that can be worked on, such as the pressing need for mid-mission checkpoints to avoid those moments when failing a mission necessitates another drive all the way across town, and the personal relationships that could be cultivated in the game could get annoying after the first few hours, but it doesn’t change the fact that Liberty City was a joy to explore. It proved that GTA doesn’t need the increasingly outlandish missions and plot twists that typified San Andreas’s government conspiracies and cult compounds. It might have been funny, but was flying a VTOL jet over Area 51 69 really in keeping with the rest of the series?

So don’t listen to the haters: GTA IV is and always has been one of the best games of 2008. Time will prove me right on that one.

Impressions

Battlefield 2

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It seems kind of wrong to be talking about games on a day like today, but I’m going to anyway.

Battlefield 2

Battlefield 2 really is a fantastic game. Yes, it’s got bugs that should have been quashed before release (here’s hoping they’ll actually be fixed this time) and yes I keep telling myself that I’m never going to buy another EA game, but the Battlefield series has always been something pretty special. Battlefield Vietnam was something of a non-event for me, being too obviously rushed to even bother with and not really doing anything to drag me away from the great pedigree of its prequel. As my brother pointed out when my copy of BF2 came this morning, I’m likely to return to the winter of 2003 with its 14-hour BF1942 and Desert Combat sessions.

I was impressed with how it runs on my system which is starting to show its age (Pentium 4 2.4GHz, 1GB RAM, 9700 Pro), where I can run it very comfortably at 1024×768 with medium/high settings. I haven’t been hugely impressed by graphics in a long time but when I climbed to the brow of a hill on the dam level I was blown away by the amount of detail stretching out into the distance. This must really be a graphical treat on a more modern rig.

Gameplay is vintage Battlefield (fun as hell if you haven’t played it) but with more features to encourage teamplay which is where much of the best stuff comes from. Taking a town with your team of 32, working street-by-street, with medics healing people and machine gunners providing suppressing fire while everyone sprints to cover from the enemy tank just can’t be beaten. The addition of the RTS-style commander mode where you can provide supply drops and artillery bombardments for your team is fun, but not as good as your regular Battlefield-ing.

It could probably do with a few more maps and needs some patching beyond that useless 1.01 release, but I think I’ve found the game to spend my free summer playing.