I Have NO TASTE: GTA Driving

I finally got another PS2 memory card so that I could start playing GTA: Liberty City Stories, in earnest. As usual, I played a couple missions, then had to get behind the wheel of a taxi. It always happens at some point in a GTA game. Usually it's cool because it teaches me the lay of the land. But this is Liberty City. Admittedly, I don't remember every shortcut. But the general layout and most important shortcuts took no time to recall.

So I had a good run. My PS2 is currently paused. I've successfully delivered 200 consecutive fares in a single cab. It only takes 100 to complete the mission, and they don't have to be consecutive. So why did I keep playing?

It's partly because the radio stations are so fun to listen to, and the changing lighting and weather conditions keep things from getting stale, but also, I love driving in GTA. According to many people, this means I have no taste. Most of the reviews for GTA IV say the driving in the game is still "squirrely" or give it the backhanded compliment of saying it's better than the old games. So, why is every reviewer out there wrong about the driving in GTA, and not me.

(Rhetorical questions don't always get question marks. Deal with it.)

The cars in GTA use car chase physics. Every corner makes the car lean. Cars roll over all the time. It's cool that they do that because then everyone has to run away from them before they explode. (I've heard they don't always explode when flipped in GTA IV. I'm not sure I like that.) Spin outs are awesome because if you time them just right, you can drive out of them (sometimes in reverse) and keep going. Admittedly, this makes some missions a pain in the butt. But without it, GTA would suck.

GTA is about the crazy stories. Everyone knows it. GTA IV finally has a story good enough that people are actually finishing all seventy hours of it and are happy to do so, but the stories they really light up in telling are the crazy stuff that happens when they were supposed to be doing something else. Those stories virtually always involve a car wreck or the highly improbable avoidance of same.

Take a mission I recently ran. I'm supposed to be guarding a mafia restaurant from some rival mobsters. They come in waves. The first wave drives up. After a short gunfight, the guards and I dispatch them. Their car is now blocking the intersection and traffic is piling up. The second wave drives up. We gun them down as well. The area in front of the restaurant is now a barricade composed of two cars full of holes and a bunch of angry drivers. The third wave shows up in a Humvee which comes barreling down the hill, right into one of the shot up cars. Realistically, it probably would have just knocked the sedan aside, but in GTA, it pops up on two wheels, flips over, and skids to a stop upside down. The gunners crawl out and start shooting, but I'm already running because I've seen this film before. The Humvee starts to smolder. It explodes. This sets the shot up cars on fire. They explode. This sets the commuters on fire who panic and try to drive away before exploding as well. I ask you, do you want realistic driving phyiscs, or do you want the carnage I just described?

(See the question mark? Not rhetorical.)