GTA4

Sorry to bore you with more of these posts. I'm just in love with that game. I wanted to relate a conversation we had at home last night. Both myself, and one of my roomies are playing through it at the same time. If you aren't as into Video Games you may want to move on now. We were discussing missions to see how far the other was.

We quickly determined that we both had fully finished Vlad's missions, as he's the first main mission guy. So I started talking about the cool part of one of his missions where you are jumping between buildings chasing him across the rooftop. Nathan looked at me like I was on crack. He never did that. At all. So I was dumbfounded. How do you finish Vlad's missions without doing that? That's part of one of Vlad's missions.

SO we went through the whole mission. So you chase a guy in your car, yeah, we both did that, then he gets to a construction site and takes off on foot. Yup, both did that. He runs up the site using some ladders to get to the top. Yeah, we both did that. Then he climbed up a crane. Nope. Not for Nathan. Apparently Nathan is a sharpshooter. Once Nathan got to the roof, he took him out with his pistol. I however, can't hit the wide side of a barn with my shooting, and my spraying the area with my sub machine gun did not take him out. Thus after following him up the crane, we jumped roof to roof, until he slipped, and I got to stomp on his hands to make him fall to his death (AWESOME!!!).

I was very surprised that this game allowed for that flexibility. We both had the same mission, at the same location, but very different means of getting to the end result. Both worked. Mine also had a choice to save him, and let him go free, but I'm an ass, so that never was really an option. Nathan never got that option. Makes me wonder about a lot more of my hits. How many of them am I just killing before I get to the point where they surrender? What sort of impact will that have on the future parts of the game?

The whole Nathan being a better shot than me wasn't news though. That's how it pans out in all video games. Nathan is the slow guy, takes him forever to get anywhere, extremely extremely cautious, takes a day to set up his shot, then snipes them. I slap on some armour, grab some sort of automatic, and charge all over town guns a blazing. Makes us a pretty good team, as I attract attention and gunfire, as he cleans things up. It'll make some interesting online team game dynamics. I'm excited to see where some other friends fit in the mix.