One of the best computer game reviews I ever read was written by two poets who had been given the task by some enterprising Sunday Magazine editor who had no doubt grown tired of the kind of cynical and world-weary copy his twenty-somthing gamer staff had been submitting to him.

The poets were not gamers and had been presented with the game "Thief 2: The Metal Age". They explained that, like poetry, their enjoyment of the game was entirely dependant on the degree to which they put themselves into its world. For the poets this wasn't so much a game as an environment which you entered and this idea of 'entering the world' of something, whether it be a game, a book or a movie has stuck with me because it made me realise that these activities aren't just passive - Playing a game is a two-way process. It also explained why I had never really liked poetry.

Of all the games I have played over my many years as a gamer it has always been the ones which allow the most freedom that I have enjoyed the longest and the most intensely. In July of this year I clocked up 12 months of playing Grand Theft Auto IV. 

At the time of it's release I was at college and didn't dare buy it because I knew how all-consuming previous GTA games had been, and also how each new edition becomes more addictive than the last.

Like Thief, GTA presents the player with a 'world' where they're free to do lots of things, most of them illegal, but  this freedom gives the player room to be creative, to come up with ways of completing a mission (or just mucking about) that the designers hadn't necessarily thought of.

So this, in a homage to the Beastie Boys single of (almost) the same name, is my Open Letter to Liberty City.

1. The Arrival

When I first arrived in Liberty City, it was dark. At the start of the game you, as Niko Bellic, meet your Cousin Roman, drive him back to his cockroach infested apartment and get your head down. It isn't until the next morning that you're really at liberty (geddit?) to wander where you please. When this does happen the impact the world you find outside your Cousins battered front door is so detailed, so immersive and so realistic compared to previous versions of GTA that you almost forget to immediately steal a car.

There's litter on the streets, spilling out of garbage cans and blowing along the sidewalk. Everything looks dirty and grimy. Someone speaking Russian wanders by chatting into their mobile phone. Light streams in through the slats in the elevated train-tracks above your head. Everything is so ordinary that to find it in a computer game is extraordinary.

2. The Environment

Unlike virtually every other video game, the world seems to exist for it's own sake and not just for your benefit. Stand on the street corner and you can watch cars and trucks roll by, people shouting abuse at each other, even other crooks getting chased down and arrested by cops (it's nice when it's happening to somebody else for a change).

So often in most other video games the environment, the level, feels like a theme-park ride. You walk down a corridor, someone pops out from a door, you shoot them, then walk down another corridor - there's only one way to go and enemies dutifully wait for you to shoot them.

That does happen to some extent in GTA IV but most of the missions are not tied to a particular location and those that are still sometimes have multiple ways in or out. I remember toughing it through one mission where you had to gain access to a lawyers office, get past security by pretending to be applying for a job, shoot your interviewer (how many times have you wanted to do that!) and escape back through the building. On the second attempt I missed the target and accidentally blasted out the glass in the window behind the desk - I had found an alternative escape route!

I've also completely avoided rooms full of guards by landing a helicopter (stolen of course) on the roof of a hotel, climbing down to the end-of-level-boss, shooting him and then climbing back into the helicopter. Whether it was intended by the designers or not is irrelevant. It makes sense in the game and means that every mission potentially can be played differently each time. You often get to choose which vehicle and which weapons to use on a mission and a rocket launcher can make a huge difference to the outcome of a street race.

The City itself is such an amazing feat of programming that quite often it's entertaining enough just to stand and watch the rain, or the shadows moving across the ground, or the reflections in the water (or maybe I'm just weird). People dash about with umbrellas or newspapers over their head when it rains. They sit on park benches reading books, they stand and have conversations with each other.

3. The Music

Whenever you get into a car you will hear whichever radio station the previous occupant was listening to. Rip off a Rasta's wheels and you'll screech away to the strains of Bob Marley. Jack a Liberty City Yellow Cab and you probably here the right wing nut Richard Bastian on his talk show 'Intelligent Agenda'. This being a city with a large Eastern European population you're also likely to hear a lot of music from the Russian station, Vladivostok FM. The music adds to the environment. And name me another game that has a soundtrack which features music so diverse as Philip Glass and the Stooges.

4. The Cops

Don't pay too much attention to the radio though, or you'll probably wind up hitting a cop car and setting into motion a sequence of events which always, always ends up with the same outcome. Once the red and blue lights flash cops will appear from every direction and shoot at you or any vehicle you're in. They are much improved over previous versions of GTA, but they're still as dumb as a box of rocks.

They aren't totally stupid; They will take cover to avoid being shot and if you're in cover, they will try to out-flank you or get in behind you. If you try to get away from them by car they will ram you off the road and surround you so you can't move, but they will also jump off bridges into the river, run each other over and use a shotgun while standing in a gas station. What the Liberty City Police Department lacks in intelligence though it makes up for in numbers.

5. The Cars

Given that the game is called Grand Theft Auto you might expect that cars would feature fairly highly on the the list of cool stuff, but they don't. The cars in GTA IV are actually pretty boring, probably the most boring thing in the game. This might be because, well with cars it's all been done before hasn't it? The cars aren't supposed to be exciting, they're meant to look like the ordinary cars you see on every american street on every cop show, and they do.

The driving physics are also the worst I've ever experienced in any video game. On-line races are particularly hard to complete as the only way to get any car around a corner is to use the hand-brake and hitting even the slightest dip in the road will send you into the air.

6. The People

It's the people that really make a city, and Liberty City is the worst city in America, according to it's tourist information. Everyone talks a lot, whether they're complaining that you've just run them over, chatting on their phones or running down the highway screaming simply because you pulled you're Kalashnikov on them. 

7. Online Gaming

This is probably the best thing about GTA IV. Not being an experienced on-line gamer I'm not absolutely sure how much better the gaming experience is compared to other games, but in what other game can you reverse an ice cream van over your opponent while playing Ride of the Valkyries backwards and lobbing Molotov cocktails at an Ambulance?

What's amazing is the level of interaction that can be achieved between the players given the amount of freedom they have to do what they want. I was once in a Cops Vs Crooks game at the docks, crouching by a wall when the shadow of a player on the roof of the building I was leaning against ran along the wall in front of me. I stopped for a moment to contemplate the fact that the other player might have been on the other side of the world and the light from the sun to cast the shadow was being ray-traced in real time by the middleware running on it's own dedicated processor, and then I got shot.

Online gaming is always chaos. Most of the time this is a problem which needs to be fixed. Race Driver: Grid, for example has a big problem with other racers just ramming you off the track when you might be trying to race 'normally'. GTA IV doesn't solve this problem because it doesn't need to, the chaos makes it more fun. GTA races routinely involve starting with a very fast sports car, picking up a machine gun, shooting all the cars at the front of the race then getting blown up. If you're not winning you can simply opt to find a bus and park it across the road, or wait near an obstacle for a competitor to crash and pull them out of their car and drive off with it. Other players of course will try to shoot you dead, but the anarchy of the game sort of makes sense.

8. Comparisons & The Future

GTA IV is, for me anyway, the ultimate game. It doesn't matter what else I play, I keep coming back to it. No other game I've played has the same depth, involvement or sheer entertainment value. One year on, I can simply boot up my PS3, load GTA IV and spend an evening 'playing', without getting bored. Of course, I would like someone to come along and do better. The promise that the next generation of consoles offers is quite mind-blowing really, especially to me, who remembers when computer games had 1 colour and involved nothing more complex than shooting a little green blob.

I think games like GTA, and Thief, is where the future lies because they aren't just 'interactive movies' or 'theme-park-rides' like most other games are. The art of making video games is still in it's infancy, like the movie industry was about 100 years ago. In terms of technology, it's like when the movies just got sound. We have the ability to create environments and narrative structures which interact with the players, even multiple players, in ways which a book or movie cannot.


Mark E. Cotterill