GTA's The Same. GTA's Different.

Yeah, more about GTA. (You know you love it. :)

I decided to stop repairing my cab and ended my Liberty City Stories cab streak at 228 consecutive fares. It had gotten pretty old and I'd secured a tidy nest egg ($150k) that was more than enough to keep me in guns for the rest of the game. I felt like turning the game off but also felt bad for giving up on seeing just how epic my streak could have been and hoped running a couple missions would cheer me up. One involved keeping the Don's shoplifting girlfriend away from the cops and triggered a nasty sense of deja vu. Sure, this game is pretty much like GTA III with motorcycles, but I didn't have the feeling before that it was the same story. That felt a little too weird.

It's especially weird when I'm hearing the radio spit out adds for Space Monkey VII, calling the designers bereft of new ideas. If I've got my chronology right, Liberty City Stories is the seventh GTA (not counting handheld versions). I wasn't sure if Rockstar was making fun of themselves or not. They seemed to characterize the Space Monkey games as mindless shoot 'em ups, which is a label I'm fairly certain they wouldn't self apply, especially now, especially after GTA IV.

GTA IV is not the same game, violence wise. For one thing, most people seem to like the main character. And they want to be true to that feeling, to behave like a good person. I've heard a number of people say they drove and fought more carefully to avoid injuring civilians. There's more to it then that, though. In the GTA III series, civilians were broad stereotypes and generally nasty and unpleasant. I never felt bad for them. I've heard GTA IV is different.

GTA IV uses NaturalMotion's euphoria tech so that every time you hit someone, they try to protect themselves. They try to stay on their feet when they are punched, shot, or clipped by a car. When they hurt their leg, they limp. When their legs don't work, they try to stand and can't. Watching a civilian dragging a useless leg or cradling their arm as they flee from a firefight seems to make most people feel pretty bad. This is something that most critics of the earlier games' violence didn't understand. It was so over the top and unreal that most people really couldn't care unless they had an overactive imagination and started making up life stories for the poorly rendered stereotypes that populated the games. GTA IV appears to have changed that. And players are responding.

The media's responding, too. But I don't give them any credit for it. When anything makes half a billion dollars in a single week (and that's not even counting the significant amount of extra hardware it moved), corporate owned news networks will have nothing but praise.