Remembrances of Thefts Past

With much of the internet succumbing to Grand Theft Auto IV monomania this past week, I've been feeling unwelcome. It's like I'm at a party where everyone is debating wether T-Pain is the best musician of all time or the best musician of an infinite number of unimaginable parallel universes. What am I supposed to say at a party like that? "Yeah, T-Pain's alright, I guess, but let's not get carried away here"?

I may be indifferent to this hype today, but I did once love a Grand Theft Auto, back when Rockstar North was DMA.

In 1997, I played a whole hell of a lot of the first game. I had to; there was no in-chapter save function in the first game, and those chapters could be looooooooooong. The weird thing about the first game is that, despite it's simple gameplay, Commodore 64-like graphics, and bothersome overhead camera wildly zooming about, the game just clicked. Like Lego blocks. The entire experience felt old-school in the extreme, but it still seemed incredibly innovative. I've come to believe the engine that drove the first GTA straight into my heart was its sense of scale: the diminutive stature of your little 8 pixel ruffian contrasted fabulously with the cities exponentially larger than other 90's action games. The crudeness of the presentation mirrored the crudeness of the premise. It was sweet.

Then things changed.

I never played much GTAIII -- I got stuck on the first mission that forced you to chase down and shoot someone -- and I've never even been in the same room with Vice City on. I assumed they were good games, of course. Eventually I tried very, very hard to play San Andreas.

This might not be the consensus on the internet, but my God, that game was a fucking mess.

There were dozens of neat little ideas -- ride your BMX bike! eat and work out to change your appearance! shoot hoops! break into homes! fly UFO's! There is trouble stuffing a gigantic game like SA full of gimmicky minigames and sidequests: they didn't have the resources to fix the annoying shooting mechanics, the largely uninteresting settings of cities and countryside (because L.A. is not an interesting place to play around in, it really isn't), or the general jankyness of the animation and crudeness of the ascetic style in the game.

Oh. And there was a mission involving R.C. Helicopters and explosives. If you enjoyed that mission, you're clearly a bad human being.

Because SA was so "wacky" and "funny" (there were moments, but that game thought it was way funnier than it actually was), and because you could "literally do anything!" (as someone recently said to me at a party -- I believe he had a college degree, which is something you cannot literally or figuratively get in GTA: SA), everyone overlooked the games imperfections. I might have been able to see past them as well if the game did any one thing extraordinarily well -- if the driving was a lot of fun (I hate the way cars handle in the 3D GTA series), or the shooting, or one of the minigames even. Instead it did some things very well, some things atrociously, and a lot of things sorta "meh."

My complaint is not a common one, I'm sure. "Make Grand Theft Auto more like an Amiga game again!" I scream, and no one listens, and no one cares.