Okay, I’ve been extremely busy playing Grand Theft Auto IV on the Xbox 360, and I do intend to write a lot more about it, but for now I just want to make a note about something that’s bugging. After days of thinking that the game is nearly flawless, I have run into a snag. I suppose it’s always more interesting to write about a complaint rather than praise.
I’m at a point in the game where every single mission is designed to make you drive as far as possible. The standard mission scenario involves driving from wherever you happen to be to one of your contact’s homes or offices where you get the story and the mission. Then they send you to a new point to actually perform whatever task is required of you. Nearly always killing someone. Our hero is a hired gun, so what else would he be doing? My complaint is that the destination is always as far away as possible, so you spend 5 to 10 minutes or more driving through Liberty City, gaining nothing, just wasting time. Busy work. Leg work. How could it hurt to put the mission sites closer to the contact’s home? I feel like every mission is a chore because I know I’ll have to drive to the other side of the map before I even get my chance at the mission. It has become boring and tedious.
If, knock on wood, you should fail the mission, you are sent a text message which gives you the option to retry what you’ve just failed. Great! Choose yes, and you will re-emerge at the mission site, right? Nope. You are teleported to the contact’s house, just in time to make the meaningless drive once again. Frustrating. I don’t need to see the cut scenes and hear the story again, and if I’m confused about an element of the mission I will simply read the briefing. I do NOT need to watch it all over again. And I definitely do not need to repeat the long, boring drive to the mission site.
There is a solution, but it’s kind of cheesy on the developers’ part. Instead of stealing a car, you can enter a taxi as a passenger and get a ride to the next waypoint. However, the cab driver informs you that he’s going to take the long way. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but that’s what he says. So you have two more options. One is to press X and “hurry” the trip, causing the cab driver to become more aggressive in traffic, but not really shorten the drive time significantly. The other is to press A and skip the whole trip, magically appearing at the destination nearly instantly. What’s the catch? It costs more to skip the trip. What?? Why would they penalize me for not wanting to sit in traffic? That’s not gaming. That’s just watching buildings go by. I appreciate the option to ride that taxi and skip the trip, and I nearly always do it, but I am angered each time I press that A button, knowing that my hard earned blood money is being taken away unfairly. I would love to know their logic on this decision.
Like I said, there is much, much more to write about. Overall I absolutely love the game. The continuous string of ‘hits’ Mr. Bellic is performing for his friends and clients will hopefully give way to more interesting missions and story lines as the game progresses.
