Game Discussion of the Week: Grand Theft Auto IV

UNPOPULAR OPINION: I like GTA IV. 2018 marks the 10th anniversary of this great game, and every day I pray that Rockstar will remaster the game for all the modern platforms (including PC). Rockstar would have to be CRAZY to not remaster GTA IV. They're sitting on a goldmine. All they have to do is at least update the textures, but if they really went the extra mile they'd add more cheats (like flying cars, low gravity, ect.) and bring back the multiplayer. And the bare minimum of what they should do is fix that fucking PC port for Christ's sake! 10 years later and it still runs like ass! Shameful.

Despite how neglected GTA IV feels in the eyes of fans (like myself), the game is still fun to play and still holds up, even if it does show its age. For its time GTA IV had unarguably the best physics/animation system of ANY sandbox game. The Euphoria engine blew minds back in 2008 and still amazes me to this day. I've never enjoyed plowing through a crowd of pedestrians more in any other game. Rockstar really went above and beyond in giving GTA IV the best possible physics for a console game at the time. (whatever happened to Euphoria, anyway? Is it still used in games?)

The multiplayer was good old fashioned straightforward fun and it was easy as pie to just jump into a match and wreck havok around the city. It's a real shame that the console ports didn't have any local multiplayer support. I've also heard that the online multiplayer has been canned for the PC version, which sucks.

Overall, despite some minor annoyances with some design choices, GTA IV is still a game I enjoy playing today; it's a lot of fun and does several things exceptionally well. I give it a 4/5.

NOW MAKE A REMASTER ALREADY!

My wife is a GTA fan and also thinks this way, so I guess this must be true for a lot of fans of the series. She was telling me that the reason why she didn't like GTA V as much as IV was because they tried to be all "zany" (trying to recapture the magic from San Andreas) but ended up being predictable and repetitive, and Saints Row was already doing a much better job at being funny anyway.

I haven't played either game myself, except for a few minutes (just have seen her playing through them), but the impression I got was that IV had a lot of small annoyances (the mobile stuff in general, bowling) and is a slower game than usual for GTA. Also, the missions had no checkpoints or a very bad checkpoint system? I don't remember. I was very impressed by the physics, though, and the storyline didn't seem too bad either.

I'll certainly play it down the line, maybe after I finish Dragon's Dogma (I'm between going for it or Saints Row 4). The game doesn't look bad at all.

Ehh, I'm not really a hardcore GTA fan so truthfully I'm probably a bit ignorant when it comes to this. But most of the criticism I've heard of GTA V has been either subjective or minor, whereas seemingly everyone bitched about IV when it came out (usually the points of criticism were the downgraded variety, the driving mechanics, and lack of open terrain). And while GTA IV is more fondly regarded nowadays, it never seemed to reach the popularity or sales numbers of San Andreas or V.

And correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't the microtransactions for V only for the multiplayer mode? Isn't it just for clothing and stuff? I've never played V, which is why I don't understand the controversy surrounding the microtransactions.

It's impossible to get fun stuff such as cars and weapons without spending real money.

I don't think most of it is strictly paid DLC, but from what I've heard from my friends who play it is that the grind is impossible. One can't make enough money to buy cool stuff without using microtransactions.

I noticed this too. It came right around that time when Gears of War and CoD got huge, so the brown/grey as a "realistic" aesthetic was getting everywhere. It surely looks depressing after the colourful world of San Andreas.