To celebrate the return of Teh Pwn Shop's forums (found at http://bobothemonkey.freeforums.org/ ) I wanted to bring you the review which I had submitted to TPS before. A review which will no longer appear there for the time being. But, never the less, I bring it to you here to fill the void that is gaping in our hearts. Ladies and Gentlemen,
Puddle Jumper Reviews:
Grand Theft Auto IV
Episodes from Liberty City
Grand Theft Auto IV
Episodes from Liberty City
GTA IV is, as stated, the fourth installment in the numbered Grand Theft Auto franchise. Following GTA III, IV as well has successors to its name. Only this time, unlike Vice City and San Andreas, they are but mere DLC instead of a full fledged game. This, however, hasn’t stopped many, many loyal fans and genre fans to go out and grab themselves a downloaded copy of both expansions. Once both of these expansions had been released, Rockstar gave us Episodes from Liberty City, a disc containing both expansions, which has recently been released to the Playstation 3 as well.
Before the main review, let’s quickly review the game from which these two expansions sprouted. GTA IV was considered to be a huge step forward from San Andreas when it came to interactivity and graphics. From a main storyline point, the game was solid and deserving of high praise. Niko Bellic, the main character of the game, was definitely a likeable person and you really cared for what happened to him in his past and what is going on in the game. The other characters in the game are just what you expected from the franchise. They were both literally as figuratively characters. Each of them was very different and special in their own way and had a few character treats that were just plain funny. Take for instance Roman Bellic, the best character in the game besides Niko. And not to forget the manliest man evarz: Brucie.
Gameplay: Different button lay-out from previous GTA games, but nothing a quick learning curve can’t fix. Though the ever so popular wall cover was clearly a new thing for them as it needed a bit more work. And the required Friend Activities were a real and regular pain in the ass.
Sound: Best songs in the games were from Ruslana and the main theme for the game. I did not care one bit about anything else. As far as voice acting went, it was amazing as can be expected from this franchise.
Graphics: As said before, the graphics are amazing.
Multiplayer: Haven’t played it, so no opinion on that.
Overall: The game deserves a solid 8/10.
Gameplay: Different button lay-out from previous GTA games, but nothing a quick learning curve can’t fix. Though the ever so popular wall cover was clearly a new thing for them as it needed a bit more work. And the required Friend Activities were a real and regular pain in the ass.
Sound: Best songs in the games were from Ruslana and the main theme for the game. I did not care one bit about anything else. As far as voice acting went, it was amazing as can be expected from this franchise.
Graphics: As said before, the graphics are amazing.
Multiplayer: Haven’t played it, so no opinion on that.
Overall: The game deserves a solid 8/10.
Now then, Episodes from Liberty City for the Playstation 3. Both pieces of DLC come on a single disc that separates the games via an options menu when you boot the disc. Whilst Vice City and San Andreas occurred in different times, these pieces of DLC happen during GTA IV. One of which is The Lost and Damned.
The story follows Johnny Klebitz and the biker gang of which he is Vice President of: The Lost. The story begins when the Chapter President, Billy Grey, is released from prison and given rains again of his old gang. It soon becomes very clear that Billy has lost a couple of marbles along the years, which nobody seems to notice but a few, including Johnny. As Billy takes The Lost to endeavors they normally wouldn’t do, Johnny has to struggle to fix Billy’s many messes and protect a woman who he has a history with.
The other piece of DLC is known as The Ballad of Gay Tony. This time we follow Luis Fernando, bodyguard and business partner of ‘Gay’ Tony Prince, manager of not only the hottest Straight club in town, but also the hottest Gay club in town. However, mister Prince isn’t exactly keen on keeping his business in safe areas, as he keeps on getting himself in trouble, needing Luis to get him out of it. So, not only does Luis have to deal with the troubles from Tony, he also has to worry about personal things as well.
As far as the main characters and main storylines went, I only found the story of Tony Prince himself to be of any interest at all. No matter how the game treats you, you still want to know what happens next to the Prince of Liberty City. Johnny and his cohorts were amazingly dull up to the point where I almost gave up and switched to Multiplayer. Luckily the game’s only interesting character, Ashley, was there a few times to save the day. All in all it’s a very forgettable story with a few memorable characters here and there. Some of them were even in the main GTA IV game. Although, even to this day, I still have nightmares on seeing that Senator’s cawk and shriveled old balls dangling in my ginormous TV screen with me sitting right in front of it because the headset doesn’t go very far.
And whilst The Lost and Damned stays true to the GTA IV formula when it comes to the story, The Ballad of Gay Tony relies more on GTA San Andreas influences, making it a more interesting and enjoyable experience in the end. TLaD is a very good piece of DLC, but it just pains me to see them take GTA IV, strip many things from it and add little to nothing to it. TBoGT at least made quite an effort in bringing back the good stuff like parachuting.
Like with Grand Theft Auto IV, the music isn’t much to write home about. There wasn’t one song or even radio station that didn’t stop the radio from being turned off. Music is a personal taste, and therefore it’s not a big factor in this review, but still it would have been to have had a better selection of songs. Or at least a station that had classic number one songs on there that we all know and love. One thing to note is that, like with everything else in it, Ballad of Gay Tony seemed to have a added a bit more pep to the songs and has even put one of those more colorful stations as a primary station for mission related cars.
The voice acting in both DLC’s are amazing and up to Rockstar standards which should really go unmentioned by every reviewer when it comes to Rockstar’s games. Looking back at many of it’s games, I can’t find a handful of voice actors that just half assed their work or who can’t voice act if their life depended on it.
All the other sounds are quite good as well, with the exception of one. There’s not one good ringtone to be found on the entire frigging internet.
At the time that Grand Theft Auto was being hyped, its main selling point was the graphics. With Niko simply walking down the street, Rockstar wanted to show us how amazing everything looked. And I have to give it to them, at the time that it was first released, I was blown away by it. From the beginning it was clear that they mirrored Liberty City with New York as it looked like it more than ever. Not only that, but everything was so realistic that it was hard to believe that the consoles could handle running it.
Now, as the game was being played on my TV, with a HDMI cable and a HD-Ready TV, I can’t help but be under whelmed by the graphics. Truth be told, it looked a lot better in the trailers than it does in the game. Which still doesn’t give away the fact that these are amazing graphics. Once you get by the feeling of: “wait, is this it?” then you get a very enjoyable sight for your eyes.
Why am I talking about GTA IV? Well, it’s because it also applies to The Lost and Damned. Now, as far as Ballad of Gay Tony goes, it’s roughly the same underwhelming feeling, but with many, many more colors added to pallet. Much needed colors as well because that was my number one complaint when it came to The Lost and Damned. And again, it’s one GLORIOUS cock in HD that’s being tossed at you. ENJOY IT. Luckily Gay Tony makes up for it with the on screen BJ and sex scene. The chick was annoying, but she was at least hot and you got to fuck her brains out.
On a final note on the graphics, these are still the best human models I have seen in a sandbox game of this size besides Assassin‘s Creed II. Overall I mean.
Before the gameplay is tackled like a bad quarterback, there’s still the Multiplayer to discuss. The first problem with the multiplayer is that it is unbelievably under populated in the things that I wanted to play. Or, if I did manage to find a group of people in that category, these people would create maps that were just plain damned stupid and not fun to play at all.
Second problem lied with the maps available to you. As cool as it may be to dick around in Liberty City, it’s not fun for multiplayer matches. No, I far more enjoyed closed off sections of the city like those small islands in The Lost and Damned or a city block with a few climbable buildings.
Another problem lied in the fact that it’s too boring in the end. Yeah, sure, it’s fun to race around town in a car and try to kill each other, but that’s all that there was to it for me. The guns were uninspired in The Lost and Damned, which was made up for in Ballad of Gay Tony somewhat. The cars were boring and the civilians were gone after two minutes.
More problems came with the glitches. Man, were there glitches. Blips on the minimap wouldn’t appear, blips and names over people’s heads wouldn’t appear, people wouldn’t die no matter how much bullets were pumped in to them, some seemed to have unlimited lives, the auto-lock on would only work half assed, meaning I missed every single shot at point blank range, and headshots only worked when they felt like it.
There was this one time where I smacked around this lady and the cops showed up. I was like: I did not hit her, it’s not true, it’s bullshit, I did not hit her, I did naht! Everybody betray me, I have no friend in the world! Everybody betray me! I fed up with this world! Anyway, how’s your sex life?
Ah, the meat of the game, the gameplay. What would a game be without you having to press a button to make the character do something. Well, Metal Gear Solid 4 …
First off, the driving. I remember playing GTA IV for the first time. Niko was off the boat, COUSIN NIKO and Roman were in the car, and then I realized I had to press gas. There the car was, doing absolutely not a frigging thing. Even though I was pressing, what I thought to be, GO. Five grueling minutes later, I finally managed to get my ass off the docks. What followed next was an experience unlike any other, which also made its way in to the DLC. Now, the driving is made so that it is as realistic as possible in how the cars would handle in the real world. Take that and a control scheme new to the franchise and you have a pretty good idea how much of a difficulty curve you’re dealing with. For those of you who are familiar with those sorts of controls it’s easy peasy, but for me it was a tad harder as that was the first time I had to drive a car in a game like that. One thing that’s worth mentioning as the controls on the bikes massively improved in the DLC, literally keeping me out of a car for a very long time. Driving and shooting is still a royal pain in the ass though. Flying a helicopter and shooting, now that is impossible without having been educated for it. Sheesh.
Next up is the on foot gameplay. Like in GTA IV, you still have to press motherfucking X to run and tap X to sprint. What kind of a backwater ideology is that? Seriously? Taking cover and coming out of cover is, like with many other games using this, a trick you need to get the hang of. It’s not exactly easy as the game has many scenarios that it can chose from. 90% of the time it does what you ask of it to do, but there’s times where you really need to fumble around. With the consequence being that you are really, really dead. Killing shit is surprisingly easy though. Auto-aim, press shoot, go to next target, press shoot, have a laugh, make sure the idiotic A.I. on your mates doesn’t botch up forcing you to do redo the mission … you know, the standard stuff.
If there’s one thing that needs to be said about the on foot gameplay is that the entire thing feels too sluggish. Instantly switching directions whilst running for example means that your character has to mildly jog for a meter or two before he turns around. Or he slides forward, turns around and instead of kicking off, he mildly jogs before he goes in to full gear. Rather annoying really.
Now, with both sets of gameplay (Driving and On foot) have different control lay-outs, can make it a bit confusing for when you’re playing in a hurry. In the end you do memorize it to muscle so that you automatically switch without thinking about it, but it’s something that keeps you thinking sometimes.
The one thing that was a massive and ENORMOUS improvement over the main game is that there are mid mission checkpoints where you go to if you die and use the cellphone’s retry text message function thingy.
Lastly, there’s Liberty City. Something worth putting in to a separate paragraph.
In Episodes from Liberty City, the city feels a lot more dead than it did in GTA IV. Whilst the activity on the streets stays roughly the same, a lot has been removed from the Episodes that made the city in GTA IV so great. Or the things that aren’t removed are downplayed severely or put so far in the background, it might as well have been removed. For one, I didn’t even know you could take your friends to places. It was a big deal in GTA IV and it wasn’t even mentioned in the DLC’s. One thing that I missed were the stores. It would have been nice to have been able to buy some clothes, even it was just one chain in the city. Another thing that bothered me was the food stores were gone. I literally once drove to ten different locations before I realized that it was removed from the game. Again, I didn’t know that and I was under the impression that HEALTH DID NOT REGENERATE. You know, having a health restorer on the map was rather handy. Now I had to go and save or find a food vendor on the streets, which I never did find fast.
Luckily me being an idiot didn’t intrude on me finding a few minigames to play. That was because these minigames were in Johnny’s clubhouse/living area. Sucks to be me. At any rate, these minigames are mostly so good that they could be games on their own. They aren’t half assed, they’re well developed, the rules are all there and the difficulty doesn’t rely on the A.I. being a cheating prick.
Ending statement:
DLC Expansions are supposed to add to the experience and not be more of the same. Whilst only Gay Tony manages to do this noticeably, Lost and Damned really falls flat in the end. If you look at Episodes with GTA IV in mind, then it really doesn’t hold up all to well. However, if you look at it as a standalone game, like I should considering it’s a review, then it does really well, despite it being a watered down version of GTA IV’s Liberty City. Thank the deities that Rockstar brought some San Andreas to Gay Tony, otherwise it would have been a really dull experience. In the end Grand Theft Auto IV: Episodes from Liberty City deserves a solid:
The story follows Johnny Klebitz and the biker gang of which he is Vice President of: The Lost. The story begins when the Chapter President, Billy Grey, is released from prison and given rains again of his old gang. It soon becomes very clear that Billy has lost a couple of marbles along the years, which nobody seems to notice but a few, including Johnny. As Billy takes The Lost to endeavors they normally wouldn’t do, Johnny has to struggle to fix Billy’s many messes and protect a woman who he has a history with.
The other piece of DLC is known as The Ballad of Gay Tony. This time we follow Luis Fernando, bodyguard and business partner of ‘Gay’ Tony Prince, manager of not only the hottest Straight club in town, but also the hottest Gay club in town. However, mister Prince isn’t exactly keen on keeping his business in safe areas, as he keeps on getting himself in trouble, needing Luis to get him out of it. So, not only does Luis have to deal with the troubles from Tony, he also has to worry about personal things as well.
As far as the main characters and main storylines went, I only found the story of Tony Prince himself to be of any interest at all. No matter how the game treats you, you still want to know what happens next to the Prince of Liberty City. Johnny and his cohorts were amazingly dull up to the point where I almost gave up and switched to Multiplayer. Luckily the game’s only interesting character, Ashley, was there a few times to save the day. All in all it’s a very forgettable story with a few memorable characters here and there. Some of them were even in the main GTA IV game. Although, even to this day, I still have nightmares on seeing that Senator’s cawk and shriveled old balls dangling in my ginormous TV screen with me sitting right in front of it because the headset doesn’t go very far.
And whilst The Lost and Damned stays true to the GTA IV formula when it comes to the story, The Ballad of Gay Tony relies more on GTA San Andreas influences, making it a more interesting and enjoyable experience in the end. TLaD is a very good piece of DLC, but it just pains me to see them take GTA IV, strip many things from it and add little to nothing to it. TBoGT at least made quite an effort in bringing back the good stuff like parachuting.
Like with Grand Theft Auto IV, the music isn’t much to write home about. There wasn’t one song or even radio station that didn’t stop the radio from being turned off. Music is a personal taste, and therefore it’s not a big factor in this review, but still it would have been to have had a better selection of songs. Or at least a station that had classic number one songs on there that we all know and love. One thing to note is that, like with everything else in it, Ballad of Gay Tony seemed to have a added a bit more pep to the songs and has even put one of those more colorful stations as a primary station for mission related cars.
The voice acting in both DLC’s are amazing and up to Rockstar standards which should really go unmentioned by every reviewer when it comes to Rockstar’s games. Looking back at many of it’s games, I can’t find a handful of voice actors that just half assed their work or who can’t voice act if their life depended on it.
All the other sounds are quite good as well, with the exception of one. There’s not one good ringtone to be found on the entire frigging internet.
At the time that Grand Theft Auto was being hyped, its main selling point was the graphics. With Niko simply walking down the street, Rockstar wanted to show us how amazing everything looked. And I have to give it to them, at the time that it was first released, I was blown away by it. From the beginning it was clear that they mirrored Liberty City with New York as it looked like it more than ever. Not only that, but everything was so realistic that it was hard to believe that the consoles could handle running it.
Now, as the game was being played on my TV, with a HDMI cable and a HD-Ready TV, I can’t help but be under whelmed by the graphics. Truth be told, it looked a lot better in the trailers than it does in the game. Which still doesn’t give away the fact that these are amazing graphics. Once you get by the feeling of: “wait, is this it?” then you get a very enjoyable sight for your eyes.
Why am I talking about GTA IV? Well, it’s because it also applies to The Lost and Damned. Now, as far as Ballad of Gay Tony goes, it’s roughly the same underwhelming feeling, but with many, many more colors added to pallet. Much needed colors as well because that was my number one complaint when it came to The Lost and Damned. And again, it’s one GLORIOUS cock in HD that’s being tossed at you. ENJOY IT. Luckily Gay Tony makes up for it with the on screen BJ and sex scene. The chick was annoying, but she was at least hot and you got to fuck her brains out.
On a final note on the graphics, these are still the best human models I have seen in a sandbox game of this size besides Assassin‘s Creed II. Overall I mean.
Before the gameplay is tackled like a bad quarterback, there’s still the Multiplayer to discuss. The first problem with the multiplayer is that it is unbelievably under populated in the things that I wanted to play. Or, if I did manage to find a group of people in that category, these people would create maps that were just plain damned stupid and not fun to play at all.
Second problem lied with the maps available to you. As cool as it may be to dick around in Liberty City, it’s not fun for multiplayer matches. No, I far more enjoyed closed off sections of the city like those small islands in The Lost and Damned or a city block with a few climbable buildings.
Another problem lied in the fact that it’s too boring in the end. Yeah, sure, it’s fun to race around town in a car and try to kill each other, but that’s all that there was to it for me. The guns were uninspired in The Lost and Damned, which was made up for in Ballad of Gay Tony somewhat. The cars were boring and the civilians were gone after two minutes.
More problems came with the glitches. Man, were there glitches. Blips on the minimap wouldn’t appear, blips and names over people’s heads wouldn’t appear, people wouldn’t die no matter how much bullets were pumped in to them, some seemed to have unlimited lives, the auto-lock on would only work half assed, meaning I missed every single shot at point blank range, and headshots only worked when they felt like it.
There was this one time where I smacked around this lady and the cops showed up. I was like: I did not hit her, it’s not true, it’s bullshit, I did not hit her, I did naht! Everybody betray me, I have no friend in the world! Everybody betray me! I fed up with this world! Anyway, how’s your sex life?
Ah, the meat of the game, the gameplay. What would a game be without you having to press a button to make the character do something. Well, Metal Gear Solid 4 …
First off, the driving. I remember playing GTA IV for the first time. Niko was off the boat, COUSIN NIKO and Roman were in the car, and then I realized I had to press gas. There the car was, doing absolutely not a frigging thing. Even though I was pressing, what I thought to be, GO. Five grueling minutes later, I finally managed to get my ass off the docks. What followed next was an experience unlike any other, which also made its way in to the DLC. Now, the driving is made so that it is as realistic as possible in how the cars would handle in the real world. Take that and a control scheme new to the franchise and you have a pretty good idea how much of a difficulty curve you’re dealing with. For those of you who are familiar with those sorts of controls it’s easy peasy, but for me it was a tad harder as that was the first time I had to drive a car in a game like that. One thing that’s worth mentioning as the controls on the bikes massively improved in the DLC, literally keeping me out of a car for a very long time. Driving and shooting is still a royal pain in the ass though. Flying a helicopter and shooting, now that is impossible without having been educated for it. Sheesh.
Next up is the on foot gameplay. Like in GTA IV, you still have to press motherfucking X to run and tap X to sprint. What kind of a backwater ideology is that? Seriously? Taking cover and coming out of cover is, like with many other games using this, a trick you need to get the hang of. It’s not exactly easy as the game has many scenarios that it can chose from. 90% of the time it does what you ask of it to do, but there’s times where you really need to fumble around. With the consequence being that you are really, really dead. Killing shit is surprisingly easy though. Auto-aim, press shoot, go to next target, press shoot, have a laugh, make sure the idiotic A.I. on your mates doesn’t botch up forcing you to do redo the mission … you know, the standard stuff.
If there’s one thing that needs to be said about the on foot gameplay is that the entire thing feels too sluggish. Instantly switching directions whilst running for example means that your character has to mildly jog for a meter or two before he turns around. Or he slides forward, turns around and instead of kicking off, he mildly jogs before he goes in to full gear. Rather annoying really.
Now, with both sets of gameplay (Driving and On foot) have different control lay-outs, can make it a bit confusing for when you’re playing in a hurry. In the end you do memorize it to muscle so that you automatically switch without thinking about it, but it’s something that keeps you thinking sometimes.
The one thing that was a massive and ENORMOUS improvement over the main game is that there are mid mission checkpoints where you go to if you die and use the cellphone’s retry text message function thingy.
Lastly, there’s Liberty City. Something worth putting in to a separate paragraph.
In Episodes from Liberty City, the city feels a lot more dead than it did in GTA IV. Whilst the activity on the streets stays roughly the same, a lot has been removed from the Episodes that made the city in GTA IV so great. Or the things that aren’t removed are downplayed severely or put so far in the background, it might as well have been removed. For one, I didn’t even know you could take your friends to places. It was a big deal in GTA IV and it wasn’t even mentioned in the DLC’s. One thing that I missed were the stores. It would have been nice to have been able to buy some clothes, even it was just one chain in the city. Another thing that bothered me was the food stores were gone. I literally once drove to ten different locations before I realized that it was removed from the game. Again, I didn’t know that and I was under the impression that HEALTH DID NOT REGENERATE. You know, having a health restorer on the map was rather handy. Now I had to go and save or find a food vendor on the streets, which I never did find fast.
Luckily me being an idiot didn’t intrude on me finding a few minigames to play. That was because these minigames were in Johnny’s clubhouse/living area. Sucks to be me. At any rate, these minigames are mostly so good that they could be games on their own. They aren’t half assed, they’re well developed, the rules are all there and the difficulty doesn’t rely on the A.I. being a cheating prick.
Ending statement:
DLC Expansions are supposed to add to the experience and not be more of the same. Whilst only Gay Tony manages to do this noticeably, Lost and Damned really falls flat in the end. If you look at Episodes with GTA IV in mind, then it really doesn’t hold up all to well. However, if you look at it as a standalone game, like I should considering it’s a review, then it does really well, despite it being a watered down version of GTA IV’s Liberty City. Thank the deities that Rockstar brought some San Andreas to Gay Tony, otherwise it would have been a really dull experience. In the end Grand Theft Auto IV: Episodes from Liberty City deserves a solid:
7/10.
This has been Puddle Jumper reviewing GTA IV: Episodes from Liberty City for the Playstation 3, developed by Rockstar Games.
No comments:
Post a Comment