Back to the subject at hand

So by now, everyone knows about the biggest media release this week, one which may prove to be the most lucrative in history. I'm speaking, of course, of Iron Man.

Go Iron Man!

Hahaha! No, seriously, GTA IV came out on Tuesday.

With predictions of 9 million units being sold on the first day, at about $60 per copy, this brings the total about to somewhere around $HolyFuckingShitMoney for everyone employed by Rockstar Studios. The actual sales figures are something else again -- I don't have the chart in front of me.

Niko Bellic of GTA IV. Not pictured: Robert Downey Jr. cowering like a bitch.

So yeah, as expected, the game's awesome, it'll change gaming forever, everyone should go buy it right now blah blah etc. There's honestly nothing I can say here that hasn't already been covered at length in any other review for the game out there. Since I won't sit here and bore you with analysis of the details that can be found in a far more polished form on a professional gaming site, I'll just do my best to sum up my overall feelings regarding the game, based on my two days with it so far.

Long story short, I would almost rather play this game than have sex, unless we're talking about me with a girl who also plays GTA and is down with having sex during. This will become less true as the week wears on. Right now, I'm enthralled.

Pic unrelated.

I'll get the obvious out of the way while covering some of the things that may jump out at a GTA veteran. Here goes.

Firstly, the graphics are good by any standard, and ridiculously good for a sandbox game; everyone's seen the shots. Physics are beautiful, and incorporate some new tech that hasn't really been seen in a title yet. Objects (including the player) are weightier and have a real, physical presense in the environment. Car physics is more realistic, with many engines responding better to a gradual increase in RPMs accomplished by applying increasing pressure to the right trigger, slowly. NPC AI feels organic and continually surprises you with its behavior. The city itself is sculpted to an inhuman degree of detail, with plenty to see and do. Gunplay is much, much improved over previous titles, with a cover system and the ability to run, crouch, run and crouch, roll, all while aiming the weapon in classic over-the-shoulder 'Gears' style. The player can grab onto just about any ledge, even while falling. Cars react to damage in a way that's far less abstract: flipping them or driving into water doesn't trigger an explosion, nor does ramming into static structures; you pretty much have to rupture the gas tank for that. When you do run into an object, the dent left in your car ends up being about the same shape as said object. There's a 'realer' feel to the game -- it's not at all cartoony like the others in the series, yet retains its distinct brand of simultaniously high- and low-brow humor. And on and on and on.

It all ties together near-seamlessly -- I say 'near' because at times you can sense the processor struggling mightily to maintain a consistent framerate through everything that's going on in the environment. That's about the only quibble I have. Everything else is straight Fun distilled to a purity I've never seen before. As a matter of fact, the highest praise I can offer this game is that it expands my idea of what video games are capable of doing. Allow me to explain.

When you've been a gamer for a certain number of years, you develop a certain cynicism toward most games that stems from a constant decrease in your ability to suspend your disbelief. Whereas you originally played games to escape into another world, you over time find it progressively harder to ignore the strings being pulled 'behind the scenes', within the game logic itself. Part of this is due to sheer familiarity with how games function. Part of it is out of necessity: completing most games requires a deeper understanding of the game at the end than you had at the beginning. Part of it's old-fashioned jadedness -- the belief that there's nothing out there that can really amaze any more, that developers will inadvertently stick to their proven formulas. You become like that asshat that gets invited over to watch campy horror B-movies, then in an attempt to sound worldly spouts off pithy, bullshit observations. "They just had sex, she's gonna die now."

For me, things had gotten to the point where I had come to believe that I'd never again play a game that could excite me the same way Contra or Mega Man II excited me as a kid. I suppose I blamed age. Turns out age has nothing to do with it -- GTA IV gets me that excited, and it manages that by throwing a curve every time I think I've gotten the mechanisms behind the game world figured out. Every time I feel as though I have a subconcious grasp of where the 'strings' are and what they're attached to, the game shows me that I still don't know what the fuck I'm talking about. This phenomenon hasn't yet stopped, and I've been playing for awhile.

The illusion of a real, living world is presented so effectively that I've stopped even trying to see the strings, and am just living the game at face value, without any subconcious awareness of any of the game's abstractions, of which there seen to be few; I think the last game to manage that feat was Deus Ex. My mind has been tricked into believing Liberty City exists with more 'realness' than any other game world I've explored, including Oblivion. The whole thing ends up being amazingly immersive, even to those who've long thought they'd lost the ability to forget they're playing a game. So yeah. I'd say it deserves the perfect 10 Gamespot gave it.

Oh yeah, and it has multiplayer.

If this doesn't look rad to you, you may want to just let your friends know that you're gay.