Curiosity wrote:
I just found GTAIV boring. And hated a particular mission where you had to shoot someone's car from in your own car, while driving, and if you parked a decent car in a convenient spot to help you, it magically vanished once the mission started.
Also, I wanted to shoot people and loot stuff, and it kept on making me go on dates and take some asshole to the pub to play darts.
It was a game of two halves, I'll give you that.
The 'go psychotically mad in the sandbox world' aspect of GTA didn't sit well with what was essentially a pretty sombre main storyline arc that often placed fairly strict boundaries on your behaviour - but it was entirely possible to keep the two things separate.
What I'd often do after a gruelling mission or session is save my game, then have a total fuckabout for a while, but then when I carried on playing 'properly', go back to the save, so I hadn't wasted a load of good weapons or fucked friends off by ignoring them and suchlike.
Sometimes I'd just load up the game, go to my most recent save, and do nothing except have a fuckabout for a while, and not save at the end of it, so I'd made no 'progress' as such, but had still been able to enjoy the mad sandbox side of the game - at the end of the day Nico always does what you tell him to, so it's not like the game was limited in that regard.
I don't really see any other way Rockstar could have handled it, short of go down the Saint's Row route and basically handle the entire thing as a big pisstake.
Now don't get me wrong, I really enjoyed Saints Row and Saints Row 2, but in a different way to GTAIV - and in the final analysis I'd say GTAIV has stuck with me as the better game. Certainly I've never felt inclined to replay either of the Saints Rows in the way I did GTAIV.
Finally, the story worked for me in GTAIV, I cared about Nico and even Roman, even though he was an annoying bastard a lot of the time. That gave me the drive to see it out to the end, even though the missions did grind a little bit at times.
It had its flaws, but for me it was very much a highlight of the entire 360 era.